The Problem: Higher Education takes too long, costs too much, and does not provide the skills needed for the modern workplace, yet is very difficult to reform.
The Solution: Launch one-year ultra-intense degree programmes for only the very top students and partner with big graduate employers to guarantee job offers.
Covid restrictions have opened up major opportunities for reform of a whole range of sectors, yet it is unlikely they will have much of an impact on higher education, particularly undergraduate education.
Efforts to date, from creating distance learning courses to private universities offering shorter courses, have failed to overhaul the behemoth that is the higher education sector. Undergraduates, especially those in the ‘soft’ subjects such as humanities and social sciences, still spend three years on their course, with barely 10 teaching hours a week, learning things that are largely irrelevant for the world of work.
The UK government raised fees up to £10k, yet it has made little difference to the quality or variety of education on offer.
The problem remains that a degree is not valuable for what you learn on the course, it is valuable because of the status of the university you attended and how the course you were on is perceived. So, a 2.1 from LSE will always have more cachet than any degree from Nottingham Trent university, for example.
Therefore, overhauling Higher Education is all about status, so I propose the creation of an incredibly tough, one-year course, which only the very top students in the country would be able to attend.
Anyone who didn’t meet the requirements of the course at any stage would be kicked off it, so people would know if you graduated you really were an impressive individual. The course itself would combine a conventional academic degree alongside a whole host of employability skills, such as coding, report writing, presentations, and so-on, developed in partnership with leading employers to ensure it was highly relevant.
Because the course would be so well-designed and so tough, graduating would be a huge status symbol and demonstration of utility in the workplace, far more than a conventional degree would be. Therefore, and to further entice people onto the course, employers would agree to guarantee a job to anyone who graduated.
So, you would have a phenomenally high-status degree, with a guaranteed job, all of which can be completed in one year; military academies such as Sandhurst have been doing this for decades, so it is eminently achievable.
And students would also leave with lower debt, and instead of spending another two years at university earning nothing, would have an extra two years of salaried employment. Assuming a standard 3-year graduate leaves with debts of around £75,000, the one-year student would only have debt of £30,000 (it would be more expensive on a per year basis as it is more prestigious), but would have earned £70,000 in the two years after they graduated, making them £115,000 better off over all.
Single year degrees could be rolled out quickly, if not by glacial universities then by private providers, and could rapidly change the nature of undergraduate education, all because they realised the value of a degree is not what you learn, but the prestige that comes with it.
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