Sixty years ago this month, in his report on higher education, Lord Robbins declared that anybody who wanted to go from school tohigher education, who was qualified and would benefit from it, should. That was the beginning of the great university boom. At the time, about 5 per cent of school leavers went to university. Now, 36 per cent do.
There’s a growing suspicion that this has gone too far. “One of the main reasons I got into politics,” Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, wrote this week, “was to change the false mindset that university is the only aspirational route for young people.”
