Value for money

AS THE annual clearing process for university places gets under way, universities are investing in ever more innovative ways of marketing to students, reflecting an increasingly competitive market now the government has lifted caps on student numbers, allowing universities to recruit as many students as they like. But given the headline price of degrees has tripled in recent years, there is thus more scrutiny of their value.

Universities may not be public institutions in the same ways as schools and hospitals, but they receive a significant chunk of public funding and should be asked to account for what they deliver from a value-for-money perspective. In recent months, stark variations in the graduate premium – the amount graduates earn compared to non-graduates – have become more evident. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found graduates of some subjects, such as the creative arts, do not appear to earn any more on average than non-graduates. Average earnings for male graduates of 23 universities were actually lower than for non-graduates.

It is too simplistic to look at headline earnings in isolation, but this is surely information young people taking on significant amounts of debt have a right to access when they’re making decisions. This is particularly when six in 10 graduates find themselves in jobs that don’t require a degree and fewer than four in 10 students think their degrees represent good value for money.

The right response is surely to ask how we can better improve the match between the skills young people develop through their degrees and those needed by the labour market, and whether degrees can be delivered more efficiently.