Daniel's asking a fairly pointed question this week, and he's asking it about himself as much as about the system. He points out that in a lot of societies, third-level education has become a rite of passage, the thing you do after school if you come from a certain background, and not necessarily a deliberate act aimed at a specific occupation. He studied law partly because his family wanted him to, ended up in journalism and content work, did a postgraduate degree in that, and by his own account most of what he actually knows and does professionally came from experience rather than the courses. His question is whether we've passed the point where the sheer number of courses and the level of participation can be justified on utilitarian grounds, whether there are serious voices arguing for contraction, to strip universities back to specific undergraduate courses plus research and postdoctoral work, and how we got from university as a deliberate act with a defined end to university as a milestone and a resume booster.
The question has a sharper edge in Ireland than almost anywhere, because the financial impediment is low. In the States the cost argument does a lot of the work, the tuition doubling and the debt. In Ireland the state picks up the fees for most undergraduates, so if participation has overshot, it's not because people are being lured into debt. It's because the culture itself has decided that this is what you do.
And Daniel holds a postgraduate degree and still lands on the word self-indulgence. That's not a skeptic looking in from outside. That's an initiate saying the ritual might not have been worth the cost of the years.
The historical pivot Daniel's reaching for actually has a name and a fairly precise shape. Martin Trow wrote the essay in nineteen seventy-three that everyone still uses as the map. He said systems move through three stages. Elite, where under fifteen percent of the school-leaver age group goes. Mass, fifteen to fifty. Universal, above fifty. And his point was that the shift isn't just scale. The institution changes function. An elite system trains a narrow governing and professional class. A mass system starts doing a great variety of things, some of which have nothing to do with training for a specific occupation.
So the moment he's asking about, the point where it became a rite of passage, is the crossing from mass to universal. The system stops being a filter for a minority and starts being the default setting for a majority.
And you can date that crossing in most English-speaking countries with embarrassing precision. In Britain it's nineteen ninety-nine, the Blair government's target of fifty percent of young adults into higher education. In nineteen ninety it was about twenty percent. So within a decade the policy aim was to more than double participation. And the target was announced without any equivalent vision for the other fifty percent. Andy Burnham, who was in that Labour world, has since said the target was an error because it had nothing to say to the half who weren't going.
That's the thing. A target of fifty percent isn't a judgment that fifty percent of jobs need degrees. It's a judgment that degrees are the default good and anything else is the leftover category. The policy didn't identify fifty percent of occupations that required graduate training. It picked a participation number and worked backwards.
And the participation number became the point of the exercise. That's the shift Trow described. Once you're in universal territory, above fifty percent, the degree stops being a signal that you're in a selected group and starts being a signal that you did the normal thing. Which changes what the degree is for. It's no longer about specific training. It's about demonstrating you completed the standard transition to adulthood.
Daniel's own path illustrates it. Law was the family expectation, not a burning vocational calling. Then journalism and content creation, which he learned by doing. The degrees were the frame around the life, not the substance of the skills.
The economics literature has a word for this, and it's the crux of the utilitarian question. Signaling. The idea that part of the value of a degree isn't what you learned, it's what the degree tells an employer about you. You finished something long and structured, you could sit still, you could write, you could meet deadlines. The credential is a sorting device.
And the uncomfortable question is how much of the return is sorting versus actual skill. If it's mostly sorting, then mass participation is a giant arms race where everyone has to get the degree because everyone else has one, and nobody's actually more productive.
There's a Norwegian study that tried to separate the two using compulsory schooling variation. It estimated a private return to education of about seven point nine percent, and of that, roughly seventy percent was productivity, actual human capital, and thirty percent was signaling. So the honest answer is both. Most of the value is real, but a substantial chunk is pure credential.
Thirty percent is not nothing. If you expand the system so that millions more people spend three or four years to capture a signal that's partly zero-sum, you're burning a lot of years to sort people.
And the sorting logic has a nasty dynamic. The signal only works if not everyone has it. The moment participation crosses fifty, sixty, seventy percent, the degree stops distinguishing you. So the credential inflates. You need a master's to stand out where a bachelor's used to work. Then the master's inflates. Daniel's postgraduate degree in journalism is partly that. The bachelor's became the floor, so the postgraduate became the differentiator.
Which is how you end up with people spending five or six years in education to get jobs that thirty years ago required none of it, while learning the actual job on the job anyway.
The Centre for Social Justice in Britain put out a report in December that makes the utilitarian case as bluntly as it's been made. They say thirty-seven percent of UK graduates are over-qualified for their jobs, the highest rate in the OECD. Almost four hundred thousand graduates claim out-of-work benefits. And their headline claim is that half of all graduates, around two hundred forty thousand people who started in the twenty twenty-five twenty-six year, could be better off taking a higher-level apprenticeship.
Better off how?
Earnings. A level four apprentice earns almost twelve and a half thousand pounds more than a graduate of a low-value course five years out, and five thousand more than the average graduate. The bottom quartile of graduates earn twenty-four thousand eight hundred, against thirty-seven thousand three hundred for a level four apprentice. The graduate premium is real on average but it collapses at the bottom.
So the average hides the distribution. The degree pays off handsomely for the top slice, moderately for the middle, and for the bottom chunk it's a bad trade. And the people encouraged into the bottom chunk are the ones the universal system recruited precisely because it was universal.
And the premium has been compressing over time. In two thousand one the average graduate earned two and a half times the minimum wage. By twenty twenty-three it was one point six times. The bottom ten percent of graduates earn eleven percent above minimum wage. Eleven percent. After three or four years of study.
That's a brutal number. Eleven percent above minimum wage is what you get for delaying your entry to the workforce by four years and emerging with a credential that used to guarantee a middle-class floor.
The public has noticed. NBC ran a poll in late twenty twenty-five. Sixty-three percent of American registered voters now say a four-year degree isn't worth the cost. In twenty thirteen it was the reverse, fifty-three percent said it was worth it. That's a twenty-point swing in twelve years. And it moved across every demographic. Even degree-holders now split forty-six to forty-six on whether it was worth it.
That's the striking part. The initiates are doubting the ritual. It's not just people who didn't go resenting those who did. It's people who went and are now looking at the balance sheet of their own lives and saying, I'm not sure I'd tell my kid to do this.
And in America the cost argument is doing enormous work. Inflation-adjusted public four-year in-state tuition has doubled since nineteen ninety-five. Private tuition is up seventy-five percent. So the American version of the question is partly, did I overpay for a signal? The Irish version is different because the state absorbed the cost. Which makes it cleaner. Ireland is asking whether the years themselves were well spent, not whether the debt was worth it.
Daniel's framing is almost more radical than the American one. He's not saying the fees are too high. He's saying that even at low cost, the act of spending three or four years broadening your intellectual horizons before you enter the workforce is, under any other frame of reference, an extravagant self-indulgence. That's a claim about the value of the time itself.
And it's a claim that would have made sense to almost every human being who ever lived before about nineteen fifty. The idea that a large fraction of the population should spend their early twenties reading literature and discussing ideas before doing any productive work is historically bizarre. It was always a luxury of a small elite. The post-war expansion democratized the luxury without ever really asking whether the luxury translated into productivity when you scaled it up.
The GI Bill is the American hinge. After the Second World War, millions of returning servicemen got tuition. The system expanded enormously. And the expansion was justified partly on civic grounds, a more educated citizenry, partly on economic grounds, a more skilled workforce, and partly on equity grounds, the children of farmers and factory workers getting access to what had been a class privilege. All three justifications were real. But the expansion developed its own momentum.
Roger Geiger's history of American higher education after the war makes the point that the role of colleges in society changed dramatically in those decades. They went from being institutions that served a narrow stratum to being the central sorting mechanism for the entire middle class. And once they were the sorting mechanism, everyone had to go through them. Not because the jobs required it, but because the sorting required it.
There's a phrase from a historian named Bankston that Daniel's guild question would appreciate. He said higher education turned what was a guildlike activity into an industry for mass-producing credentials. The guild analogy is exact. A guild controlled entry to a trade through apprenticeship and mastery. The university performed the same function for the learned professions. And then it scaled the credentialing function beyond the professions it was actually credentialing for.
That's the lineage. The medieval university was a trade school for lawyers, clergy, physicians. The guilds handled the crafts. The apprentice system handled the rest. Daniel's earlier episode on guilds and apprenticeships is the direct ancestor of this question. The university was one credentialing body among several, and it credentialed for specific occupations. What changed is that the university credential became the general-purpose license to be middle class.
And the specific occupational content became optional. A degree in English literature doesn't train you for a specific job, and nobody pretends it does. It trains you to read carefully, to argue, to write. Those are real skills. But they're not occupationally specific, and they can be acquired in a lot of ways that don't involve three years out of the workforce.
The defenders of the broad degree make the human capital version of the argument. The skills are general but they compound. You learn to think, to analyze, to express yourself. Those pay off over a forty-year career in ways that are hard to measure at year five. And there's something to that. The Norwegian study found seventy percent of the return was productivity, not signaling. That's the broad skills showing up.
But the question is whether the university is the most efficient place to acquire those skills, or just the most prestigious. Daniel's point is that he learned journalism by doing journalism. The course gave him a credential, but the skill came from the work.
Which is the apprenticeship argument in modern clothes. The craft skills come from doing the craft under supervision. The credential comes from the institution. The two have drifted apart. The credential now floats free of the craft.
The Centre for Social Justice report is the strongest current voice for contraction, but it's worth being precise about what they're actually proposing. They're not proposing to abolish universities or turn them into research-only institutes. They're proposing to rebalance. End low-value degrees, rebuild the technical pathway, fund apprenticeships properly. The UK government scrapped the fifty percent target in October twenty twenty-five and put seven hundred twenty-five million pounds into apprenticeships.
And that's the thing Daniel asked about directly. Are there voices pushing for contraction to support only specific undergraduate courses and focus more on research and postdoctoral work? The honest answer is no, not in that form. Nobody serious is proposing to strip universities back to research-only. The contraction argument is framed as rebalancing, not abolition. The closest you get is Frank Furedi attacking the idea of seventy percent participation as turning universities into an extension of school. But even he isn't proposing to close undergraduate teaching.
So the answer to Daniel's direct question is that the contractionists want fewer undergraduates in low-value courses and more apprentices, but they still want universities teaching undergraduates. The research-only vision doesn't exist as a serious policy position.
And there's a reason for that. Universities are not just teaching institutions. The research and the teaching are linked, and the undergraduate teaching subsidizes the research. If you cut the undergraduate numbers, you cut the funding base. A research-only university would need a completely different funding model.
Which is why the actual fight is about which undergraduates and how many, not whether undergraduates at all.
The demographic pressure is going to force the question anyway. The Atlantic ran a piece in April about a looming college-enrollment death spiral. The number of eighteen-year-olds is falling in the United States. The pipeline is shrinking. Universities are going to have to contract whether they want to or not, because the students aren't there.
And in Ireland the opposite is happening, at least for now. CAO applications hit eighty-eight thousand eight hundred seventeen by the February deadline, up five thousand on the previous year. Points went up for six hundred thirty-one of eleven hundred eighty comparable courses. More than half of applicants missed their first choice. The pressure is upward, not downward.
Ireland is the interesting counter-case. Low fees, rising demand, rising points. The system isn't being forced to contract by cost or demography. If it contracts, it'll be because of a deliberate cultural and political choice that the current level of participation isn't serving people.
And that's the choice Daniel is implicitly posing. Not whether the system is financially sustainable, but whether it's justified. Whether the years are well spent.
There's a theoretical paper from this year, an arXiv preprint, that models educational choices under social influence. It has agents called Followers who imitate and Positional Agents who do the opposite. The finding is that social pressure, not just economic returns, drives enrollment, and that under certain conditions the system can produce chaotic enrollment cycles. Boom and bust in participation driven by nothing but imitation.
That's the rite of passage mechanism in mathematical form. You go because everyone goes. The decision isn't individually rational in a narrow sense. It's socially rational. The cost of not going is social exclusion from the class you were raised to join.
And the social cost is real. If the entire professional class goes to university, then not going marks you. The degree becomes the price of admission to a social world, not just a labor market. That's the part the utilitarian critique misses. The degree isn't only a productivity signal. It's a membership card.
Which is why the NBC poll is so significant. If even the members are saying the membership card wasn't worth it, the social logic is cracking. The ritual is losing its hold on the people who performed it.
Palantir is hiring high-school graduates now. Not as a stunt, as a deliberate policy. They've decided the credential is dispensable for the kind of work they need. That's a corporate signal that the sorting function can be replaced by direct testing and work samples.
The moment a few large employers start hiring on demonstrated competence rather than credentials, the signaling equilibrium starts to unravel. The degree stops being the only door. And once there's another door, the question becomes whether the degree door is worth the years.
The honest synthesis is that the average premium is real but the marginal case has collapsed. Both things are true. Degree-holders on average earn more and have lower unemployment. But the average is dragged up by the top, and the bottom chunk of graduates is doing no better than they would have done as apprentices, while having spent three or four years not earning.
The bottom chunk is the new population the universal system recruited. The expansion was sold on equity grounds, open the gates to everyone. But opening the gates to everyone meant admitting people for whom the broad degree was a bad trade, while telling them it was the only respectable path.
The equity argument has inverted. The universal system was supposed to level the playing field. Instead it created a new hierarchy within the graduate class, where the institution and the course matter more than ever, and the people at the bottom of the hierarchy paid years of their lives for a credential that returns eleven percent above minimum wage.
Daniel's own experience is the counterpoint. He did the law degree, the journalism postgraduate, and then built a career on experience. The degrees didn't teach him the work. But would he have had the same opportunities without them? That's the unanswerable counterfactual.
The signaling model says probably not. The degree got him in the door. What he did after that was on him. Which is exactly the Jessica Burns quote from the NBC piece. She's an Iowa degree-holder who said the degree isn't valuable because it brought value added, it's valuable because it's the key to getting in the door. That's the pure credential thesis in one sentence.
If the key is the only function, then the system is a toll booth. You pay years of your life for the key, and the toll keeps rising because everyone has to pay it.
The question is whether we're at the point where the toll booth starts to lose customers. The American data says yes, enrollment is falling. The British policy says yes, the fifty percent target is dead. The Irish data says no, applications are still rising. So the answer to Daniel's question about whether we've passed the point of utilitarian justification depends on which country you're in and which part of the distribution you're looking at.
For the top slice, the degree is still a spectacular investment. For the middle, it's a reasonable one. For the bottom, it's increasingly a bad trade. The utilitarian case hasn't collapsed. It's fractured. It's true for some and false for others, and the system keeps pretending it's true for everyone.
The contraction voices are really arguing that we should stop pretending. Stop pushing people into low-value degrees because the participation target demands it. Let the technical routes have equal dignity. Let the apprenticeship be a first choice, not a consolation prize.
Lord Gove put it in terms of the dignity of work and the mastery of craft. Which is the guild language again. The idea that there's honor in being good at a specific thing, and that the university route shouldn't be the only route to social respect.
Danny Kruger's version is sharper. He says the system detaches talented young people from where they grew up, starves the economy of practical skill, and leaves those who fail to meet the academic standard with no place. That's the social cost of universal higher education. It tells the non-academic half that they're the failures, while also telling the academic half that their only respectable destination is a degree.
The non-academic half got nothing. That was Burnham's point about the fifty percent target. The policy had nothing to say to the other fifty. The universal system didn't universalize opportunity. It universalized the judgment that one path was the good one and the other was the leftover.
Now the policy is reversing. The UK scrapped the target and put the money into apprenticeships. But the cultural shift lags the policy. Parents still want their kids to go to university. The status hierarchy doesn't change because a government target changes.
The status hierarchy is the deep structure here. The degree is a status marker before it's an economic instrument. That's why Daniel's phrase rite of passage is exactly right. A rite of passage isn't about utility. It's about marking the transition from one social state to another. The utility is secondary, or even irrelevant.
Rites of passage are hard to dismantle by economic argument. You can show that the bottom quartile of graduates earns eleven percent above minimum wage, and it doesn't matter, because the parent isn't choosing the degree for the earnings. They're choosing it for the status. The earnings are the rationalization.
Daniel's own framing shows how deep this goes. He holds the postgraduate degree, he's built a successful career on experience, and he still frames the degree as something his family wanted. The family expectation wasn't about earnings. It was about what a son of that family does.
The family expectation is the social pressure the arXiv paper was modeling. You don't choose in a vacuum. You choose inside a network of expectations, and the expectations are shaped by class, by community, by what the people around you consider respectable.
The answer to how we got here is layered. The post-war expansion democratized elite education. The democratization turned the degree into a general-purpose middle-class credential. The credential became a status marker. The status marker became a rite of passage. And the rite of passage became self-perpetuating, because once everyone does it, not doing it marks you as outside.
The self-perpetuation is now running into its limits. The cost, the debt, the compressed premium, the over-qualification. The ritual is still running, but the initiates are starting to ask what it was for.
Which brings us to the question of what a contracted system would actually look like. Not the research-only fantasy, but the rebalanced system the Centre for Social Justice is pushing. Fewer undergraduate places, more apprenticeships, technical routes with equal funding and equal status. The German model, roughly, where the vocational path is not a consolation.
Germany runs about one to one on university versus vocational. The Netherlands two to one. The UK is three to one in favor of university. So the rebalancing isn't speculative. There are working models. The question is whether the English-speaking world can import the status structure that makes the German model work.
The German model works because the vocational path carries genuine status. A Meister in Germany is a respected figure. The apprenticeship isn't a failure route. The status structure is the hard part to import, because you can't legislate respect.
That's the deepest answer to Daniel's question. We got here because the university degree captured the status structure of the middle class. The contraction argument is really an argument about status. Can we rebuild a status structure where the craft path and the academic path carry equal dignity? Because if we can't, the contraction will fail. Parents will keep pushing their kids toward the degree, whatever the earnings data says.
The earnings data is already saying the bottom chunk of degrees is a bad trade. The public opinion data is already saying the degree isn't worth it. And the applications are still rising in Ireland. Because the status structure hasn't moved.
Hilbert: The eleven percent figure. Bottom ten percent of graduates, eleven percent above minimum wage.
That's the one.
Hilbert: I was at a college in Connecticut in the early two thousands. Not as a student. I ran the mailroom. And I used to watch the seniors come through in May, picking up their caps and gowns. The mailroom was next to the registrar's office, so I saw the whole thing. Four years of tuition and half of them were picking up a degree in something that had no job attached to it. And the parents would be there, taking pictures, and I'd think, that's forty thousand dollars a year for a photograph.
Connecticut. Storrs, by any chance?
Hilbert: New Haven. But I knew the Storrs campus. Different school. The point is, I watched it happen. The college wasn't selling an education by then. It was selling the photograph. The gown, the diploma, the family standing on the lawn. That's what they paid for. The classes were almost incidental.
The photograph as the product. That's the rite of passage in its purest form.
Hilbert: The thing nobody said out loud was that the jobs those kids were going into didn't ask for the degree. The degree was just the thing you did before the job. Like a debutante ball. You don't go to a debutante ball to learn anything. You go because that's what your family does.
The debutante comparison is sharper than the guild one, in a way. The guild credential was tied to the craft. The debutante ball was pure social marking. And the modern degree has drifted from the first toward the second.
Hilbert: I had a cousin who did two years at a state school in the eighties and dropped out to fix furnaces. He made more than I did for twenty years. Nobody took his picture on a lawn. But he owned his house outright by forty.
The furnace fixer with no photograph and no debt. That's the counterfactual the system doesn't want you to see.
Hilbert: The system wants the photograph. The photograph is the product. And they figured out how to sell it to half the population.
The half the fifty percent target aimed at.
Hilbert: That target was about the photograph, not the education. The education was always available. The photograph was the new thing.
The photograph is what's now being questioned. The initiates are looking at the photograph and asking what it cost them.
The cost was four years and the earnings forgone, plus the debt in the American case. And for the bottom quartile, the photograph didn't even buy them the earnings premium they were promised.
The misconception to close on. The thing most people get wrong about this topic.
That the value of a degree is uniform. That a bachelor's degree is a bachelor's degree, and the premium applies across the board. The data says the opposite. The premium is real on average and negative at the bottom. The degree is a spectacular investment for some and a bad trade for others, and the system has spent fifty years pretending that distinction doesn't exist.
The distinction is the whole question. Daniel asked whether we've overshot the utilitarian justification. The answer is that we've overshot it for a specific slice of the population, while the average still works. The future of the system depends on whether we're willing to tell the truth about the distribution.
Which leaves the open question. The status structure hasn't moved yet. The applications are still rising in Ireland. The question is whether the public opinion shift and the earnings compression will eventually move the status structure, or whether the rite of passage will keep running on social momentum long after the economic case has fractured.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the show on the rails.
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