Degrees are meant to encourage critical thinking – no wonder Rishi wants rid of them

Rishi Sunak has a BA from Oxford and an MBA from Stanford, yet seems to think the way to tackle the lack of good jobs for graduates is to crack down on the number of graduates, writes Tom Peck

What even counts as a rip off degree? (PA Wire)

As if the Tories didn’t have enough to worry about, Rishi Sunak appears to be in campaign mode. Despite being the actual prime minister, Mr Sunak has only ever fought one political campaign in his life, which he lost to Liz Truss, and he very much appears to be at it again.

It’s hard to believe that this time last year that campaign hadn’t even started. In some ways, it’s hard to believe it ever happened at all. But suddenly the signs of deja vu are there.

For most of the summer of 2022, Sunak knew he was going to lose, so spent every single day coming up with increasingly mad ideas in a futile attempt to turn things around.

How do you sort out the housing crisis? Ban building on the green belt! How do you hang on to those crucial red-wall voters now that their saviour Boris Johnson is no longer around? You go to Tunbridge Wells and allow yourself to be filmed bragging about how proud you are that you’ve been diverting money away from “deprived urban areas” and sending it straight to places like Tunbridge Wells.

And now it’s the summer of 2023. Twenty-four hours ago, I think, he was promising to scrap inheritance tax. Now his new plan is to “crack down on rip-off degrees”. He even has one of his little graphics, featuring a cracking pavement. Well done.

In between those two seismically bad ideas, by and large the only respected man in his cabinet, the defence secretary Ben Wallace, announced he would be quitting at the next reshuffle and standing down at the next election. He too, has spotted that Rishi is in campaign mode. And he, like everyone else, knows how it is going to end.

Naturally, there’s a lot of quarter-arsed thinking to unpack in this latest announcement. All degrees, indeed all education of any kind, are meant to encourage critical thinking.

Sunak has a BA from Oxford and an MBA from Stanford, yet he really does seem to think that the way to tackle the problem of there not being enough good jobs for graduates is not to increase the number of good jobs but to crack down on the number of graduates.

What the policy actually means, no one really knows, and certainly not the actual education minister Robert Halfon, who went on Good Morning Britain to announce it but found himself entirely unable to name a single course anywhere in the country that would constitute a “rip-off degree”.

To be fair to him, it’s a fiendishly difficult thing to work out. What even counts as a rip-off degree? The parliamentary Tory party is drowning in arts degrees from the world’s finest universities, yet half of them are 12 months shy of finding themselves middle-aged and unemployed.

Kwasi Kwarteng has degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Princeton, he’s won prizes for the translation of Greek poetry, yet was by some margin the single worst public servant in the history of his country. Are his many degrees “rip-off degrees”, or does it not count if it’s absolutely everybody else that ends up ripped off while, for you, things continue to turn out just fine?

Does Sunak know? Clearly not. Does he care? Who can say? There’ll be another mad idea along tomorrow. And another once-sane Tory MP, announcing their stampede for the exit.