We overestimate graduate regret, and underestimate the economic value of higher education
Are the thousands of university-bound students who celebrated their A-level results last week walking into a trap?
You don’t have to look far to find tales of disillusioned graduates who feel ripped-off by their “Mickey Mouse” courses. The narrative is so pervasive you might assume graduate regret is endemic.
And the public do think that’s the case: in a new study, we asked them to estimate how many graduates wouldn’t go to university if they could choose again. The average guess was 40 per cent — but the reality, from our detailed surveys of actual graduates, is just 8 per cent.
The public also guess that half of graduates say their university debt has negatively impacted their lives — but only 16 per cent of graduates feel this way.
When we ask people about their understanding of these key higher education realities, we’re not running it as a general knowledge quiz, to point out their ignorance. The vast majority of the public have more important things to pay attention to and worry about.
Our responses are driven by emotion, not analysis
Instead, these type of questions give us important clues about what we instinctively think about an issue — our misperceptions are often a very direct signal of how we feel about something.
And it’s clear that on some measures many of us don’t have a full picture of the value of universities: while we hugely overestimate graduate regret, we also significantly underestimate the economic importance of higher education.
Very few of the public are aware that universities are among the UK’s biggest exporters, or that an institution like the University of Manchester has an income almost equalling that of Manchester United and Manchester City football clubs combined.
From a list of eight well-known businesses and institutions, just 6 per cent correctly rank the University of Oxford top for revenue, despite its income being more than £1bn higher than the second on the list, Greggs bakery chain. At a time when the UK could really do with more global economic success stories, we’re clearly not doing a very good job of highlighting and backing the ones we have.
It’s more of a mixed bag when it comes to university and student finances. We know that graduates will, on average, leave university with a very large debt: the average person guesses £43,000, when it’s even higher — £53,000.
But many of us have the wrong idea about the nature of this debt, with a third of the public thinking student loans need to start being paid back as soon as graduates get any sort of job — when the reality is you need to be earning £25,000 or more before repayment kicks in.
Of course, it’s understandable that the public in general hasn’t paid much attention to a complex student loan system. But it’s more of a surprise, and much more worrying, that those who are most directly affected by tuition fee debt — young graduates — are most wrong about it: six in ten of those aged 18 to 34 with a degree incorrectly believe graduates must start repaying these loans as soon as they get any paid job. Half also believe the Student Loans Company can repossess their belongings if they fall behind in repayments, which is not the case.
Perhaps most damaging for universities themselves, only 17 per cent of the public know that student fees in England have not kept up with inflation since 2012, meaning they’ve lost a third of their real value. This fee erosion, masked until recently by overseas students paying much higher rates, is one of the key drivers of the sector’s current financial crisis, and could have been avoided if inflation-related increases were built in from the start.
The public are reasonably aware of the importance of overseas students: they guess that they contribute around a third of total tuition fee income — though the real figure is an even riskier 45 per cent. But they‘re wrong about what happens next: most international students leave the UK after graduating, but people assume they stay.
This confusion reflects extreme misperceptions about immigration generally. When we asked about the most common types of immigrants to the UK, asylum seekers topped the list in people’s minds, despite this group making up less than half the number that come for either work or study.
This pattern — overestimating asylum seekers while underestimating work and study migration — points to one of the key reasons we get both universities and immigration so wrong.
Our responses are driven by emotion, not analysis. We remember vivid stories about boat crossings and individual student regret more than dry statistics.
Humans also have a “negativity bias”, which is partly an evolutionary trait. Negative information tended to be more urgent, even life-threatening: we needed to take note when we were warned by our fellow cavepeople about a lurking sabre-toothed tiger — and those who didn’t were edited out of the gene pool.
Politicians, the media and social media obviously know we react more strongly to these arresting negative stories, so they feed us more of them: stories about graduates looking back on their degree as something enjoyable and valuable would get very little reaction, so they don’t get written.
There are very many challenges in the university sector, and real debates to be had about how we better balance degrees with a much more developed technical and directly vocational training offer, which has seen woeful underinvestment in the UK.
But it’s also important for the media, politicians and the sector itself to remember that there is much to be positive about, and to have more confidence in making that case.
The reality is that, despite these too-negative misperceptions of specific aspects of our universities, the public’s overall perspective is that they’re a “good thing”: only the NHS, armed forces and Royal Family are more likely to be picked out as one of the UK’s world-leading assets. Our views of universities are categorically not as bad as we think.
