So, August comes around again, and the headlines announce yet another bumper year for A-level results, and another cohort of happy/relieved students heading off to university for the next three years. But, at the other end of university education, dissatisfaction appears to be stirring. One student commented: “I feel very disheartened and, frankly, lied to … I have £90,000 in student debt – for what? They told us: ‘If you don’t go to university, you could be working in McDonald’s.’ I went to university and applied to be a barista, and was rejected for lack of experience.”
Access to higher education
When I was born at the dawn of the 1960s, only 4% of the British population entered university. By the time I was 18 in the late 1970s, that figure had risen to just 14%.
Girls like me, raised within the sound of bow bells, were not expected to aspire to university; the most we were routinely offered (unless we had family or friends who had higher education connections) was sub-degree training to become a nurse or a primary school teacher. So, when people of my generation (the ‘boomers’ born between 1945 and 1965) initially arrived in the workplace, so few of us had a university degree that it conferred an elite status, opening the doorway to an enhanced career path.
Some, like myself, took later opportunities to return to education. My journey started in my late 20s, when I enrolled with the Open University (OU), and culminated 15 years later with the award of a PhD. Fast forward to 2019, and 50% of young people entered university on leaving school at 18. This met the target set by Tony Blair 20 years earlier, the so-called ‘widening participation’ initiative of 1999–2002, of which I became a part.
The national widening participation ambition
When the call for widening participation innovators went out, I was teaching in a further education college in Yorkshire, while studying for a master’s degree. Given that my own career path, through my OU degree, had been enhanced by an earlier widening participation initiative, I was highly motivated to become part of an ambitious social equity project: a national target of 50% of young people entering university at the age of 18.
I felt this was an exciting next step to build on my slowly equalising experience of education. Unlike my mother’s generation, I had received a belated opportunity to boost my academic qualifications, but my undergraduate years had comprised solitary engagement with open learning ‘units’ and academic books after my young children had finally gone to sleep.
I was appointed as a widening participation officer in Yorkshire, working on a collaborative regional project between several major universities. I will not name these institutions so many years later, as personnel and policies will have changed many times over 25 years.
There was liaison across regions, so I know that the issues that I describe below were common practice across the country. I don’t intend this as a critique of any institution in particular, but of the generic strategies the project gave rise to.
Talent-spotting and ‘bums on seats’
As I moved between institutions, it became clear to me that there were different but characteristic uses made of the widening participation funding, depending on whether the institution in question was an ‘old’ university or a ‘new’ one.
The ‘new’ universities at that time were those that had been polytechnics prior to 1992, when John Major’s Conservative government had passed a law to grant them full university status. They were typically large institutions situated in major cities.
‘Old’ universities tended to use their widening participation funding to finance partnerships with local state secondary schools to cherry-pick their highest performing pupils and groom them towards entry to the university with day-schools and other activities. In the year leading up to A-level completion, firm offers of places and bursaries were made to those students who had been assessed as good prospects.
‘New’ universities, by contrast, engaged business managers who embarked on flurries of new degree creation, with instructions to departments to design these specifically for the demography they deemed ‘widening participation.’ The typical target was a young person from a family that claimed some type of state benefit, living in an area designated ‘deprived’, who presented to the university with low tariff entry qualifications. Mature students meeting this profile were also encouraged to apply. Such applicants attracted the maximum state funding.
Entrants were uncapped at this time, and the ‘new’ universities operated on the basis that the more they could accommodate, the better. Some disillusioned staff (no, not me) created a spoof website called the University of Bums on Seats which still remains online. It pokes fun at the issues that quickly began to arise from such frantic attempts to accommodate as many students as possible, without considering the value that the degree route offered would be likely to add to the student’s personal and professional life.
Cynical use of public funding
I quickly became disappointed and disillusioned. I felt that both ‘old’ and ‘new’ university tactics were a cynical use of public funding, designed to serve the institutions rather than the prospective students. However, it was the ‘new’ university approach that concerned me the most.
While the ‘old’ university tactic was, in many ways, just an extension of the elitism that widening participation had been created to counter, the young people who were taken into those university liaison projects would have most likely benefitted from the experience. But taking a young person into a degree programme that had been cobbled together to comply with a business management objective to attract a (questionably profiled) demographic group into spending three years in an institution whose principal target was to acquire the funding that they would generate, with scant consideration of whether the programme offered would offer them any enduring benefit seemed, to me at least, to be a form of chicanery.
The widening participation projects ran for three years. During that time, degree routes were speedily created that were designed to accommodate business managers’ stereotypes of working class ‘widening participation’ students, where ‘too difficult’ elements had been removed. This frequently meant dropping professional societies’ content specifications for the award of accredited graduate status at the completion of the degree.
I had personal experience of observing this happen in my own field, psychology, at a university in another region. I also sat on a panel in my own region that was attempting to validate an academic engineering degree in which some allegedly ‘too difficult’ maths elements had been removed, with the result that it conferred no accredited graduate status at the end. However, when I tabled an official objection, I was treated as a troublemaker.
Making the best of it
I made a huge effort to use the funding I was responsible for to support initiatives that genuinely added value for people within the region to which I was allocated. I had some successes, notably offering free IT skills training, in collaboration with the Worker’s Educational Association, to people who were finding their lack of basic IT competence a barrier to moving forward in their education.
But sadly, my abiding memory of that project is huge disappointment with the cynical corporate profiteering that occurred, and my concern for students who would unwittingly spend three years of their lives building up debt to undertake a programme that was unlikely to add the commensurate amount of value to their lives in the years that followed. After the project concluded, student fees (and debts) rose steeply, which made me feel even worse.
A legacy of Blair’s widening participation initiative
A young graduate who spoke to the Guardian earlier this year said:
“My biggest fear is never being able to get into the field I want to be in … There are very few jobs available for graduates, and entry-level jobs appear to be increasingly hiring experienced employees [instead].”
In 2024, it was reported that “54% of employers told a survey that they found it difficult to recruit at least one of their graduate roles [and] suggest[ed] that there is an oversupply of graduate workers lacking relevant skills”.
This took me straight back to my misgivings about students being sold low-quality programmes – and triggered a concern that a gap between what students have been led to believe employers are looking for in the degree recruitment process and what employers actually want may still be a live issue.
Many other issues have come into play over the 25 years since the Blair widening participation initiative was launched, notably IT programs and most recently, artificial intelligence, being increasingly deployed to undertake routine tasks that may have previously been allocated to entry-level recruits.
The current new graduate dissatisfaction with the career-entry situation is not only due to sharp university business practices, or to low-quality degrees sold to vulnerable young people. But I believe that this is still a significant factor in a complex tangle of issues.
I continued to work in higher education after the regional widening participation projects concluded, retiring in the year the 50% target was reached. My own impression is that some, principally the lowest quality ‘bums on seats’ degrees, fell by the wayside, but that some are still in operation across the country.
A false hierarchy?
Another significant issue relates to the fact that if 50% of a population are graduates, those entering employment cannot expect to have the same relative status that graduates had in the past when they comprised less than 15% of the workforce. Universities should be required by legislation to present young people with a more honest, nuanced story about the relative costs and benefits of undertaking the specific degree they have applied for, before asking them to sign on the dotted line at the bottom of the student loan contract.
Perhaps there is also a fundamental cultural issue underpinning the situation. The UK, class-ridden England in particular, is far too inclined to see educational achievement as a simplistic hierarchy, with academic skills at the top. We need to question ourselves as to why (for just one example) would a history professor be so widely perceived as inherently superior to a master builder? Skilled workers in a vast array of professional roles are equally important within a functional society.
So, what should ‘widening participation’ really mean? It’s a question that a new generation must now urgently address, and I was pleased to recently discover that this is an issue that the Northern ‘metro mayors’ already have on their agenda.
