So someone can study someone as pointless as “classics” and get to be PM yet the government think they should be the arbiters of whether a course is worthwhile or not.
The flaw with this thinking is that they equate university with work training. Academia doesn’t exist purely to serve the workforce.
While I think some universities should be stopped from charging obscene amounts for useless degrees, this should be judged on more factors than “lol who gets a job from fashion design”. Get them to reduce the number of degree types they offer in the same subject (my old uni has 15 different degrees under Computer Science, all slightly tailored to industry jobs), and if the subject isn’t producing in academia and work figures, lower the cap for that course.
I’m not yet sure about what the consequences of this might be, but here’s an opinion piece from the Guardian that provides a counterpoint to the government position:
I’m not sure what I think yet but my instinct is that reducing degrees to earnings potential alone isn’t reasonable in an economy that judging by the strikes doesn’t seem to fairly value a lot of people.
It should be up to the student to decide if they want to do a course. A lot of jobs just require a degree without it necessarily being related by subject.
But I can see the government worrying some of the subjects won’t be able to fully repay their student loans.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to change how loans work? Make your threshold of payment based around the average earnings of a graduate on your chosen course rather than pull those courses all together?
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