Most interestingly to me the university he works for has not increased the amount spent on teaching students by any significant amount since fees were introduced. The money seems to being spent on hiring additional administrotors to do tasks which used to be done by academics (meaning the tail is definitely wagging the dog) and on building superflous buildings.

The university are also concentrating on improving research as they are assessed on the quality of their research and paid for it based on the outcome of the assessment but there is no real assessment of the university’s teaching quality.

To me the fatal argument for tuiton fees is that the government’s own figures suggest that graduates would pay far more in additional tax due to the supposed ‘salary boost’ given by a degree than the cost to the government of paying for the degree. It is of benefit to the economy and society to have graduates and IMHO this is something which is best paid for by the government not the individual if we are to have true equality of oppertunity for all.

What do you think the typical employer would say if the Government offered to provide all its bright young staff with three years academic training in analytical skills, technical writing, etc etc, absolutely free of charge?

That’s why taking on graduates makes business sense!

Of course, the employer might very much prefer to just take the money that graduate education would have cost, and then do his own training. We don’t offer him that choice, so, we don’t find out if we have wasted our money.

I don’t think your answer is a very sensible one to the question of “which jobs is a degree necessary for?”, but let’s go along with it for the sake of argument.

You didn’t say which of the occupational groups I mentioned satisfied your criterion. Do you know which? Are there any data on how the “graduate premium” varies between the groups? Obviously an average figure over all graduates doesn’t give you the answer.

What other answer did you expect from an economist?

(PS Since I teach historians, I mainly talk to the employers of historians, not economists)

It’s sounds as though you’re talking about people who are employing economists. Well, obviously they are going to want their employees to have degrees in economics!

What I’m questioning is whether half the jobs in the country – or even perhaps, heaven help us, four fifths of the jobs, as you suggest in your article – really require a university degree.

To be concrete, for which of the following groups in the standard classification of occupations do you think education to degree level is necessary?

4 Administrative and Secretarial Occupations
5 Skilled Trades Occupations
6 Personal Service Occupations
7 Sales and Customer Service Occupations
8 Process, Plant and Machine Operatives
9 Elementary Occupations

If your “optimal” percentage of the population going to university were really 80%, it would have to take in most of those.

My answer is that they are not as good at “grad jobs” when offered the place at univ as they are when their leave univ, and that is why employers prefer LSE grads to people who have offers from LSE. We teach them stuff that makes them better at their jobs.

By all means post some of this evidence.

Of course I _didn’t_ say that there were lots of jobs for which you “now need” a degree. I said there were many jobs which wouldn’t be offered to anyone without a degree.

Surely it’s not that hard to work out. If 40% of the population have degrees, 40% of jobs will be viewed as jobs suitable for those with degrees. If it did ever happen that 80% of the population had degrees, then inevitably something like that proportion of jobs would be viewed as degree-level jobs.

None of that has anything at all to do with how much three years’ academic education actually helps people do their jobs.

The unsurprising facts that graduates earn more than non-graduates, and that for many positions employers prefer graduates to non-graduates, tell us nothing about how useful degree courses are, let alone what proportion of graduates is “optimal” .

But all the evidence that I am aware of so far, from here and abroad, suggests that the steady expansion of HE seems to help long term economic development.

The ongoing existence of a graduate earnings premium supports that view, even if is doesn’t prove it.

CCF: You say that there are lots of jobs for which you now need a degree. I would argue that this is because a degree helps you do the job! Otherwise why wouldn’t those firms offer the jobs to anyone who had an offer from LSE? They don’t, so unless you think every graduate employer is stupid, it seems to me that your argument is logically flawed.

David: you can have any number you like! If you want the current low and declining quality of univ education then stick with current fee levels. If you want LSE levels of funding, multiply by 5-6 per student. Pick your quality and we can tell you the price! There is no “correct” price per se.

“You double the numbers and treble the fees, and you are talking big money for tax payers to find.”

First of all – yes but, most of us don’t believe you should double the numbers. So that’s a bit of a straw man argument.

As to raising or trebling the fees so as to fund unis properly – well maybe. How big is big money? Are you able to produce some sort of costing or is that too much to ask?

But that too is a meaningless comparison. Applicants without a degree won’t even be considered for many jobs, in the current set-up. And of course people who choose not to go to university have very different career aspirations from those who do.

It may be the best comparison you can do, but it’s so deeply flawed that you’d be better not bothering. It certainly doesn’t prove anything.

But I think the perception that “the more people who go to university the better” is so ingrained now, that it’s pointless trying to question it.

I agree with Matthew that middle ranking univs are under a lot of pressure, and so are their staff. No offence taken.

CCF: The point is that you compare people with qualifications X and a degree, with people with qualifications X, to try to overcome this. It is the best we can do. If we were sending too many people to univ, you would expect that the premium would fall. It hasn’t, that is the evidence.

We could fund univs by higher taxes, but taxes would have to rise quite a lot. If we spent the same % of GDP on univs as the US – which has a better access record than we do – then we are not talking about a couple of billion. You double the numbers and treble the fees, and you are talking big money for tax payers to find. One advantage of the market is that it is easier to provide both low cost univs – like US community colleges, which do a great job, and top notch research univs like my own. Having a system where everything is free and pretends to be equal is just a lie, and deep down we know that a 2:1 from one univ is not necessarily the same as a 2:1 from another.

Off to lecture…

“I do think it is likely that steady growth in the proportion that go to University is sensible, and that this will effectively pay for itself in the long run.”

It will only pay for itself if three years of academic study improves people’s abilities to do their jobs to such an extent that it makes the huge investment of time and money worthwhile.

Just think how much directly relevant training – throughout people’s careers – could be provided for the cost of a three-year university course.

Surely we should be looking at the evidence in a hard-headed way, not just going along with the trend?

You are quite right that in itself it far from proves the case.

I do not take the view that it is sensible for the Government to set an artificial target of the percentage of people that should go to University.

I do think it is likely that steady growth in the proportion that go to University is sensible, and that this will effectively pay for itself in the long run.

There is certainly no evidence that we have hit a ceiling on the sensible proportion of people going to HE.

I can beleive that at some point the proportion going on to HE will be very high, in the same way that the proportion of young people staying on after 16 has grown massively over recent years to the point where it is the norm.

I am sure that particular problem could be dealt with fairly easily by allowing those paying off a loan to credit that against tax.

1. If there is huge societal gain why are we so keen on individualising the cost? You are in effect arguing for Private Squalor , Public Affluence in this policy area.

2. If we currently sending c45% of people to University and think the potential optimum might be as high as 80% what about basic behavioural psychology ? Is charging inividuals more or making it cheaper/free more likely to encourage such a huge sift ?

3. finally I don’t much like the implied non sequitar in all of this. thats because a service will be used by 80% of a society it is therefore unaffordable. thats an arguement against any kind of universal provision. the NHS, the military, roads, street lighting.

“Do you prefer this one? (p. 13 is the most appropriate)

http://www.dius.gov.uk/consultations/documents/Higher_Education_at_Work.pdf”

But, as I said, the fact that graduate salaries are higher on average proves absolutely nothing about how many people should be taking a degree course.

If the state selected the 40% most academically able students and sent them on a 3-year skiing holiday, no doubt it would later be observed that the skiers’ salaries were, on average, higher than those of the non-skiers …

I don’t want to say too much as I am posting under my real name, this is a public website, I am employed as a university lecturer, and I don’t want to damage my relationhsip with my employer.

However, things have changed very much in the university sector since 1980 when your father retired, and I can assure you the days when being a university lecturer was a stress-free job where you could work short hours have gone. I came in just at the tail end of those days, so I have seen the changes.

I know from Tim’s record that he is an excellent university teacher as well as a respected researcher, so if what I said came across as any sort of criticism of him, it wasn’t meant to be.

What has happened is that university funding works on the basis of flat level of fees per home student and a fixed allocation of home student places, plus top-up funding based on the research record of each department in the university, plus whatever you can get overseas students to pay and you can have as many of those as you can recruit.

One of the consequences of this is that in some institutions (not naming any names) there can be a bit of a gung-ho attitude to recruiting overseas students i.e. don’t ask too much about whether they are suitable for the degree, just ask if they are willing to pay.

The other is that there’s a perverse incentive to put all effort into improving the research rating and none into doing good teaching, because research rating brings in extra money and good teaching doesn’t. University lecturers can no longer take long summer holidays, because if they aren’t churning out research papers and grant applications, or supervising full-fee paying MSc students who do dissertations over summer, management has ways of making their lives unpleasant.

Tim is hinting at chopping contact hours because, by and large, spending more time with your students is less profitable to the university than spending more time writing research papers. I agree with Tim that it’s good that university teachers are proven experts in their field shown by active research in it, but I feel quite strongly that the perverse incentive has now way overbalanced things, and the public ought to know that and ought to be angry about it.

Part of the reaspn why good teaching counts for so little is that students tend NOT to make their decisions on university places after careful consideration of the particular degree programme they’re interested in. Rather, they will make their decision on the basis “University X is better than University Y, so I’ll go to University X if I can get the grades they require”. They might look at the university league tables, but the ranking on these and university reputation in general is based largely on research profile rather than quality of teaching.

I think this applies most strongly in the middle ranking institutions where the students are weaker than at the top-ranking, so require more teaching support, but the pressure on academics to pull the ranking up to the top level by churning out high quality research – too specialised to be of much benefit to the weakish students – is particularly intense.

Naming no names of institutions, of course.