Should universities lose public funding for degrees with poor employment outcomes?
UK universities receive significant public money via student loans, teaching grants and research funding. Government policy under the 2024-2026 Labour administration uses Office for Students metrics on graduate employment and earnings to limit expansion of low-value courses and hold providers accountable. Recent data shows large variation, with some subjects like creative arts yielding near-zero or negative lifetime returns for many graduates while others such as medicine deliver strong outcomes.
2 Opinions
If you strip funding from arts and humanities because they don't churn out City traders, you turn culture into a luxury hobby for posh kids with trust funds. A degree in creative arts or youth work adds massive societal value, even if our broken economy pays them peanuts.
I feel sorry for the youth today. The amount of mickey mouse degrees and others that dont prepare you for the real world, high debt, and a government telling and promoting you to get a degree, yet you can't get a job that you wouldn't otherwise have gotten without one. The system is broken.