There’s no doubt that the government has the best of intentions when it comes to clearing up the Augean stables of UK higher education: witness its setting up of the Office for Students to protect students’ interests against ever-more monolithic university management, and more recently this year’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act aimed at safeguarding the interests of both students and staff.

However, all this leaves a much more awkward issue: what are we actually promoting? True, it’s the done thing for middle-class 18-year-olds to be sent away to university. True too that you still need a degree to obtain certain kinds of well-paid jobs. But these aside, why should anyone want to go to a UK university – or if they do choose higher education, to go here rather than somewhere else? It’s a question worth taking seriously.

Up to about thirty years ago, the spirit of the post-war years was still recognisable in most UK universities. If you were seriously interested in a subject, you got contact ad lib with a community of seriously keen and well-informed scholars. You also had the opportunity to learn for yourself (and a realisation that this was up to you; if you didn’t make the effort you’d do badly), and the prospect that, in contrast to the world outside, intellectual prowess and cleverness would be nurtured and recognised.

In addition, you got a reasonable social life. If you were lucky, there would be glimmerings of social graces (useful if you came from a background where they were regarded as unimportant) and an atmosphere where you could say, to all intents and purposes, what you liked and a realisation that others would give as good as they got.

There is a strong argument that a good number of our universities should be gently allowed to die

Some of this you may still get, at least at Oxbridge and a few other elite institutions. There is also, to be fair, some advantage in later earnings (the so-called graduate premium), though this has gone down markedly in the last ten years and depends very much on your subject: medicine at Cambridge or law at Bristol are very different matters from fashion studies or journalism at some provincial ex-polytechnic.

But this aside, the atmosphere facing most modern students is pretty uninspiring. A recent Twitter thread from a final year student at the University of Edinburgh put into perspective the sorry state of many UK universities: ‘This week I was told that due to industrial action, my 10k word dissertation will probably not be marked…ever.’ This is due to disruption caused by ongoing strikes by the UCU, and the university’s response that ‘to allow us to graduate on time, work submitted during the boycott will just not be marked’. In words that ought to disconcert any vice-chancellor, he wondered what he had got out of a course that would give him a degree, but where he was saddled with upwards of £37,000 in debt and where a dissertation he had put his heart into – and taken six months to write – might stand for nothing.

Nor, at most universities, is the intellectual life much to write home about. Academics, once happy to talk to students at most times, are now too busy and post very limited surgery hours on their doors. Some institutions are still providing lectures and seminars online (an unwelcome hangover from the pandemic) giving rise to the quip that UK universities now provide the most expensive streaming service in the world. In teaching, the emphasis is not so much on open-ended discussion of ideas as on ‘learning outcomes’ and gaining ‘transferable skills’: in other words, how to profit best from the education commodity you are buying from an increasingly corporate-minded institution headed by business managers in all but name – who being paid decidedly corporate-minded salaries. And that is before you get to the manic efforts of that same management to push equity, diversity and inclusion, to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum and to make sure reading lists are properly balanced by reference to such intellectually vital matters as the sex and skin colour of the writers.

And outside of academic life? Well, you are increasingly on your own. The ‘student experience’ that institutions assiduously promote largely comes down to garish new buildings, student clubs, gruesome socials and cheap bars. Meanwhile, while the tutorial system, supposedly a copy of the Oxbridge college practice of having an academic keeping a parental eye over every student, is broken, Most academics, who are scandalously underpaid and overworked at the bottom in striking contrast to the prosperous (but largely non-teaching) management at the top, have neither the time nor the ability to arrange for it. This can have disastrous results: there have been a number of well-publicised cases where parents have relied on assurances that universities will look after the interests of their children, only to find little done, with predictable effects on physical and mental health. This has, in far too many cases, led to suicides by students abandoned by a system that should have offered them help.

There is a strong argument that many of our universities are now beyond redemption and that a good number of them should be gently allowed to die. It’s also arguable that if they do, we should replace them with a new kind of slimmed-down institution more typical of much of European practice: one limited to providing libraries, lecture-rooms and scholars for students with a desire to learn. But these could be non-residential campuses which are not claiming to provide advice or welfare, and with none of the other pretensions of the corporate behemoths that too many universities have become.

But that is for the future. At present, the best advice for aspiring 18-year-olds might seem, to some, controversial. If you look closely at a particular department in a university and really want to spend three years there, feel free. Otherwise, remember that most degrees don’t guarantee a decent life at university or a good job after it – and choose to do something else. A year abroad could well be better for you. It will certainly cost you a great deal less, even if you do fly business both ways.