Is education as worthless as Sunak thinks?

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The course leader on a training session I attended many years ago explained the difference between education and training in roughly the following terms: “If your daughter came home from school and said the class had had sex education, you’d probably be quite relaxed, but if she said they’d had sex training you might be a little concerned”. The English government, it seems (and there will be knock-on effects in Wales, in funding terms at least) has effectively decided that all university courses are to be designated training rather than education, in the sense that if they don’t make students fit for a particular job, they are inherently worthless. The English education minister went so far as to say that there were some students still earning less than £18,000 a year, five years after graduating, and that this was not acceptable.

Leaving aside the question about the acceptability of any employer paying low wages, whether to graduates or not, what exactly is wrong with a graduate ending up in a comparatively low-paid job? There are a number of reasons why it can and does happen – it doesn’t mean that the education is worthless or the course pointless. Sometimes, the jobs aren’t available, and sometimes people deliberately choose to work in jobs which happen to be low-paid, not because the pay is low, but because there are other attractions to the job. Whilst the chief executives of some charities earn very high salaries, most of their staff do not, to look at only one example. Social care is another. Are we (or the government acting on our behalf) really saying that there’s no purpose educating people who work in those jobs beyond the level of training strictly required for the job?

It highlights one of those ideological differences which those who espouse something called ‘post-ideology politics’ deny exists: is the role of the education system to be limited to fitting people to the work which needs doing, or is there some intrinsic value, both for society as a whole and individuals, in having an educated population? Looking at the current level of political debate in the UK, I can understand why having an educated population might be considered dangerous to a Conservative Party which depends on prejudice and hatred for its electoral support. But Labour aren’t much different, and not just in terms of fishing in the same electoral pool. It was, remember, a Labour government which introduced student fees in the first place, beginning the process of marketizing higher education. Winnowing out courses which provide a ‘poor return on investment’ when looked at on a strictly cost-benefit basis is a pretty obvious outcome from that process. The tendency towards seeing all state spending in terms of investment and return, measured only in monetary terms, is a feature, not a bug, of the two parties’ shared ideology.

In purely practical terms, there is something very strange about having civil servants (or an outside agency contracted by the civil service, which amounts to the same thing) examining each individual course at each individual university to determine whether the university should be allowed to run the course at all, and if so, with how many students. It’s a short step from there to each new course requiring ministerial approval before it can start – a level of interference in the activity of ‘autonomous’ universities of which any dictatorial regime would be proud. Presumably, Sunak thinks that this will be a ‘popular’ decision amongst his target audience – that seems to be the only factor driving his decisions on policy. Perhaps he’s right, although it seems to me unlikely that those who are vociferously opposed to immigration are also deeply concerned about the nature of courses being taught in universities. It is a blow, though, against the idea that ‘life-long learning’ has a value, both to individuals and the wider community.