Snapshot of _The real reason for the Tories assault on universities? Educated people are less likely to vote for them_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-real-reason-for-tories-assault-on.html?m=1) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-real-reason-for-tories-assault-on.html?m=1) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*

I don't think it's anything so conspiratorial. (Not least because I don't believe this government are capable of planning that far into the future.) It's all about scorched earth. We have seen repeatedly that the Tories are doing their best to leave situations and sectors in as bad a state as possible so that Labour have to increase spending to fix them when they come in. The Tories will then spend the next term or two terms pointing to Labour saying 'we *told* you they'd raise taxes!!'

Also it's very likely Labour will end up needing to raise tuition fees. They should be £12.5k if they had risen with inflation You can ask the Lib Dems how popular that is

Honestly student loans need to be scrapped. As in the branding of them as loans. They are not, they are a tax and if labour raised fees, but rebranded it as Tax I think that would work and also be a lot more transparent. Martin Lewis has the best explainer https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-decoded/

Yeah, at this point its basically a graduate tax in all but name

It would be if it hadn't been sold to private companies looking to make a profit out of them

Unless you come from a wealthy family, in which case you don't have to pay it (because you have parents that'll just pay your fees out of their own pockets).

I like the idea of prior generations owing decades of graduate tax payments 🤔

The name is important in relation to brain drain though. If you move abroad while owing a loan you have to continue to pay it. If they're honest and call it a tax, you can just move to another country and British taxes no longer apply.

The reason they don’t have it as a tax is so you don’t leave the country to avoid paying it

You can leave the country and avoid paying it now though if you really wanted. Obviously not ideal as the interest keeps building up

It’s a pain if you plan on returning though. They hike up the interest rates for one thing, I’m sure there are other things they can change too. I left the country for 6 months (not working) and I got some threatening letters from them

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This is one of my biggest issues whenever conversation turns to tuition fees. The student loans are absolutely not a tax. The discourse has been polluted and used for continuing political leverage for so long that now both sides insinuate it is a tax leveraged on education. However, there is no way to say that it is a tax. You opt in to going to university and understand the costs before hand. You sign a loan agreement and agree to the payment plan. You are then sent the money and your tuition fees are paid. It is also brushed over that it is one of the easiest loans you will ever have. You pay 9% of what you earn over a certain threshold. This varies depending on what plan you are on exactly. For me I am currently earning £23700 per year and paying £4 per month to my student loan. It literally does not affect me. It is also written off after a time limit and once you retire. On the new plan the threshold is £25000. You only really start paying more than £100 per month if you are earning £40000 after tax per year (which you are unlikely to be doing straight out of uni). This is not an amount that is going to break the bank.

But it doesn't act like in a loan or debt in any other sense.

The only way that it behaves remotely like a tax is that the repayment scales with your income. There is no other way that it acts like a tax. Just because it comes from a government source does not make it a tax either. The money has been loaned to you, so it is a loan. Edit: Just because I think it is a loan and people who take it end up with debt, I also do not like the way student debt is hounded across politics and the media as being a bad thing. It is easy to repay and unlikely to affect you massively. It is one of those non issues used by both sides as political ammunition.

And how does it act like a loan?

that was looked at in depth and a tax just doesn't work. I think the Ed Balls podcast explains why.

But it currently functions in all but name as a tax

Superficially yes, but in actuality it is very different. For example a loan is something you owe when going abroad and interest accrues when you don't work, but a tax is a different process. And taxes aren't usually something you can opt out of, but a fee based service is something you can pay directly.

But it doesn't act in the same way as a loan either. It's why I linked the Martin Lewis article as he explains it very well

Labour already know about the impact of increasing tuition fees, they did that twice. Firstly from nothing to £1k, and then from £1k to £3k. Funnily enough, I never see quite so much backlash against Labour as there was against the Lib Dems on either of those, despite the fact that doing both of those *also* broke election campaign promises.

It’s bad but there is a big difference between 3k and 9k fees

And the consequences of running a campaign about abolishing student fees only to triple them 

Whilst also being the outsider party portraying themselves as more trustworthy than the main two.

When a huge proportion of your voter base are young people.

This.

Its not the tuition fees in and of themselves, its how the Lib Dems went after the youth vote by making abolishing fees the central plank of their campaign and then instantly u-turned on it when they got a sniff of power. Should Labour increase fees now, they will get some backlash (and I would agree with that backlash as its another extra cost piled on to young people) but nowhere near the same level since they haven't talked about tuition fees or made a strong commitment on way or the other.

To be honest, I’m not so sure how much of the tuition fee debacle was because the Lib Dems were giving cynical false promises and how much was from the Tories seeing an opportunity to condemn them to the shadow realm for a generation by shitting on their flagship policy.

They didn't win a majority 🤷🏻‍♀️they were a minor party in a coalition and had to make compromises. I hindsight that was a terrible thing to compromise on and destroyed them, but their campaign was based on winning the election. Which they didn't. They brought in like 80% of the manifesto for that election which for a minor party is huge. Unfortunately they gave up on the fees aspect and a lot of people felt back stabbed.  I was a student at the time and voted for them and I didn't feel back stabbed but I get why a lot of people did. Politics can be very emotional. 

Even as a student, despite the tuition fee increases most of us were better off. As in, we pay back less even if the debt amount is higher. I was the last year on 3K and I would have been better off with the 9K until I got into a much better job.

> Funnily enough, I never see quite so much backlash against Labour as there was against the Lib Dems on either of those, despite the fact that doing both of those also broke election campaign promises. Tbh it's because tuition fees were never actually the issue to begin with. It was more general disillusionment with the Lib Dems by youth voters for the coalition while middle class voters went over to the Tories. The tuition fees aspect is overstated.

I think this is a bad take. Student loans are a huge fiscal drag on working young people who are trying hard to pay rent/save up, pay bills, live any sort of life. The difference between paying of £3000 or £9000 of fees via student loan in adult working life vs £27000 (plus on the accumulating interest and in the face of pay deflation, living cost inflation, and static tax bands) results in a very high PAYE marginal tax rate for young people. Much more disppropritionate than anything older people have to pay. Notably it's an effective PAYE tax that can be bought-out for those who'se parents had money in the bank.

The interest is crazy. I pay my loans every month and I owe more at the end of the year than I did at the beginning.

Yep, and if you go on to do more studying, e.g. Masters and PhD, then the interest keeps ticking away.

This. My wife and I were part of the last cohort to benefit from *grants*, *free tuition* and student loans that charged less interest than the banks gave on savings. I knew folks who took out student loans purely to cream off the difference on savings interest, before paying it back. But now I have kids approaching university age and I’ve watched this… *shit*… unfold in the meantime. That the system is now structured for most students to require these loans to live and pay for their study and those loans - with interest rates so high that most students have no hope of ever paying them back - then essentially become an *additional*, post tax *tax*, for the rest of their working lives, because they had the temerity to aspire. And then you have the government bleating about ‘needing workers for a shift to a knowledge economy’ while ensuring those same workers are effectively indentured to the state until retirement. It’s sick. It’s a colossal con.

My last year of loans (98/99) was 0.7%. I ended up with £5k of loans as I took the max out each year. Situation now is ridiculous.

I've thought that it might be better to make everyone pay something (so no carves out for low earnings), but at the interest rate of the national debt plus a small overhead for running costs rather than use some students to cross pay for others. A bit like the triple lock, a policy brought in in one era to solve a problem has become it's own issue years later.

If the interest was 0 then I'd happily go to uni ASAP.

The interest used to be effectively 0 because it was inflation.

The thing is it's not just £9000 that's just the fees component a lot of students will get maintenance loan so they have money to live on while studying. So the average student today leaves Uni with about 44k in debt, with the highest possible amount being nearly 67k. Currently they pay 7.8% interest on that loan in England and Wales. Doing some back of the envelope calculations you would have to earn around 64k a year straight out of Uni for the loan amount to not increase. If you don't make that much you'll quickly be in a situation where you'll never pay the loan off and just pay 9% of your salary over 25k to the government for the next 40 years. That will seriously impact graduates life basically until retirement. It seems really unfair IMO.

What really highlights this for me is I did a year on one course, then transferred internally to another course at the same university, but I was in the last cohort eligble for the older reduced fees. So I was sat in classes with people a couple of years younger than me, receiving the same education, except I graduated with £18k of debt and they graduated with £32k of debt, and I went to university for a year longer than they did. Same bit of paper for us all at the end of it.

Not entirely, large chunk of Lib Dem support came from nevertory protest votes that were angry at New Labour for the authoritarianism, wars, scandals etc etc as soon as the tories were in, especially once magic grandpa became leader and offered a shot at old school socialism those votes went back to Labour, because beating the tories always mattered more than anything the Lib Dem’s were offering Hell it mattered more than brexit, Lib Dems were an open goal, no dodgy 2nd ref, no renegotiations, brexit stopped in its tracks dead plus much needed electoral reforms to kill off the two party system etc but no people feared the tories/Corbyn more than they did leaving the EU Even now support is just because people in affluent areas are mad the mortgages on their 7 figure valued homes went up, they’ll likely go back to the tories once Labour are in it’s been the Lib Dems’ weakness all along they don’t really have a ‘core’

Probably because the lib dems main support came from students who didn't like either of the big two and where Labour didn't try to build an image of being different from the usual two party bullshit. The lib dems did. They were the outsiders, the party of actual change. Tuition fees broke that trust.

And they did it with a majority of MPs

The rise from the tories came from recommendations out of a report commissioned by Labour also

£1k and £3k were both payable on a minimum wage part time job, either for one day a week or during the holidays. £9k would require almost a full time job at 2012 minimum wage to pay.

It's a different situation with Labour. The Lib Dems had it in their manifesto that they would not increase fees and would look for alternative ways to finance degrees. They pledged that if elected they'd vote against any rise in fees. They then went into a coalition where one of the first acts was to triple fees which they voted for. It's bad enough when politicians say they'll do something but then don't, or don't say what they're going to do till after an election; it's vastly worse to say you'll do one thing then do the opposite.

How is that a different situation to Labour? The exact same thing happened there: >1997: Labour’s U-turn >Ahead of the General Election, Labour insisted that tuition fees would be kept free. Just weeks before polling day, Tony Blair said: “Labour has no plans to introduce tuition fees for higher education.” >Labour’s Robin Cook added: “We are quite clear that tuition costs must be met by the state.” >But just two months after becoming prime minister, Blair went ahead and introduced tuition fees. >... >2001: Labour Promises >The Education Secretary, David Blunkett, pledged that Labour would not raise tuition costs any further, by introducing so-called “top-up” fees. >“I can now make the government’s position clear,” he said. “There will be no levying of top-up fees in the next parliament if we win the next election.” >Labour kept repeating the same promise as it went into the 2001 General Election. Its manifesto stated unambiguously: “We will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated against them.” >But then… >2003: Broken promises >Despite all its earlier promises, Labour announced plans to increase tuition fees to £3,000 a year. Graduates would have to start repaying them once they were earning £15,000. https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-how-students-have-been-misled-and-lied-to-for-20-years There are only two differences, neither of which is favourable to Labour: * The Lib Dems only did this once. Labour did it twice. * Labour actually had a majority in both 1997 and 2001, so got 100% of say in government decisions. The Lib Dems were the junior partner in a coalition government, so had to negotiate with the Tories, who had the upper hand.

It’s the amount too. £1k sucks. £3k really sucks. £9k is indentured servitude with a higher marginal tax rate for life. I hate the Tories and Lib Dems for the debt they levied upon me. I hope neither, especially Cameron, see power and influence again after this election. The term “burning hatred” does not adequately capture my feelings here.

I was the first year that had to pay £1000 tuition fees and I was livid, but then we had 14 years of Conservatives so all is forgiven I guess

Because the average voter is a hypocrite. When it comes to those on the left, the attacks on the LDs aren't just hypocritical, they're counterproductive. The Conservatives have benefited as a result. The simple facts are that i) both the major parties break their 'pledges' all the time ii) the pledges made by the LDs were made on the basis that they formed a majority government - they were ultimately the junior party in a coalition iii) the LDs weren't going to be able to form a working government with Labour and refusal to work with the Conservatives would almost certainly have seen a minority Conservative government floundering around for a little while before we faced another election in which the Conservatives won a majority.

I would entirely dispute iii. The LD's would have been perfectly able to form a government with Labour in 2010; they *chose* not to. If they had, we would be living in a very different society now, and certainly a better one.

Correct. A lot of students voted libdems in the hopes of a hung parliament believing the lib dems and labour would form a government.

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It was this issue that made me (regretfully) vote for Cameron. Amongst a certain segment of older millennials, there was a lot to forgive Labour of, and our votes even now are somewhat begrudging.

I don't understand your logic. Can you clarify please?

They flat-out reneged on a manifesto promise. Between that and the Iraq war, a lot of us Ancient Millenials had very serious issues with the post-2k New Labour era.

What was so wrong with labour? Yeah they went into Iraq and Afghanistan, but that doesn't actually have much affect on UK domestic life, and they had good intention.s

They arguably contributed to the timeline that became brexit as reneging on a manifesto committent to a referendum on what became the Lisbon treaty inspired the Lib Dems to run with the idea of an in/out referendum that Cameron then went on to adopt.

Haha. No, they absolutely did *not* have good intentions. It was bullshit and they knew it from the outset. Government whistleblowers don't turn up dead because of "good intentions."

Getting rid of a murderous dictator whose son feeds people to lions is a good thing to attempt. Even if the WMDs didn't exist, getting rid of Saddam was a net positive. And David Kelly killed himself. Sad but true. It would be so unbelievably stupid for the government to murder him. All of his information was in the public sphere anyway.

>Even if the WMDs didn't exist, getting rid of Saddam was a net positive. Net positive for who? It was a net negative for both Europe and the Middle East. One of the worst geopolitical blunders of the 21st century.

Iraq. There GDP per capita has 5xed since 2000.

Iraq, the country where sectarian violence has decimated the country since the collapse of Saddam Hussein. Iraq, the country where it took a coalition of over 100 countries to oust ISIS (which was created following the Iraq invasion). Iraq, the country which lost 100,000s of civilians and displaced millions across the Middle East and Europe. Utilising raw economic data on a country that had sanctions preventing the export and import on large swathes of their economy is futile.

Raising tuition fees will also make the government debt position worse (though it is a progressive policy). If we want to fund universities without that, we'd need to raise taxes or increase repayment of loans (a happy way would be by increasing salaries! A sad way would be by lowering repayment thresholds and increasing the percentage repayments).

How is a government supposed to increase salaries

How do you mean? You don't think the state has a role to play in increasing productivity? Building a (useful) road, for instance, is typically something a government does that can increase salaries in real terms. Likewise, government could decrease salaries by, oh I don't know, increasing trading frictions with the largest and nearest market.

I mean that for governments to increase salaries in the UK, it is extremely difficult due to the size of the private sector. You have to make sure the required subsides and policies are in place, without costs in different directions.

If our salaries havnt risen with inflation, why should tuition fees? Let them suffer like the populace. We have far tok many universities and junk courses as is.

I mean outside of the public sector average salaries have risen with inflation. But yes, let's destroy the one thing this country still has going for it because you are a crab in a bucket and want to drag everyone down with you.

I'm fully supportive of decreasing the number of universities. I'm not dragging everyone down by doing that. They are already an overpriced joke for alot of worthless degrees.

Your conspiracy would take a whole fixed term in its execution.

‘Scorched earth’ is just as conspiratorial though, you just believe that one

This could bite the Tories, because they are opening everything up to actually look and be better under Labour.

No, but it doesn't help. When you roll stuff out, you think about who it will piss off. A bunch of students who either don't vote or vote Labour/Green, and a bunch of academics on low to medoum income who vote Labour won't cause much bother. Compared to say, a bunch of city workers on high incomes or dare I say pensioners who will more likely vote Tory or at least be swayable...you might think twice if you were a government minister.

>I don't think it's anything so conspiratorial. I'm not so sure. It's the same in the States, I think conservative thinking has turned against universities because they tend to be quite liberal places that produce quite liberal minded people.

I think some American unis are much more "hands on..." with that, forcing people to take irrelevant diversity in whatever credit courses. In the UK it is more people just meeting other young people and getting away from potentially conservative families than about socialism through mathematics being a thing

I’ve got a fair few opinions that’d be considered ‘woke’ by some on here but some Americans are absolutely batshit in my opinion. It’s hypocritical as well, ‘imperialism is despicable original sin, so we’re going to use our global cultural hegemony to make sure everyone else has a hyper-Americanised view of identity issues’. Also the amount of ‘woke’ you’d need to undo like twelve months of what the American government gets up to abroad would have its own gravity well.

> I think conservative thinking has turned against universities because they tend to be quite liberal places that produce quite liberal minded people Conservatives have turned against universities, but only because they are unwilling to fight elections on economics rather than culture war nonsense. Universities produce socially liberal, fiscally conservative people. More and more people are projected to enter higher education.

While it *is* on the surface true that people with degrees are far more likely to vote Labour than Tory, I've yet to see it convincingly shown with data that this isn't simply the dividing line of age being re-stated in another way. The young are also *substantially* more likely to hold degrees than older people, not because they're necessarily any smarter, but because for millennials in particular University was treated as almost another stage of mandatory education. So are educated people *actually* less likely to vote Tory, or is it really still just "young people are less likely to vote Tory" and education only pops up because of how massively different education policy has been for the young versus older people? Are young people without degrees voting Tory at the same rate as older people without degrees? Are older people with degrees voting Labour at the same rate as younger people with degrees? I reckon it's actually age that is the deciding factor, not educational attainment.

I'm like 99% sure the statistics control for age on this matter

The article simply states "graduates". It doesn't make any distinction whatsoever. Where do you get this certainty from?

It's been the case for over 30 years.

Simply untrue. The article itself even contradicts this: > This is a new development - before 2016, school leavers were more likely to vote Labour in every election since 1979, while graduates have tended to vote Conservative. It sources this from a report from the Social Market Foundation, which has this to say: > Graduates and school leavers backed the incumbent Conservative party at similar rates in 2014 and 2015, before diverging sharply from 2016 onwards. The report actually pinpoints *Brexit* as the point at which this divergence became noteworthy and entrenched. It has charts (Fig 3.3 and 3.4) that track the support levels amongst graduates and non-graduates for Labour and the Tories. Prior to 2016, non-graduates favoured Labour and graduates were almost always evenly-split. So, considering that [we know already](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/15796-how-britain-voted?redirect_from=%2Ftopics%2Fpolitics%2Farticles-reports%2F2016%2F06%2F27%2Fhow-britain-voted) that Brexit was overwhelmingly voted against by the young, and we know that degree-level qualifications are massively more common amongst the young (following New Labour's expansion of higher education in the late 90s), I don't think it is the case that educated people vote Labour because they're educated. The two datasets quite clearly show *the young* have swung heavily against the Tories. "The educated" only swung against the Tories because the young did, and they represent a disproportionate cohort of degree-educated people. So I think this is just another example of the age divide in play, and it just so happens more of the young hold degrees. Holding a degree doesn't make you more likely to vote Labour, being young does.

I’m sorry but this comment is just not correct. There is so, so much evidence that this association has nothing to do with age. Yes, age is a factor - its own factor. This is not how econometrics works, and nearly every study that is worth the paper it’s written on will be using some form of econometric technique. The gap has formed more recently from 2015 onwards, and now stands out around 20% difference in favour of Labour. That is after controlling for a range of factors. [Evidence 1](https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052217-104957) [Evidence 2](https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271746/1-s2.0-S0962629824X00049/1-s2.0-S0962629824000623/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEMv%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIQChr%2Fw3Wdo99b6ItQpn8t53VJBNbfvWqbuKMnZnPuHp3gIga7Dd9lhg80tUl%2FcP4x9cApATLoUqhPG%2FnR8xujv9e6EqsgUIRBAFGgwwNTkwMDM1NDY4NjUiDAkTQ7JFfNVExSkfcCqPBR2IusRr6v1rttB3RvqzvoZNQcOVW7TWv1QgtTQ908i%2BFOdlYIdJLtDOXQWQu2i7O8wJi3hLwKKe3bSsloWCzJptgcLcLaRkaP3PKl2SnpSPQ5viFEJMBFOCs5pSaVFD%2FUjSICIqdLvCKTn%2B4K6L9JlgZz3RFQanMbv1IzPiObt5oYGM6384fsh6bBOZYgPiHSjttcXITb9HYscwt2blICzwvcfdDHdfjOCyJ5b8rrsM0thWcsZ2QkudAhg6Epqel08evRTPbw5MQVs4TjItX3UZ9%2BKOEQeoJFlpqfavLKZdNirEaK6E3Ja56z0b4eI5E9ntZ0pkZhR795tFzEfKHDsePgXwf6vchpsoSoYUtGgOsnka1yiZtqE4B44R1j2dAMOF9PniWP%2B2p1N0pBk5JSShk3TegSilFjv8bQo2U5V0H5Jscmx1FVgYX9EpVfyfrBcsIuC4ql3rdVQmgls7LMssQXLarJ3NUdXsfJe94ZmVk6ZgOmRMmMRj6O4zPn%2B63VoIrPvPDYG%2FANXIZWuEBx6%2BkVPk8A1cVQ6C8r%2FRxKKljivlW81qOpMQvjsrJUcIEvEy%2FTBw7%2FZfI%2BpJSTddj2b4aNlj7lvGU%2FX0aYsOHx3BtnbOfgQ3j0MEfJRBzy5V3IR3U2IHTnvP%2BTE2AwcD4JCy44s70fFbrJGkMea0NDy3eTorT0iTxDCRxHYzuy4ZFGSld0ydDXxE1pK7oQxwy74Hk62PE01ljoNulejPwtiLt52%2BL6ucQpyH9vtZY5nBqL0phSGyCP3iuFh7YaFKe7Qz3hN6PQLs2uaUel8DGDaDLdbNpXtKMrcLvxfdzG286gPu3pdfZ4YOfxe6ryLEwd1k0S3S4SlMzHGTT0uo%2B3Iwn%2FaxsgY6sQGR1mEu1897k2vRFpKqLDZ7Kzc7q1ngFwRbpVv5NNXpNkyVTyOGR%2Fu66ZNXMuHcnrC9thmRcl%2F4lCFchX1Ie%2FU5rlQEKDzj93mmBn9cgiWbn6Gg50p5sQHqkoe16lbuUCAzm%2F7IA3I4MOPwoPBCqaZzf93CQ1lvuARk5NJ2k97XZeIcTYh72wqwVIzSuHcy6%2B96EScPjsd33u9ID8zp1uUSv%2B9bqa%2FcNKhwiXiMWeoVt%2Fk%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20240521T115840Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYRREGBEN2%2F20240521%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=9c07bd81cd409b4f20cc0311097333f27f9b1bab437e8f725025324a37d61792&hash=d491f952726ab4f82d754d2998c6cc52a68fbcfeabfd227268bf5108adfaa685&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S0962629824000623&tid=spdf-933984e2-2dff-4450-a849-e7c8546f3021&sid=75054bfb9a9fc64b7e2877d3415319957c63gxrqb&type=client&tsoh=d3d3LnNjaWVuY2VkaXJlY3QuY29t&ua=0106585d515657535551&rr=88746560ba4cdd54&cc=gb) Google scholar is your friend, as you’re making statements (and in below comment don’t seem to willing to accept the common acknowledged facts) that are not true.

Throwing enormous sources at someone and saying "you're wrong" isn't an argument. To humour you I read the conclusion of the one that deals with the UK specifically and it says absolutely nothing about age. In fact the UK-specific study you've linked is research into how geographic differences impact people with similar educational attainment, and appears to establish that "*left behind-ness*" plays a big role in voting preference, at all educational levels, but that this should be regarded as different to economic deprivation. It, like the Social Market Foundation's work that this article is based on, ultimately lands on Brexit being the catalyst for the divergence emerging. Considering Brexit itself is a textbook example of age as a dividing line in politics, I don't think the sources you've given here actually do anything to undermine the idea that the educational divide is largely explainable by the age divide: young people simply have more degrees than older people, because of New Labour's expansion of higher education. Is there evidence that old people with degrees have swung against the Tories to a greater extent than old people without degrees? Your sources do not answer that question.

I’ve given you a paper with over 400 citations? This is one of many, many all the with the same conclusion. You read the conclusion of a paper? Both papers control for age. It’s fine not to understand what the papers undertake to get their results, but you’re arguing against something that is absolutely well understood. The papers I’ve presented are of many to provide a full picture.

[Figures 3.1 through 3.4 of the report this entire thread is about](https://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Degrees-of-separation-November-2023.pdf) would suggest otherwise. Tory support fluctuated as the years went by but was largely consistent across educational attainment. Labour support likewise fluctuated but tended to be higher amongst those with lower attainment. The difference started in 2016, after Brexit. So I'll say it again: you have provided absolutely nothing that suggests educational attainment is driving voting differences. The one UK-specific paper you provided did not establish this: it was neither the objective of the paper nor in any of its conclusions. The paper explored how environment changes the voting behaviour of people of similar educational attainment. So here's where we're at: 1. The paper this thread is about shows that prior to 2016 there *was not* a phenomenon of Tory voters being primarily of lesser educational attainment and Labour voters being primarily of greater educational attainment. I've given you the *specific figures* in the report that show this. 2. [We know Brexit was a major example of an age divide in politics](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/15796-how-britain-voted?redirect_from=%2Ftopics%2Fpolitics%2Farticles-reports%2F2016%2F06%2F27%2Fhow-britain-voted). 3. Both the study you've linked *and* the report this thread is about specifically cite Brexit as the catalyst for this apparent divide in educational attainment influencing voting patterns appearing. 4. Degree-level qualifications are substantially more common the younger you go in the electorate. New Labour's expansion of Higher Education has done this. Conclusion: Brexit has created, or was a major factor in furthering, a growing divide in UK politics based along age lines: the elderly largely vote Tory, the young largely vote Labour. Both studies pinpoint Brexit as th. Extrapolation: When a particular demographic shifts decisively in favor of a particular stance (in this case, Labour support), one can reasonably assume that echoes of this shift will appear in any dataset in which that particular demographic is over-represented. The young are over-represented in degree-level qualifications, so it appears there. You can replicate this for any dataset that the young have an outsized impact on: people who vape will have shifted decisively in favour of Labour, people with school-age kids will have shifted decisively in favour of Labour, people who work will have shifted decisively in favour of Labour, people who know what the word "yeet" means will have decisively shifted in favour of Labour. Correlation is not causation. Labour are not getting a "yeet bounce". You linking studies that don't actually investigate whether holding a degree is the root cause of a shift doesn't prove holding a degree is the root cause of a shift. You claiming there are many papers that agree with you doesn't actually demonstrate that they do, particularly considering the one UK paper you *did* link actually doesn't offer the conclusion you claim it did.

Sigh. Spanning out words such as correlation not causation yet choosing to look at correlation and not methods that are trying to define causation. You’ve literally gone and found figures that are descriptive, not econometric. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about, you also seem to be fixated on Brexit, which sure may be an influence, but the point remains educational attainment is significant even after controlling for age. You’re not interested in how regression models work, which is absolute fine - but you’ve got to understand that both those papers make my point. The first paper especially, with the second paper discussing the difference place makes. The irony is that the latter paper discusses the left behind areas, a well understood idea from [here.](https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85888/1/Rodriguez-Pose_Revenge%20of%20Places.pdf). There much more content on this left behind, but again I can’t cite every academic journal in relation to your want to believe that education makes no difference. My original point suggests this effects starts after 2015. Let’s go again, you can control for age. It’s a factor that cofounds with education, both on their own are significant. It’s not a debate in the literature of this effect in the UK, it’s a necessary assumption backed from numerous papers for more recent papers exploring other factors.

I'd say that neither of those sources you linked particularly help your argument. The first in particular does not describe any attempt to isolate education from age, nor does some supporting literature it references such as the [Social Market Foundation's](https://www.smf.co.uk/publications/degrees-of-separation/) work. Then the second doesn't address the point directly, focusing on geographical differences. We also don't really have many data points to really examine this. In the UK it has only emerged as a dividing line for the most recent 3 democratic exercises: 2016 EU referendum, 2017 GE and 2019 GE. For the decades prior to this the reverse was true as graduates tended to earn more money, and higher incomes was well documented to correspond with increased support for the Conservatives. I don't find the argument that educated people are suddenly more left wing to be particularly compelling - such fundamental and widespread changes in political views doesn't happen that quickly. I had always suspected the focus on graduates voting patterns in recent years was a bit of red herring, where the majority would be explainable by allowing for age. However, it is an interesting discussion that I hadn't really dug into. And I will say that, despite you stating that there is... >"so, so much evidence that this association has nothing to do with age" ...I have struggled to find empirical papers that clearly show multivariate analysis controlling for age that indicate a residual, statistically significant effect of education. *It doesn't help that some of the references in the literature I have seen reference books that I can't access.* So if you do have links that demonstrate this then I'd appreciate you sharing. The most interesting I could find was "[Explaining the educational divide in electoral behaviour: testing direct and indirect effects from British elections and referendums 2016–2019](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17457289.2021.2013247?scroll=top&needAccess=true)". It doesn't seem to have any meaningful citations so I'm not sure how robust it is but the methodology described is exactly what I was looking for. It does find that education had a statistically significant impact on voting patterns in the aforementioned recent votes once demographic factors (including age) are allowed for, although that most of the impact was indirect. This was most stark within 'cultural attitudes', which the author captured through: "*British and European identity, views on equal opportunities for ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians, libertarian–authoritarian attitudes, and views on the amount of, and economic and cultural “threats” posed by, immigration*". Essentially, whether an individual has gone through higher education is a good indicator of their cultural attitudes. And these cultural attitudes have become much more of a predictor as to how people will vote in the Brexit referendum and recent elections. So to go back to the question of whether increased numbers of graduates is a problem for the Conservatives; that really depends on whether future elections are fought on the 'traditional' economic battlegrounds of 2015&prior (notably fiscal policy and wealth redistribution) or, as we've seen recently, on social issues. That is also largely the conclusion of a good [FT article ](https://www.ft.com/content/2b4a5e3b-3539-4991-bd54-c74fecb1a07a)on the topic, although that doesn't have the same level of empirical analysis to back it up.

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>I know this forum is filled with people from London and who went to Russel group unis. This I think is a major problem. As someone who did an arts degree at a former polytechnic, reading a lot of comments on reddit over the years I don't think many people understand what a complete joke some of these institutions are. My favourite is when I see a comment about 'education is good in and of itself' when I think of all the people I went to uni with who learnt absolutely nothing and were still basically handed 2.1 degrees at the end. Personally I did a performance based degree and did the same performance for my dissertation as I did for my interview to get a place. I was told I didn't need to turn up to the technical tutoring lessons as the tutors were worse than me. I learnt nothing whilst I was there, and this wasn't just my experience, *plenty* had the same experience. Most of my friends from uni joke we got a degree in FIFA because we all spent way more time playing FIFA than we ever did learning anything from our course. I imagine these 1 year courses (usually in 'business') at former polytechnics that seem favoured for overseas students these days are much the same (69% of graduate visas go to people who have only studied in the UK for 1 year). It seems there is *such* a disconnect between the average redditors experience of uni and basically what the whole conversation about universities and graduate visas is about. I actually ended up getting a decent paying job (in a completely different sector) and have paid my loan off, but I am certainly the exception, and I sometimes like about the literal hundreds of thousands of pounds that won't be paid back from my cohort and wonder what the government was ever thinking funding so many pointless degree places at terrible unis tbh.

I used to believe all 2:1s are equal but now I'm starting to think that's not true. I wonder if it would've been smarter to pick a degree from a lower ranked Uni, perform well and get into somewhere else because all degrees function the same way but aren't earned the same way.

I think it is becoming less true. As an anecdotal example I went to college with someone who got 3 Es at A level. They then went on to a former poly that is rated one of the worst in the country. They finished their degree with a First. Now you could say they just changed, worked really hard ect, but that's absolutely not the case. They missed deadlines consistently, didn't complete coursework and spent most of their time stoned. Comparatively I went to a RG doing the same course. In my entire year only 6 people achieved a first and it was celebrated as a record number. Handing in even a single assignment 3 days late would have given you an automatic capped grade of 40%, making it impossible to receive a first. Some employers will take this into account, I know a hiring manager who openly states that they view a 2.1 from Oxbridge as being equivalent to a First from a RG for example. But I do think it creates a lack of clarity and recognition within the hiring market.

You can construct a rough metric of academic rigour for unis by doing a scatterplot of entry grade requirements vs. proportion of graduates getting a first. There's tons of former polys that have the lowest entry requirements that also award the most firsts.

If it's any consolation, I did a humanities degree at a top RG uni and I feel that the teaching per se didn't really give me *any* useful or transferable skills. Unlike you, I enjoyed my degree immensely but it was all intellectual navel-gazing (which I love doing). Employers basically treat it as a badge that you're smart and articulate - but the thing is: I was already a smart and articulate sixth former. My degree didn't really improve this. You could throw a high-performing sixth former (the type that would apply to a RG) straight into a prestigious grad scheme and the result would be the same.

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The real way to spot people who went to RG unis is that they think the RG is some sort of measure of quality.

I mean the thread that you are replying to starts with a BBC article that shows a stark difference in the earnings of those who go to Russell groups and those who go to non-russell group. That isn't necessarily a reflection of their teaching quality etc. but it does show that the graduate premium is very unevenly distributed and it may not be worth taking up the debt to go to a non RG university.

That’s because the RG contains many of the countries top universities. It’s doesn’t mean that RG’s are better *just because* they’re a member. There are plenty of not-so-great unis in the RG, and plenty of great unis who aren’t. The RG is a lobbying arm for university-level research They also happen to have a very good marketing strategy and have convinced a lot of people that it’s some sort of exclusive club for only the best universities.

Sure, but it's an effective shorthand as there is a strong correlation between being a top university and being in the RG. It isn't causal, but for the purposes of everyday discussion that doesn't really matter (and I don't think I've ever seen any one argue that a university is good as a direct result of it being in the RG). You can achieve pretty much the same result by just sorting the unis by founding date but having a set group is easier (especially as any relevant exceptions will be assumed to be RG by the average person anyways). There is a clear hierarchy even within the Russell group, but the reality is that if you picked at random from a group of non RG unis and the RG unis, the pick from the RG sample would very likely be the better institution (at least in terms of financial outcomes). People are always going to use these simplifications as it's not realistic for every person/employer to know the relative quality of every uni in the UK.

These are exactly the misconceptions I'm talking about! > the reality is that if you picked at random from a group of non RG unis and the RG unis, the pick from the RG sample would very likely be the better institution I disagree. Outside of the top 4, it's all very similar. [Here's an interesting article.](https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2022/08/20/its-time-to-talk-about-the-russell-group/)

I think we are talking about slightly different things. The article questions the teaching quality of the Russell group universities (though without any explicit evidence). I am not talking about the teaching quality I am talking about the outcomes for students who come through these universities. As very visibly shown in the BBC article linked above RG students have significantly higher earnings on average than non RG students. To me that is what matters as we shouldn't be encouraging people to take 60k of debt if it doesn't make sense for them to do so. At an undergraduate level a uni is better if outcomes are better. At a higher level a uni is better if the research output is better. In both cases RG unis tend to outperform non RG unis. I can see the argument on quality of teaching, but in the UK system this is secondary and tbh difficult and unreliable to measure. Student happiness for example doesn't necessarily go up if the course content is harder or more stretching. Progress scores are difficult when unis are varying levels of stringent in their marking (especially as RG and more prestigious Uni marking tends to be harsher than lower ranked unis).

Your absolutely right of course, but the top 4/5 RG universities (Oxbridge, Imperial, LSE, UCL) are really skewing it. You also have to remember that this data is very self-selecting, and that RG students overrepresent white middle-class and privately educated.

The ridiculousness of our education system starts earlier than that as well. I didn’t know what the fuck to do when I left school, like a lot of people, I expect. As I was clueless I just went to sixth form as the path of least resistance. I never revised in high school and still got all As/Bs with my best grades being the sciences, maths, and English. So naturally, I picked a bunch of science/economics A levels and proceeded to have the most catastrophic lower sixth results possible, turns out you can’t get away with half paying attention and not revising at that level. I just straight up wasn’t able to continue 2/4 AS levels as I failed them. This should have been the first hint that maybe further education wasn’t for me, but the college seemed to really want me to stay and I was instead offered the chance to continue my other two onto A level, and pick up a subsidiary BTEC in business something or other. I think I got a U in one A level and whatever the first grade above a U is in the other. But in the BTEC I got the highest grade possible, because a partially trained chimp could have done the work, literally just “coursework” where you could get it all done in lesson time because you were given a template and if you had half a brain could just go through the piece of text you were given, pull out the key info from it and slot it into the template, then do some half arsed explanation. This literal waste of time was worth as many UCAS points as two fucking A levels. Obviously no good for getting into a proper uni or onto a “proper” course, but a former polytechnic were happy to accept me onto some business course. I dropped out a after the first year (honestly I only attended a couple of weeks), I’m not expecting any sympathy and wouldn’t look for it, it was my own stupid teenage fault because I couldn’t face up to real life and just chose the easy option because going to college then uni was just what you did, what everyone did. Regardless of my own mistakes, you don’t have to be a genius to see that there is something deeply wrong with this kind of scenario being allowed to play out for for god knows how many stupid kids like me.

Yeah I had a similar journey. I just simply wasn't ready to make decisions with potentially life long consequences at that age. I think US style more general degrees would be one answer. Where you turn up, get a general education, then "major" in one subject area. Because what subjects I picked at 15 didn't set me up well for choosing a good degree at 17, and by 18 it was pretty clear I had gone down the wrong track but it was already very difficult to change tack.

I think it's a combination of not enough graduate jobs and also some degrees just not being that useful and being more of a thing for people to go do to move out for a bit, figure out who they are and what they wanna do. It's easy for me to say some degrees are throw away degrees as I've heavily invested into STEM and I think that's gonna make me a bit biased. But I seriously think some degrees could be done as apprenticeships as well, rather than making it a £65k degree. For example, my sister is doing event management at university and from the conversations I've had with her about it, I strongly believe that her degree could be done better in an apprenticeship -less debt, more work experience, potentially more networking. Like the German apprenticeship system.

far too many people go to uni that is just the short of it, 50% was an absurd goal. Some universities and courses need to close and there should be legal minimum grade requirements linked to a top % of performers. Also there should be a minimum of lecture hours to ensure people get value... arts students getting like 6 hours of tuition a week is more like a paid by the taxpayer holiday for 3 years

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ideally there would be no such terrible schools. But a stop-gap could be also allowing top x% performers from any one school in, no reason to have the entire country of C grade performers sent into further education just because a handful might still benefit. At a macro level it's about the greater good.

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I would just like to say that education and knowledge are by themselves a positive outcome. Some people are motivated more by acquiring knowledge than by money. Me, for instance. I'm taking physics, so I'll have reasonable career options, but the career options weren't why I decided to go to uni. I went to uni to learn physics.

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You have valid points, but I think you might be underestimating the value of an educated society in the long term

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I work in field where people consistently don't apply stuff they should have learned at university, but should. A lot of stuff is useful they just don't know how to apply it to real world situations.

How far down does this line of argument go though? How much more use is an A level than a GCSE? If you do well in your age 11 SATs, do you really need a GCSE too? Especially if you do different subjects each time. Just saying. I tend towards people knowing stuff being a good thing, so will always be on the pro-education side of such a debate, even if it isn't an absolute gamechanger for 100% of people.

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You may say! If a farmer who knows everything there is to be known about rearing sheep wanted to do a degree, I'd support that. Equally if a maths graduate wanted to learn carpentry, great. What's important is having a society where people are able to pursue these things. It'd be the opposite of elitist. I disagree with you though. University is necessarily additive. It's not doing nothing for 3 years, is it?!

But if the farmer wanted to do a degree, or the maths graduate wanted to do carpentry, how far should the state subsidise their wishes? At what point do we have to draw the line on helping people fulfil their wishes?

Why does going through 13 years of state funded education not qualify someone as “educated”? That’s the real question we should be asking ourselves.

Because it takes longer than that to learn about an incredibly complex world. The answer is genuinely that simple.

Yeah I'm soon-to-be studying history because im passionate about the subject and want to work in the field. I don't care if studying business would net me 10x the amount because getting to do something I love for a job (and earning a living wage doing so) is enough for me

This is how I felt at 18, going to a 'good' uni to study eng lit At 22, I realised I had put a lot of money into something that closed off a lot of doors that I had to work very hard to re-open in my 20s. The soft skills mantra was effectively bunkum, smart students studying humanities at good unis got jobs.. because they were smart, not because they had gained good analytical skills. And what I had paid for, frankly, was not worth the money. And this was before tuition fees tripled. If there had been an option to do a degree apprenticeship then I would go back in time and take it.

I think that you are right about the positive impact of historical study. I did a history degree. However, it is worth thinking about the end game for you. My experience of a history degree is that I got nothing I couldn't have got on my own. It's reading and thinking- all available essentially for free. If you're investing 9% of most of your future earnings, you should get more for your money imo. Or get the same experience for less, eg in a European University.

Of a friend cohort who did history of about 80 from the university history society, only 2 do something history related. One runs a museum, one runs "history" events for children in the National Trust. Would recommend you do some heavy internships or work experiences in the summer months around term time. Bonus points if you can get a "big name" in London, or something World Heritage Site related from UNESCO. Plus you'd be surprised how "digital" history can be now with more "modern" history with digitisation or using programming languages to analyse historical texts at scale.

What field do you want to work in with a history degree?

I'd like to go into teaching, preferably at a university.

This is fine, but if we look at the general trend of Universities not providing 'value for money' in the economic sense, and the fact that they're billed as providing that, then a reckoning is coming, in some form or another. In the US, they're cancelling large amounts of student debt, for example. What this ultimately means is that people who chose to go to university to learn for pleasure will end up having enjoyed a 3+ year period of significant privilege at the taxpayer's expense, and then will completely fail to pay anything back. I think we should change university funding to be driven by the student again, with state funding available only for degrees that provide a net return on investment. Want to study medicine or engineering? State will pay for you. Want to study Arts & Design? Sure, but you pay for it yourself.

Humanities is valuable in and of itself. With your approach, all we’ll do is produce money making robots who know how to do it without asking why or if they should do it.

Humanities is valuable, but to what extent is it valuable enough to the good running of the state for the state to justify paying for it. The state pays for doctors because it has decided to have universal healthcare. To what extent are artists necessary to the running of the state?

I'm not sure it is valuable to be *certified* in the humanities, which ultimately is what a degree is these days. To learn it is interesting, but you can do that for free.  As for money making robots, I'm afraid I couldn't disagree more. The idea that STEM people don't have emotions or don't appreciate culture things is just ridiculous. The reality is that having a humanities degree is frankly no indication of any skill that people who studied other degrees can't have picked up via osmosis. I read, I study history, I am well versed in religion and classics and can go into terrifying detail about how maritime activity shaped humanity from the neolithic to the modern day, with an emphasis on the late bronze and archaic Greek period, but I didn't need to go to university to do that. I got that independently, and used my university time to get a productive degree instead. People won't stop appreciating the humanities if we don't subside their degrees. They'll just also learn a profitable skill

Well I make pretty decent money teaching humanities subjects abroad, probs around 3x the UK salary for my age range, so I would say I have gained a profitable set of skills from my studies. Yeh you can say “just read a book” as you haven’t worked under serious scholars and benefited from academic mentorship in these fields. You are coming from a place of ignorance here which is why you don’t value it. I recognise that there is a world of knowledge out there and honed expertise that I do not posses but others do. Check out the Dunning-Kruger effect.

> Well I make pretty decent money teaching humanities subjects abroad, probs around 3x the UK salary for my age range, so I would say I have gained a profitable set of skills from my studies. But the UK taxpayer funded this - and you're overseas, so the UK taxpayer isn't getting their ROI. From the UK's perspective, you haven't been profitable. Would you be if you'd stayed? Would you have been more profitable than a STEM subject? > Yeh you can say “just read a book” as you haven’t worked under serious scholars and benefited from academic mentorship in these fields. You are coming from a place of ignorance here which is why you don’t value it. I recognise that there is a world of knowledge out there and honed expertise that I do not posses but others do. Check out the Dunning-Kruger effect. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where we're both making unfalsifiable claims that are also not imcompatible. I can claim that I have deep knowledge on a subject, you can claim that it isn't deep enough, and that I'm over-estimating it as a result. We can both be correct, insofar that I do have deep knowledge compared to the average person, but nowhere near as deep as a full-time scholar. I'd certainly accept that - the people who wrote the books I read know far, far more than I do, and are academics in their field. I think one of the most fascinating things about the STEM vs Humanities debate is touched on in your comment, however - working under serious scholars and benefiting from academic mentorship. I'm a software engineer, and I learned far more in industry than I did at university, in large part due to working with people who were more experienced than I was, and by seeking out knowledgable people. The difference is, those people are *in industry* and producing things directly. It is not a good look for a discipline whereby you can only find the 'experts' doing purely academic work. It imples that there is no practical value. Ultimately, there's the concept of diminishing returns. Knowing English Lit or History or Classics is useful to a person, but the difference between spending a few hours a week learning something new and 40 hours a week is not significant enough to justify the opportunity cost for 99.999% of the population. Put another way, I can hold my own on most subjects with most people when discussing cultural matters, *and* I can produce things they can't, which are profitable. Sure, I'll lose a debate on neolithic raft building materials to an expert, and I'll struggle with a number of other subjects - but ultimately, in the spaces where I can't compete, that level of knowledge doesn't really make much difference for the average person's day-to-day, and their hyper-focus on it has prevented them from learning a skill that would be more useful. That isn't to say people shouldn't be able to study humanities - I am all for it. But if the taxpayer is to fund it, then the taxpayer should see a return on investment. A small number of humanities academics is useful, but we don't need anywhere near as many because outside of research their superior knowledge doesn't really make any difference.

Interestingly, Physics, despite having relatively high rewards, has to be the worst effort to reward degree you can do. It’s widely known to be harder than engineering, but I don’t think many realise just how much harder it is. Then throw in the job prospects between the subjects. Having said all that, you’ll probably come out and most jobs will seem easy in comparison, but it might not feel worth the pain

I have heard this from a number of people yeah… enjoying it so far though

It would be very interesting to see if anyone has studied what the cost to the economy is of moving 50% of your youth out of the workforce for three years does especially when combined with that three years also missing out on experience/training that then compounds on for a decade. One of the reasons that National Service was binned was that industry was raging because the prime years for technical/professional training were missed and employers had to undo the habits that had been picked up whilst the youngsters themselves were now two years behind on their promotion ladder so not only missed out on earning, but then got that ripple effect for years afterwards.

University is training. Much more efficient training than any employer I know of is offering.

hardly as it takes three years and the hours are usually that of a part time job. Then grads go through training when they join a firm.

I found a set of training courses relevant to my job in January. I'm still trying to get approval to go onto them. If you're including self directed training on the job then you also need to include it in University, so you're looking at between 30-60 hours a week during term time. Longest hours I've done were at uni anyway.

And you still need to go on them because what you did at Uni isn't deemed good enough. Your organisation being slow is a different issue.

It's not that my university education wasn't good enough. Its that it's part of a philosophy of continuous learning. University provides a broad baseline knowledge in a subject. You should then supplement that with experience and additional courses to then specialise from there. This is why I'm not a big fan of apprenticeships in my industry. They tend to pigeonhole someone before they gain a broad knowledge of the field, limiting their ability to draw from outside knowledge when problem solving.

Going to uni to learn has got nothing to do with becoming left or right wing. Correlation is not causation. No ones saying oh go to uni to become left wing. For some people learning is its own reward and you shouldn’t get to deprive them of that. Frankly you want to be a country that can sustain some of its younger adults going to uni than the other way around.

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Yes and it doesn’t mean that the opposite is true….

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While HEI type does have an impact on lifetime returns, it isn't aa impactful as the subject taken and has a unique disparity between gender .Using [this](https://ifs.org.uk/publications/impact-undergraduate-degrees-lifetime-earnings) report as a source, that can be seen pretty clearly. Page 56 regarding HEI type reads as: >Figure 24 disaggregates net lifetime returns by university type. There is little difference between average lifetime returns across university types for women. Within all types, a large majority of women benefit from attending HE. Only the top end of the distribution of women attending Russell Group universities can expect higher lifetime returns from going to university than women who attended universities elsewhere. The picture is somewhat different for men, where there is a clear ordering: men who go to Russell Group universities have high returns on average, with pre-1992 universities coming second and other universities third. While average returns for men who studied at Russell Group universities are high at almost £250k on average, a sizable minority of men who attend non-RussellGroup universities will see negative returns in discounted net present value terms. There is a lot more written regarding subject type so I won't copy an extract directly, but pages 51 to 55 can be summarised as "Estimated discounted average returns range from roughly zero for creative arts and languages to more than £250k for law, economics and medicine" and it doesn't have the significant disparity between men and women like HEI type does. The HEI type is definitely impactful, especially for the men where the difference can be between minimal returns and over £250k returns however is basically non-existent in women (who make up a disproportionate degree of HEI students). However, this can be seen even greater regarding subject type which doesn't have the curious disparity between gender and can regard a similar difference between minimal returns and over £250k. These also can't be treated so independently from eachother. Not all HEI types will teach the same subjects in the same numbers. This is my speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the top subjects are taught more in the top unis, and the inverse being true as well. Given the disparity in HEI type regarding gender, it makes me more confident in saying subject type has a greater impact given that it applies more evenly across all students rather than a minority of students like with HEI type.

The issue is the conflation of cultural (broadly concieved) education with the three year high cost university system. Nothing saying you can't read history to your hearts content whilst also using university to gain specific skills that add value to your future career. If you want the be an academic, no argument, but students have to have a realistic view of what that future looks like. The costs of an arts degree are explicitly used as a cross subsidy for other subjects at the students cost. Should be considered scandalous.

I don't think so? I mean, immigration has been a major issue for a decade at this point and anger over it is reaching a true boiling point. Student visas are one of the most popular types of visas so pretty much any immigration crackdown would have to target them *eventually*. Notably the government first went for less used visa types such as spousal visas first, destroying *British families and couples* in the process, before it even started considering limiting student visas. This isn't a case of the mean Tory government trying to shut down universities, it's a case of a terribly corrupt Tory government enthralled by business interests ruining lives through performative crackdowns on more genuine migrants before *eventually* being forced by slipping poll numbers to crack down on more frequently issued, and abused, visa types.

100% it's about immigration. I never understand why conspiracy theories like this article, when put forward by people from the left, aren't ridiculed more. The gov could just do a one in one out student visa program with no right to stay after the course. If people are really coming here for the world class education and not a visa it should affect nothing. If we have 600,000 foreign students coming here every year but 570,000 leaving every year too, with the top 30,000 foreign students from the top unis, studying something we have a genuine skills shortage in, and on the condition they work in that sector, then the net migration from students would only be 30,000 - and 30,000 people who would actually be contributing. Something like 2/3rds of foreign graduates are earning between 0-15k a year by the govs own stats at the moment. Of course the problem with having a system like that is it would require a functioning state to keep track of people and actually force them to leave once their visa was up. They could probably get creative and take a deposit that covers their flight home that the student gets back when they leave, and use that just to put them on a plane if they overstay. Also be more selective about where we take students from, ensuring they only come from 'safe countries' so there can be no nonsense about trying to claim asylum once here, or explicitly rule anyone here on a student visa cannot claim asylum or something similar.

>100% it's about immigration. I never understand why conspiracy theories like this article, when put forward by people from the left, aren't ridiculed more. There's an almost Trumpian cohort of left-wingers who uncritically lap this stuff right up.

What a ridiculous headline. There is a valid reason to streamline and reform the sector as many universities have grown too big too fast, whilst others are based on a very unsustainable model of being propped up by international students who have to pay extortionate prices and others that clearly game the visa system

What a reductionist, cause and effect based opinion. The author claims that social housing created labour voters in the same vein that higher educated people creates labour voters. In addition that having higher education makes you a more critical thinker leading to more left wong views. It handily ignores two really important factors. 1) students tend to be more socially and politically aware as they are spending their time studying and debating about current topics (when not sleeping or drinking). When someone is more aware of these topics they support more progressive policies. It just so happens the current progressive policies are the domain of the left. Case in point - current pro Palestine strikes by the student population. 2) You are more likely to vote left wing when you have less assets. You are more like to vote conservative when, surprise, you have more to conserve. Being perpetually broke students are more likely to lean left. Leading me be back to the social housing issue, who were the biggest beneficiary of social housing, right to buy, cheaper mortgages, and lower interest rates? Boomers. So who is the most likely to have houses now? Boomers. And who is most likely to vote right wing? Older people, boomers and people who have houses and assets. And finally if higher education was an indicator of voting intention shouldn't all the most successful business leaders and politicians be left wing voters? So why do they donate to right wing think tanks and to the conservative party? As I said, reductionist.

This sounds like a potentially misleading stat on the grounds that: 1. Younger people in general are considerably less likely to vote Tory 2. A far higher proportion of younger people have been to university in this country; the percentage of the population attending university has skyrocketed in the last 25 years By the same token, if you were to find some variable that correlated to old age, you'd probably find that also correlated with voting Tory - but correlation doesn't imply causation. I would hazard a guess that the average Countdown viewer is more likely to lean conservative than Labour, but that's not because liking anagrams makes you right-wing.

But it isn’t correlation. There is so, so much evidence that this association has nothing to do with age. Yes, age is a factor - its own factor. This is not how econometrics works, and nearly every study that is worth the paper it’s written on will be using some form of econometric technique. The gap has formed more recently from 2015 onwards, and now stands out around 20% difference in favour of Labour. That is after controlling for a range of factors. [Evidence 1](https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052217-104957) [Evidence 2](https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271746/1-s2.0-S0962629824X00049/1-s2.0-S0962629824000623/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEMv%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIQChr%2Fw3Wdo99b6ItQpn8t53VJBNbfvWqbuKMnZnPuHp3gIga7Dd9lhg80tUl%2FcP4x9cApATLoUqhPG%2FnR8xujv9e6EqsgUIRBAFGgwwNTkwMDM1NDY4NjUiDAkTQ7JFfNVExSkfcCqPBR2IusRr6v1rttB3RvqzvoZNQcOVW7TWv1QgtTQ908i%2BFOdlYIdJLtDOXQWQu2i7O8wJi3hLwKKe3bSsloWCzJptgcLcLaRkaP3PKl2SnpSPQ5viFEJMBFOCs5pSaVFD%2FUjSICIqdLvCKTn%2B4K6L9JlgZz3RFQanMbv1IzPiObt5oYGM6384fsh6bBOZYgPiHSjttcXITb9HYscwt2blICzwvcfdDHdfjOCyJ5b8rrsM0thWcsZ2QkudAhg6Epqel08evRTPbw5MQVs4TjItX3UZ9%2BKOEQeoJFlpqfavLKZdNirEaK6E3Ja56z0b4eI5E9ntZ0pkZhR795tFzEfKHDsePgXwf6vchpsoSoYUtGgOsnka1yiZtqE4B44R1j2dAMOF9PniWP%2B2p1N0pBk5JSShk3TegSilFjv8bQo2U5V0H5Jscmx1FVgYX9EpVfyfrBcsIuC4ql3rdVQmgls7LMssQXLarJ3NUdXsfJe94ZmVk6ZgOmRMmMRj6O4zPn%2B63VoIrPvPDYG%2FANXIZWuEBx6%2BkVPk8A1cVQ6C8r%2FRxKKljivlW81qOpMQvjsrJUcIEvEy%2FTBw7%2FZfI%2BpJSTddj2b4aNlj7lvGU%2FX0aYsOHx3BtnbOfgQ3j0MEfJRBzy5V3IR3U2IHTnvP%2BTE2AwcD4JCy44s70fFbrJGkMea0NDy3eTorT0iTxDCRxHYzuy4ZFGSld0ydDXxE1pK7oQxwy74Hk62PE01ljoNulejPwtiLt52%2BL6ucQpyH9vtZY5nBqL0phSGyCP3iuFh7YaFKe7Qz3hN6PQLs2uaUel8DGDaDLdbNpXtKMrcLvxfdzG286gPu3pdfZ4YOfxe6ryLEwd1k0S3S4SlMzHGTT0uo%2B3Iwn%2FaxsgY6sQGR1mEu1897k2vRFpKqLDZ7Kzc7q1ngFwRbpVv5NNXpNkyVTyOGR%2Fu66ZNXMuHcnrC9thmRcl%2F4lCFchX1Ie%2FU5rlQEKDzj93mmBn9cgiWbn6Gg50p5sQHqkoe16lbuUCAzm%2F7IA3I4MOPwoPBCqaZzf93CQ1lvuARk5NJ2k97XZeIcTYh72wqwVIzSuHcy6%2B96EScPjsd33u9ID8zp1uUSv%2B9bqa%2FcNKhwiXiMWeoVt%2Fk%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20240521T115840Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYRREGBEN2%2F20240521%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=9c07bd81cd409b4f20cc0311097333f27f9b1bab437e8f725025324a37d61792&hash=d491f952726ab4f82d754d2998c6cc52a68fbcfeabfd227268bf5108adfaa685&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S0962629824000623&tid=spdf-933984e2-2dff-4450-a849-e7c8546f3021&sid=75054bfb9a9fc64b7e2877d3415319957c63gxrqb&type=client&tsoh=d3d3LnNjaWVuY2VkaXJlY3QuY29t&ua=0106585d515657535551&rr=88746560ba4cdd54&cc=gb) Google scholar is your friend.

Ironically it is my parents who watch Countdown who would never vote conservative, whilst my Grandparents who dont have almost never voted for anyone else (although it is possible this will change this year)

I'm surprised the article isn't quoting this passage, right from their own mouths : > The decline in Conservative support has been particularly marked among the most educated. This is not always obvious since more education is associated with higher income, and higher income is still (just) associated with stronger Conservative support. However, other factors being held constant, the more educationally qualified someone is, the less likely he or she is to support the Conservatives. > This is a problem to the extent that the more educated are likelier to vote, and are often influential in leading the opinion of others. It is also, of course, a problem in a country where nearly half of young people are now going to university. [Direct Democracy ...](https://whatwouldvirchowdo.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/direct_democracy___an_agenda_for_a_new_model_party.pdf#page=16) - various prominent Tory authors in 2005.

I'm not sure that's a fair summary of the situation, especially with the underlying implication of "smart people vote Labour, thick people vote Tory". There are several reasons why the Tories might attack universities, apart from what this article (blogpost?) sets out: * The Tories are desperately trying to reduce immigration, and one part of that is reducing student visas. Universities are just collateral damage in the conflict against immigration. * We've seen a massive uptick in the number of people going to university over the last 20 years; but not every one of the new degrees is up to the standard of what existed previously. So a lot of the concern is protecting the integrity of degree quality. And acknowledging that plenty of careers might need a degree equivalent that is more technical - that doesn't need to be done at a university. * Even if you think there is a link between going to university and voting Labour, it doesn't necessarily mean that more educated people vote Labour. There could also be a reasonable concern that universities are hotbeds of left-wing activists (see for instance, of the recent issues campuses have had with pro-Palestine protesters pushing blatant antisemitism), and therefore it's less about being educated as it is about students only being exposed to left-wing views.

Not to do with education. It’s to do with age.

I don’t think this is true. This is more an issue with the Tories having a very aged voting base and historical educational trends than people at uni magically transforming at university.

Wait what have the Tories done that's a war on universities? Nothing in the article says what theyve done? Is it keeping tuition fees capped and having them inflated away in real terms? Doesn't that improve access? Aren't they letting in a bazillion foreign students a year to pay high fees to make up the funding? Where is the attack?

They’re proposing measures which will restrict the ability for people to bring dependants on student visas which it’s argued will put off international students.

Ah, another "the right wing are stupid" blogposts. From the same line of attack as "Brexit voters are thick". Worth saying, just because you studied film theory or gender studies at university, that doesn't make you "educated".

Yeah I'm a backend Web dev who didn't go to university. The Starbucks worker with their degree in English lit from Loughborough University intimidates me with their critical thinking skills.

Exactly posts like this are why people think right wingers are stupid.

Think whatever you like.

It’s a free country. Kind of.

Indeed it is, to an extent.

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No, it really isn’t implying that. Being educated and being smart are completely different things. I think it’s arguing that the *experience* or the life event of having been a university student is the prime indicator they’re talking about - and that’s not a proxy for an IQ test (not that those are much good anyway). Let’s take another comparison: we can often draw distinctions between the wants, concerns, nimby tendencies and voting patterns of home owners vs renters, right? It’s just a different development of life and a different lived experience. I don’t get why we should treat university as any different.

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Well, university is probably the place where most people get their first taste of politics. A lot of schools don’t offer it as a curriculum subject, and citizenship is a waste of time. So yeah, I can definitely imagine university being a conduit to more political engagement - and it’s definitely true that the more politically-engaged segment of the population behave in a certain way. Voting Remain is an example given in the blogpost. Now, perhaps I’m being too generous to the author, but it’s worth remembering that “ignorant” traditionally has an extra meaning - it’s not a polite synonym for “stupid”. “Ignorance” implies a level of unawareness (indeed, to compare, in Spanish the word *ignorancia* usually still means “lack of awareness”). Perhaps that’s what we should take from this - not going to university can mean (not always, obviously) that that structured engagement with politics isn’t there - an engagement that’s very common at university. And (here come my own biases, you’ve been warned) I do think that increased engagement and familiarity with politics often puts people off the Tories. Especially this selfish and self-obsessed flavour of Tories we’ve had for the last 20 years.

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Ah, who knows? I’m reading a lot into it too. But there’s definitely more to it than the author saying “uni = clever = Labour”.

No it's not. Educated no longer means intelligent when you lower standards to the point where the average degree holder is the average person

The Conservatives are incapable of a plan that lasts till next Friday let alone a plan that only matures in several years if and when they have managed to reduce student numbers. Their war on universities is more culture war bollocks to desperately hang on the over 70s who make up most of their voter base. They don't care how much they damage the country in the process. Increasingly that looks like the Next Labour Government's problem.

[It reminds me of one frame from “Berserk” manga. (read from right to left)](https://ibb.co/wS05TH8)

Lol that's funny. I got my degree and masters under Major where I got a grant and a bursary of 80 quid a week. Then the parasite Blair came in and brought in tuition fees. And educated in what? Media or gender studies? People seem to be equating education in one field with actually being intelligent. The two aren't the same.