Cutting subsidies and tuition fees are part of broader and more audacious attack on England’s liberal institutions
Imagining the future is never easy. But for teenagers in a pandemic, struggling to get a feel for university life from “virtual open days” now being conducted strictly via Zoom, it’s perhaps uniquely tough. This year’s lower sixth, only too aware of a harsh jobs market out there, are more anxious than ever about getting their decisions right.
Is university even worth it? Should they follow their hearts and study what they love, or buckle down to something boring but more likely to lead to a job? Enter the education secretary Gavin Williamson, scoffing, just as students return to campus, at “dead-end courses that leave young people with nothing but debt” – increasingly taken to mean almost anything but the government’s approved priorities of science, technology, maths and engineering.
