It took me a significant amount of time to truly grasp the meaning of the phrase “he’ll piss on you and tell you it’s raining” – to truly understand it at a deep level. It took precisely 13 years and 10 weeks of consecutive ineptitude from the Conservative party, messing everything up and then having the audacity to tell us just how messed up everything is.
So, after implementing the tuition-fee system that burdens students with life-changing debt and drains the morale and resources of the education sector, resulting in underpaid lecturers constantly going on strike, the Conservative party has now declared war on what they deem as “rip-off” degrees. According to Rishi Sunak, young people are being sold a false dream, with no guarantee of a decent job upon completion. Well, Rishi, that’s simply called “life in the UK.”
The idea of the “Mickey Mouse” degree has long been cherished by the right as a means to display their anti-intellectualism. It implies that all forms of learning are useless unless they pertain to physics, while also functioning as a subtle class warfare tactic, suggesting that all universities besides Oxbridge are merely fronts for the left. Looking at the past five prime ministers, it becomes clear that an Oxford education holds no real value when it comes to effectively governing a country. However, this unfortunate reality does not disprove the fact that students are being sold a false dream.
I learned this firsthand when I interviewed a young man in Liverpool approximately ten years ago. It was a regular weekday lunchtime, in a pre-Brexit era before the concepts of the “red wall” and the “left behind” had entered our vocabulary. There was a palpable sense of decline driven by austerity measures, without a name yet attached to it. Regardless of the topic, the underlying question was always: “Why are you on this deserted high street on a Tuesday?”
This young man’s response was entirely reasonable, yet disastrous. He had started a business studies course the previous year. However, at the midway point of his second term, he couldn’t ignore the logic of what he had already learned. The value proposition simply didn’t make sense: he was paying nine thousand pounds a year for lectures available for free online and reading lists that could easily be tackled in any library with a bit of planning. The only tangible thing he was paying for was the social aspect, which inevitably consumed his study time.
Considering his ambition to become an entrepreneur, the employment opportunities provided by a degree seemed muddled. In the entrepreneurial world, the cardinal rule is to never waste time. The tuition fees were only a fraction of the story; living in the expensive southeast added to his financial burdens.
As a result, he dropped out and returned to his parents’ home, only to discover something the business studies program failed to mention: a significant part of tertiary education lies in the unspoken value of being carried along by its momentum. While it may not lead to lucrative outcomes, being outside of this system with the initial debt burden leads nowhere. It’s the paradox of tuition fees: by monetizing the process, the attached value becomes immeasurable. Degrees are marketed as qualifications that boost your earnings, but in reality, studying for one is a process of social stratification, marking you as someone with a specific type of degree, destined for a specific type of life.
So, yes, it is a scam, but not because education lacks value. It’s because education is sold as something it simply isn’t: a clear-cut equation where you pay X pounds for Y knowledge and emerge into the world with that much knowledge to offer, in a bustling market eager to buy it from you. By the time you realize that’s not how it works, it’s too late to turn back.
The most effective way to stop selling false dreams is to eliminate tuition fees and distribute the risk of an unpredictable future through the mechanism we call “general taxation.”
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