Surplus Education
Helen Rollins
23 January 2025
Helen's Everyday Analysis pamphlet, Babyface, is available here.
Declassed
Fifteen years ago, I would often encounter students in my role as a private tutor, for whose parents there was no question that they should go to university. The cost of a degree was rarely reflected upon; it was still assumed that a place at university would secure a professional class job. Parents were willing to pay for coaching to ensure their children’s applications were as competitive as possible, as well as for tutoring for public exams to ensure the highest results. By contrast, more recently, there are fewer UK-based, middle-class parents willing to make this kind of investment and, amongst the traditional clientele of the private tutoring industry, these 'home-grown' groups have been replaced by wealthy families from developing countries such as China. This question of the value of a degree for families in countries such as the UK was particularly sharpened during the pandemic when teaching was moved online and students were not offered a reprieve in fees.
Further, in the wider economy, it is no longer a given that an expensive education will set young people apart from their peers. In fact, the over-investment in the promise of an education by so many has led to its devaluation. Graduates have been proletarianised by their overproduction — the 'surplus graduate' is a member of the new 'reserve army of the unemployed' of this professional class. Once the investment — in terms of time and monetary sacrifice — has been made and cultural recognition sought via the completion of a degree, students are understandably unwilling, in the short term at least, to take non-graduate roles that are less prestigious and have less scope for high salaries, even though, in the long term, graduates might find greater economic security on average in these kinds of roles (although it is of course the very fact that these roles themselves don’t offer adequate financial reward that lead to a greater aspiration on the part of the student in the first place). Whilst the neoliberal education system individualises this problem of low pay, encouraging the sole player to 'back themself' in the market of education and make sacrifices for their future that will, in fact, statistically impoverish them, emancipatory politics should encourage a wider economic critique that looks at the material conditions that have generated these problems, working towards improving living standards for everyone via a universalist politics.
The digging of education’s grave was caused by the market’s offering of Education as a 'solution' to the inevitable collapse in living standards wrought by capitalism. This is a tragic and perverse turn of the screw of history, given education was long fought for by civil rights and labour activists and was only ever possible in its true sense against and outside the auspices of the capitalist market. In the 90s, the so-called British 'Labour' party belaboured this push towards Education as magical (capitalist) 'solution' to market failures — an ideological foil that meant tarrying with the inevitable contradictions of capitalism would be delayed — with John Prescott’s famous dictum (articulated in his recognisably firm Northern accent) Education, education, education. What resulted was not only a huge extraction of capital from students via fees and a band aid over the fact that there weren't enough paid roles in the economy since hundreds of thousands were kept from the labour market for several years as they studied, but also graduates' proliferation in the marketplace. This has led to graduates' position in a 'holding pen' (waiting for a role that has been traditionally considered prestigious, that may still hold the promise of high earnings over the course of a career and that makes good on the sacrifice made and cultural capital aspired to), meaning that employers are now able to offer them lower salaries; the employers have the market advantage. In 2021, 38.2% percent of young people in the UK attended university. But a top 25% salary that same year was only around £40,000, across all age groups, even including for those who had already been in the work force for decades. According to HESA’s Graduate Outcomes survey of 2020/21, graduates in full-time employment earned an average of £27,340 15 months after graduation. Those same students had an average debt of £45,000. The average plumber in the UK earns £38,282 and has no student debt. And a full-time minimum wage job in Britain from April 2025 (based on a 40-hour work week) will be £25,397.
Tertiary Education’s Economic Crisis
As students are reviewing the worth of attending universities, higher education institutions in the UK are struggling to fill places, particularly on courses that are (often wrongly) considered 'soft' in the atmosphere of our neoliberal, 'problem-solution' orientated economy, which currently favours STEM degrees (and will do so until STEM graduates’ own over proliferation). The same goes for degrees that are geared towards career placements that could be achieved with practical experience.
Many British universities have declared themselves in financial trouble in the past year. Modern Languages courses at Aberdeen have shuttered, Bedfordshire has closed its Performing Arts degrees and Edge Hill its Creative Arts programme. The Open University, an institution that has historically catered to students who would not otherwise enter formal tertiary education, claimed a £25 million deficit in 2023. At Goldsmiths, 130 full-time academic posts were declared at risk that year. Whilst the proliferation of university candidates over the past decades (8% of people went to university in 1970; 38% in 2021) meant it had been increasingly competitive to secure a place and universities could be discerning in their selection of candidates that added cultural and academic value to their institutions, as universities now begin to struggle to recruit students to certain courses, the reverse is often true and colleges and universities are beginning to have to drop entry standards to attract students, particularly during 'clearing', where — with places left to fill — universities appeal to potential fee-paying students by lowering the required grades.
It is important, however, to consider the full scope of our contemporary global economic crisis when considering British universities’ faltering viability, rather than simply the choices of individual university candidates (although — of course — these choices are a symptom of our wider economic condition).
Billionaires vs Governments
In the UK, university fees are set by the government. Fee-setting is part of a broad schema of government-sponsored policies that are coming to dominate contemporary capitalism, techniques employed by the state to mitigate against worsening economic conditions, not in the favour of workers, but of the capitalist class. Indeed, policies like fee-setting might appear, as first blush, like a mechanism by which to protect the less well off. However, in a capitalist economy, as the global rate of profit nears zero, these policies are merely the market finding greater and subtler ways of extracting value from the masses.
The falling rate of profit in capitalism is an inevitable result of automation; profit is generated by the sacrifice of workers. Without sacrifice, there is no long-term profit (although there is short-term cost-saving for the capitalist who replaces salaried workers with machines, which is why the capitalist is motivated to turn to automation in the first place, even though it will — most likely — inevitably destroy him on behalf of a singular capitalist who will survive, extracting all dwindling profit from the market for himself, becoming the monopolist). The latest incarnation of automation is AI, which is unique in that it is a form of mechanised production that affects graduate jobs; most machines have historically undermined the income of manual workers. That AI is eroding graduate opportunities of course undermines universities’ value further since it means graduates will be less likely to find a role that requires the sacrifice and investment of a degree.
Because of globalisation, one of the damaging schemes in which capitalists have been able to engage to mitigate against the falling rate of profit is capital mobility (or tax evasion). This has further led to increased inequality — since wealth is not taxed — and to the disempowerment of governments who cannot raise enough money to avoid bankruptcy and who are in the descendency relative to corporations and billionaires who are coming to dictate state policy on their own behalf. Two obvious examples of this are the fact that Elon Musk is so rich and influential as an individual that he engaged in a private 'ambassadorial' tour of Israel and Palestine at the start of the current war, as well as the presence of him and other tech billionaires in Trump’s cabinet. Another is in the global corporate tax haven of Dublin where Apple owes the state scores of billions, but, over the course of many years, the EU was not able to enforce the Irish state’s acceptance of this money. For Irish politicians, it has still been (in the short term) more 'valuable' to offer Apple (and other corporations) tax exempt status because there are wealthy executives who come to Ireland and increase nominal GDP. The long-term consequence is the destruction of local people’s living standards. Here, tragically, blame has been placed upon immigrants since the political class has not come to terms with the destructive dynamic in which they have been engaged for decades and there is scant political and institutional consciousness around this issue, one that not only erodes Irish people’s living standards, but also those of the citizens of the whole world. To confront this would be far more difficult than to blame individuals. Contingent events have therefore been weaponised to 'prove' that immigration in this state is the underlying cause of dwindling living standards, rather than the destructive dynamic of the wider capitalist imperative.
Ireland, of course, is not solely to blame; this is a dynamic that exists across all nations. In Britain, it is perhaps most evident in the policies of the film industry, where government bodies have long offered millions in grants and tax relief to global media corporations and undermined the local economy (as well the American film economy, for its workers). Further, and quite shockingly, UK government institutions have blamed the resultant economic erosion on workers, who are, they say, 'greedy' for having 'charged too high fees'. Globally, governments, desperate for a crumb of value from the capitalist class, are forced to enact policies that benefit nomad capitalists (individuals and corporations) who dictate the market.
In the UK, whilst fee-setting may be branded 'fee-limiting' (here, it can be claimed students are 'protected against' the excesses of inordinate fees by setting them at a certain level), university fees have in fact impoverished a generation of young people by extracting value from them at a time of decline (and austerity) when there are not enough jobs. As we have discussed, in capitalism, profit is generated by surplus value — labour that is not paid its worth. But in this instance, student-reserve-workers have been doubly exploited. They have entered into debt for the promise of a job that — by definition — the market can’t offer them (their very indebtedness is a symptom of this; if there were to be ample jobs, students wouldn’t have to pay for the pleasure of being considered for them).
Whilst the historic worker was paid (badly), the contemporary reserve graduate pays for the promise of future value extraction (and pay). As a consequence of corporate and high-net-worth capital mobility, governments are going bankrupt not only because they cannot extract tax from money that flees their shores, but also because — since these corporations and high-net-worth individuals don’t pay tax — governments are in a weaker position relative to them and must, as we have seen, offer grants and even further tax breaks to attract them in order to provide the last gasp of 'job creation' and 'trickle down economics' (i.e. spending on certain local businesses). By incentivising so many into indebtedness via corporate education, governments are further undermining themselves. Graduates not only have fewer years in the market generating taxable income for governments (because governments have not broken up monopolies, nor have they encouraged re-investment in jobs), but also — because they have so much debt — they have less money to spend, are less able to buy property, less able to settle down, less able to procreate, creating an aging population that relies more on redistribution of taxed wealth than one comprised principally of working aged people who are able to pay tax. This is an economic catastrophe. And no governments seem capable of offer any solution.
It has been a political catastrophe, too: whilst precarity makes individuals more desperate and exploitable by the market (if everyone is single, there are more bills to be paid), it also renders a tendency towards reactionary politics, when no emancipatory alternative is offered by a market system that refuses to confront its own contradictions at all costs. It should also be understood that — as a result of bourgeois ideology — individual, bourgeois-aspirant students may experience immense psychic violence by a system that has encouraged them to see their descent in class position not as a symptom of a wider economic network, but as a result of their own failures. Until economic conditions are understood and digested, the intense affect wrought on students by these conditions (trauma, shame) — as well as the loss of the parameters of fantasy that kept a student engaged in an illogical system — serve universalist politics ill. This may have been a factor in the past decade of identity, rather than class, politics. For some graduates, to recognise themselves as proletarianised may have been a psychic fate worse than death. This may seem hyperbole, but given the sacrifices made, the promise of the reward of cultural and real capital and the way in which bourgeois politics disdains the working classes (one of the reasons young people have been pushed to work so hard at school in the first place), it becomes an understandable phenomenological reality. It is not surprising that, in these conditions, 'left-wing' politics became distorted towards oppositional, responsibilist, moralist, bourgeois socialist values as aspirants lost their footing, but have been unwilling and unable to recognise their status as truly proletarianised subjects. This distortion alienated many in wider society towards right-wing populism and generated competitive purity spirals whereby aspirants were encouraged to particularise the problems of the market, to vouch for themselves as moral subjects and to participate in discourse generation that benefited their potential employers (corporations) against tarrying with the structural factors at play from which they were in fact — precisely because of their (forced) participation in the university-market — not exempted. Nonetheless, as the bourgeois fantasy of the promise of industrialised education may be expiring, and the death of this fantasy may become more widely understood, a more universalist turn in politics may be forthcoming.
Student Debt... And Worse...
Via UK government policy, students have been forced to take on a set amount of debt (unless they are privately wealthy and able to pay for a university degree outright, an inequality that compounds because the poorer students end up paying more for their degrees than their richer counterparts because of interest and because of limited opportunities via indebtedness at key points during their private lives and careers). Since the fee-setting regime is managed by governments who are nominally paternal, 'looking over their flock' (i.e., under capitalism (or at least the ideology of 'democratic socialism' into which western governments still often claim to invest), the state is theoretically supposed to rectify the greatest excesses of capitalism via taxation and redistribution, unlike big business that is consciously acknowledged as exploitative), it is a regime that is perhaps understood, ideologically, as less problematic than it really is. Rather than confront the unfair, unproductive nature of our economy and guarantee jobs for all, students are forced to take on debt before they have a guarantee of employment. Instead of dealing with the wider contradictions and failures of the capitalist economy, governments fiddle with policies that in fact impoverish their workers and redistribute wealth upwards to sustain unprofitable corporations and institutions and protect them from their dwindling bottom line. Whilst Marx predicted socialism for all, we appear to currently have a bitter chimera of it: policies that mask the dwindling global rate of profit by redistributing upwards. There is socialism for corporations and the rich. And students and workers are paying for it.
The contradictions of the dwindling economy are catching up with corporate education, whose future has been undermined by the short-term gain of paying students. The last fee hike set by the UK government was in 2012, when fees were set at £9,250 a year for in-country undergraduate students. Inflation since 2012 in the UK is nearly 40% — £1 in 2012 was worth £1.39 in March 2024, according to the Bank of England. There is thus a huge shortfall for universities who were allowed to raise fees over a decade ago, but have not been permitted to since. Growth has been so low since the recession and the promise of education to ‘kick start’ economic progress has failed to materialise so the government is in no place to set a new fee hike; absolutely no one would be able to afford it and it would be the end of the university in this country as we know it. Encouraged by the income from students made possible by government ideology, universities rapidly expanded in the late noughts and early twenty-tens with often bloated HR and administrative departments, with the professionalisation of university teaching (to the detriment of its quality) and with the creation of courses that would not otherwise be practically viable. With rapid inflation since the pandemic, there has been an equally rapidly emerging shortfall. It is staff and students who suffer. Staff are forced to further professionalise; the quality of teaching (and learning for learning’s sake) is cut. 'Labour’s' ideological impetus of 'education, education, education' has undermined the future of the institution.
Whilst British students and their families question the value of a bachelor’s degree under these circumstances, universities have sought means by which to mitigate against the shortfall between fee caps and inflation. They have done so by courting international students on whose fees there is no government cap. In the long term, however, this process with engender the same contradictions as those faced by home-country students. Overproducing international graduates will have the same undermining effect upon the commodity that the corporate university offers and the same proletarianising results that have afflicted home students.
Helen Rollins is a writer and filmmaker interested in the intersection between art and philosophy. She has written, directed and produced several short films that have played in festivals throughout the world. She is also author of Psychocinema.
This essay is taken from a longer piece called Notes From the Private Tutoring Industry, to be published by GCAS in 2025. It tackles the proletarianising process that results from the neoliberalisaton of the education industry. This section talks about the tendency of the rate of profit to decline and its effects upon students and workers. The wider article looks at the class dynamics between workers and students that result from this process — both the reactionary turn that has occurred over the last ten years and towards an emancipatory potential in the recognition of the universalist insight by Marx that the proletariat will eventually ‘recruit from all classes’, looking at how this necessitates a novel politics and economy that functions for everyone.
