Thread by @rcolvile

Have written my column on why Britain's university system is, quite literally, sub-prime - please read whole thing but key points below (with charts!) thetimes.co.uk/article/sub-pr…

First and most obvious disclaimer: Britain still has great universities. For large majority, it's still worth going. (Though financially, the big gains are clustered around a relatively small number of courses/institutions.)

But but but - for many students, it really isn't. The IFS estimates that 1 in 5 (70k a year) will lose out financially, and gains to many others are pretty minimal.

The poster child for this stuff is creative arts and design - now fourth largest subject, with 187,000 students. There's been a huge row over the withdrawal of £120/student in subsidy - but the average person taking the course costs the govt £35k in written-off student loans!

Now obviously we don't just want to optimise for earnings - there are lots of socially useful things that people don't earn much money for. And we do need creative artists and designers. But do we really need quite so many? All signs point to 'hell no'.

The key problem, as I say in the piece, is that unis do the lending but govt picks up the bill. This is literally the subprime mortgage model - admissions tutors are incentivised to maximise numbers, and someone else picks up the bill if (when) the debt goes bad.

(And yes the interest rates on tuition fees are utterly extortionate and need to be reformed but that's a separate issue...)

Two other huge issues I mention in the column, which are associated with this. The first is the astonishing level of grade inflation at unis. The proportion of firsts being awarded has QUINTUPLED since 1997 (7% to 35%).

As of last year (admittedly juiced by the pandemic), 82% of students were getting Firsts or 2:1s. Just 3% got Thirds. This is the result of 'the customer is always right' - but it utterly destroys the value of the degrees.

The other big problem - Blair expanded universities before fixing the schools. Our graduates tend to have worse literacy and numeracy than others (and a much wider spread of ability) - yet we have many more of them.

In column, I originally quoted a New Statesman piece that said 20% of grads in England had poor literacy/numeracy. They got that wrong - it's significantly lower. But still more than double the OECD average.

In other words, we're sending too many low-skilled people to university, to do courses that won't help them, to pick up honours that have been devalued - and neglecting degree apprenticeships and technical alternatives that might be better for them. Not great!

For a more detailed explanation - plus more on the politics of all this - read the full column here thetimes.co.uk/article/sub-pr…