“We must crack down on low-value university degrees.” Who claimed that and when? It might have been Rishi Sunak last October. Or Sunak last July. Or Sunak the previous August. This time, it was Sunak on the election trail last week. Sunak promised to scrap “rip-off degrees” , replacing them with 100,000 vocational apprenticeships. Politicians keep repeating this argument, seeing it as tapping into popular hostility towards the “ university-educated liberal elite”.

What, though, is a “low-value” degree? For many policymakers, the worth of a degree is measured primarily by metrics such as the proportion of students who fail to complete their course and the number who land high-skilled, well-paid jobs. Ironically, though, the highest dropout rates at universities are in computer sciences, business and administrative studies, and engineering and technology. The lowest, apart from medicine, dentistry and veterinary science, are in languages and historical and philosophical studies. Stereotypes and reality don’t necessarily coincide.

Also often ignored is the impact of class on student experiences and outcomes. A study last year by London South Bank University’s Antony Moss showed that students who had been eligible for free school meals, an indicator of poverty, are less likely to complete their degree, achieve a good grade or get into a graduate-level job or further study. Improving the quality of courses barely challenged such inequality.

The background to all this is the colonisation of policymaking by a more instrumental view of education as valuable primarily because of its economic benefits, whether personal or national. It is a perspective that has turned universities into businesses, students into consumers and knowledge into a commodity. The notion of learning as being a good in itself, as a means of elevating the quality of our lives, is now scorned as hopelessly naive, or at least as something that should be the preserve of elite students.

The instrumental view of education is often presented as a means of advancing working-class students by training them for the job market. In reality, what it does is tell them to study whatever best fits them for their station in life. As the Observer’s Martha Gill observed last year, many politicians and commentators value university education as a means “ to elevate human lives and nourish the soul, regardless of any job market benefit”—but only for a certain class of people. “The sorts of students to whom we tend to apply a financial—rather than spiritual—calculation when it comes to higher education,” she wrote, “tend to be those from poorer backgrounds.”

For the affluent, education is about enriching the soul. For working-class students, it is viewed primarily as a route to the job market. They are seen as the kind of people who benefit from more “vocational” learning. As education analyst Jim Dickinson observes-. “When we say ’low-value’ courses, isn’t there a danger that we really mean ’low-value students’?”

What can be learned from the study last year by Antony Moss?