The return of the RAB

The debate about the value of a university education has become so flyblown that it can be tempting to disengage.

But universities must resist the urge, for two reasons. The first is that value – as subjective as it is, and as bad faith as many media takes are – is fundamentally important. The decision to take three or four years of undergraduate study comes with not only financial but also opportunity costs.

The second is that the question of value is also the underpinning of many other desiccated debates about higher education, so should be considered a root cause of the prevailing narrative.

It was probably inevitable following the tuition fee reforms in England that a reductive view of value primarily based on financial return would cement itself in the national consciousness.

Another, related consequence – and one that has returned to the fore recently – was the sport of RAB watching (the RAB charge being the proportion of tuition fee debt that will ultimately be written off by the Treasury).

The RAB is interesting because while it is often positioned as evidence of degrees not delivering the graduate salary returns anticipated, it was always intended as both a safety net and a conscious public investment in higher education. But like fees themselves – framed as covering solely tuition, so leaving universities open to relentless attacks over such metrics as contact hours – this investment in educational opportunity via tricksy public accounting has framed it as a write-off, which we more readily associate with something that has gone irretrievably wrong (or a car crash).

This week, the Higher Education Policy Institute and Advance HE release the results of their annual UK student experience survey, which has further grim reading on the value front.

Among the headline findings are that little more than a quarter (27 per cent) of the 10,000 respondents felt they were getting good value for money, while there had been a big increase (from 29 to 44 per cent) in the proportion who said they had received poor or very poor value.

The more detailed findings show, unsurprisingly, that the loss of in-person contact, with staff and with other students, was among the key reasons for this deterioration.

The past year has, of course, been uniquely atypical, but the question of value was to the fore in higher education debates long before Covid took hold.

If we are to look at the financial return in isolation, particularly in the context of alternative routes through education to employment, then a paper from the Centre for Vocational Education Research offers some firm evidence.

It confirms that there is an earnings premium attached to any and all progression beyond Level 3, as one would hope and expect, and that Level 6 delivers good earnings premiums at ages 26 and 30.

For the university-bashing brigade, it also shows that the average earnings of men with Level 4 and women with Level 5 qualifications at these ages outstrip those with degree-level qualifications.

To which the only response can be a sincere and heartfelt “good for them”. University is not the right route for all, nor is the success of those with technical qualifications a slur on degree-level education that is also delivering returns financial and otherwise.

Crucially, the paper also offers various caveats to the data. The outperformance in salaries of Level 4 (for men) and Level 5 (for women) is identified at relatively early career stages, and degree holders tend to experience strong salary growth in their thirties that might not be matched for others.

In addition, the paper’s six authors point out that the salary premiums at those lower levels reflect high concentrations of qualifications in specific areas such as engineering and construction.

This, they say, might be challenged if technology continues to drive mechanisation in particular industries, and – importantly – might not be replicated if public policy changes lead to big increases in subdegree qualifications, especially in different subject areas.

It is, they add, “crucial to consider how different educational trajectories prepare people for a lifetime in the labour market and whether they enable individuals to cope with technical change and economy-wide shocks” (more research required).

But with these caveats, the conclusion that technical and vocational routes “can lead to good outcomes for the young people well suited to those qualifications” should be entirely uncontroversial, as should the point that it can be more economical both for individuals and the Exchequer.

The frustration is how often this is then converted into the desiccated argument that this proves that higher education is a Ponzi scheme. It does not.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com