A couple of months ago I wrote about the UK Higher Education (UKHE) sector in the age of nationalism. The occasion was the government’s immigration policy, which has already had a devastating effect on UK universities and may have still more devastating ones depending on what the decision on post-study work visas will be (expected in mid-May). Immigration policy is one key factor explaining why 49 out of just over 200 universities in the UK have now introduced redundancy plans (see the University and College Union’s live tracker). Since then, the attacks on UKHE have continued unabated and indeed have become more widespread. They have partly moved away from blaming universities for their impact on ‘net immigration’ – I remain as unconvinced as ever that an overseas student is an ‘immigrant’ in the conventional sense even if some will become after their studies – back to the ‘value’ (more on this later) of university degrees and the quality of research done by academics notably in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Given how dishonest, insidious and – yes – stupid, these attacks are, I felt another post on this was in order. As an academic, this is of course a subject close to my heart. However, I do think that what is happening to UKHE should be of interest to people interested in Brexit, because the HE sector provides an excellent example of a highly successful UK ‘industry,’ which is – however – incompatible with ‘Brexitism’ that has taken hold of UK government after 2016. UKHE, alongside farming, fishing, and financial services, may be one of the sectors most negatively affected by Brexit – although only partly directly because of Brexit (the exit of the UK from the EU) and more due to Brexitism.
Brexit and Brexitism impact on UKHE
Direct Brexit effects concern the plummeting number of EU students in the UK, which has halved since Brexit. That is not necessarily a financial problem for university, because the half that still comes to study in the UK normally pay twice the fees they would have paid before Brexit. But it does fundamentally change the composition of classes, but also the ‘risk profile’ of universities, as recruiting from a narrower range of non-EU countries becomes vital for financial stability.
Another direct Brexit effect was the prospect of the UK not participating in the EU’s ‘Horizon’ research funding programme. While the Windsor Agreement on Northern Ireland made it possible for the UK to rejoin the programme last September, much damage had been done by three years being outside the £82bn programme. By that point, leading researchers and talent had left the UK for EU countries and opportunities for funding of cutting-edge research had been lost.
However, beyond these direct Brexit effects on the UKHE sector, this post is more about ‘the other Brexit.’ Namely, the ‘Brexit of minds,’ by which I mean the project’s radical ideological underpinning, which Chris Grey aptly calls ‘Brexitism.’ Brexitism is a radical right ideology that goes far beyond the project of leaving the EU. As Brexit is failing, Brexitism moves on to find ever new targets to blame for the broken promises and maintain enough political support for the reactionary – and delusional – project of nostalgic recovery of Britain’s alleged lost greatness.
The attack on higher education is – just like EU membership, or membership of the ECHR, just one tool in achieving the ultimate Brexitist goal of turning cosmopolitan, liberal Britain into a reactionary, conservative Island, which I called Budapest-on-Thames in one of my posts.
Ripp-off
Ever since the Prime Minister announced a ‘crack down on rip-off university degrees,’ by limiting the student numbers on degrees that are considered ‘low value’ (more on that later), the attacks on a wide range of subjects in the social sciences and humanities have continued unabated. The government’s proposal from July 2023 targeted ‘poor quality courses’ defined as those with high drop-out rates and courses unlikely to lead to high-paid jobs. A the time, the PM stated that ‘too many young people are being sold a false dream and end up doing a poor-quality course at the taxpayers’ expense that doesn’t offer the prospect of a decent job at the end of it.’ Sunak’s definition of a ‘decent job’ is – of course – purely defined as one that pays well, not one that is meaningful, fulfilling, motivating to the person doing it.
Indeed, the metrics the government is using to assess the quality of degrees are deeply flawed. There are many economic, psychological, and social reasons for students dropping out of university. Some of them related to the socio-economic background of students. Therefore, all else equal, universities recruiting more students from disadvantaged backgrounds will see higher dropout rates than universities whose students have parents that can underwrite their children’s living costs during their studies no matter what.
Similarly, the same ‘less selective’ universities that give young people from less privileged backgrounds the chance of a university education are also the ones whose students’ earnings in absolute terms will not be as ‘decent’ as students going to more selective universities. Partly that’s due to a self-selection bias: If you go to a highly selective university, you are more likely to have connections and be from a social class that is more likely to get a high paid job. But in relative terms, what the government calls ‘low value degrees’ may actually be relatively more valuable to the people who take them, because they are crucial to their social mobility and higher wages than they would otherwise have. Thus the Sutton Trust underscores that less selective ‘post-1992’ universities do a lot more for social mobility than the more selective ones, because they take a larger number of low income students. In other words, while such university education may not lead to salaries the PM would consider ‘decent,’ students attending such universities, they are considerably better off than they would be without the degree.
The PM has of course very strong incentives to bash university degrees that lead to jobs with wages below a certain level, namely the reimbursement of student loans. Getting rid of degrees that lead to earnings below the reimbursement threshold (currently at £25,000 a year), will help the PM to reduce the student debt that the government has to write off. So, ironically, while the Coalition Government had promised higher tuition fees and lower public funding for universities would increase universities’ financial independence, the government’s obsession with ‘sound public finances’ comes creeping back through the back door via the student loan system.
More fundamentally the government’s and right-wing newspapers’ discourse very successfully reduces university education to a cost-benefit analysis and universities are accused of ‘ripping off’ students if their wages do not achieve some artificially defined threshold.
The price of everything, the value of nothing
Cost-benefit thinking has become the only game in town when it comes to higher education policy. ‘Value’ is narrowly defined as monetary value or return on investment for both students and ‘taxpayers.’ Education Secretary Gillian Keegan for instance considers that “[s]tudents and taxpayers rightly expect value for money and a good return on the significant financial investment they make in higher education.” Similarly, conservative MP Neil O’Brien tweeted a graph taken from Tim Leunig’s Substack (although it is actually one Leunig took from an IFS study).* The graph shows that ‘creative arts’ degrees are – according to this study – ‘net negative’ in terms of monetary returns to both the taxpayer and those who take them. I’m assuming O’Brien loves the graph so much because in his thinking it illustrates that fine art degrees are ‘worthless,’ a point right-wing populists have been trying to make more forcefully recently (see below).
Leunig too reduces university education to a cost-benefit analysis. Commenting on the government announcement of funding freeze for art degrees, he confidently proclaims that “[e]conomics and medicine students are good news for everyone. They earn a lot, repay their student loans, and pay a lot of tax.” While “creative arts’ graduate outcomes are uniquely awful.” That’s based on the estimated cumulated income of the average male creative arts graduate compared to people who have not gone to uni. Consequently, from Leunig’s one-dimensional economist’s viewpoint, the earnings variable indicates that creative art degrees are low value and therefore capping number of places is justified.
There is a lot wrong with Leunig’s analysis – most fundamentally perhaps the idea that individual earnings compared the cost or price of a degree course reflects its value either to the UK economy or to society. As an example, someone studying for a nursing degree and then working for the NHS will not be paid as much as someone studying finance or maths and then working in the City of London. Based on this example alone, most readers will probably agree that the salaries of nurses and bankers are a very poor proxy for the societal value of these professions.
Regarding degrees in the fine arts and other branches of the humanities, things are less obvious perhaps. Some ‘products’ created in the creative industries sectors can be ‘priced,’ e.g. the value of the Harry Potter ‘franchise’ (estimated at $43.1bn), which is the brain child of someone who studied French at Exeter. However, much of the societal value of creative arts, history, philosophy etc., is hard to put in monetary terms and they will lead to jobs in sectors that are typically low paid on average. That is no doubt why these subjects are particularly vulnerable to the commodification of education, which has gone further in the UK than in most other countries.
What is the “value” of cultural production – such as Shakespeare’s plays – to society? Who can tell! Arts and humanities are typically the realm where we move from classical utilitarian thinking about objectifiable ‘use value’ – that may be appropriate in some areas like engineering perhaps – not just to subjective perception of value (which neo-classical economists especially of the Austrian school have long acknowledged), to the question of intrinsic value. Indeed, the value of a degree in arts cannot be judged based on what returns the person studying it gets on their investment, not even what people are willing to pay for the products of artists, but only based on a much vaguer notion of the ‘good life’ and ‘good society.’ How much better is my life, because I can enjoy a play by Shakespeare, or a poem by Byron, or a painting by Millais? How much ‘richer’ is British society because we have authors like Zadie Smith, actors like Judi Dench, or film directors like Ken Loach? It is impossible to say – and I am sure I am not the only one thinking that people like them make a – literally – invaluable contribution to the country. They are valuable not because what they ‘produce’ has any specific, measurable utility, or because people are willing to pay money for what they produce. Rather, I would suggest, what they do is intrinsically valuable. Britain – and the world – would be a much ‘poorer’ place without people like them.
To some extent ‘basic economists’ like Leunig seem to recognise that there is some value in cultural production beyond money, but he seems relaxed about what limiting funding for such subjects will do to cultural production in our country. Indeed, according to him “[t]he most talented students will still do the courses they want to do.” That statement would of course only hold if there were a corelation between your talent and your choice of degree and if there were a mechanism that would guarantee that admissions tutors correctly spot talent and give them one of the rationed places when they apply. Besides the fact that ‘talent’ is presumably not a fixed quantity that you have when you start Uni, but rather something that you can develop in the right environment, I have no idea why Leunig thinks the mechanisms to distribute limited seats according to the ‘amount of talent’ exist in UKHE. Rather, the system may rely on ‘trial an error’ where there may be real ‘value’ in giving more people the chance to enrol on programmes they are motivated to pursue so as to make sure we do not miss out on people whose talent may not be reflected in their A-levels results or personal statements.
Are ’Mickey Mouse degrees’ low value degrees?
Not just economists like to dismiss ‘rip-off’ and ‘low value' degrees. The right-wing tabloid press has for a long time been bashing humanities and social science degrees, whose value is harder to understand than – say – a degree in dentistry. Seemingly spurred on by the government’s own plan to crack down on such degrees, papers from the Mail to the Telegraph now run regular articles ridiculing such courses. One Telegraph journalist for instance listed English literature, fine art, and photography among degrees that ‘damage your career.’ The Mail ran an article with quotes from an alleged former student on a media, journalism and communications degree at the University of Hull, which it dubbed the ‘ultimate Mickey Mouse degree,’ because it had the lowest average graduate salaries in the country after five years of graduating (£16,100). In an extraordinary follow up article, the Mail interviewed a former student who had dropped out after just three months, because according to her ‘many sessions were just watching a film and talking about it.’ The 18-year-old also seemed to object to having a module on ‘Disney studies’ that is said to provide an ‘in-depth exploration of the history and impact of Disney's global entertainment empire.’
The fact that an 18-year-old does not understand what she can learn from watching and discussing Disney movies probably says more about her than about the degree. Similarly, what exactly is objectionable to a module on possibly the most successful entertainment company on the planet is drowned in the gloating of the article’s writer who seems to know that the average Mail reader does not need an explanation why studying Disney Inc is somehow absurd. Indeed, even the insult of ‘Mickey Mouse’ degree is full of involuntary irony, given that Mickey Mouse is arguable one of the most successful (and importantly for this kind of people monetarily valuable) cultural product of all time.
Regardless, in characteristically populist manner, the article goes on to quote a range of random ‘no-nonsense’ people (by which is meant people who do not hold back with their opinions however ill-informed they are) from Hull – all of whom know that specific degree from hearsay at best – who wholeheartedly agree that such degrees are worthless. Invariable, the argument that’s being cited is that they do not lead to a ‘decent job.’ By which is meant one that pays a lot of money.
An interesting pattern here is that the blame is always squarely placed on the university degree and its content, never on the UK labour market. Indeed, the fact that many UK employers are not willing to pay decent salaries, has all sorts of causes many of which have nothing to do with the skills people have acquired at uni. Indeed, one of the bitter ironies of the excruciating debate about the quality of university degrees, is that the very same government that has presided over more than a decade of stagnating real wages and has tolerated and indeed encouraged a low-wage economy by busting trade unions, judges universities for not being able to guarantee its graduates well-paying jobs!
Errors of judgement
More often than not, attacks on universities are made by people with very large numbers of followers on Twitter, and very little understanding of universities and academic research.
Thus, Darren Grimes showcases his profound ignorance complaining about the fact that more than 50% of fees income at Russell Group universities now comes from foreign students. To him that means ‘that British universities are now cash cows for the world's global elite and not hubs of learning and excellence for British students.’ That seems like an utterly absurd statement. For one, it remains Grimes’ secret how foreigners who pay fees to UK universities can be portrait as parasites who extract money from UK universities. What Grimes also does not seem to know is that foreign students pay twice the fees of UK students. So, when 57% of income in leading universities – as per his post – are from foreign students, that actually means they are not a majority, but only around 29% of students. This illustrates just how large a contribution foreign students make to subsidies home students.
However, Brexitism does not stop at degrees taught at universities. The research academics in the social sciences and humanities do is also being targeted. An excellent example comes from a Twitter user called Charlotte Gill who has 34k followers on Twitter. She has taken it upon herself to expose ‘shocking’ research projects funded by UK Research Councils that according to her are ‘nonsense’ that needs ‘auditing’ (by her!) to make sure that taxpayer’s money is not going towards ‘woke waste’. Her audit, of course, is based on the most superficial possible of assessments of the research projects in question, i.e. reading the project title. The sort of studies Gill finds unacceptable include one project on ‘Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Fiction through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education and Community Engagement,’ one on ‘Digital Islam across Europe: Understanding Muslims' Participation in Online Islamic Environments,’ and another one on ‘Asexual Epidemics, Detectives and Spinsters: the construction of pathological asexuality in Victorian fiction.’
Just like the average Mail reader, who cannot grasp that there is any value in a degree in medieval poetry, Gill does not seem to understand the value of anything but the most mundanely useful things such as medicine. Anything that is valuable to society for reasons other than satisfying an immediate material or physical need seems beyond her. The ‘model of man’ underlying Gill’s worldview seems properly animalistic, where people only seek to cover their basic needs – everything else is an unaffordable luxury. (I do wonder what she would make of some of Tim Leuning’s published work, e.g. on the topic 'Was Dick Whittington taller than those he left behind?’ But I guess the fact that that paper was written by an economist may make it ‘useful’ in her view regardless of its content).
Even the crudest theories of motivation – such as Maslow’s pyramid of needs – have for decades acknowledged pretty much the opposite, i.e. that satisfying one’s basic needs are only the lowest level of human motivation. Humans strive for aesthetic and artistic expression as much as they strive for a roof over their heads. That’s what makes us human. Gill and probably a large part of her 34k followers, of course, do not understand that. To people like her, a research council spending £800k on a ‘Shakespeare study’ is an unjustifiable fancy not an investment in our cultural heritage and an important contribution to an intrinsically valuable public good.
I am of course not arguing that research projects and outputs should not be challenged and assessed. What I am arguing is that a Twitter thread looking at project titles is not the way of doing it. There certainly is a lot of nonsense being published in academic journals. The reason for that, however, is not ‘woke waste’ or the existence of some inherently unworthy subjects, but rather the incentives created precisely by the commercialisation of HE. Many scholars – especially early career ones – are so desperate to get the publications they need to get and keep a job that they would do almost anything to get publish. There are even software packages explicitly designed to assess whether you publish enough or are at risk of ‘perishing.’ This pressure has led to a situation where the number of publications and status of the outlet where research is published is more important than its content. This in turn has led to all sorts of perversions in academic research, such as HARKing or worse still (some high profile) cases of alleged data fabrication.
Yet, like in the case of universities providing a large number of degrees that do not cost much to teach but charge high fees, these practices are not the result of inherent dishonesty of academics or universities, but a rather predictable result of a system where higher education and research has become increasingly exposed to market forces and competitive pressures. The far-reaching defunding of university sector by the state has made universities and academics masters of catering towards what the ‘customer’ wants. Sometimes that pushes them into questionable practices. Some universities now openly acknowledge the perverse effects of that system. The University of Zurich announced a couple of weeks ago that it will withdraw from the Times Higher Education ranking – despite being ranked in the ‘Top 100’ – because such rankings create perverse incentives.
The utilitarian trap
One thing that particularly upsets me in all this is the fact that the reaction of UK universities to the widespread smear campaign against social science and humanities has remained very muted. There was some reaction from the Russell Group – the professional association representing UK’s ‘elite’ universities – to false claims made in a Sunday Times article about international students on pre-sessional courses. But by and large, the broadside against social sciences and humanities has gone largely unchallenged by universities. Even people trying to defend the value of university education have to parrot the language of ‘return on investment,’ e.g. Professor Mary Vincent, Vice President for Education at the University of Sheffield who succumbs to that narrative in her defence against the ‘rip-off degrees’ language, stating that “[v]alue for money in our education system is crucial, especially when the economic purse-strings are so tight.”
The reason for this is that top managers in UK universities have long been convinced of the economistic cost-benefit, ‘price-of-everything-value-of-nothing’ ideology that has penetrated UKHE so much. Indeed, top university managers at Goldsmith, Roehampton, Kent, etc. do not need much convincing that social sciences and humanities are worthless. Their management of their universities has been premised on that idea for a long time, destroying some of the country’s finest centres of excellence in these areas. Similarly, Edward Peck, Vice-Chancellor and President of Nottingham Trent University and panel member of the independent Review of Post-18 Education and Funding seems to agree with the government’s crackdown on ‘rip-off degrees.’ Clearly, UK universities’ top managers too have fallen into the utilitarian trap.
There is two ways of challenging the attack on UKHE. One is to push back against the Brexitist analysis on its own terms, e.g. by pointing out that if the PM wants more maths and less arts, humanities, social sciences in school, the closure of university maths departments will be self-defeating.
Adopting that approach, we could also ask why we would not apply the Brexitism logic to sports and football in particular. After all, the vast majority of professional footballers are foreigners (nearly 70% in the case of the EPL), who use English clubs as ‘cash cows,’ and bring their families – thus increasing net migration. Brexitism may excuse professional footballers of course, because they would probably be deemed to have a ‘decent job’ given that they are making millions. Although, if we exclude the fat cats in the English Premier League, the average footballer salary in the UK is between £20k and £29k – lower than some of the graduates from the Mickey Mouse degrees that are being decried. So, why not turn Brexitism on football? Well, simply because it’s not a good object of the culture war because it does not divide us into ‘elite’ versus the ‘real people.’ University education does. That should illustrate that the attack on UKHE is largely driven by political motives and made entirely in bad faith.
More fundamentally, Simon Pegg’s – shall we say ‘passionate’ – rejection of the PM’s push for maths until 18, comes closer to the second approach, which is to tackle the premise that arts and humanities (and social sciences) are worth- and valueless. In a recent post, I have written about ‘inverting the red lines,’ by which I meant that we stop pushing back on Brexit based on the criteria and values that Brexiters impose on us. Instead, we should start seriously challenging those criteria and values themselves. The same goes for Brexitists’ attack on UKHE. Instead of asking what’s the ‘worth’ of a degree, we should be asking what its value to society is. An Oxford PPE may have tremendous ‘worth’ in terms of ‘lifetime earnings,’ but its value to society may be negative if we look at the impact politicians who obtained that degree have had on the country. Conversely, a ‘Micky Mouse degree’ may produce graduates whose creativity and artistic expression may add some intrinsic value to our country, even though they may be paid a lousy salary for it.
So, the point – like with Brexit red lines – is that we do not just try and defend UKHE on the terms imposed by Brexitists but start to impose our own narrative on why social sciences, arts, and humanities are intrinsically valuable for our country. Only if we start doing that is there any chance to free ourselves of the economic doxa, which has taken hold of all areas of our lives and makes any fundamental change of the current failing system impossible.
* The IFS provides many very valuable studies on financial issues. On Higher Education, however, it has the ambiguous effect of providing a valuable source of financial aspects of UKHE and buying into and contributing to the commercialisation and monetarisation of education, see e.g. its report ‘what is a degree worth?’ (narrowly defined as graduates lifetime earnings).