There is an idea gaining traction inside the UK that a university degree has declining social and economic value.

As an ever-increasing proportion of young people have acquired degrees, this has, almost inevitably, got an element of truth to it. The fact that there are diminishing marginal returns to a university education as the scale of that education has expanded is hardly surprising.

At the same time, government sources estimate that at least 24 UK universities, which is around 20% of the total, face the risk of financial insolvency over the next few years. In other words, given their current structure, they might fail.

The latest to face up to this dilemma is the University of Nottingham, one of the elite Russell Group universities, which is trying to sack many hundreds of its staff, close many of its courses, including in subjects like physics, and is facing an employee backlash in the form of a two-month strike which will prevent any of this year's exams being marked without considerable delay as a consequence.

So what is happening? As someone who became an academic relatively late in my career, not becoming full-time in this role until 2015, although I had associations with UK universities since the 1990s, I do perhaps have a perspective worth sharing on this issue.

In my opinion, UK universities are not dying: they are being killed. Given the environment in which they operate, their decline is almost inevitable and might have been the intended outcome of those who initiated the processes that now threaten their demise.

There are several aspects to this suggestion. All have their roots, almost inevitably, in neoliberalism and its associated ideas. If there is a single villain in this piece, it is Michael Gove, now Lord Gove, now editor of The Spectator. David Willetts, now Lord Willetts, also has a role to play. Both, of course, were Tories, and both had a significant impact upon our education system during their periods in office.

The commodification of education

The first, and absolutely core, problem that universities face is the commodification of education that Gove, above all others, promoted.

Neoliberalism always treats a person as a consumer. It assumes that they are trying to maximise their economic opportunities. The whole of our education system is now designed around these two ideas.

It is assumed that education must supply a product, and that the product in question must both increase the economic potential of the consumer of that education and, as a consequence, increase the economic potential of the economy for the benefit of those who wish to extract value from it.

The idea that education might exist for its own sake, and that it might encourage a person to become a fuller, more rounded member of a society of which they are a part by assisting their understanding of their own needs, and the needs of others, with the aim of providing them with the curiosity to ask how those needs might be fulfilled in a way that benefits the broader community, including the world at large, is utterly alien to the neoliberal way of thinking, which seeks to silo gains to the individual and deliberately ignores any other consequence of an action unless it provides an opportunity for rent extraction.

This argument can be elaborated, developed, and nuanced in different ways, but this is the problem our education system, from about age three through to PhD level and beyond, now faces. There is nothing about that system that encourages creative thinking. The student is told that they must learn what they are told and be able to regurgitate it. The idea that they might critically appraise that information, assess its quality or merit, and consider alternatives to it, has been so thoroughly expurgated from education by the time a young person reaches the age of 18, and so overloaded with facts have they been, that they are left educationally incapacitated as a result.

In my experience, the number of young people at university, after maybe 17 years of education, who are able to write an essay that makes an argument based on a narrative, a counter-narrative, the appraisal of evidence, and the drawing of conclusions is very limited indeed. What is more, it seems that very few people at university think it is their job to teach students what their prior education has failed to impart, and so this deficiency is not made good.

The consequence is that, as a result of deliberate education policy design, the majority of students leaving universities have learned how to absorb data and regurgitate it, but not in any way process it. That is what neoliberal education demanded.

Since the Rockefeller Foundation wrote the report on education to which I referred in my weekend essay on 1908, the core right-wing approach to education has been to presume that the tiny elite in society should be provided with the means to think, and that the rest should be provided with the means to do whatever they are told without questioning.

The expansion of universities did not change this assumption because it was a neoliberal project. Instead, it shaped university education to ensure that a genuine university-style education, which embraced the idea of critical thinking, would still only be available to a few, with the vast majority being supplied with what might, at best, be called a technical education.

This process is very clearly seen, for example, in economics. This subject was, at one time, largely narrative-based and involved the appraisal of evidence based upon wide reading of contradictory approaches to economic management, from which conclusions should be drawn.

Now it has become an exercise in learning, regurgitating, and presenting mathematical formulae without any contextual basis, or the ability to appraise the assumptions on which those formulae are based, because that would be dangerous to the neoliberal system, which those who teach this subject are particularly determined to preserve. Historical context has also been eliminated from the syllabus.

As a consequence, do not blame students for the fact that they do not have the skills that are required. Blame the politicians who destroyed their primary and secondary school education by reducing it to a process of rote learning to facilitate testing that delivered data of no value to anyone, which then left most universities unable to do anything but perpetuate that system, not least because many of the younger lecturers in universities are now products of that education system that failed to teach the ability to appraise, which many of them appear to have difficulty doing.

If you want to know why education is in a mess, this is it.

The business model that was bound to fail

The second reason why education is failing at university level, and to some degree at lower levels, is that neoliberal politicians insisted that education was a business that must be financially viable. The intention was deliberate. It was to guarantee that educational establishments would focus upon the supply of people with supposedly enhanced economic prospects above all else, with educational attainment being decidedly secondary in their consideration.

In fact, for the reasons previously noted, they have supplied an education which does not offer the opportunity for economic advancement and, simultaneously, they have failed to provide a proper education as well.

When this culture then created a dependence on foreign students, revenue maximisation, and the development of master's programmes that had very little value but which did generate significant overseas revenues, and which were generally quite badly supervised, with all of these factors having now been noticed, the outcome was almost inevitable.

If you supply a product that fails to meet the specification that the neoliberal system suggests is desirable and simultaneously alienate your potential consumer base as a result, the fact that you might face economic difficulties is hardly surprising.

Universities that are overstretched, that have sought to expand their student catchment area well beyond their host city or country, that have permitted grade inflation to attract students without offering better education to match the awards, and are operating in a marketplace that has been forced upon them, were always going to fail. And now they are.

Will the University of Nottingham survive? I do not know.

Will more than 20 other universities face the risk of closure at some time in the next few years, with catastrophic impacts upon their staff, students, and the communities that have hosted them? I do not know.

But the possibility is real. And this possibility is the consequence of neoliberal thinking that has debased education, not just to the point where it is a commodity, but where that commodity is becoming worthless because it lacks quality.

What education should be for

What can we do about this? The answer is quite straightforward. We need to totally reorient the education system from the age of two or three onwards.

The pointless desire to assemble facts that will be of no relevance to a student should cease to be the goal of the educational system.

Exam success or failure should also cease to be that goal. It clearly has not worked when no one now thinks that the grades a student obtains in their GCSEs or A-levels are consequential. When so many students are now asked to take AI-driven tests by potential employers, we can be sure that the exam system is not only failing but has completely broken down.

Instead, we need an education system that feeds the three Cs, which are curiosity, communication, and community.

Without curiosity, no child or young person wishes to engage in the educational process at present because they are its subject rather than a participant. They are inherently alienated. If their curiosity was piqued, they would wish to participate.

In this context, communication is key. This is about the ability to talk clearly and present a coherent verbal argument.

It is about their ability to write coherently and comprehensibly.

And it can be about their ability to communicate numerically, which means they must understand the maths they are doing, which is something that happens far too rarely.

None of this does, for example, require the learning of all the quite obscure grammatical rules that very young children are now meant to understand, but which their parents very happily survive without, as do I.

Instead, the focus should be on the ability to deliver a message. Nothing else matters, and yet many young people are quite unable to do this verbally, in writing, or numerically, precisely because communication is not the focus of what they are taught. The recipient of their work is removed from their thinking. That is what the neoliberal silo required.

And why community? That is because education does not exist within a silo. Education is all about relationships, and building, reinforcing, and expanding upon them. This is where value is created, but our focus has been on the person in isolation, and not upon their ability to work with others, which is the ultimate test that most employers need to know about.

The person who genuinely works in isolation is rare. I am not saying they are not valuable, but even they work for, and with, others, meaning communication is vital.  In that case, we should be teaching to explore how we work in relationships above all else. And we don't. We teach for the individual.

This is what a politics of care would deliver.

This is what neoliberalism cannot deliver.

This is why education is failing, and it will continue to do so until we recognise that it is failing by the deliberate design of governments that have put in place the policies that are killing it.

Do not blame the students.

Do not blame the teachers and other educators.

Do not blame the institutions.

Blame the framework in which they are forced to operate, which is wholly inappropriate for the supply of genuinely educated people of the sort that the 21st-century economy needs.

Blame neoliberalism, in other words. As is true in so many other areas, it had its own failure built in from the outset, but too few spotted it. They were blinded by a neoliberal education system by then so well established that they could not see what was happening. And we are all paying the price for that. But let's be clear, this is precisely what the neoliberal elite wanted, and it is right now what they are getting.

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