Is a university education still of value?

 

Both Peter Hitchens and his brother Christopher Hitchens were middle-class boarding school boys who were never likely to be seen dead wearing a pair of overalls. Both of them were former Trotskyists who talked a lot about the proletariat while secretly despising them.

Peter Hitchens has made a living as a journalist writing angry jeremiads that lament the state of society and its moral decay. Peter Hitchens is an English middle-class snob who thinks the only people who should go to university are people like himself and his brother. I much preferred Christopher Hitchens who intellectually stands head and shoulders above his brother.

In 1958, less than 2% of the population of Britain went to university, whereas today, it is around 39%.  Personally, I don't care for this utilitarian view of education that sees education as only having value if it leads to a job. I think that education as value as entity in itself. The type of people who read novels like Middlemarch by George Eliot, don't generally become delinquents or become members of Tommy Robinson's pitchfork mob. It stands to reason that a university degree will have less value when you have more people having university degrees, but that's no reason why you shouldn't study for a degree.

Today, many university students are using AI to write and research their essays and hardly read at all. I gather that many university students write using text language and that university tutors will accept an essay written using AI, provided the student acknowledges this. They’re the cut and paste generation. The British universities are just churning out semi-educated nincompoops and clever conmen.