Why Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are dead right about the problem with universities

But there is a growing realisation that the financial models underpinning higher education are bust. That is, everywhere except Scotland where the SNP clings to the principle of free tuition with the religious fervour of a saint being burnt at the stake, still warmed by the late Alex Salmond’s declaration that rocks would melt in the sun before Scots paid for a first university course.

How far off those days feel now, and not just because of the former First Minster’s spectacular fall from grace. It’s hard to imagine any university acting with such sycophancy as Heriot-Watt in proudly accepting such a crass sculpture as a boulder carved with his words, a tasteless artefact of past times presumably still gathering dust somewhere on the Riccarton campus where it can’t embarrass the current management.

READ MORE: New Scotland college and university funding analysis shows 'most colleges are not sustainable'

Stark contrast between Labour and SNP

The bubble was tentatively poked by Sir Keir Starmer at last month’s Labour conference, announcing Tony Blair’s target of getting 50 per cent of young people into higher education was being binned in favour of a new goal for two-thirds to achieve “higher-level skills” through university, further education, or a “gold standard” apprenticeship (to be defined in a White Paper) by age 25.

The old target was not “right for our time”, he said, as if it ever was, and instead approximately £800 million will be spent on further education, including 14 new technical excellence colleges. It stands in stark contrast to the SNP, with an Audit Scotland report last week revealing a 20 per cent cut in real terms funding for Scottish further education colleges in the past five years, in favour of the now teetering university sector.

Labour’s new approach should signal a re-examination of what has been achieved by the Conservative policy in the John Major days of converting perfectly good polytechnics into universities, the majority of which make up the lower reaches of the annual university league tables, of which Glasgow Caledonian (36th in this year’s Times Good University Guide, the top ex-poly) is a happy exception, as are Robert Gordon (50th) and Edinburgh Napier (51st).

‘Rip-off courses’

Part of that transformation was the addition and expansion of art-based courses, many of which will be in the cross-hairs of Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch who in her big conference speech this week pledged a future Tory government would “shut down rip-off courses” which she claimed left nearly one-in-three graduates without any “economic return” for their degrees, with over £7 billion in unpaid student loans written off at taxpayers’ expense.

None of this will apply in Scotland where responsibility for higher education is devolved, and with the polls predicting another SNP stroll to just short of a majority in May’s Holyrood elections, any revolution in Scottish higher education will be because of irresistible external pressures, not government policy. Given there is less chance of the SNP admitting its policies are wrong than pools of lava forming where Arthur’s Seat used to be, Scottish universities will be left to muddle through as best they can.

To take the global warming metaphor further, the financial crises at Dundee and Edinburgh universities are just the tip of a fast-melting iceberg and even prudently conservative universities like Stirling, where I’ve taught part-time for the past 13 years, are feeling extreme financial heat.

Problems in plain sight for years

Having resisted headlong physical expansion and avoided the worst excesses of the Klondike rush for overseas post-graduates paying big money, Stirling is in a stronger position than most but is still trying to manage the impact of a projected 11 per cent drop in revenue, with budget cuts and a voluntary severance scheme to reduce the headcount.

The sector’s problems – and solutions – have been in plain sight for years, just that politicians have not had the courage or foresight to face up to the consequences of their actions, and have bought into the fantasy that a “university experience” should be everyone’s goal, even a right, skewing the whole education system accordingly.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Today’s undergraduates, certainly most of the ones I teach, don’t just leave with a degree but CVs bursting with all kinds of work experience. Only a couple of weeks ago, one of my charges attended a seminar wearing work clothes covered in paint because he works in a paint shop and now knows a thing or two about interior décor.

The challenge is that most will want to leave that kind of retail experience behind when they graduate, rather than it potentially being the start of a good career.

A debt-increasing fallacy

On-the-job training and vocational further education courses, such as used to be the way into journalism, must be the way forward rather than the situation now, in which four-year degree courses are now so often the starting point.

Why is nursing now a university course, other than for some sort of parity of esteem with doctors? Too often, graduates looking at a highly competitive jobs market are persuaded that another one-year masters course costing close to five figures might give them the edge. Sadly, in most cases it’s a debt-increasing fallacy.

For my part, at the end of the month I’m making my contribution to the future health of the university sector, in Stirling anyway. I’m taking voluntary redundancy. It’s been an education.