Record numbers of young people are going to university, despite the prospect of a lifetime of debt.
The number of people heading into higher education has reached an all-time high, confounding fears that many will be deterred by the rising cost of tuition.
But the gender gap is wider than ever before, fuelling fears that boys are being left behind.
Almost half of young people under 30 in the U.K. now go to university, according to official figures released today.
The participation rate — which measures the likelihood of a person under 30 going into higher education — stands at 49.3%, the highest figure recorded.
This is the culmination of a decade-long rise, broken only by a spike in 2011/12 ahead of the introduction of £9,000 ($12,000) tuition fees, and a subsequent drop in the first year of their operation.
The rise comes despite warnings that students in England will be the most indebted in the world, owing an average of £50,000 ($66,000) on graduation, with around three quarters unlikely to pay it back.
Lord Adonis, a former adviser to Tony Blair and one of the architects of the U.K.’s system of tuition fees, has argued that the fees have failed to lead to improvements in teaching quality and should be scrapped.
But rather than putting students off going to university, today’s figures suggest the cost has done little to dampen the enthusiasm for higher education. It may even be that rising fees have made it more valued and therefore more attractive.
The figures also bring Tony Blair’s target of 50% of young people entering higher education within reach, albeit six years late.
But flooding the market with graduates has not been without its problems, bringing with it a range of unseen consequences, or at least consequences unseen by those who drew up the policy.
One is that the number of graduate jobs has not risen to match the increase in graduates. According to one study, four out of 10 graduates were not in graduate jobs a year after graduation.
Another is that as many job applicants possess degrees, degrees themselves have become devalued. Employers are increasingly looking for additional skills, whether it is postgraduate study or work experience gained while studying.
Today’s Department for Education figures also show a worrying gender gap in higher education participation.
While girls have long been more likely to go to university, in the 12-months to 2015/16 the gap experienced its sharpest rise on record, leading to the biggest gap yet recorded.
In 2014/15 the gap stood at 10.2% but in 2015/16 this had widened to 11.9%. While 43.5% of males under 30 are expected to go to university, the equivalent among girls is 55.4%.
Among 18-year-olds, the typical school-leaving age, just under a quarter of boys (23.5%) go to university, compared with just under a third (31.1%) of girls.
This largely reflects differing levels of educational achievement, with girls outperforming boys at every level from elementary school to high school, with efforts to improve boys’ performance so far seeming to have little impact.
While much of the developing world wrestles with the problem of getting more girls into education, across the developed world the underperformance of boys is its most pressing issue.
