The case for mass higher education: University education empowers people and gives them the skills to perform a wide variety of jobs in a changing economy. A high proportion of graduates makes an economy more flexible and ultimately more prosperous. Universities offer dissent and eccentricity and enrich society.
The case against mass higher education: Prolonging education infantilises people and postpones their development of responsibility and financial independence. Because the state cannot fund it people are forced into debt. It does not prepare people for jobs, being generally too lengthy and insufficiently relevant to the job market. Worst of all, it imprisons non-graduates under a glass ceiling which prevents them from doing jobs they are capable of. Universities no longer offer genuine dissent and eccentricity, but have returned to their old role as purveyors of dogma and orthodoxy.
It’s natural to put the case against at greater length because the case for is a broad orthodoxy held by elites and successfully diffused to non-elites. Every medium of communication is dominated by successful graduates who are glad they are successful graduates. Many non-graduates are proud that their children or grandchildren are graduates: “the first in the family to go to university” is a common, proud theme and featured in a famous speech by Neil Kinnock which was plagiarised by Joe Biden. The opposition to expanded higher education has been low level and diffuse. There’s that bloke in the pub who says that the University of Life is the best one and your cousin who tells you that the graduates now running his place of work couldn’t run a party in a brewery. And your tennis partner who expresses incredulity that there is something called the University of Luton.
But the times they are a’changing and the range of arguments, speeches and articles opposing the current scale of higher education is growing steadily. And then there is J.D. Vance. The Republican candidate for vice-president is unequivocal in his statements that university professors are “the enemy”. Universities have become the “gatekeepers” of decent employment, rent-seekers who soak people for four year degrees (which are far too long). Their real role is to divide and impoverish American society by undermining the values (hard work, family loyalty) which they have previously learned. In doing so they amass vast wealth (over $750B is quoted). In some respects these arguments parallel those of early protestants against the Catholic Church. They could have some purchase in almost any developed society. The phenomenon of university wealth is mainly American – though it should be pointed out that David Lammy has expressed interest in the wealth accumulated by Oxford and Cambridge colleges which is said to be more than £21B.
Melodramatically one might say that we are a tight election and a heartbeat away from having a “most powerful man in the world” who regards universities as the enemy. But the point is not really about Vance. If it were we would have to ask which Vance: the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a graduate of Ohio and Yale Law School, who praised universities, wrote for the New York Times and claimed Barack Obama as a role model? Or the early Republican who compared Trump to dictators and poisons? Or the recruited MAGA who says Trump was the USA’s best president? His current arguments are more Marx than Bentham; they are not the polite querying I hear from friends about whether it’s a good idea for people like their son going to university “even though he’s not the least bit academic”. This is more the language of class war, exploiting anger against a managerial and intellectual class (“chattergerial”?) which is seen as dominant and exploitative.
I don’t think American universities actually have much to fear from Vance. If he were president he’d have different priorities and the federal government’s relationship with universities is largely a distant one. And American universities have multiple legal degrees of protection from government interference (including tenure) going back to the nineteenth century. But I think there are two important aspects of his attack on universities that must be taken seriously. The first is that it represents a recognition of changing class alignments actually described in essence as early as 1941 in James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, but which have been under-represented in mainstream politics. The “liberal” press tend to represent views like Vance’s as “populist” and “right-wing”, both of which are simplistic obfuscations. It’s actually quite radical and involves an attack on a privileged class which has greater job security and better pensions and vastly greater opportunities for self-expression than most people have.
The “right-wing” label allows people to take sides easily and to oppose Vance when they should be realising that not only does he represent something important, but that he’s right in many respects. Actually his sort of politics might be more immediately successful in other countries where central government could much more easily defund universities. As someone who loved universities as eccentric backwaters and doesn’t like them as vocational trainers and gatekeepers I would be in favour of this. And as someone from a generation which produced excellent teachers, lawyers, detectives, nurses and so on who did not go to university I’d be in favour of immediate legislation prohibiting job discrimination against non-graduates except in the odd case (like medicine) where a degree is really necessary.
Lincoln Allison October 2024
(An edited version of this article was published by Times Higher Education in November 2024 to coincide with the US presidential election.)