No Refunds, No Credit Note

Nik,
There was no-one among my contemporaries doing ‘A’ levels… that would ever have thought twice about it as a drain on the state much less immoral… I can be accused by others of pulling up the ladder behind me and to be actively denying the same benefits to the generation finishing high school in the next couple of years.
I’m sure some people will make that accusation. We have a generation of students who’ve been led to believe, by the left, that they have an unchallengeable “right” to spend years studying X at someone else’s expense, regardless of whether a degree in X will lead to employment, to the repayment of that debt, and to fairness for those actually footing the bill. Intergenerational subsidy depends on repayment, ideally via lucrative employment in the private sector. If that doesn’t happen, or doesn’t happen enough, it’s unsustainable.
For how many years can we go on bankrolling, say, 20,000 students of fine art or 27,000 enthusiasts of media studies if their qualifications have little value in the job market and don’t lead to employment? As we’ve seen, very few of those art students will make even the most basic living as artists. A majority of those surveyed earned less than a quarter of their income from art, the rest often coming from low-paid temp work and/or state benefits. The supply of artists exceeds demand by quite some margin. A few may find a niche in academia, where their debt to the taxpayer may eventually be ‘repaid’ with taxpayers’ money. Shouldn’t students be advised of these practicalities and bear some responsibility for their subsequent choices? And shouldn’t that inform any argument about fairness?
You may want to point those doing the accusing to some recent political history. Subsidised tuition for a gifted minority from modest backgrounds – say, 2% or 5% of the student population – is admirable, something I’d endorse. But doing the same for 20% or 50% of the country’s teenagers, regardless of their abilities, simply isn’t viable, and never was. Yet this was New Labour policy and so we arrived at some arbitrary target of 50% of young people in higher education, supposedly in the name of fairness. And so joke courses multiplied and standards fell.
It seems to me that the “devaluation of academia” has already happened – in the name of egalitarian progress. And this policy of fairness, so conceived, makes grants and intergenerational subsidy unworkable, and thus the need for loans. It’s no coincidence that the far-left academics who’ve championed student rioting and disruption are those whose areas of study are disreputable, dogmatic and economically frivolous, and which will be very hard to sell in the harsh light of day. As I’ve said before, those students who feel entitled to protest, even riot, might at least direct their feelings towards the egalitarian architects of the situation now at hand. People whose worldview isn’t far removed from that of Zygmunt Bauman.
[ Edited. ]

present & correct: You are absolutely right. Nothing is forever.

What “national rep” means in academia is a “national academic reputation”.
When (say) Yale asks for a national or international reputation, they mean an art career. What a school asks for and what it can reasonably hope for are two different discussions. Radford would likely settle for what you describe – no disrespect to Radford, town or college; I’m sure they’re lovely – but the request is aimed at the art career. And in fact, competition is so fierce that someone who’s exhibiting around the country if not exactly selling all over the place is likely to take the position.

David,
“For how many years can we go on bankrolling, say, 20,000 students of fine art or 27,000 enthusiasts of media studies if their qualifications have little value in the job market and don’t lead to employment? … we arrived at some arbitrary target of 50% of young people in higher education, supposedly in the name of fairness … It seems to me that the “devaluation of academia” has already happened – in the name of egalitarian progress.”
There is nothing that you’ve saying here that I can find any real disagreement with – in fact if anything, the situation is even worse than you describe it.
The New Labour policy wasn’t simply about making things fairer, it was about bringing society together. Blair, as we know, was someone who was quite invested in that vague wishy-washy spirituality that obsesses about everyone ‘becoming one’, so it should be no surprise that universities under New Labour became far more than simply places where higher education was conducted.
Literally hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent by universities up and down the country on swanky new buildings, huge purpose-built halls of residence, student ‘villages’ and so on. It’s unlikely the universities could have received the investment for such projects if they weren’t able to project income based on a vast increase in student numbers. In cities like Hull, Leicester or Stoke-on-Trent, I suspect that the universities are probably really quite significant to the local economies of the area and I don’t just mean late night kebab shops or 24-7 grocery stores.
So yes, sending 50% of high school leavers to *is* an absurd and unsustainable plan for many reasons but if (when) subsidies are withdrawn, it won’t simply be the universities that will go down but in many places, half the small businesses in the community will probably go along with it.
If Blair’s policies did communities closer, it has done so by tying them great numbers of them into the same fate, all of which is predicated on massive amounts of debt and borrowing.
Not only that, but if the plan really were to make society more egalitarian it has done nothing but lead to precisely the opposite result. Once the fact of having a degree itself becomes no longer remarkable or noteworthy, it starts to matter greatly where that degree was awarded.
There may have been a time from the 60s onward that having a degree from the University of Hull probably was as valuable as one from Oxford or Cambridge, even if it lacked the same cultural prestige.
Now, though, it hardly seems worth trying to get a degree unless you’re going to get it from one of the top 20 universities and colleges in the country. In other words, Blair’s policy has arguably reintroduced a spirit of elitism probably not seen in the UK since before the First World War.
In the not too distant future, I suspect the legacy of this policy will make another useful warning of the perils of overt government interference on society.

Well, quite – it’s a situation that we can’t afford to continue and yet seemingly can’t afford to discontinue either, not without a precipitous descent into wrack and ruin.
There’s a huge difference between using borrowing/lending as a necessary resource to get things done and move things forward and making a near bottomless ocean of debt the foundation of your entire culture.
As for the lesson, well, it’d be nice if it could learned at least once by somebody, somewhere.
On a less depressing note and just in case you haven’t already seen it, you may well also enjoy this exchange between Dave Gibbons (of Watchmen etc. fame) and a typically effulgent TV presenter-type on the question of Roy Lichtenstein and plagiarism (the relevant part of the documentary starts at 34:54 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0gyP17bs8I

Alistair Sooke, the BBC critic/broadcaster in the Lichtenstein docu is such a pretentious nob, endlessly finding supreme value in all sorts of banal contemporary art-wankery.

I did enjoy Sooke’s repeatedly failed attempts to persuade Gibbons
Maybe there’s a short documentary to be made there: Art critics and curators trying to persuade people from other walks of life of the merits of half a dozen recent works. Have them talk with graphic designers, comic book artists, games developers, etc. See if their views collide. Though as I said, a little art criticism goes an awfully long away.