Does a university degree still matter today? It is a prudent question, one that surfaces both within and outside the academy. With the progression rate to higher education for the UK's young people at almost 50%, the issue has become one of oversupply, as King’s College London’s Vice-Chancellor and Director Dr Shitij Kapur positions this predicament for the UK. Ben Lubitsh’s recent piece in Varsity explored this same condition: the increasing futility of university degrees in ensuring social and economic mobility, and the fading allure of degrees as a ‘golden ticket’ to a flourishing career. Lubitsh moves further by calling this predicament “a beautiful death”: if entry into an elite academic institution like Cambridge no longer guarantees entry into industry or favourable social mobility, then students can finally immerse themselves in their disciplines rather than submitting to a cynical arithmetic of employability.

His piece is perceptive in diagnosing the instrumentalisation of university life, or one’s academic pilgrimage in the university enclave. As a fellow sufferer of this very instrumentalisation, and as someone who, just like Lubitsh, studies an ‘unprofitable’ degree in the social sciences, I nonetheless assess this situation very differently. Perhaps this difference is heavily informed by my formative experiences of dwelling in and studying the social sciences primarily in the Global South. I cannot celebrate this death, let alone call it beautiful. If it is a death at all, it is an unnatural one, and not something to be celebrated. If his obituary sees and salvages an inert liberation, mine seeks a very different goal: an investigation.

“Education as a public good, or the wager for it being a tenet of state welfare or redistributive economics, is innately linked with the demands of skills or expertise in a modern economy”

Lubitsh points out that the death of the ‘golden ticket’ liberates us from the rat race: cynically polishing CVs, herding into programmes of ‘transferable skills’, and the swelling demography of the ‘anxious applicant’ student. This exercise in reverse analysis; finding admiration in a structural failure, nonetheless, is an imaginative intervention. By interpreting the crisis of the neoliberal higher education model as a doorway to the joys of private intellectual pursuit, Lubitsh’s critique provides a secret ‘way-out’ to the anxiety-ridden trade-offs that many of us make but is silent on interrogating the very structure (s) that condition and legitimise this fateful predicament. I believe we need to build onto this second part of the problem which is more structural and normative in nature, and how we, as citizens of the university republic, can actively address this conundrum. His interpretation individualises a problem that is, by nature, collective. My formulation is that the two worlds – university and industry/economics – are deeply interrelated.

Firstly, we must recognise the historical fact that the birth of modern education is linked with the socio-economic differentiations that precipitated at the onset of industrialisation, at least in Europe. Even in Plato’s Republic, education is formulated as the necessary procedure to filter a population into groups performing a social function, to sustain a ‘just city’. Education as a public good, or the wager for it being a tenet of state welfare or redistributive economics, is innately linked with the demands of skills or expertise in a modern economy. To repeat, education is umbilically tied to labour. That we have arrived at a point in history where more than half of the undergraduate-aged world carries a university degree on the one hand, and the formal economy failing to accommodate this expanding labour force on the other, elucidates one of the biggest enduring contradictions of our contemporary period.

“What makes the modern university a salient force of emancipation is that it cannot be and is not a place of insulated development”

The ‘anxious applicant’ student, in my assessment, is a result of this structural contradiction. That education is reduced and squeezed to a singular end-driven function, one which makes it more easily purchasable, saleable, and ‘market-friendly’ instead of it co-constituting with the economy as an end in itself reflects the deep utilitarian capture of the educational enterprise. This utilitarian pandemic affecting students across the globe, therefore, is not one of the student’s own choosing. A hard observation that I carry from my previous academic institution in Delhi, which happens to be one of South Asia’s largest public universities in terms of student enrollment, is the expanding diaspora of postgraduate students (mostly in humanities and social sciences) who enters and exist within the university but labour outside of it – most likely in private coaching firms that provides training to undergraduates for civil service examinations. Trade-offs like these reflect the very brutality that the structural contradiction unleashes on students when they enter the modern university – that is, the front lawns of the economy.

Secondly, this crisis raises foundational questions around the social role of education and its enabling, empowering, and critical function in society. The life-defeating character of an increasingly instrumentalised and managerial academic culture not only fashions us towards a docile and philistine worldview of work-life but also turns us into depoliticised inhabitants of the university republic. This, in turn, raises normative questions on what a university is for, and how it might reclaim its emancipatory role in cultivating understanding, critique, and solutions to problems that surround us. That modern education is tied to employability does not mean that it must be reduced to employability. The anxious applicant can equally be an authentic learner. The deterrent is the anxiety that the contradiction induces, not the individual’s will to learn.

Lubitsh is right in his critique of the “transactional mindset”. For the world’s majority, it is the economy that shapes the function of education. In such a world, education is locked in place as a necessary requisite in the teleology of livelihood. The aim of a broad social critique, therefore, must be targeted at both structural and discursive domains. When I emphasise that university degrees do and should continue to matter, I do not defend the deeply entrenched and narrowly defined dogma of meritocracy that is inherent in our educational system. Education as a social system has existed much before the ascendance of the modern university and still exists outside of the modern academy in alternate figurations and worldviews of tutelage and training.

What makes the modern university a salient force of emancipation is that it cannot be and is not a place of insulated development. It must strive, and fight, to be a sanctuary of intellectual labour, a republic of ideas, a guild of unproved, but imaginative hypotheses, creative pursuits, and a radical enclave where insurgent ideas and innovation that today’s world of industry and professionalism deny, exist. It is essentially a place for hopeful politics. To fight for that hope, therefore, must be collective and from within.