MR David Craig - The Great University Con: How We Broke Our Universities and Betrayed a Generation

Thirty years ago around 770,000 people just one in six school leavers attended a university or polytechnic. Now there are over 2.3 million students in Higher Education almost half of all school leavers.

For the last 30 years weve all been sold the mantra that the more people go to Uni, the better off well all be. Students will have a fun time, learn all sorts of useful things and then get good jobs. Our economy will be more internationally competitive. Society will benefit as these graduates pay more taxes and, being educated and responsible citizens, will be less of a burden on the NHS and social services. And universities also provide plenty of other societal benefits through their academic research and their contributions to the nations intellectual and cultural life. After all, everyone would probably agree that the more educated a countrys population is, the more prosperous and civilised that country will be.

But is this true? Has the huge growth in the number of people going to Uni the Great University Expansion really been the success the politicians and universities would have us believe? Whats the point of having a degree if one in every two people has one? Why get a degree if only a small minority of university graduates on some courses less than one in ten will find jobs requiring a university education, especially if many graduates leave Uni with debts of up to 60,000?

A degree is now the second most expensive thing most graduates will buy in their lives. But is it worth buying if it ends up costing much more than it returns? And does society benefit from the Great Uni Expansion if taxpayers have to pick up the bill for billions of pounds each year for student loans that will never be repaid?

Normally, these are the types of questions that academic researchers in universities would excel at answering. However, these are not questions that anybody working (or, at least, wanting to continue working) in a university is thinking about, let alone answering. This is quite understandable. It is, after all, both rude and impolitic to bite the hand that feeds.

There are plenty of reference guides to support students university applications, numerous campus novels describing life within fictional universities and a huge body of academic texts about universities, written by academics for academics (and generally lacking pageturning narratives). But, despite the massive costs of the Great Uni Expansion for students, their parents and all taxpayers, nobody has dared question why and how we have so massively and rapidly grown our Higher Education system and what effect this has had on students, their families, academics, the economy and society.

In THE GREAT UNIVERSITY CON we expose the truth behind the massive expansion of Britains university sector pressure on school leavers to get to Uni whether they are likely to benefit or not; schools feeling they have to game the system to send as many of their pupils to Uni as possible; universities lowering entrance standards to fill up their everincreasing numbers of courses; dumbing down of university courses; falling academic standards as lecturers no longer have time to deal individually with increasing numbers of students; universities trying all sorts of tricks to avoid failing anyone, however poor their work, given that theyve paid so much for their degrees; rising student dropout rates; graduates with unrepayable debts which will have to be picked up by taxpayers; a massive oversupply of graduates compared to available job opportunities and a university sector that has become huge, bureaucratic and selfserving and which is too often a burden on, rather than a benefit to, the country.

Weve been sold the myth that with universities more is always better. But weve been fooled and now its time to expose the truth about the Great University Con.