About 30 years ago, around 770,000 people attended a university or polytechnic. Now there are over 2.3 million students in Higher Education.
For the last 30 years we’ve been told that ‘the more people go to Uni, the better off we’ll all be’.
But is this true? Has the huge growth in the number of people going to Uni – the Great University Expansion – really been the success the politicians and universities would have us believe?
After all, what’s the point of having a degree if one in every two people has one? Why get a degree if only a small minority of university graduates – on some courses less than 1 in 10 – will find graduate jobs, especially if many graduates leave Uni with debts of up to £60,000?
In THE GREAT UNIVERSITY CON we expose the truth behind the massive expansion of Britain’s university sector:
• pressure on school-leavers to get to Uni whether they are likely to benefit or not
• schools gaming the system to send as many pupils to Uni as possible
• universities lowering entrance standards to fill up their ever-increasing numbers of courses
• dumbing down of university courses
• falling academic standards as lecturers no longer have time to deal individually with increasing numbers of students
• universities avoiding failing anyone, however poor their work, as they’ve paid so much for their degrees
• graduates with unrepayable debts which will have to be picked up by taxpayers
• a massive oversupply of graduates compared to available job opportunities
• a university sector that has become huge, bureaucratic and self-serving and which is too often a burden on, rather than a benefit to, the country.
