Rory Sutherland tells Tom Swarbrick about the ‘invisible problem’ with universities in the UK at the moment.
This follows the advertising guru’s recent comments online regarding the impact of university degrees.
He tells Tom that a university degree is often used as a ‘proxy’ for starting a career, but continues to say that it can be a ‘misleading’ and ‘narrow opportunity.’
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how much longer do you think 50% of school leevers are going to feel like they need to get a University degree for right okay I’m first of all I’m going to Cave at this there are patently jobs okay no no I have to do this okay uh there are jobs like brain surgery yes okay or advanced mathematics or indeed law where your education is part of what you practice effectively and I wouldn’t want to relax educational standards for my brain surgeon or my Proctologist or okay I’m not taking that risk however you know I spoke to someone who got a double first in maths from Cambridge who worked for an investment bank and I asked him how long after you started work did anybody care what math degree you got and he said it was about 3 to four years after that point no one cared who had you worked for what had you done so in some ways the University degree for many many jobs is a way of getting a great starting job it’s a way of getting a great start in life but actually it’s a proxy measure and I’d also argue it’s a dangerous proxy measure actually because I think it’s one of these measures do you have a degree what degree class do you have which is what I call a one-way measure I’ll explain that okay if you’ve got a really good degree in maths you’re probably pretty intelligent and capable doesn’t necessarily mean you’re totally sane or capable of working with other people in fact that may beely correlated exactly yeah okay but if you don’t have a degree it’s not safe to make the opposite assumption so the example I always give is chess playing if you’re very good at chess okay you’re probably quite clever in some specific regard okay but you couldn’t say that bad chess players were thick I mean my brother’s an astrophysicist and he can’t play chess to save his life okay it’s not really a reliable measure except in One Direction and consequently what we’ve done is we’ve made this degree a necessary hurdle or bottleneck through which everybody has to pass in order to enter sort of what you might call remunerative employment uh and it’s a terrible mistake I think I think it leads to an incredible waste of talent uh you know some people are very good at solving abstract problems for example other very capable and intelligent people can’t stand working on abstract problems because they’d rather deal with something concrete and I I I do worry about that by the way I’m not the only person I mean uh you might Scott Galloway the podcaster Michael sandel the Harvard philosopher have both made the point that ivy league degrees in the US are really luxury goods in other words you know the closest business comparison to Harvard might be Louis vuon in other words it’s something that’s very expensive to attain as a credential you know and it’s valuable precisely because of its scarcity yeah now things that are valuable because of their scarcity are actually slightly dodgy if you want me to be frank uh you know their Fab eggs their luxury goods now a very interesting guy called um fishkin I think it’s Joseph fishkin who’s a UCLA law professor makes a very interesting point which is because of our need to establish equality of opportunity we pay a hidden price because if you want equality of opportunity by definition you’ve got to impose the same criteria on everybody because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair but when you impose the same criteria on everybody what you’re invisibly doing is you’re narrowing opportunity you’re saying in order to be good at anything you have to be good at this one particular thing now fishkin believes that we should actually optimize for what he calls plurality of opportunity in other words create a world in which lots of different people can be really successful in lots of different ways through lots of different paths to entry rather than rather than what we’ve done at the moment absolutely and it strikes me that that’s the employer’s fault that I think a lot a lot of employers have said the only way the only way in which we’re going to look at you as if you have any or a degree it sort of doesn’t matter what I take your point about being or above yeah ridiculous first of all it’s LED ridiculous grade inflation Google actually did the work and found there was no correlation between people’s degree class and their performance in the workplace some years later um it’s it’s it’s it’s lazy recruitment oh God we’ve got a set an arry kind of uh cut off to reduce the number of applicants we consider to one or above now I work in advertising which is an interesting business because it is a bit meritocratic or it used to be in that one of the most successful people in Creative advertising was actually a motorcycle dispatch Rider who made a delivery in an ad agency one day thought it looked a bit interesting and set out to try and get a job there and other of the most successful people started in the post room there were still sort of chin stroking Oxbridge type kicking around that’s fine okay but it what’s patent if you work in a business like advertising which isn’t really credentialist traditionally is you realize that actually really valuable Talent can come from anywhere well I wonder then whether fundamentally we have too many universities whe one day they they’ll reduce in number well there’s an invisible problem when Tony Blair set that apparently admirable Target okay which is that 50% of people would go to un first of all University went from being an option to an obligation yeah I think a lot of people ended up going to University who didn’t really want to you know but they felt that you’re you would be disadvantaged in life if you didn’t and in the process by the way ended up accumulating a whole heap of debt not you know it’s not as if property isn’t expensive enough in London without having debt as well for the younger generation and also it it it it very unfairly stigmatized people who didn’t go to university I think it almost could have bad over the heads of people who hadn’t been
20 Comments
Talks utter sense
Unlike some of the presenters on this f channel !
A degree or education in general, helps train the mind. It is not just a proxy to get a job.
No Russell Group or Ivy League schools in my nation; we just quietly get stuff done, in a population with over 57% having a post secondary education.
It's partly because universities became businesses and will pass anyone for the right amount of money, which inevitably reduces the value of a degree over time
And then theres the lies about how ‘you won’t pay it back until you earn a certain amount’
Let’s be clear 27k is not much money anymore and it showing no sign that they will change this threshold. In 10 years time with inflation 27k could be minimum wage and you WILL notice that deduction on your wage slip for student loan, trust me I do.
The UK. Advertising. Meritocratic.
Hmmm. I'll have to check with Jaguar on that one.
What distinguishes an undergraduate degree is the cognitive development of your brain. This can be done without a degree but you are compelled to complete a developmental journey. Moreover, it supports other skills including critical thinking, researching, writing. I'm convinced that my degrees didn't teach me that much about the subject area, however it did develop the aforementioned skills. There is an issue that universities tacitly/overtly overstate the value of the degree in the labour market.
I have a top degree, and I agree useless managers insist on a 1st with honours in the same way, nobody was ever fired for buying IBM, BUT until they were
Most big businesses don’t actually need very many talented and genuinely intelligent and capable people. They are large, bureaucratic, machines that need lots of people to follow well defined processes and procedures.
You just don’t need many independent, free thinkers in most of these organisations.
Therefore degrees are quantifiable commodities for individuals who in turn are commodities who are pushed through a metric driven recruitment and work life process.
Funnelling everything towards Universities pulled up the ladder. It led to cutting further education and education and left nothing for adults unless they either needed basic skills or an access course to get into university. A whole swathe of people are not catered for. It doesn’t appear that making some careers into graduate careers led to improvements either, the police is one job that springs to mind. My husband feels his degree has been devalued, because it really meant something when he graduated as a mature student and now it’s just a run of the mill thing.
The pendulum swing, it is not a degree anymore, it's debtgree.
I trained an IT apprentice a few years ago, he quitted and got a job paying £40k. My son same did an apprenticeship on engineering, just got promoted to senior staff at 21 in an international company, and just under £30k.
Whats a degree worth when 90% of students are using Chatgpt and similar sites?
This was never an employers thing, it was Labour government that channeled as many folk through the uni system as possible. As the whole thing was dreamed up by MCPs, (middle class profesionals) and they all went through the university system, so this was the pinnacle for them.
Plumbing and Joinery etc for them are deemed as terrible jobs and to be avoided.
So, probably subconsciously crated this uni skewed. System.
Then factor in educational bias you have the problem you have now.
Near the beginning…it's worrying that he has to explain in simple words things like modus pollens and modus tollens
The issue is..wr need to stop treating uni like a job factory. Why not make uni have absolutely nothing to do with jobs, jobs do their own training, but uni is part of your necessary education. ? An extension of school in a way. Learning is an end in itself. Study anything you enjoy. Do vocational training after. Better citizens, less urgent competition for jobs at 18, and ofc make uni incredibly cheap. In parts of Europe it's free or 500 a year. Uk is insane
"University went from being an option to being an obligation", this is not just true but is a major reason for the misery now vastly associated with university education. It gets worse when one considers that the learner must also pay for it. Then you don't necessarily get the students that dream about the beauty of pi or want to spend countless hours trying to get into the heads of philosophers who lit up the path.
It doesn't stop there, it's actually just the start. Because, as noted in this great conversation, employers still insist on considering only applicants with a degree….
I'm an educator who believes in the power of education, but I don't believe a university degree is the only route and I know that it will not make everyone happier. We need to nuance our understanding and help young people to find what they'll be happy with over their productive years.
I have 5 egrees, and I'd do them all all over again, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone because it's really not everyone's cup of tea. Yet, those people are significantly better than I could ever be in many respects – the question is how many of them.know it AND are in the company of others who see and embrace it.
Unless you NEED to do a degree these days – for medicine, law, or anything else – it's a waste of money.
Do what you want to do, not what you think society instructs you to do.
I had "graduate-itis" for years. I used to look for jobs and think "But I'm a graduate!"
No one cares! They care what you can DO, and *who you are*.
I also looked down on lots of non-grads, and it wasn't until years later that I realised: boiler installation instructions are pretty fking complicated! Now I respect contractors more than ever.
Degrees are fine – but only if you really want to study something.
I heard, recently, that the UK Police plan to become an aĺl graduate profession? I was surprised & a bit puzzled – that (along with the military, fire service. etc) has always been a route to a solid career for school leavers.
I decided, maybe through some external pressure from family, to pursue a degree whilst working full time, 10 years ago now. Studying and working full time for 4 years was hard, but ultimately helped me develop skills that have since helped me in work and in life.
Now, was that degree worth 40k? absolutely not. Would I do it again? Not if I can help it. However… I do believe university to be the last place where one would typically make friends and life long connections, as it then becomes progressively harder with time and in the workforce.
Rory for PM