Opening up higher education to half the country hasn’t been quite the progressive boon we were promised.

For someone who thinks they know their own mind and has a clear view of their beliefs and what matters, there are a range of issues which I’ve struggled with all my life. Should people have the right to send their children to private schools? Should borders be open? What rights come with what responsibilities?

One particular dilemma has bugged me for decades. It’s whether significantly more people should go into higher education, which has been the case since New Labour effectively made a target of half of us ‘enjoying’ that experience from 1998? I still don’t know what I really think – and here’s why.

What drives me politically more than anything is how the talent and ability of people is wasted, primarily for themselves but also for society. The fact that we exist at all is a miracle and our lives can be long, full and beautiful, or short, empty and ugly. But all of us are capable of the most amazing feats of ingenuity and creativity, when given a chance and the support needed to realise our incredible potential.

University, or more precisely for me Trent Polytechnic, was a vital stepping stone on the journey to unlock the modest potential I could boast. I came from a family in which no one had ever got near a sixth form, let alone a university. My mum, one of those smart working-class women who left school at 15 and worked in shops and offices all her life (while running the home and the family), somehow thought that college might be good for me without any direct knowledge of what it actually meant.  She asked Dave, in the big house over the road, to talk to me about it and to give me a nudge. Duly prodded I eventually found myself immersed in Frankfurt School Marxism, student politics, football and endless joyful fun. Not least, I see retrospectively, because I was given a grant to live off. For those under 55 let me explain – the state or more precisely your local council gave you the money for rent and food. And there were no, I repeat, no tuition fees.  Can you believe it?

This public largess was deemed financially feasible while only 10% of the country went to university.

As an interregnum between youth and adulthood, it provided not just three golden years, but a lifetime of brilliant friends and stepping stones to jobs and opportunities my mum could only dream of (but would have succeeded in given half a chance). For me it was priceless. So why shouldn’t everyone who wants to go, get to go?

When New Labour launched its plan to open up universities to half the country I was instinctively opposed. Tuition fees sounded the death knell of higher education as a place in which the public good was paramount.  Fees simply embedded the commercialisation of both the student and the institution. The learn, to earn, to spend treadmill was now complete. People would increasingly see themselves as their own individualised private company and brand, worthy of investment to guarantee a return on themselves. Meanwhile the institutions would expand dramatically and recklessly and along with it, the pay and prestige of their once humble administrators.

“The economy is the means, the goal is to change the soul” Mrs. Thatcher famously remarked.  She also crowed that her greatest achievement wasn’t the conversion of the Conservative party to Thatcherism but the conversion of the Labour Party.  And so, with tuition fees, her claim rang true.

I thought tuition fees would put off kids like me, whose families were not used to such large levels of debt, from going. I was wrong. The lure and desperation of getting on board the gravy train of material advantage was too strong. But what’s the result? Yes degrees, but millions of them which flood a shrinking jobs market, and that’s before the explosion of the great AI work displacement. Huge numbers are left with huge debts in jobs that people with A Levels or GCSEs could do.  Meanwhile the Ponzi scheme of loans festers and institutions that have over expanded face economic ruin. One insider informs me that 14 universities are in special measures and two are close to going under. But like the banks, and now the water companies, will universities be too big to fail and will the state have to step in?

But what of the magic of learning and living a semi-independent life as students? Here we have created two classes, those who are forced to live at home and attend institutions that used to be further education colleges that rebranded, and those who can afford to live away at the always elite universities. And even there two classes exist, those who have the money and therefore the time to enjoy to the full the student experience, and those who must work all hours, with lectures and study eked out in the margins of minimum wage bullshit jobs which could be their working experience for years to come, but topped up by nagging gloom of £10Ks of debt.

And here is a bigger political factor. When you look back at the New Labour years and consider what they did to help guarantee a progressive political future for our country, you might imagine that putting half the country through a process that tends to liberalise and enlighten its participants would be at or near the top. Just like council house sales and privatisation were seen to benefit the Tories electoral hopes in the 1980s. Was HE expansion a smart but cynical electoral move by New Labour?

For years this is the way I saw it. But now I’m not so sure. As the country polarises between small L liberals and small C conservatives, between the big urban cities and the small towns, surely a driver of that cultural, experiential and identity divide is the fact that half the country went to university but half didn’t. If you wanted to cleave the country in two, then this was the way of doing it. Nigel Farage never went to university and somehow it shows.

But you don’t just end up with Brexit and Reform on 30% of the vote. At the other end of the political spectrum you get the fragmentation of progressive voters, who start backing the Greens and independent candidates on the left, or around issues like Palestine.

And here I return, as I always do, to our cursed voting system which piles up wasted graduate votes in big cosmopolitan centres like London, Manchester, Leeds and Bristol, but leaves the non-graduate vote spread evenly and effectively across the suburbs and towns of our insecure and resentful nation that Reform are now hoovering up. And it is those who have never worn a gown or a mortarboard, have never sat in a lecture theatre or gone to a fresher’s fair who hold the whip hand – and who can blame them.

Was university expansion a good thing or a bad thing? I still don’t know. But I know it matters.

This article first appeared in the Byline Times on 19th May 2025.