How should we measure the value of university education?

My opening remarks at a Battle of Ideas event on the ‘McDonaldisation’ of universities

I’m going to focus on the final question in the event blurb: ‘how should we measure the value of university education?’.

First, I’m going to take ‘university education’ to pertain to a very specific kind of thing. My view is that whilst all universities are higher-education providers, not all higher-education providers are universities. And I think the UK system could be vastly improved if we were honest about this. Not only because obfuscation means that some less informationally-privileged school kids end up at institutions that don’t really meet their needs and preferences. But also because lumping all HE providers together means devaluing the ones that aren’t really universities.

So, I’m going to take a university to be an institution that provides high-quality teaching of universal knowledge to those studying for degrees, and in which leading academic research is carried out. Basically, this is augmenting John Henry Newman’s view. Newman thought a university was ‘a place of teaching universal knowledge’ — somewhere ‘intellectual, not moral’, he said. But I’m adding this condition about it also being a place that does leading academic research, because the kind of institution I want to focus on is a highly academic place.

That’s not to disparage places that call themselves universities but aren’t highly academic. Again, one reason I think we should be clear about these things is so we don’t devalue those other places by pigeonholing them into a ‘university’ box they will never quite fit.

Next, I’m going to put aside the fact that someone could get this kind of education outside of a university, per se. Surely, one advantage of the boom of Zoom is that, sooner or later, high-end teaching could become practically non-rivalrous. In an ideal world, it would no longer be the case that top academic X is captured by Cambridge or Stanford, to the benefit of a tiny number of super-smart yet often super-privileged students. That said, an alternative could be that top academics will get bought up by oligarchs.. Who knows?

But would it matter? Should we care? I think these things matter for two main reasons. First, because education is something special. We all have obligations around it — and particularly those people who provide it — because of its nature. It’s a universal good; it’s something that everyone has an equal moral right to. Or all children, anyway. When it comes to adult education — which, comfort animals and safe spaces, aside — is what university education is, then there are some more questions. Is there a general right to higher education? If so, should it be paid for from general taxation? Should it be open to people of all ages? Where do merit and desert and fairness come in?

Beyond that, but related, the second reason we should be interested in university education, in this moral sense, comes back to taxpayer funding. The truth of the matter is that universities in this country are, to a large extent, public institutions. Sure, their employees aren’t public servants like university workers in many European countries. But in terms of funding and regulation — UK universities are very much public. And this brings privileges as well as, yes, more obligations.

So, if universities are public institutions that provide high-quality teaching of broad knowledge to those studying for degrees, and in which leading academic research is carried out.. then, what is their value?

Well, value comes in many different types. Some kinds of value are deemed objective, and some subjective. It depends what you’re talking about. On dry descriptions, value is about having some ‘evaluative’ function. On more moralised conceptions, it’s about tracking something worthwhile — typically the good. And there are different domains of value: the moral domain, the personal domain, the civic domain, and so on.

Earlier, I said that Newman said that universities were places that are ‘intellectual, not moral’. And whilst it’s clear that education has moral value, if education institutions start trying to tell their students what’s morally good, then that can really work against their ability to provide high-quality teaching of universal knowledge.

When we look beyond each institution, however — at the learning, at the acquisition of knowledge. That has incalculable total value. Perhaps you can measure some of its instrumental value: in terms of increasing students’ social capital and earning potential, and in terms of driving economic growth, and so on. Though good luck parsing the data: not least when you have so many non-easily-quantifiable differences within and between all the places we call universities.

But beyond that, education can wake up your mind. As Adam Smith said, it gives people something interesting to think about when they’re caught up in the drudgery of work — that’s why he was a big supporter of state education. It also allows you to exercise your core capacities. It helps you — as Martha Nussbaum points out — to think for yourself, to criticise, to be better participants in democratic deliberation. And it also helps us — as Amartya Sen emphasises — to value human achievement as universal. In his Nobel speech, Sen quoted Tagore: ‘Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin’.

And that’s it. Talking about the value of university education seems like a university kind of thing — esoteric, complex. But really, it’s just human. As human beings, we are thinking things: we learn, we reason, we contend. And whether we do these things in a university, or at school, or in the pub, the summation of their value is incalculable.

When we do them in a university, specifically — when we’re fortunate to be taught at that level — that value is distinct. And reducing it to employability metrics is laughable. Yet too often, politicians who should know better — politicians who have typically benefitted from the full value of a great university education — too often they devalue it, and other good but different things, when they talk about it in this instrumentalist way. The full value of a university education is immeasurable, and being able to understand that is a joy in itself.