Factories for Knowledge Workers

The first properly mounted attack on the commercialization of the university came more than a century ago, not in the UK but in the United States. In The Higher Learning in America (1918), Thorstein Veblen, a sociologist and author of the classic analysis of conspicuous consumption The Theory of the Leisure Class, lambasted the growing conception of the university “as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge,” where corporate interests prevail over intellectual ideals. “This incursion of pecuniary ideals in academic policy,” Veblen bemoaned, leads to the “supersession of learning by worldly wisdom”.

In 1918, the year that The Higher Learning in America was published, UK universities were recipients of public funding — alongside private endowments and minimal tuition fees — and had been for almost thirty years. The world Veblen describes would have been foreign to them. In 1919, the University Grants Committee (UGC) was established to centralize and distribute state subsidies among universities in England and Wales, balancing academic freedom with public accountability. The next four decades would see a steady increase in state funding and student aid until, following the Robbins Report of 1963, higher education was made free for all home students. Despite the appearance of welfare statism, the wheels of free higher education were actually set in motion under a Conservative government, and the eponymous Lord Robbins was no champion of Marxist ideology but a proponent of neoclassical economics.

Despite a stated commitment in the Robbins Report to make university places “available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment,” higher education largely remained the preserve of the middle and upper classes until the 1990s. The first seismic demographic shift came in 1998, when newly elected Labour prime minister Tony Blair announced his ambition to see half of all young people in higher education. Such an unprecedented expansion of higher education would, of course, require an injection of money, so Blair introduced a “top-up” fee of £1000 (a top-up, that is, to existing state funding), which would rise to a £3,000 “variable” fee in 2004.

The introduction of top-up fees was broadly unpopular in England and Wales (Scotland continued — and continues — to make higher education free for its students). Up until the introduction of fees, free access to university degrees was largely seen as an inalienable right. But the initial £1000 rate was manageable, and public opinion was assuaged by Blair’s egalitarian ideals: New Labour was throwing open the doors of the university to people from all walks of life, the economy would grow, and every British citizen could now be a knowledge worker in the new, postindustrial, society.

What was perhaps less obvious at the time was the extent to which New Labour was continuing the economic and political project set in motion by the Tories, beginning with the dissolution of the UGC during the last years of the Margaret Thatcher administration. This was followed swiftly by the 1992 act whereby polytechnic colleges — higher educational institutions that primarily provided vocational training for working class professions — would be granted full university status. The 1992 act completed the project of centralization and standardization that made it easier for governments to impose top-down demands for universities to cut costs and be more competitive.  (One of the great ironies of Thatcher’s program was its need to centralize power in order to impose free-market fundamentalism.) Marketization had as its corollary the devaluing of technical and vocational courses. All of this was part of a mission to promote social aspiration and trample any sense of working-class identity.

Underlying New Labour’s higher education reforms was a utopian belief in the power of social mobility as an alternative to redistribution. The end goal of Blair’s expansion of universities had as much to do with the growth of the middle class as it did the expansion of higher education. The result was the creation of a two-tier society, in which swathes of young people felt obliged to slog their way through university — whether or not it improved their job prospects, and whether or not they had any aptitude for, or interest in, further academic study — because social expectation demanded it. And if an influx of first-generation scholars made campuses more diverse — and it did — that was simply a step toward the creation of a new, more diverse, middle class.

And then in 2010, just as the number of seventeen- to thirty-year-olds entering higher education for the first time was about to peak (it reached a record high of 49.1 percent in 2011–12), Britain’s newly elected Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government delivered the coup de grâce, announcing their plans to triple tuition fees. From 2012 onwards, students would, in effect, begin paying for their degrees in the form of a loan that would be repaid over a period of thirty years. The last rise in tuition fees in England and Wales came in 2016, when they crept up to £9,250, which is where they remain frozen, despite soaring inflation since the pandemic.

All of Britain’s major political parties have learned the lesson of the protests that rocked the country after the trebling of fees in 2011 and the electoral destruction of the Liberal Democrats who were held responsible for this policy: that raising fees again would be tantamount to electoral suicide. Nevertheless, the real costs of higher education, when inflation is taken into account, have continued to rise. To counter the shortfall, the Conservatives have, over the last ten years, introduced a series of less easily assailable (though no less damaging) policies and initiatives. These have included the lifting of the cap on student admissions in 2020, the extension of student loan repayments from thirty to forty years in 2022, and an increasing reliance on overseas students, whose tuition fees are pitched considerably higher than those of home students. This year, a Tory crackdown on immigration and a tightening of visa restrictions have revealed the unsustainability of a system that relies so heavily on international revenue. This is a big part of the reason so many universities are now staring grimly at the deficits and shortfalls crowding their ledgers.

The current business model of higher education in the UK, in which students are expected to cover teaching costs, is antithetical, both in principle and in practice, to the history of higher education in the country. At no other point have universities in the UK operated as a store from which wealthy students purchase their degrees while their poorer classmates are hustled into accumulating large amounts of debt before the age of twenty-one. This has had the effect of transforming university students from intellectual participants, whose input in the classroom might further knowledge production and critical inquiry, into end users with little investment in the scholarly culture of the university, anxious only to get the most value for their money.

But what exactly is “value for money” when it comes to university education? Earning potential? University reputation? Campus experience? Quality of teaching? It is unclear how seventeen-year-olds are expected to know in advance which institution or which course will deliver the most bang for their buck. As Stefan Collini, an academic and author of What are Universities For?, has observed, the logic of consumer choice doesn’t work for undergraduate degrees in the same way that it might for, say, soap, since most students will purchase this particular commodity just once in their lives. They can’t make informed decisions based on past experience, and they can’t adjust future choices since they are unlikely to make repeat buys. This is why universities with long-standing reputations have little difficulty recruiting students with the best grades — a group disproportionately represented by children who attended private schools and have parents who went to these prestigious universities. For the rest, it’s a race to the bottom.

A Market in Degrees

My own academic career has coincided with the last fourteen years of Conservative government. I was among the 49.1 percent who entered higher education in 2011, when I enrolled on my undergraduate degree in English literature at the University of Sussex. I was, incidentally, also among the last wave of students to pay £3,000 ($3,874) a year in tuition fees; the last time I checked, my student debt had risen to more than £24,000 ($30,998). At Sussex, I was among the students who protested the privatization of support staff and campaigned alongside academic staff in their strike over a 1 percent pay offer. Over the next fourteen years, strike action over pensions and pay would become the norm at many UK universities; consecutive waves of extended industrial action between 2018–2023 constituted the longest dispute in UK higher education history.

Unlike many of my colleagues, I have only ever known the university in its marketized guise. I don’t know what it was like to be a student — or an academic — in the heady days of free higher education. I can’t lament the decline in student participation or wistfully recall what it felt like to have greater research freedom (I also can’t comment on what it felt like to attend university when the overwhelming majority of staff and students were white, male, and middle class).

What I can comment on is how much worse things have gotten in less than a generation: how many departments I’ve seen close in the last fourteen years; how many professors are taking voluntary redundancies to save the jobs of junior colleagues; how many promising early career scholars on precarious contracts are throwing in the towel; how many undergraduate students are suffering from anxiety, priced out of campus accommodation and struggling to keep on top of academic work and part-time employment to avoid spiraling even further into debt. A Veblenian opposition to the principle of commercialization is one thing; the piling up of casualties that result from it is quite another.

In all probability, Keir Starmer’s silence on the question of the higher education crisis conceals an intention to raise tuition fees in 2025 (the date at which the current settlement is up for review). But this cannot be the answer. Another rise in fees will not benefit students, nor will it fix struggling universities, nor, even, will it be to the advantage of the economy, given that the treasury is currently facing a debt to the tune of £236 billion from unpaid student loans (forecasted to reach £500 billion by the late 2040s).

Perhaps ironically, the answer may be to devalue university degrees — literally, by scrapping tuition fees and dismantling the notion that degrees possess market value, but also ideologically, by placing them on a par with other choices which young people make after turning eighteen. University degrees are not the only pathway available to young people, and the government must work hard to remove social stigma around alternative choices, whether they’re vocational courses, apprenticeships, or the decision to enter the workplace at sixteen.

But that doesn’t mean that we should disincentivize young people from going to university. Placing greater value on other options shouldn’t mean shutting off access to university degrees and restoring them to elite class markers, nor should it entail an inverse snobbery that denigrates the pursuit of learning and critical inquiry as serving no practical social function. What a degree might not do is guarantee higher earnings or drive economic growth, but what it might do is provide people with time and space to think, outside of the relentless demands of the job market and beyond bogus ideas around social status.