Philosophers have been moaning about this for decades. The introduction and increase of student fees accelerated the process, but it started in the 80s when the people who run universities settled on two measures of success for any degree programme (besides brute profitability): student satisfaction and employability. Both measures are driven by marketing, which is in turn driven by the need to compete with one another for student numbers. Promise prospective students that they will enjoy the course and have a good time and they are more likely to choose to come to you. Promise them that they will get a good job from their degree and earn lots of money and they, and more importantly their parents, are much more likely to choose to come to you.
These seem like virtuous aims. Who would be content to deliver a course that students don’t enjoy? Who could take so much money from students if there weren’t the promise of some return for their investment? But as virtuous as they seem, they have sinister and far-reaching consequences.
Once the value of a degree is measured by the satisfaction of its students, everything that is part of that degree is held to account by one simple question: do the students like it? It won’t then be long until the more challenging, inaccessible, and boring elements of the course, no matter how technically heavyweight or deeply expressive of the subject, get side-lined in favour of the more fun or accessible content. There are always some students with a serious interest in the subject, but the majority opinion of mostly teenage minds, at the time uneducated in the subject, is an unreliable measure of what a subject should be. Sometimes they ought to study what they don’t like because it’s good for them. Sometimes they ought to find it difficult to understand; what else should we expect if a subject has significant depth?
And it’s not just the content of a degree that’s vulnerable to this corruption, but the form of it too. Students don’t like exams, so don’t give them exams; students don’t like deadlines, so don’t give them deadlines; students don’t like bad grades, so don’t give them bad grades; students don’t like hearing about things that challenge their deeply-held opinions, so don’t discuss their deeply-held opinions. Pretty soon we are left with a watered-down, lightweight, shallow, and simply easier version of the degree that seeks popularity with young minds at the cost of authenticity to the generations that came before – and will come after, if the subject survives for them. But that is an ‘if’, because a generation grows up with this depleted version of the subject and, knowing no better, passes it on the next generation; and the subject, as it was, is lost (until it might be rediscovered, with great effort, by some future generation).
The employability measure is far more damaging. What it establishes is that the only value of a university education, besides enjoying it and having a good time, is to increase your earnings potential. A degree has value relative to the increase in earnings you can expect to receive as a result of having it. This is why we study, why we learn: to earn more money. If you cannot expect to receive any increase in earnings, then the degree has no value. It is a bad investment.
Generations of students, and now the parents of students, have grown up with only this understanding of a university education. They talk only in terms of being paying customers, of ‘getting their money’s worth’, of a return for their investment. They and their parents understand learning to be for the purpose of completing assessments and getting grades, for the purpose of further study for more assessments and more grades, ultimately for the purpose of a good job that earns lots of money. Any suggestion that learning might have intrinsic value is met with a funny look: a mixture of perplexity and urbane condescension.
After all, what is the point in learning Shakespeare if he will not make you any money? What is the point in understanding music if that understanding will not make you any money? What is the point in old art, old literature, ancient languages and cultures, if none of them can make you any money? What is the point in digging up old relics unless you can sell them for a bucketload of cash? What is the point in God, or atheism, if neither will make you rich? Why even ask the question ‘what is it to live well?’, when asking the question will not serve your purposes (of making money) but judge them? None of these things increases your earnings potential, so they are all worthless and not worthy of study at higher education.
And whilst we’re at it, what is the point in love, in friendship, in duty or goodness, when none of these things will make you any money? The mistake is to think that, because you cannot attach a monetary value to these things, they are therefore worthless. But they are not worthless; they are priceless. Priceless in the sense that they are beyond all value and yet cost nothing. Or at least that used to be the case, until the marketeers meddled with values that they did not understand.
The academy should never have gone along with this. We should have stood firmer in the 80s and insisted on the intrinsic value of higher education. We should not have lost the will to articulate this idea to men in suits who do not understand; but having lost the will, we then lost the ability. It is too late now: the swing is too pronounced and the momentum too great to even slow, let alone stop or reverse. Few in the academy remember what it was like before, when the primary duty was how best to stay true to your subject, for its sake, and pass it on to the young person in front of you, for their sake. Such an idea requires a commitment to the intrinsic value of higher education. But that ideal of the university is dead. And we have killed it.
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