| Summary/Abstract |
At the heart of my article in 2015, to which Dennis A. Ahlburg is publishing a rejoinder, lay reports and official data exposing a major flaw in British education policy. The data show that, even five years after graduation, about one third of all graduates this century have not been employed in jobs for which a university degree was actually required. Furthermore, projections for student loan repayments indicate that well over one third of the total will never be repaid; since repayment is triggered only when someone's income reaches a level similar to the average for part-time employees (and less than for full-time workers), massive social waste seems apparent.1 This scale of waste is partly due to traditionally high costs of university level teaching when compared with many forms of teaching and methods for developing skills. (Primarily this is because effective teaching at an advanced level, especially of analytic skills, is best undertaken in small groups, and also because it requires close co-ordination with those researching in the relevant fields.) Eventually someone has to pay for that education. In the much smaller higher education sector of the mid-twentieth century the cost was largely borne by the British state. Later a large portion was transferred to students themselves, through introducing tuition fees and abolishing universal maintenance grants, and also to future tax payers when loans are not repaid. From the sole perspective of financial return (my focus in that article), more seems to be being paid by individuals and the state than necessary for servicing the needs of the British labour market.
|