A university education is no longer good value for money
Students have been turned into customers but the product they’re buying is worthless and it’s underwritten by the taxpayer, says Paul Ormerod
The plight of graduates burdened with debt has been a prominent feature in the media over the past week or so.
Hundreds of thousands will never earn enough to repay their student borrowings, and the loans will have to be written off courtesy of the taxpayer.
But there is a deeper crisis across the whole university sector which embraces a wide range of their activities.
For example, a detailed story in the Daily Telegraph exposed the fact that there has been massive grade inflation in degrees.
Almost one third of students leave with a first class degree. This is double the percentage in 2010, which in turn was double that of 1990.
Over the past three decades or so, the huge expansion of the sector has meant that the average quality of the intake has declined markedly. Last year, 75 per cent of applicants with three Ds at A-level or worse were offered university places. Yet the proportion leaving with the top grades has soared.
There is a simple explanation. Students are now “customers”, and as such expect a pleasant customer experience. What better way to do this than to award more first-class degrees! Stories abound of staff being “encouraged” to award higher grade degrees.
The apparent increase in student achievement can hardly be due to improvements in the quality of teaching. University teaching practices in general remain firmly rooted in the past.
An example is the teaching of courses in introductory economics, or economics 101 as our American friends would say.
The most popular textbook is written by the Harvard economist Greg Mankiw. Around ten years ago, Mankiw performed the public service of putting onto YouTube, with free access, one hour lectures for each of the 36 chapters of his book.
Yet up and down the country, university staff are still paid to deliver economics 101 lectures based around Mankiw’s book. They are simply not needed. Students can not only listen to the man himself but can go over a lecture as many times as they want.
AI of course makes possible even higher quality teaching across almost any subject. The traditional Oxbridge tutorial, in which just one or two students spend an hour discussing a topic with an academic, is now in practice open to all.
Judicious use of ChatGPT or Claude, for example, enables each student to interrogate an expert and to go over points which are not understood in a variety of ways.
The other main activity of academic staff apart from teaching is of course carrying out research. That is, when they have time from the endless form filling required by the massively expanded bureaucracies which appear to have taken over many universities.
The outlet for their published research is the venerated – by academics that is – peer reviewed journal. Articles are sent by journals to readers, and they are accepted for publication only if the comments deem them of a suitable standard.
The number of both journals and published papers has soared over the past 10 to 15 years. But this is not an indicator that more scientific work is being carried out.
A great deal of what is published in these journals is of no value whatsoever.
The metric which academics use to judge the quality of a published paper is how many times it is cited subsequently in papers published by other academics.
In most disciplines, the median number of citations of an article is in fact zero.
The university sector is for the most part underwritten by the taxpayer. It can hardly be said that, taking the sector as a whole, we are getting anything like proper value for our money.
Paul Ormerod is an Honorary Professor at the Alliance Business School at the University of Manchester. You can follow hm on Instagram @profpaulormerod