David Willetts: Conservatives must see higher education as it is, not how they fear it might be

David Willetts was Minister for Universities and Science 2010-2014. His book A University Education is published by OUP.

 The Government’s White Paper on Skills is a good moment to assess where the Parties are on universities and apprenticeships

The UK has slightly above average Higher Education participation – 50 per cent of  young people under the age of 25. Higher education is paid for more by graduates (about ¾) and less by taxpayers (about ¼) than most other advanced countries. It is hard to see much extra public spending going into universities so funding them by collecting the money back from graduates when their earnings are above a certain threshold is sensible.

This a fair and effective model though unloved. There is no alternative.

There are widespread misconceptions about it shown in a recent survey by the King’s Policy Institute. Parents worry that the “debt” will directly reduce the amount that their children can take out as a mortgage. 35 per cent of people wrongly think graduates must start paying back their student loan as soon as they get any paid job, rising to 58 per cent of young graduates. In reality it is a 9 per cent deduction on income above £25,000 per year. So for the typical the amount they pay back is much less than the extra they earn compared with non-graduates.

Our universities score highly in international rankings but that is heavily influenced by research quality.

Teaching is much harder to measure.

The 25 per cent real cut in resource for educating every student over the past decade has led to an increase in class sizes and made it harder for universities to invest in modern equipment for teaching science and engineering. These cuts have been invisible to most people apart from students but represent a failure to invest in the next generation. They lose and we all lose from such cuts which would not be acceptable in schools and ought not to be for universities. If taxpayers won’t pay, we must expect graduates to do so by increasing fees. There would be no increase in anyone’s monthly repayments.

That is what at last the Labour Government proposes in the White Paper. In return there will also be tougher monitoring of teaching standards, as Jo Johnson planned years ago. Such a deal, at least maintaining the real level of funding whilst pressing hard on standards is in everyone’s interest.

The Conservative leadership seems pretty hostile to higher education and reluctant even to accept that funding needs to be protected from inflation – not a position they adopt on any other stage of education. Some of this may reflect public attitudes and the current media narrative. However the research by King’s College is very illuminating. The public guess that 40 per cent of graduates wouldn’t go to university if they could choose again. But the actual proportion of graduates who wouldn’t go again is 8 per cent. It is 40 per cent of non-graduates who regret not going to university by the age of 25.

The public also underestimate the economic impact of universities. They think aircraft manufacturing and telecommunication services contribute more in exports. But higher education brings in a greater amount of money than both these sectors put together. (The figures are £11.8b and £8.8b with HE at £24.6b). The public guess that five in ten people think a university education isn’t worth the time and money it usually takes – but only three in 10 really hold this view.

Tory voters are not hostile to HE.

11 per cent of Tory voters are negative about universities and 73 per cent are positive. This is rather different from Reform supporters who are 24 per cent negative and 52 per cent positive. So this could be one of those areas where the Party leadership is in danger of getting closer to Reform than our own supporters.

Very few other systems have the amount of data we have on financial returns to higher education – as minister I fought long and hard to get it published and the more detail the better. It still shows graduates earning more than non-graduates. There are however courses with lower returns and it is understandable that people are very unhappy about that and students need to know that in advance. The Government’s White Paper rightly proposes working with UCAS to get more of this information out to applicants.

There are about 15 per cent of providers who do not deliver decent outcomes: there should be powers to step in there. But that is not just about low earnings But low earnings are not a direct measure of poor teaching or bad universities

For example performing arts do particularly badly for earnings. But some people are so keen on drama that they are willing to take the risk. Should we forbid them doing so? Courses in the North do worse on graduate earnings as pay there is lower. Is this a reason for closing courses there which would not be closed in the South?

We only have good data on graduate earnings up to middle age after which graduate earnings continue to rise, unlike for many non-graduates. And it gets even trickier if one tries as the Institute for Fiscal Studies does to predict what people would have earned if they had not gone to university. So there is a case for good data and informed student choice – important choices at other stages of education such as GCSEs and A levels should be similarly informed. It is right to tackle poor quality provision but earnings are not the whole story.

Conservatives as well as the Government can recognise these realities so we treat universities with the same amount of respect and challenge as other stages of education.