It’s always around A level results day that the Telegraph or the Times will find a commentator to suggest that a university education is wasted on those outside the dominant class. The ritual is familiar: sneer at “Mickey Mouse” degrees, complain about debt, warn of oversupply. Behind the rhetoric is an old hatred: the hatred of education when it ceases to be their private inheritance.
The dominant class tolerated universities when they were little more than finishing schools for their own sons. Oxford and Cambridge functioned as waiting rooms for the family estate, a bank directorship, or a parliamentary seat. But the post-war settlement opened the gates. Working-class kids entered through grants, middle-class numbers swelled with mass higher education, and the monopoly on knowledge was broken. The breach was never forgiven.
What they resent is not “wasted degrees.” It is the fact that miners’ sons sat beside the sons of barristers, that daughters of shop workers read history and politics alongside the daughters of bankers. Education ceased to be a mark of inheritance, and for a brief period became a right. That right is what they have spent forty years dismantling.
Today’s rhetoric of “realism”—too much debt, not enough skills, better off learning a trade—is camouflage. The dominant class designed the debt system. They marketised education in order to shrink it back into a privilege. Their vision is brutally simple: universities for their children; warehouses, call centres, and gig work for yours. A system pared back to produce technical competence without critical thought, drilled obedience without imagination.
Because what they fear is not bad job prospects. It is the possibility that education arms people with the tools to see through their rule. That a kid from a council estate might pick up Marx, Fanon, bell hooks (or simply learn to think critically) and begin to understand why things are the way they are. Critical thought is poison to the dominant class. It dismantles their myths, questions their authority, and destabilises the order they want to pass on untouched.
That is why every August the press runs the same argument in new clothes. It is class war dressed up as common sense.
So when they ask “why go to university?” we should hear the real command: know your place.
