Image: Terry Murden, via Shutterstock
Head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies takes aim at ever-increasing university participation rates
Sending 50 per cent of young people to university is “not delivering for the economy” and a significant group should take vocational courses instead, a leading economist has said.
Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), told an audience at an IFS lecture on the future of education on 28 October that he “very much doubts” 50 per cent of school leavers should go to university, given the UK’s low productivity.
Johnson said that sending half of school leavers to university “does not mean that all of those 50 per cent of young people are doing the right thing, are being well trained for what really matters or are going to do well in the labour market”. He added that creating so many graduates is “a very expensive way of achieving what we are currently achieving”.
“From an economic point of view, if we were designing a system to equip people for the labour market, you wouldn’t be designing the system we have at the moment, where such a large number are going down that route,” he said. “I don’t know what the right number is—is it 30 per cent, 40 per cent? I very much doubt it is 50 per cent.”
England surpassed a target of sending 50 per cent of young people to university, first set by former Labour prime minister Tony Blair in 1999, in the 2017-18 academic year, with 50.2 per cent of the population aged 17 to 30 taking a higher education qualification.
During the lecture, Johnson said university is not “the be-all and end-all”, and cited IFS research showing that male students taking courses such as creative arts, English and philosophy are economically worse off by the age of 30 than they would have been without going to university.
Meanwhile, conservative peer Theodore Agnew, the government’s spokesman on education in the House of Lords, heralded the “beginning of the push-back” against encouraging more school leavers to go to university during a debate on vocational training on 28 October.
Agnew agreed that vocational education “does not get the status it deserves”, adding that the “lazy mantra” of pushing students towards a university education was starting to be questioned.
“I think we have overcooked the rather lazy mantra of encouraging children to go to university whatever the cost to them and whatever the quality of the course they are studying. We are starting to change that,” he said.