Is the “doom spiral” about curriculum or poverty?

Specifically, it handles a growing disillusionment with mass higher education by arguing that it might be based on a misunderstanding of its educational potential.

It’s built on a seven-year longitudinal study drawing on over 700 interviews with students and graduates who studied chemistry or chemical engineering at six universities across England, South Africa, and the United States, tracking them from first year through to three years after graduation.

It’s moving in places, and built on impressive evidence. The central finding is that what makes higher education educationally powerful is not so much the development of generic skills or employability attributes – but the process of taking students “inside” structured bodies of knowledge so that they develop new ways of engaging with the world.

Graduates who saw knowledge “from the inside” – who owned it, used it, and saw the world through it – had far more flexibility in what they did next. Those who remained “outside” – seeing their education as a collection of disconnected topics to be acquired and deployed – were more likely to end up in non-graduate employment and more likely to consider their degrees a waste of time.

The longitudinal data makes it all quite vivid. A South African chemistry graduate describes how chemistry “sprinkles on your everyday life” – how making tea becomes an encounter with diffusion. A chemical engineering graduate working in retail sees the supply chain through the lens of unit operations and systems thinking.

Given that both chemistry and chemical engineering might be seen as having students who start their degrees for purely instrumental reasons, the book explains that they’re not so much reciting textbook knowledge as they are people whose world has changed (and who might, therefore, go on to change it).

The doom spiral

The instrumental question makes it matter beyond the sector. The authors are unequivocal – students who engage with their education only instrumentally, as a transaction, a credential, a means to an end, don’t go inside knowledge. They disengage, they consider it a waste of time – and they’re right to, because for them it was.

The authors describe this as a “doom spiral” – as higher education is increasingly framed in terms of human capital and employability, more students engage instrumentally, more become disengaged, and more evidence accumulates that mass higher education doesn’t work. The louder the calls to make it “relevant to the labour market,” the faster the spiral accelerates.

It’s a critique of much of what the Office for Students has ever done – and of the generic graduate attributes frameworks that many universities have adopted as their response to employability pressure.

The authors argue that these frameworks are “essentially empty” once separated from disciplinary knowledge – and that the “disengagement compact” (easy grades for easy teaching) is a symptom of the spiral rather than its cause.

But if instrumental engagement is the enemy of educational transformation – and the evidence here strongly suggests it is – then we do also have to ask what drives students to engage instrumentally in the first place.

Two-thirds of full-time UK undergraduates now work during term time, and average combined working and studying hours for students with jobs exceed 50 hours a week. Nearly half are on zero-hours contracts. Maintenance loans cover barely half of actual living costs, and students are commuting further, sleeping less, eating worse, and arriving at university with less preparation and more anxiety than at any point in the history of mass higher education.

Is it any wonder that a student working 20 hours a week in hospitality while commuting 90 minutes each way engages with their degree instrumentally? Is it surprising that someone whose maintenance loan doesn’t cover rent treats their education as a transaction – something to get through, qualification in hand, so they can start earning properly?

The book’s evidence shows that most students start their degrees with instrumental motivations but can be moved towards transformational engagement if the conditions are right – but the authors avoid saying much about what those conditions look like materially.

Too hungry to think

For me that matters because the book’s seven lessons about the educational potential of mass higher education are all framed in epistemological and curricular terms – the structure of knowledge, the design of degree programmes, and the expertise of teachers.

If they are necessary conditions, they are not sufficient. If I simplistically play with Maslow’s hierarchy – self-actualisation through knowledge – the book sort of avoids the foundations.

My guess is that you can’t take a student inside a body of knowledge if they’re too exhausted, too hungry, or too anxious about rent to engage with it. The preconditions for the kind of education this book advocates are not just pedagogical – they’re financial, spatial, temporal, and social.

And they’re increasingly demanded by the economics of “mass” higher education.

There’s a telling moment where the authors note that graduates’ reflections on their education are shaped by how things are going for them at the time of asking – and that this process risks reinforcing the dominance of elite education, since elite graduates are more likely to be successful and therefore more likely to look back favourably.

They acknowledge that continuing to develop a relationship with knowledge after graduation requires “access to supportive contexts,” which is distributed by privilege – but the thread isn’t followed.

The uneven distribution of supportive contexts isn’t just a post-graduation problem – it’s becoming the defining feature of the massified undergraduate experience in a system where student poverty is now endemic.

I also wonder whether the signals in the study could be misread if “being inside knowledge” is interpreted as evidence that full-time disciplinary immersion itself is the causal driver of better outcomes.

The authors are careful to note that the relationship runs both ways, and that graduates’ capacity to sustain and deepen their relationship with knowledge depends heavily on access to supportive contexts, including employment, networks, and opportunity after graduation.

What looks like the educational effect of immersion may partly be the effect of those contexts selecting and reinforcing certain trajectories. Because the study doesn’t compare full-time with part-time modes, or narrow disciplinary programmes with broader major/minor or credit-mix systems, I’m not convinced that it nails the idea that intensity or exclusivity of subject study is the decisive factor.

It certainly feels plausible that sustained, coherent engagement with knowledge in general is what matters, and that this could be achieved within more varied credit structures if they remain intellectually connected – or at least as long as the student has time to connect them.

What it gets right

It’s still a fab piece of work. The argument that mass higher education’s educational potential lies in disciplinary knowledge rather than generic skills is well evidenced, clearly articulated, and very much needed – and if nothing else, it’s probably a pre-condition to winning arguments about not stretching the experience too thin.

The warning that moving towards micro-credentials and (over-)modularisation risks creating a two-tier system – deep knowledge for the privileged, empty generics for everyone else – is one that policymakers should take more seriously.

And the call for universities to be more honest (and modest) about what higher education can and cannot makes sense, even if it’s unlikely to be heeded by those designing websites any time soon.

But if we’re serious about realising the educational potential of mass higher education – and I think Ashwin and colleagues are – then we need to reckon with the fact that the “beautiful risk of education” requires material security to take. Two to tango and all that.