Does Britain send too many people to university?

When in 2012 Britain’s politicians tripled the maximum tuition fee for undergraduates, critics feared youngsters would go off degrees. They need not have worried. Participation kept going up. By 2024 about 60% of young Britons had some kind of post-secondary qualification, up from 48% when fees were raised. Only five rich countries boast rates higher than that.

The worry these days is that universities are enrolling more students than is wise. A furore over student debt has rekindled old claims that the system is rife with “low value” degrees. The Conservatives say Britain should cut by around 100,000 the number of students entering higher education each year (652,525 Britons began undergraduate courses in 2024). They say this would generate savings that might be spent on lowering the interest on the debts of existing graduates.

Discussions about dud degrees split into two debates. The first is whether universities competing fiercely for new recruits have cut entry requirements far below what is smart. In 2024 more than 10% of freshers on full-time undergraduate courses had no A-levels (or equivalent qualifications), up from only about 3% ten years before. Data suggest that about a quarter of such students drop out, twice the average rate.

The second debate concerns students who choose to study subjects that don’t provide much (or any) earnings bump. In 2020 the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, crunched educational and income records and concluded that, after costs, about one-fifth of graduates would be better off financially over their lifetimes if they had not gone to university. That was true for most graduates in creative arts—studied by 7% of undergraduates—and for swathes of those studying agriculture and English.

These students are more likely to have a big chunk of their debt written off (as happens to what is unpaid after 30 or 40 years). That raises the costs of the system as a whole (see chart). A study in 2019 predicted that people with creative-arts degrees would repay only about a quarter of the money they borrowed. Capping enrolment on these bachelor’s courses might thus save taxpayers cash. Yet the idea alarms people who warn it risks choking off supplies of workers to industries in which Britain excels. ■