00:07:57.820It's still, despite high tuition fees, it's still hugely subsidised by the taxpayer.
00:08:03.720And it's become completely automatic now for most of the middle and upper middle classes in this country.
00:08:10.600I mean, it's true, some working class people go into higher education too.
00:08:14.720But it's one of the reasons for the slowdown in social mobility.
00:08:17.620All of the things that are claimed by the advocates of expanded higher education have really, I mean, one has to be pretty sceptical about.
00:08:27.320You know, we don't have the right skills for a highly productive economy.
00:08:33.480Social mobility has declined, not increased in the time that higher education has been expanding.
00:08:38.420And that's partly because it has been so monopolised by one section of society.
00:08:42.780um and and there used to be there used to be lots of little ladders up there's now one big ladder
00:08:49.140up you know if you don't if you don't get into that you know if you don't do a levels and and
00:08:54.640go to a decent university um you know your life chances are quite likely to be not necessarily
00:09:00.580but are quite likely to to to be lower than somebody who does and uh i think you know you
00:09:05.820only have to go back 30 40 years and there were lots of lots of different pathways to
00:09:10.020leading a successful life and David there's a question that I want to ask which is how much
00:09:17.020responsibility do John Major and Tony Blair need to take for this John Major number one because he
00:09:21.620turned all the polytechnics into universities and number two with Blair saying that 50% of
00:09:27.600the population should go to university and when quizzed about this it turned out it was just an
00:09:33.460arbitrary figure um yes i mean i think i mean it's not really about allocating blame but
00:09:40.700but i do think perhaps particularly you haven't met francis it is on trigonometry david that's
00:09:47.300what we do guilty men he loves it how much responsibility does this need to take that
00:09:53.220it's all about taking listen i'm catholic all right come on well yeah i mean i do think there
00:09:58.700was a kind of there was a lack of emotional intelligence i mean this sort of in a way goes
00:10:01.680back to my previous book and the argument about kind of anywheres and somewheres and anywheres
00:10:05.800you know the anywhere worldview which tends to be pro-mobility and openness and autonomy
00:10:11.140perfectly decent and legitimate worldview just as the somewhere worldview is you know with its
00:10:15.420um greater attachment to familiarity and and locality and so on these are both decent worldviews
00:10:22.140the problem was problem is that anywheres in the last 30 40 years have become too powerful and
00:10:27.480dominate our culture and our society. And they think they're doing it in the national interest,
00:10:32.140but often actually they're pursuing their own priorities. And this is a very good example of
00:10:35.980it, I think. The fact that Tony Blair could give that speech in 1999, saying that we want 50% of
00:10:42.220school leavers to go straight to university, showed not only the extent to which the Labour
00:10:48.280Party had kind of lost connection with its sort of original voters, but it was just sort of
00:10:54.960psychologically um uncurious i mean i i talk in the book about what i call the 15 50 problem
00:11:02.260that when 15 of people you know go back 40 years or even when i was at university i mean
00:11:08.380eight or ten percent of school leavers went to university so the kind of the graduate elite was
00:11:12.880much smaller and there's obviously something to be said for the graduate elite being bigger and
00:11:16.980more democratic um but you know inclusions create their own exclusions and that actually when only
00:11:23.96010 or 15 percent of people in your class or school or town were going to college and you weren't it
00:11:29.560didn't matter you know you went and worked in a local office or factory and life went on
00:11:33.700but when 40 or 50 percent are going and you're not it's a completely different ball game and
00:11:39.380and nobody seems to have thought about that i mean you know um in in the late 1990s when they were
00:11:44.940when they were expanding well the big expansion came as you say when when polytechnics became
00:11:49.320universities in 1992. But then this 50% target in 1999, nobody seems to have given any thought
00:11:57.080to that. And I think, you know, and these, I mean, what did they imagine that 50% would
00:12:04.540become 100%? I mean, and I think, I mean, part of it is a perfectly decent, and I have
00:12:12.080this argument now with David Willits and Andrew Adonis and others who are much more wedded
00:12:43.080um well i mean that that's that seems to not be you know that's sort of getting it the wrong way
00:12:50.900around i mean we should you know when we'll when we're arguing about this or trying to think about
00:12:55.560this we should sort of look at the bigger public interest to begin with so what is it actually in
00:12:59.820the interest of this country to do in terms of how many people can actually benefit from how many
00:13:05.360people is it appropriate should go to you know properly rigorous academically rigorous higher
00:13:12.600education and of course much of our higher education has ceased being properly rigorous
00:13:17.960but I mean you know if we want to keep you know really proper decent rigorous academic
00:13:22.860higher education you know what is the proportion of the population that should go from the point
00:13:29.240of view of the kind of public interest given all the other things that we also need done in our
00:13:33.440society that don't necessarily require higher level academic qualifications. But even David
00:13:39.120Even from the perspective of the individual interest, the economic figures you described, the decline in the graduate premium, the rising tuition fees, the huge debts that graduates are now accruing.
00:13:52.780It would seem to me that 20 or 30 years ago when the argument was going to university is good for you, then of course you'd want to increase the number of people who'd go.
00:14:03.320Now that argument is starting to look increasingly unsound,
00:15:01.080And, I mean, it's another basic thing that people seem to have overlooked
00:15:04.080is that there's something called the law of diminishing returns.
00:15:07.880You know, you cannot, when 50% of the population are going to university,
00:15:12.520you're obviously going to have a lower return than when only 10% or 15% go.
00:15:16.920And the whole ballgame is a different one.
00:15:20.200And, yeah, I mean, I think we've, as I say, we've sort of got things out of kilter,
00:15:26.000but now the system has so much vested interest behind it too.
00:15:28.960And also we have a situation where 40% of jobs in the British economy are graduate only.
00:15:34.580You know, more and more professions that don't have graduate status, like nursing, policing now is coming up,
00:15:43.060it's going to be graduate only in a few years' time.
00:15:45.600More and more, because there's a, you know, if you can't beat them, join them.
00:15:51.180I mean, you know, in a society in which all the prestige seems to be going to people, you know, with degrees,
00:15:57.820the sort of graduate the mass graduate elite if you like um everybody everybody wants a part of
00:16:03.940that you know aren't we as policemen sort of you know shouldn't we be respected too and
00:16:07.620and the and the only path to respect has become going through that funnel into into higher
00:16:13.300education and it's become dysfunctional um and you know like i said there used to be many more
00:16:19.980ladders up you used to be able to get promotion from below you don't really get promotion from
00:16:23.000below any longer you know if you were an able able kid and you you know you hadn't done very
00:16:27.800well at school and this happens to a lot of people now people some people are late developers
00:16:32.720and and don't do very well in their exams um but you know their lives are now much more precarious
00:16:39.700i think than would have been the case um in the in the relatively recent past if you were
00:16:44.220if you didn't do well you'd still you still had had the opportunity in most big organizations if
00:16:49.500If you were capable, you'd be spotted and you would kind of rise up through the ranks.
00:16:53.420Now you have to have a degree or even a postgraduate degree before you get in the front door in the first place.
00:16:59.220So I think, you know, and also we just, you know, the amount of kind of national resource that is invested in 18, 19 year olds going into higher education, many of whom aren't going to benefit from it particularly.
00:17:13.340I mean, they're just not mature enough.
00:17:14.820you know wouldn't it be far better i mean that to say you know go and do a pretty basic job in
00:17:20.380software development or coding or whatever and then you know if you are if you do have a kind
00:17:24.600of intellectual interest in it and you want to find out as it were the kind of logic and the
00:17:28.600maths or the physics or whatever it is behind uh behind what you're doing you know go and do a
00:17:33.340degree in computer science five or ten years later you'll probably be you'll enjoy it a lot
00:17:37.380more you'll get much more out of it and you'll probably be a much more useful person economically
00:17:41.260too um david isn't part of the problem that with globalization a lot of these menial jobs
00:17:47.360they simply don't exist anymore so kids have less choice when it comes to choosing a career path
00:17:53.300and it seems that for them university might be the only option in some ways
00:17:58.140um it's true that that that both kind of trade and and technology and automation of have have
00:18:06.980have caused a lot of old-fashioned blue-collar jobs to disappear.
00:18:36.980You know, and lorries are perhaps in the front line of that.
00:18:39.860So people are not doing HGV courses and so on.
00:18:45.180And as I said earlier, I mean, those kind of, we've got a missing middle in our training system.
00:18:53.520The old, you know, in the language of international education, level three is A-levels and level six is a degree.
00:18:59.820level four or five we used to have hundreds of thousands of people doing these kind of higher
00:19:05.420technical manual um qualifications usually spending some time in a polytechnic before
00:19:11.920the politics became universities um and and sort of doing it on the job part-time courses and
00:19:17.340sandwich courses and so on and and all of that is not completely disappeared but i mean you have
00:19:23.100kind of a few thousand people doing those courses because the people that used to do those courses
00:19:26.960You know, their children have gone to university or many of them have gone to university and they're doing dilute versions of what our kind of political class elite, you know, many of them went to the very best universities, think, you know, thought, you know, in a perfectly sort of generous spirited way, they thought, well, why shouldn't everybody else have this experience without really sort of thinking it through?
00:19:52.980because by definition, not everybody can have that experience.
00:19:56.700I mean, both because there is a limit on the number of people
00:20:00.080who are clever enough to really take advantage of it,
00:20:03.680but also because it's bound to be a sort of diluted version
00:20:07.160of the kind of experience that the Tony Blairs
00:20:11.600and the Gordon Browns might have had, you know, 40 or 50 years ago.
00:20:16.420and you know is a diluted version of that sort of elite academic experience really better than
00:20:26.560you know doing a doing a technical qualification at a polytechnic i mean given that you know we're
00:20:33.440talking about the level of ability i mean you know most of us are in the middle when it comes
00:20:37.680to ability you know speak for yourself well constantin will be in the top 15 or in the
00:20:45.680bottom it depends who you ask and then you know i mean this is you know i mean intelligence
00:20:49.800researchers will say you know there's kind of 15 with you know very high kind of you know raw
00:20:54.740intelligence as it were i mean intelligence is a complex i mean i have a whole chapter on it it's
00:20:58.640very context dependent and complex and um and one can't speak too confidently about it but i mean i
00:21:06.240think intelligence researchers will say there are there are people who do have um that that very
00:21:11.660high level of kind of raw intelligence, and there are 15% of people at the bottom who
00:21:16.360are a bit slow. But most of us are in the middle. So most of the people that are going
00:21:20.340to university now are probably no brighter than the people who are not going to university.
00:21:27.420Most of the people who are not going to university. So it's not about ability. I mean, it's about
00:27:31.860you know, being pro-immigration and so on.
00:27:33.860But I think the other story was meritocracy.
00:27:35.700It was kind of easier for the centre-left, perhaps because the centre-right was more of a defender of privilege and therefore less inclined to meritocracy.
00:27:43.120Although, in fact, of course, Margaret Thatcher may not have talked very much about meritocracy, but under her, the Tory party definitely changed its style and image.
00:27:52.920It was, what was the joke? It used to be the party run by people who owned a state, and now it was taken over by a state agent.
00:28:00.820and so actually the centre-right went along
00:28:29.180But, I mean, I think one of the reasons why, perhaps particularly in America, people on the left have turned against meritocracy is because it's at the time when meritocracy has been on the kind of banners of most of the mainstream political party flags,
00:28:49.300has been a time of grotesque increases in inequality
00:28:54.460and only rather limited increases in social mobility.
00:28:57.380So it's proved much harder to have anything much more than a partial meritocracy.
00:29:04.340Now, a partial meritocracy is probably better than not having one at all,
00:29:08.100you know, going back to, we don't want to go back to nepotism,
00:29:11.080but it's proved much harder, I think, than people expected.
00:29:14.200um so people have been have been questioning both it's kind of meritocracy gets two barrels
00:29:22.580in a way it gets first of all it's not meritocratic enough you know it's not it's not
00:29:26.380working according to how it should be but the second point is that it's we don't really like
00:29:31.160it in principle anyway now the reason we don't like it in principle is that what's so clever
00:29:37.400about turning society into a competition that the most able win and most of the rest feel like
00:29:42.860failures. That doesn't sound like an ideal society, does it? So, I mean, my answer to this
00:29:49.700is that, yes, of course, meritocracy is unavoidable at the level of the labour market,
00:29:58.180the level of job allocations, and to some extent, the allocation of merit too. But it is not and
00:30:04.360should never be seen as an ideal. It's a kind of pragmatic labour market principle, like I said,
00:34:05.700So right the way through from your school education,
00:34:08.860You were told that you were worth less than the people in the top seats.
00:34:14.820And perhaps to some extent that's unavoidable.
00:34:17.160I mean, I think the problem is not so much...
00:34:22.740The very highest level of raw intelligence or stroke academic ability
00:34:28.800is always going to be very highly valued.
00:34:31.980And I don't want to give the impression that I'm hostile to intelligence.
00:34:35.920I mean, you know, as a human species, we need our really, really intelligent people probably more than ever.
00:34:42.160I mean, you know, we need them to invent a bloody vaccine for COVID-19.
00:34:45.820You know, we need people to work out how to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.
00:34:50.480I mean, there are all sorts of problems that we have posed ourselves as a species in recent decades because of what we've been up to as human beings.
00:34:58.340And, you know, we now need the clever people to come to our aid and find technical fixes to a lot of these problems.
00:35:03.560um and and i think um you know and we should value high intelligence um you know and and people who
00:35:13.060do those jobs more than someone who who cleans your office here um in terms of not not as human
00:35:18.840beings but in terms of the wards the wards i love the way david thinks we actually can afford to
00:35:23.680pay a cleaner we do it ourselves those people are very low iq david i promise you oh it's looking
00:35:30.220very clean good job lads well if there's one thing we can do it's it's do the hoovering yeah um but
00:35:37.260david i mean the idea that um these other forms of work should be valued and forms of intelligence
00:35:44.940which is what you're really talking about emotional intelligence and being able you know like i think
00:35:50.140i'm probably intellectually quite intelligent but when it comes to putting a shelf together or
00:35:54.240whatever i'm i'm a cretin right and there are thank you mate you are even worse though so i
00:35:59.980wouldn't i wouldn't but um but there are people who who are insanely gifted when it comes to
00:36:05.380things like that they're mad to me what they do is magic but you know i was thinking about this
00:36:09.960like my plumber i i speak to him when he comes to service and whatever he makes way more money than
00:36:15.060me yeah but if you were to ask somebody you know who's cooler or more high status say the plumber
00:38:41.940And I thought it was a rather kind of idealistic notion anyway, almost a bit new agey.
00:38:48.280I also discovered that head, hand, heart is the motto of B-Dale's school, the progressive English private school.
00:38:56.140But the more I read about what's happening with AI and what's already happening,
00:39:01.540I mean, both with the kind of diminishing returns from the graduate class and what's happening with, you know, bank managers being replaced by algorithms.
00:39:17.600It hasn't even really moved in on a large scale.
00:39:19.760But the work of people like Phil Brown and Hugh Lauder on digital Taylorism, so many jobs did involve a degree of sort of professional judgment and analytical ability.
00:39:30.140are now being replaced by sort of thinking machines.
00:39:34.000You know, what's happened to blue-collar work
00:39:35.600is now happening to kind of the middle and lower levels
00:46:38.900And, you know, of course, I'd still rather my children
00:46:43.720didn't stack shelves in Lidl's or Tesco's.
00:46:46.740But nonetheless, I think, you know, we do post, or not that we are completely post-pandemic, but we do kind of, those people are less invisible than they were.
00:46:59.660And, you know, there are lots of basic jobs that will always need to be done.
00:47:04.700And it's one of the kind of mistakes that economists always make.
00:47:08.240I remember when I was Labour editor of the FT in the early 90s,
00:47:14.240all these people predicting the complete disappearance of low-skill employment.
00:47:19.440Actually, Gordon Brown, in his penultimate speech as Chancellor in 2006,
00:47:26.140predicted there would be 600,000 low-skill jobs in Britain by,
00:47:30.740I think maybe in about now, 2020 or maybe in 2025.
00:47:34.140Depending on how you define low-skill, there was something like 10 million.
00:47:36.860I mean, you know, they just got it so wrong.
00:47:42.160Lots of technical change generates actually quite, you know,
00:47:45.180like kind of Amazon, Amazon warehouses.
00:47:48.840Of course, they replace some jobs in retail,
00:49:00.080Something that occurs to me, which is one of the things Francis and I have talked to a lot of our guests, as you know, because you listen to the show, is the cultural shifts that are happening, what broadly might be described as the culture war.
00:49:14.340Now, you've described the situation where you have a large number of young people who are getting increasingly poor education, which is simultaneously becoming more expensive as it becomes less useful.
00:49:24.920we've got a future where they are not likely to get much out of those degrees that they have
00:49:31.900they've accumulated large debts inequality is not being reduced and in fact rising we keep
00:49:38.280hearing the talk of the one percent who are genuinely accumulating more and more of the
00:49:42.780gains that society makes social mobility is sort of sluggish in terms of how it's growing
00:49:49.040is that all the recipe for the sort of blm stroke whatever a culture war stroke cultural revolution
00:49:58.120stuff absolutely i mean i i think i think it's a it's a good observation um and i i i share that
00:50:05.760idea i mean i do think that underlying um quite a lot of the the kind of eruptions of political
00:50:12.600emotion, whether it's BLM or the kind of Sanders movement in America, Jeremy Corbyn here,
00:55:31.700That doesn't happen here, anything like so much.
00:55:33.920And this is one of the things that really, really irritates me about the way that the political class has been wringing its hands over regional inequality, say, over recent decades, while at the same time encouraging an expansion of higher education, which sucks out all the most able kids from working class towns like your Mansfields and your Rotherham's.
00:56:00.340You know, they lose 20% or 30% of their brightest kids every year
00:56:04.460to residential universities, and they invariably never go back.
00:59:39.660And it's not a particularly big picture thing.
00:59:42.660It's rather a kind of techie, nerdy thing.
00:59:44.300I think the state is missing a huge opportunity to use its kind of convening power combined with the digital world to create, to make it so much easier for people to say, volunteer, do kind of just-in-time volunteering.
01:00:00.360Why don't we have, you know, there ought to be, I mean, it would need to have the state's kind of imprimatur on it, and it should be advertised over here on the kind of tube on the TV, that you go to this one portal and you put, you know, and you type in your postcode and you find out, you know, I mean, you know, a lot of people have very busy lives, but they still want to kind of, and we've seen this actually in the pandemic, you know, a huge amount of volunteering.
01:00:25.520let's try and keep some of that um going forward um you know you should be able to type in your
01:00:32.020postcode and find out you know it may be little stuff like there's some little old lady who lives
01:00:36.740up the street from you who just needs her drugs picked up from from boots or you needs to be
01:00:42.020taken out for a walk every you know for an hour every every weekend or something and little things
01:00:48.960you could sort of fit in around you know even if you have a family and you're very busy um and of
01:00:55.060course one of one of the issues i guess would be security um uh and there's ways to do all of that
01:01:02.980but it's interesting how the whole kind of um child protection thing you know seems to be
01:01:08.200suspended for the for for covid volunteering um but i think you know and that and that could be
01:01:14.120applied to other things too i mean another thing actually sorry related thing that i've always had
01:01:19.740be in my bonnet about is um and i'm not going to go into a whole germanic spiel i mean i i am
01:01:26.860very nicely with the reputation of the show
01:01:30.040but i did spend three years in germany i know the german system well and there are a lot of
01:01:38.820things about it to admire and a lot of those things cannot very easily be translated into
01:01:43.540into the british context but one thing that could very easily be is there's something called the
01:01:48.240beruf actual that all kids who leave school get, I think particularly the kids who are going on to
01:01:55.500an apprenticeship, is essentially tells them what all the kind of the options are for apprenticeships
01:02:01.440and what the jobs that you could then apply for once you've got this apprenticeship
01:02:08.460and what they pay and so on. And I don't see why, why don't we have something like that
01:02:14.260And in the UK, just, you know, again, it's something the state would need to do.
01:02:17.620It would have to have the kind of imprimatur of a, you know, you could update it every year.
01:02:21.420And it could have not only, here are all these different jobs, and this is what they pay,
01:02:26.580and this is the training you need in order to get it, you know.
01:02:30.600So, you know, a coding course is going to cost you five grand.
01:02:33.500What subsidy might you be able to get from the state to do it?
01:02:36.160You know, why isn't it all just written in one place?