When I worked in electrical retailing in the early 1990s, there was a period when sales of Zanussi washing machines went through the roof. As the finance director, suddenly realising I had warehouses full of other-brand machines, I started to plot a pricing strategy to get them sold. 

My boss was a retail legend, a man who had co-founded Olympus Sports and made his fortune selling sports socks in packs of five rather than as individual pairs. Younger readers won’t remember a world where socks were only ever sold in individual pairs. 

He told me to just get hold of as much Zanussi product as I could, and fast. We made a fortune and it was a lesson in riding a wave once the public has spoken. 

It is a lesson the public sector tends to ignore, preferring to talk about needs rather than wants and desires.

Background: Parents value vocational qualifications over HE

FE White Paper: Government to ‘overhaul’ accountability

Opinion: Tuition fees? That is not what they are. Here is why

I’m always reminded of that experience when considering our curriculum. Is there any qualification, anywhere in the world, as successful as the UK undergraduate degree? 

It is the Heineken qualification, reaching parts of the economy other qualifications don’t.  Or perhaps a better analogy is Japanese knotweed? Whenever governments try to cut degree numbers back they just grow stronger, yet obey few of the established rules of product design.

A league of its own

The success of degrees is absolutely remarkable. This September, 42 per cent of 18-year-olds will go to university, the highest proportion ever, despite Covid, the lack of face-to-face teaching, and the eye-watering price tag. It is the market leader, in a super league all of its own.

The success seems also to be a product of its flexibility. The only thing first degrees have in common is their three-year length. At a time when the government seeks to consolidate the number of further education qualifications, universities offer degrees in a bewildering range of specialist subjects. 

Degrees within the same university will vary in volume of tuition quite significantly. Degrees in the same subject at different universities will have different content and hours. 

Assessment approaches also vary enormously within and between degrees. There is no real consistency of award, even though universities use the same degree grade descriptors. Grade inflation has been more rampant in universities than any other part of the education system.

Employers may despair at this variation and inconsistency but they work around it. Top employers might simply choose graduates from those universities with the highest entry grade requirements, rather than focus on the class of degree, for example. Where you get your degree is an important factor.

‘A proxy for relative intelligence’

It is the ubiquity of degrees that has cemented their dominance. Whole areas of the economy are pretty much closed off to non-graduates when they were not in the past, and the march continues: nurses, police, social workers, prison officers. 

This is not a surprise. We might see this argument as deeply flawed but a degree is an easy proxy for relative intelligence. If almost half of young people study for a degree, any employer or profession or occupation wishing to recruit people of “above average” intelligence is likely to demand a degree as a shortcut to attracting such people.

The Skills for Jobs White Paper pushes for a new kid on the block, the “higher technical space”. It is defined as lower level than a degree so most who achieve these qualifications will still be “below average” using the crude level-of-study hierarchy described above. 

Sure, the qualifications are cheaper, quicker and meet the needs of employers, but are they what people want?

Surfing desire

I can’t help feeling we are maybe facing our own Zanussi moment and, instead of surfing people’s desires and aspirations, we are trying to flog other brands on the grounds that employers say that’ll do. That’s a big risk for government and even more so for our sector.

My old boss would probably have a different solution. Get as much of the popular product as you can. Wouldn’t it be better to develop “college degrees” instead so that even more of the population achieve a higher level of education? Everyone would understand what they meant, home and abroad. 

There are strong existing frameworks for developing such products and they have a world-class reputation. It would increase consumer choice and might lead to financial efficiencies and savings for the taxpayer. 

Most importantly, it would give our students more power. If you are more highly qualified than your employer strictly needs, you become an asset that helps the business get better, and you are likely to be in a stronger position to get a good proportion of that benefit.

Of course, the most prestigious employers may still not seek out our undergraduates. We know that employers view degrees from Oxbridge differently to those from the Russell Group and those from most post-1992 universities. “College” degrees might well be regarded as less valuable. 

On the other hand, if we had a national approach to achieve consistency across colleges, and if we involved global partners like Pearson or City & Guilds, it is possible that the reputation of such degrees would have more global kudos than those of some universities, especially in higher technical subjects.

In the end, your brand of washing machine does not change your life, but your brand of education does.  Are we sure the risk of creating something new is worth it when we could build on something which has momentum and global credibility?