Britain has gone uni tunes

Good news has emerged from King’s College London — contrary to the prejudices of the fearful British public, mass migration and sociology degrees from former polytechnics are both crucial features of economic growth. Yes, this is the UK higher education: Public perceptions vs reality report, which sets out to measure the gulf between popular belief and statistical fact. According to the report, graduate regret is rare, universities are vital and the public’s worries about migration are based on misconceptions. The sunny report follows hot on the heels of record high A-level results. If you judged the British education sector by the report cards it writes up for itself, you would never imagine that anything was amiss in the perfumed gardens of academe.

Yet these same young people with their A-stars and regret free university experiences are also the generation that reports “the lowest levels of reading enjoyment and daily reading in a generation”. Another survey found that mental illness amongst British undergraduates had tripled in recent years. So readers can perhaps be pardoned for questioning the Panglossian spin that is routinely put out by schools and universities.

The author of the report takes a dim view of the misinformed general public, noting in a press release that “Our responses are driven by emotion, not analysis. We remember vivid stories about boat crossings and individual student regret more than dry statistics.” This pessimism about human reason has a clear origin in the theories of Evolutionary Psychology, as he goes on to explain:

Humans also have a “negativity bias”, which is partly an evolutionary trait. Negative information tended to be more urgent, even life-threatening: we needed to take note when we were warned by our fellow cavepeople about a lurking sabre-toothed tiger – and those who didn’t were edited out of the gene pool.

That so many in positions of institutional power share the basic assumption that people are naturally irrational and in need of guidance by scientific or technocratic expertise should alarm us. And indeed, this attitude of manipulation pervades the report, which sets out to discredit criticism of universities as mere prejudice.

The first claim, that graduate regret is rare, looks superficially persuasive. According to the report “The public guess that 40% of graduates wouldn’t go to university if they could choose again. The actual proportion who say this is only 8%.” This sounds impressive, but consider the question used. Graduates were not asked if they regretted going to university in a general sense, or if they regretted doing their particular subject, nor were they asked if they would have chosen to go straight into their area of employment without the necessity of a degree. Even leaving that aside, you will also notice that the public were not polled on what proportion of graduates would be better financially if they didn’t attend university — the answer is about 20 per cent, over twice as high as the regret rate the report asserts. 

But this bit of statistical spin looks positively honest compared to the nonsense basis for claiming that “the public significantly underestimate higher education’s contribution to the UK economy”. The public are asked to rank various organisations according to revenue, and end up wrongly putting Oxford University below premier league football clubs and Greggs Bakery. Yet choosing recognisable commercial brands used by many members of the public was guaranteed to produce this kind of result. Football clubs, with their glitzy reputation, are an easy way to get people to overestimate revenues. However, had you put Oxford up against Marks and Spencers, Next, or Jet2, public prejudices would have been entirely correct in attributing higher revenue to the highly visible commercial enterprises. All that is being done, on this and other questions, is exposing or creating apparent “gaps” between public perception and the facts, then interpreting this result in a way useful to the aims of universities.

The disingenuousness of this method continues and other unlike-for-like comparisons are employed to create fake knowledge gaps. In one question, members of the public are asked to rank highly recognisable supermarket chains against the entire higher education sector, and predictably get tripped up. But had you asked the public if the entire supermarket sector was a bigger employer, they would almost certainly have got the question right — in fact supermarkets overall employ over twice the numbers working in higher education. 

On another economics question, they simply employ the trick of conflating service exports with goods exports then asking the public whether certain (pre-selected) manufacturing sectors or universities generate more export revenue. It’s very likely that the general public does not know that if a person chooses to pay an accountant in the UK, or pay for an education, that this is classed as an export. Even leaving this aside, if the three most valuable UK goods export areas had been included (cars: £32.9 billion, mechanical power generators: £32.7 billion, Medicinal and pharmaceutical products: £24.6 billion), the public would have been correct in putting them ahead of overseas tuition fees. 

In other words, you could design a survey that would prove the public right, or wrong, with great ease simply by selecting intuitive or counter-intuitive options. Nor is public ignorance always an indication that better information would place them on the side the authors of the report would wish. The public belief that manufacturing is a larger employer than universities in the named British regions, if corrected, would probably incline many people to be more hostile to higher education and to see this situation as a sign of dangerous deindustrialisation (as indeed, it is). 

That public misconceptions are often protective of the establishment is nowhere more true than in the area of migration. As the report asserts, people wrongly believe that asylum seekers make up the bulk of immigration. Yet the British public, a majority of whom believe migration is too high, also believes that the scale migration is much lower than it actually is. Were more people to become aware of the true numbers, it is certain that opposition to migration would increase. 

This manifesto of complacency is a demonstration of just how institutionally blind and inflexible British universities are

The report also isn’t afraid of over-egging the pudding. Is the general public really grossly overestimating international students as a source of migration because they guess that 30 per cent stay on to work in the UK rather than the actual number of 27 per cent? And what does this perceptual gap prove anyway? If nearly a third of international students are staying on after graduating, then the (self-confessed) financial basis of British higher education relies on a perpetual flood of long term migration. And the public belief that only around a third of students and revenue comes from overseas when it is actually now nearly half, is yet another case where accurate public knowledge would equate to widespread outrage, not greater sympathy for universities. 

The recommendations, direct and implied of the report, can be boiled down to the predictably self-serving. We should allow student loans to rise with inflation, we should keep sending as many people as possible to university, and we should place no limits on international student places. 

This manifesto of complacency is a demonstration of just how institutionally blind and inflexible British universities are in the face of impending disaster. No hard questions are to be asked of whether it has expanded too far and too fast, or whether the government should subsidise a loan scheme that burdens young people with debt that only two thirds of them will repay. No challenge will be admitted to a sector that teaches nearly one overseas student for every Brit, and would collapse tomorrow if it were not allowed to do so. So used are these bloated institutions to soaking up government money and feeding off of young hopes, that they have forgotten the most basic of questions: why? 

Why are we sending young people to university? If it is to gain employable skills, then it is certainly the case that the hundreds of thousands studying business and management would learn more by doing an actual job. If it is for the sake of life-enhancing knowledge and experiences, surely these could be provided in a form that does not soak up three years and £50,000 in return. In response, universities can only cite the outsized, wasteful scale of their operations, as if these were the answer, rather than the problem itself. The reality that they are unable to confront is that any honest answer leads inexorably to the break up, reduction and rethinking of British universities.