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Beyond the Price Tag: The Enduring Value of Higher Education
There is currently a growing public debate about the cost of higher education. At a time when the cost of living is widely recognised as a crisis, questions about whether university offers “value for money” have gained considerable momentum. Opinion polls, newspaper commentaries, and online discussions increasingly ask whether attending university is still worthwhile.
As a new cohort of students prepares to walk through the doors of universities across the country, it is perhaps the perfect time to reflect on the true value of higher education.
If there is an opportunity to understand that value, we must first consider the challenges universities have faced in recent years. The era of austerity was followed by the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit, global instability, and increasingly restrictive immigration policies across Europe, including the UK. Together, these developments have created significant pressures for universities and wider society alike.
These pressures have also affected the labour market. Graduate employment pathways that were once seen as relatively secure have become increasingly uncertain. For many years, the link between higher education and access to better employment opportunities was a central justification for the introduction of tuition fees. As economic conditions changed, however, questions emerged about whether universities could continue to maintain their relevance to the job market. Yet focusing solely on graduate outcomes risks overlooking much of what universities actually offer.
Throughout these challenging years, universities have experienced reductions in funding, financial pressures, and declining international student recruitment. Despite this, they have continued to provide high-quality education, support local economies, and, in many regions, remain among the largest employers. University communities enrich society through research, innovation, public engagement, and outreach programmes that support local people and communities. In many respects, universities serve as centres of learning that extend far beyond their campuses.
Yet this is not their greatest strength.
As a new generation of students enters higher education, regardless of their subject or institution, they become part of a community dedicated to learning, discovery, and personal development. While higher education is often viewed simply as the next stage of the education system, it is fundamentally a different experience.
University education is adult education. Its purpose is not merely to transfer knowledge but to develop independent learners. Students are encouraged to engage critically with ideas, to take ownership of their studies, and to develop their own educational identities. As they progress through their degrees, they begin to shape their own areas of expertise and specialism.
Learning at university is inherently investigative. Unlike many previous educational experiences, students have greater freedom to determine what they study and how they study it. They choose topics for assignments, identify areas of interest, and explore perspectives that matter to them. This process develops not only subject knowledge but also critical thinking, problem-solving, research capability, and intellectual confidence. These are skills that remain valuable long after graduation.
It would, however, be impossible to discuss the value of university without recognising its broader impact on those who attend. For many students, whether they are the first in their family to enter higher education or not, university becomes one of the most memorable periods of their lives. It is a transformative experience that they will reflect upon for years to come.
University offers a unique opportunity to encounter new ideas, engage with unfamiliar perspectives, and challenge previously held assumptions. It is a time when students test not only theories and concepts but also themselves. They discover strengths they did not know they possessed and develop resilience through overcoming challenges. Importantly, they do so in an environment designed to support learning, growth, and development. It is a place where mistakes become opportunities to learn rather than reasons to fail.
University is often described as a rite of passage, but it is far more than that. The relationships formed between students and academic staff, among fellow students, and between students, employers, and the wider community can have a lasting impact. Many students build friendships that endure for a lifetime. Others choose to volunteer, contribute to community projects, or gain valuable employment experience while studying.
These experiences cannot easily be measured.
How do we quantify the achievement of a student who spent years being told that a career in retail represented the limit of their potential, only to graduate confidently discussing complex ideas in their chosen field?
How do we measure the transformation of a student who arrived from school having been bullied, lacking confidence and unable to speak in public, yet delivers an eloquent dissertation presentation before graduation?
What value can be attached to the student who was repeatedly told they would amount to nothing, only to stand proudly in a graduation gown surrounded by family and friends?
Universities provide opportunities and belonging for people from all walks of life. Students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, ethnic minority communities, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, immigrant and refugee backgrounds, and countless others find spaces where they are welcomed and encouraged to succeed. At its best, higher education is founded upon the principle that knowledge should be accessible and that potential should not be limited by circumstance.
For these reasons, and many more, the true value of higher education cannot be fully captured through metrics, rankings, salary data, or opinion polls. These measures may tell part of the story, but they cannot capture personal transformation, intellectual growth, confidence, belonging, or aspiration.
Most importantly, they cannot place a price tag on human potential.
So, to all of you crossing the threshold and joining a university this month, let me offer a warm welcome. You are about to begin a journey of self-discovery, growth, and learning. My colleagues and I look forward to guiding you through the wonderful world of knowledge.
“Welcome to higher education. Your journey starts here”.
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Technology: one step forward and two steps back
I read my colleague @paulaabowles’s blog last week with amusement. Whilst the blog focussed on AI and notions of human efficiency, it resonated with me on so many different levels. Nightmarish memories of the three E’s (economy, effectiveness and efficiency) under the banner of New Public Management (NPM) from the latter end of the last century came flooding back, juxtaposed with the introduction of so-called time saving technology from around the same time. It seems we are destined to relive the same problems and issues time and time again both in our private and personal lives, although the two seem to increasingly morph into one, as technology companies come up with new ways of integration and seamless working and organisations continuously strive to become more efficient with little regard to the human cost.
Paula’s point though was about being human and what that means in a learning environment and elsewhere when technology encroaches on how we do things and more importantly why we do them. I, like a number of like-minded people are frustrated by the need to rush into using the new shiny technology with little consideration of the consequences. Let me share a few examples, drawn from observation and experience, to illustrate what I mean.
I went into a well-known coffee shop the other day; in fact, I go into the coffee shop quite often. I ordered my usual coffee and my wife’s coffee, a black Americano, three quarters full. Perhaps a little pedantic or odd but the three quarters full makes the Americano a little stronger and has the added advantage of avoiding spillage (usually by me as I carry the tray). Served by one of the staff, I listened in bemusement as she had a conversation with a colleague and spoke to a customer in the drive through on her headset, all whilst taking my order. Three conversations at once. One full, not three quarters full, black Americano later coupled with ‘a what else was it you ordered’, tended to suggest that my order was not given the full concentration it deserved. So, whilst speaking to three people at once might seem efficient, it turns out not to be. It might save on staff, and it might save money, but it makes for poor service. I’m not blaming the young lady that served me, after all, she has no choice in how technology is used. I do feel sorry for her as she must have a very jumbled head at the end of the day.
On the same day, I got on a bus and attempted to pay the fare with my phone. It is supposed to be easy, but no, I held up the queue for some minutes getting increasingly frustrated with a phone that kept freezing. The bus driver said lots of people were having trouble, something to do with the heat. But to be honest, my experience of tap and go, is tap and tap and tap again as various bits of technology fail to work. The phone won’t open, it won’t recognise my fingerprint, it won’t talk to the reader, the reader won’t talk to it. The only talking is me cursing the damn thing. The return journey was a lot easier, the bus driver let everyone on without payment because his machine had stopped working. Wasn’t cash so much easier?
I remember the introduction of computers (PCs) into the office environment. It was supposed to make everything easier, make everyone more efficient. All it seemed to do was tie everyone to the desk and result in redundancies as the professionals, took over the administrative tasks. After all, why have a typing pool when everyone can type their own reports and letters (letters were replaced by endless, meaningless far from efficient, emails). Efficient, well not really when you consider how much money a professional person is being paid to spend a significant part of their time doing administrative tasks. Effective, no, I’m not spending the time I should be on the role I was employed to do. Economic, well on paper, fewer wages and a balance sheet provided by external consultants that show savings. New technology, different era, different organisations but the same experiences are repeated everywhere. In my old job, they set up a bureaucracy task force to solve the problem of too much time spent on administrative tasks, but rather than look at technology, the task force suggested more technology. Technology to solve a technologically induced problem, bonkers.
But most concerning is not how technology fails us quite often, nor how it is less efficient than it was promised to be, but how it is shaping our ability to recall things, to do the mundane but important things and how it stunts our ability to learn, how it impacts on us being human. We should be concerned that technology provides the answers to many questions, not always the right answers mind you, but in doing so it takes away our ability to enquire, critique and reason as we simply take the easy route to a ready-made solution. I can ask AI to provide me with a story, and it will make one up for me, but where is the human element? Where is my imagination, where do I draw on my experiences and my emotions? In fact, why do I exist? I wonder whether in human endeavour, as we allow technology to encroach into our lives more and more, we are not actually progressing at all as humans, but rather going backwards both emotionally and intellectually. Won’t be long now before some android somewhere asks the question, why do humans exist?
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How to make a more efficient academic
Against a backdrop of successive governments’ ideology of austerity, the increasing availability of generative Artificial Intelligence [AI] has made ‘efficiency’ the top of institutional to-do-lists’. But what does efficiency and its synonym, inefficiency look like? Who decides what is efficient and inefficient? As always a dictionary is a good place to start, and google promptly advises me on the definition, along with some examples of usage.
The definition is relatively straightforward, but note it states ‘minimum wasted effort of expense’, not no waste at all. Nonetheless the dictionary does not tell us how efficiency should be measured or who should do that measuring. Neither does it tell us what full efficiency might look like, given the dictionary’s acknowledgement that there will still be time or resources wasted. Let’s explore further….
When I was a child, feeling bored, my lovely nan used to remind me of the story of James Watt and the boiling kettle and that of Robert the Bruce and the spider. The first to remind me that being bored is just a state of mind, use the time to look around and pay attention. I wouldn’t be able to design the steam engine (that invention predated me by some centuries!) but who knows what I might learn or think about. After all many millions of kettles had boiled and he was the only one (supposedly) to use that knowledge to improve the Newcomen engine. The second apocryphal tale retold by my nan, was to stress the importance of perseverance as essential for achievement. This, accompanied by the well-worn proverb, that like Bruce’s spider, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But what does this nostalgic detour have to do with efficiency? I will argue, plenty!
Whilst it may be possible to make many tasks more efficient, just imagine what life would be like without the washing machine, the car, the aeroplane, these things are dependent on many factors. For instance, without the ready availability of washing powder, petrol/electricity, airports etc, none of these inventions would survive. And don’t forget the role of people who manufacture, service and maintain these machines which have made our lives much more efficient. Nevertheless, humans have a great capacity for forgetting the impact of these efficiencies, can you imagine how much labour is involved in hand-washing for a family, in walking or horse-riding to the next village or town, or how limited our views would be without access (for some) to the world. We also forget that somebody was responsible for these inventions, beyond providing us with an answer to a quiz question. But someone, or groups of people, had the capacity to first observe a problem, before moving onto solving that problem. This is not just about scientists and engineers, predominantly male, so why would they care about women’s labour at the washtub and mangle?
This raises some interesting questions around the 20th century growth and availability of household appliances, for example, washing machines, tumble driers, hoovers, electric irons and ovens, pressure cookers and crock pots, the list goes on and on. There is no doubt, with these appliances, that women’s labour has been markedly reduced, both temporally and physically and has increased efficiency in the home. But for whose benefit? Has this provided women with more leisure time or is it so that their labour can be harnessed elsewhere? Research would suggest that women are busier than ever, trying to balance paid work, with childcare, with housekeeping etc. So we can we really say that women are more efficient in the 21st century than in previous centuries, it seems not. All that has really happened is that the work they do has changed and in many ways, is less visible.
So what about the growth in technology, not least, generative AI? Am I to believe, as I was told by Tomorrow’s World when growing up, that computers would improve human lives immensely heralding the advent of the ‘leisure age’? Does the increase in generative AI such as ChatGPT, mark a point where most work is made efficient? Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see any sign of the ‘leisure age’, suggesting that technology (including AI) may add different work, rather than create space for humans to focus on something more important.
I have academic colleagues across the world, who think AI is the answer to improving their personal, as well as institutional, efficiency. “Just imagine”, they cry, “you can get it to write your emails, mark student assessment, undertake the boring parts of research that you don’t like doing etc etc”. My question to them is, “what’s the point of you or me or academia?”.
If academic life is easily reducible to a series of tasks which a machine can do, then universities and academics have been living and selling a lie. If education is simply feeding words into a machine and copying that output into essays, articles and books, we don’t need academics, probably another machine will do the trick. If we’re happy for AI to read that output to video, who needs classrooms and who needs lecturers? This efficiency could also be harnessed by students (something my colleagues are not so keen on) to write their assessments, which AI could then mark very swiftly.
All of the above sounds extremely efficient, learning/teaching can be done within seconds. Nobody need read or write anything ever again, after all what is the point of knowledge when you’ve got AI everywhere you look…Of course, that relies on a particularly narrow understanding which reduces knowledge to meaning that which is already known….It also presupposes that everyone will have access to technology at all times in all places, which we know is fundamentally untrue.
So, whatever will we do with all this free time? Will we simply sit back, relax and let technology do all the work? If so, how will humans earn money to pay the cost of simply existing, food/housing/sanitation etc? Will unemployment become a desirable state of being, rather than the subject of long-standing opprobrium? If leisure becomes the default, will this provide greater space for learning, creating, developing, discovering etc. or will technology, fueled by capitalism, condemn us all to mindless consumerism for eternity?
Thoughts from the criminology team 