Has Britain finally fallen out of love with university?

Helen Coffey, The Independent

Going to university is the most powerful single tool we have to boost the living standards and life chances of many young people.” These words were recently uttered, without irony, by the very man who helped to make getting a degree a much more unappealing proposition for Britain’s young people over a decade ago: the former Tory universities minister, David Willetts.

Hitting back at “edu-sceptics” this week in a report for King’s College London’s policy institute, he declared that higher education was still very much not a waste of money. “If you were a doctor, you would prescribe more education,” Willetts said, citing studies suggesting that higher education is a driver of better physical and mental health. Perhaps he felt so compelled to make the case for university because it was he, back in 2012’s coalition government, who oversaw the infamous tuition fee price hike from £3,000 to £9,000 a year. At a stroke, he tripled the debt that most students would be saddled with, prompting widespread discontent and student protests across the country.

Nevertheless, the evidence Willetts recently presented in favour of getting a degree was compelling. By the age of 31, graduates are earning 37 per cent more than non-graduates with at least two A-levels (£30,750 and £22,500 respectively). An undergraduate degree is estimated to be worth on average £280,000 for men and £190,000 for women, net of tax and student loan repayments, over a lifetime relative to what a graduate would have earned had they not gone to university. Young graduates earn £5,000 more annually than non-graduates — although this is less than it was a decade ago. (Real earnings of young graduates have not seen much uplift for the past 10 years, unlike non-graduate earnings, which have been boosted by the minimum and living wages increasing.)

Subtler long-term benefits include the fact that graduates remain in the workforce for longer and enjoy increases in earnings out into middle age, unlike those with job-specific vocational qualifications. Tuition fees have remained pretty similar for the past 12 years, meaning they have gone down in real terms, although the new Labour government announced in autumn that they would go up to £9,500 per year for students starting in September 2025. On the face of it, some might argue that the popularity of going to university hasn’t been much affected by fees. Applicant numbers fell in 2012 following the price rise but recovered the following year; headline student numbers “have increased to new record levels in recent years”, according to a House of Commons research briefing on higher education. The number of UK university applicants increased each year from 2019 to 2022.

But a slightly different truth lurks beneath the top-line numbers. Growth in the student population since 2020 has largely been driven by increases in overseas students on postgraduate taught courses — and any increase in domestic applicants is due to the increased number of 18-year-olds in the population. “Everything tells us that demand is softening,” says Nick Hillman, director of Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and former educational special adviser for the Conservative party. “That is against expectation. Five years ago, everybody was expecting that 2025 would be a boom time for universities, because the number of 18-year-olds grows every year in the 2020s — so there are more school leavers than previously, and we expected that to flow through to higher education. But the numbers are flat or declining as a proportion of the population.”

A report from HEPI published in October last year suggested that, after steadily increasing over the past two decades, the proportion of young people choosing to pursue higher education in England had gone into reverse in the two years since Covid-19. Many universities are already suffering from a drop in numbers; looking ahead, the report warned that overall demand for higher education could fall by around 20 per cent from 2030 to 2040 as a result of the decline in the number of young people in the population by that time.

“The reasons for the recent reversal of the increasing desire of young people to go to university need to be understood,” said HEPI president Bahram Bekhradnia at the time. “It is unlikely to be because of cost — the cost of going to university has actually reduced in the past decade ... Whatever the reasons, unless there is an increase in the desire of young people to go to university then the future looks very bleak for many institutions.” The dwindling interest in getting a degree among some of the latest cohorts is not impacting all universities equally. The top-tier, most prestigious names — for example, Russell Group universities — continue to be in demand from domestic and foreign students. They might have to widen their doors a little more, drop their grade thresholds a little lower, but they can still fill courses. At the other end of the spectrum, the ex-polytechnic universities are also hanging in there.

“There’s a squeezed-middle problem,” says Hillman. “The universities that are losing out to more prestigious institutions.” Scottish universities are also suffering as they get less funding, as are smaller, specialist universities with high overheads. Conor Cotton, founder of the recruitment service Not Going To Uni, has seen a huge spike in interest from young people. “As a business, we’ve certainly seen an increase in the number of young people coming through the website every single year looking at alternatives to university,” he tells me. “We’ve just had probably one of our most successful starts to the academic year for applications for apprenticeships — we were seeing thousands of applications coming through from September 2024 to January 2025, which massively outperformed last year by at least 50 per cent.” Though Labour’s rise in tuition fees will be negligible in real terms, merely accounting for inflation, Cotton still credits this in part for drumming up more interest in alternative pathways. “Keir Starmer delivering that speech about student fees going up again really played a part, because it was all over the news — it was very hard to miss.” The previous Conservative government arguably had a larger role to play in sowing these seeds of doubt, with former PM Rishi Sunak pledging to fund 100,000 more apprenticeships and axe “Mickey Mouse” degrees that were “ripping young people off” as part of his failed election campaign.

Although the fees themselves might not make a material difference to young people’s access to higher education, the broader cost of living just might. Maintenance support granted to students has stagnated well behind the cost of accommodation and food. Hillman shares a stat that proves increasing numbers of students are currently struggling to make ends meet: for the first time since HEPI began collecting data, more than half (57 per cent) of students surveyed are working at a paid job during term-time.

It goes hand in hand with headlines about the death of UK nightclubs; Gen Z are often blamed but, in many cases, young people say they simply can’t afford nights out any longer.