Why a third of Britain no longer believes in the degree

I spent three years at law school, a year at my post-grad and emerged with a qualification which, in the early 2000s, functioned exactly as advertised. It opened a door, and behind that door was a career. I mention this because I am aware that when someone who benefited from the system questions whether the system still works, it can sound like pulling up the drawbridge. So let me be precise. Education is valuable. It always will be. But a degree is a market instrument as much as it is an intellectual achievement. When six per cent of school leavers held one, it told employers something specific. When 36 per cent hold one, it tells them something vaguer. The degree may still maintain its intrinsic worth, but it has lost its bargaining power. And the people defending the system seem not to have noticed the difference.

The 2026 British Social Attitudes survey delivered a verdict that should have rattled every vice-chancellor’s office in the country. In 2005, 14 per cent of the British public believed a degree was not worth the time and money. By 2025, that figure had reached 34 per cent. Belief that graduates would end up ‘much better off’ financially fell from 50 per cent to 36 per cent. Over a third of the country has looked at the product and decided the price no longer matches the result. In any other industry, that would trigger a product recall. In higher education, it triggered a defence of the ‘average.’

The graduate premium and who it actually serves

Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, responded with a sentence that deserves to be read slowly.

“The data consistently shows that those with a degree are more likely to have a job, earn more and have better health.”

Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute took a similar line.

“It is still only one in three people who think university is not worth it.”

Lord Willetts, the former universities minister who designed much of the current fee architecture, has defended the average lifetime premium at £280,000 for men and £190,000 for women.

Each of these statements is technically accurate. Each is also doing a very specific job. It is using the average to absorb the failure at the edges. And the edges are getting wider.

The Department for Education’s own data shows that the graduate pay premium for 21-to-30-year-olds fell by roughly a third between 2007 and 2024. Real median graduate pay for that age group dropped nine per cent over the same period. Research based on IFS and government figures estimates that around one in five graduates now receives a negative financial return on their degree. They paid for a qualification, took on debt, spent three years out of the workforce, and ended up financially worse off than if they had skipped the whole thing.

Meanwhile, the system that produced this outcome has expanded dramatically. In 1983, less than 10 per cent of school leavers went to university. By 2025, 36 per cent did. Fees rose from £1,000 a year when they were introduced in 1998 to £9,535 today. More people are buying the product. The product costs more. And for a growing share of buyers, it delivers less.

Alex Stanley, the NUS vice‑president for higher education, has spoken publicly about graduating with a large debt that continues to grow despite repayments, and about juggling multiple jobs alongside his studies. His grades suffered as a result. He still believes his degree was worth it. But his is exactly the kind of story the headline figures are designed to smooth over. The average graduate does fine. Alex Stanley is not the average graduate. Neither is one in five of his peers.

When the defence becomes the diagnosis

What is interesting about the institutional response, is how perfectly it illustrates the analytical problem it is trying to deny. When Vivienne Stern says the data ‘consistently shows’ graduates are better off, she is describing a distribution and reporting it as though it were a guarantee. When Nick Hillman says it is ‘still only one in three’ who are sceptical, he is framing a 143 per cent increase in public disillusionment as a manageable minority. When Lord Willetts cites a lifetime premium of £280,000, he is quoting a headline figure that includes doctors, lawyers, and software engineers while smoothing over the graduate working in a role that never required a degree in the first place.

I wrote about the mechanism that produces this kind of credential erosion in an earlier Insight, The Credential Economy’s Final Settlement. What the BSA data adds is the public verdict. The mechanism has been running long enough that a third of the population can now see what the sector’s defenders apparently cannot. The signal has weakened. The price has not followed.

A credential economy that defends itself with averages is already losing the argument one graduate at a time.

The policy question this raises is uncomplicated but uncomfortable. If the average premium genuinely justifies the system, then the system should be willing to have its funding tied to the outcomes it claims to produce. Universities that consistently graduate students into roles that do not require degrees, at earnings that do not cover the cost of attendance, should face a financial consequence proportionate to the failure. The mechanism this case demonstrates is examined in Part I of my book, The Re-Alignment Era. Until the institutions that issue credentials bear some share of the cost when those credentials fail, the only people paying for the gap between the promise and the reality will be the graduates themselves, one monthly loan repayment at a time.

The sector’s defence is that the average still works. The public’s response, increasingly, is to ask for whom it really works.