DOUGLAS MURRAY: A university system that charges our children a fortune to study video games and zombies is a national fraud

It is more than 20 years since our then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, announced that he wanted 50 per cent of young people to go to university.

It was the sort of move that Blair was such a master at. Great on pizzazz. Low on thought.

After all, why should half of young people go to university? Universities have always been elite institutions precisely because most people don’t go to them.

Last year, that 50 per cent figure was finally achieved. Yet, as the novelist Kingsley Amis once explained, when it comes to higher education, ‘more means worse’.

He has been more than proved right. As the university system has expanded, so it has changed from being a sector dedicated to excellence into a national fraud, something akin to a Ponzi scheme, with those at the bottom – the debt-laden students – coming off the worst.

This is why the Policy Exchange think-tank is quite right to say that universities have ‘lost the faith of the nation’, that they are out of touch and a sitting duck for this new Government.

From the fat salaries paid to vice-chancellors to grade inflation, the failings are many and various.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8087479/amp/DOUGLAS-MURRAY-Uni-charges-study-video-games-zombies-national-fraud.html

And then there's the little employment problem...

Where less than 30% of jobs in any western economy actually require 'tertiary level' university qualifications..

Meaning that some 40% of those current uni' students won't actually get to use their qualifications in the work place --   where many of them would have been better off chasing trade college and "business college" level certificates and diplomas..