https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/08/14/wales-awakens/

If you listen carefully, you can just make out the sound of pearl clutching in the management offices of Wales’s universities. The reason is that far fewer youngsters (33.8%) have applied to go to university this year than the UK average (41.9%), with the most deprived parts of Wales seeing the biggest decline.

For the establishment BBC and the wider professional managerial class, this is obviously a terrible development. The BBC quotes professor Paul Boyle, vice chancellor of Swansea University:

“We need to be worried. That’s our next generation of doctors, of nurses, of teachers, of engineers – vital cohorts who will come through and help the economic growth that Wales needs.”

But are they really the future specialists or are they the next generation of debt-serfs emerging from second-tier colleges with degrees in subjects that nobody really needs? Even the BBC notes that the average Welsh student left university with a debt of £37,360 which will hang around their necks as an additional tax – notably making it all but impossible to get on the housing ladder early enough to start a family, thereby adding to the perilous decline in UK birth rates.

Moreover, in recent years we have seen members of professions like law and medicine, which traditionally allowed graduates to secure a higher income, taking to the picket lines in protest at low pay and heavy workloads. These days, with the exception of a handful of niche specialisms and university management itself, only the banking and finance corporations offer rates of pay that make the student debt worthwhile.

With the high vacancy rates of the post-lockdown years, youngsters may be turning to on-the-job training as an alternative to the debt burden that comes with a university education. Others have turned to apprenticeships which at least pay the youngsters as they are learning. In the 2020s, this may well be the smart choice, since many graduates will never make up the earnings they lost while doing their A-levels and degree compared to a tradesperson who was being paid from the moment they left school at 16.

Ever since the introduction of student loans in the fag-end of the Thatcher government, and particularly after the Blair government’s expansion, university has been a means of hiding youth unemployment – with the added trick of getting students to borrow their living costs. But for the new breed of university managers (who are paid far more than the teaching staff) the system turned students into income sources… especially once universities began to provide their own accommodation. But in recent years – partly because the youth population is declining anyway, but also because increasing numbers no longer see the benefit – universities have seen their own debts spiral, leaving them dependent on fee-paying international students to (fail to) balance the books.

What is clear is that the neoliberal cargo cult approach to higher education has failed. Overproducing graduates did not result in the creation of new graduate-level jobs. Rather, the degrees themselves were devalued – forcing youngsters with little choice than to take on student debt to get jobs that a previous generation could have walked into at age 16 or 18. After a quarter of a century of this, the evidence is piling up. And today’s youngsters – particularly those from the UK’s ex-industrial, rundown seaside and small town rural regions – only have to look at the millennials to see that the true beneficiaries of higher education today are the same as they always were – the offspring of the professional-managerial classes living in the prosperous districts of southern England who attended the same handful of top-tier universities that have always offered a route to prosperity (for the privileged few).

It is, of course, true that Wales – and the UK as a whole – is going to need doctors, nurses, teachers, and engineers in future. But if we (they?) are really concerned about this, wouldn’t they be paying youngsters to learn those specialisms? And if – as is likely the case – the cost of this is prohibitive, wouldn’t they be closing down those courses and universities which are currently producing armies of graduates with degrees nobody wants? But then again, to do so would be met with vigorous opposition from the lenocratic university managers who grew out of the expansion of higher education. But most difficult of all, to do so would require that the elites admit that their neoliberal faith in education as the cure for socio-economic ills was simply wrong… and they will more likely allow Britain to burn before admitting as much.