Are we forgetting what university is for?

As the government inquiry about student loans continues, British attitudes to university ask whether it's worth the time and money, and graduate struggles grow... have we forgotten what university is actually for?

Where is it all going?

Last autumn I was talking with a second-year student at Cambridge studying English. Revealing my bias here, but surely that’s one of the most intellectually rich subjects at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. She wasn’t failing, and she wasn’t unhappy, exactly. But somewhere in the conversation she said, almost in passing: “I’m not really sure what I’m doing here. I mean, where it’s all going? Sometimes I wish I’d done something useful. STEM, maybe.”

Think about that. Somehow a Cambridge English undergraduate has internalised the idea that what she’s doing isn’t “useful” enough—that her degree is to be measured by its practical utility.

Nor is she alone. This week we heard that a record 34% of Britons agree with her unease. “University just isn’t worth the time or money” they say.

Given that graduates will often leave university with £50,000 of debt and a degree that apparently may not impress a hiring manager who happens to be offering vacancies at their lowest level since 2012, scepticism is understandable. And given that even when they are employed, many endure the monthly ritual of seeing loan repayments leave their payslips whilst watching their debt level steadily rise, I understand why scepticism deepens.

Something somewhere is going wrong.

Are we Hosting the Wrong Debate?

Yet, despite the wavering court of public opinion, government and sector data stubbornly persists in suggesting that graduates tend to earn more across their lifetimes than non-graduates and are more likely to be employed.

On average that is…

That seems to be the major counter-argument for the university defender to take up: “it is still worth it, honest” they say, “look at the figures!”

Yet I wonder.

Does our instinct to reach for those statistics to debate what they really show reveal a different problem? Why do we feel compelled to justify education almost purely in terms of economics at all? Is there no richer account of its purpose?

There is also a further difficulty. Things most easily measured are not always things that matter most. Lifetime earnings, employment rates and salary premiums tell us something important, but they are imperfect proxies for human flourishing. Yet, once a measure becomes the target, institutions begin optimising for that metric. What can be counted crowds out what cannot. The result? We mistake indicators for ends and confuse measurable outcomes with the deeper purposes education was meant to serve.

Perhaps this explains why current debates about the value of university sound like a big financial audit. Will a degree increase earnings? Will it pay back a good return on investment?

Don’t get me wrong. Those are reasonable questions to ask. University is expensive, and it would be strange not to think about the money. But are they the only questions? These questions (often the only ones being asked) are of the same species that you’d apply to a boiler purchase. Or a pension fund.

The thing is, we don’t normally evaluate the most important things in life that way. Nobody seriously asks whether friendship delivers adequate returns, or whether the pay-off for reading Middlemarch is as valuable as that for reading A Brief History of Time.

So, before answering the value of university question in this way, perhaps we should first ask if we actually know (and agree on) what university is for. Or what we want it to be for at least.

This is all relatively new, of course. The earliest universities were never conceived primarily as engines of economic productivity. Medieval universities spoke of forming wisdom. Victorian universities spoke of character. Even in the twentieth century, the language of education tended towards cultivation.

That’s why a good university education introduces students to worlds beyond themselves. It exposes inherited assumptions to challenge. It cultivates intellectual humility. It teaches people to read carefully, argue honestly and listen seriously. It enlarges moral imagination. It creates the conditions in which a young adult can become something more than they were before.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a sentimental defence of universities, although it might be sounding that way. Many modern institutions fail these tasks spectacularly. Degrees have become transactional and instrumental, and meanwhile prospective students are often encouraged to approach higher education as consumers purchasing credentials.

So in a sense, the critics are right. Universities have forgotten what they are for. But here’s the point: the entire debate suggests that we all have too.

Getting Comfortable with Wisdom

The ancient Sages would have found our debates strange. They tended to assume that the central challenge of life was not how to maximise earnings but how to become wise. Sadly though, that sort of language now seems to make people uncomfortable. Utter the word “wisdom” in a policy document and watch the room.

But wisdom in the tradition that produced the university was never just a policy goal or graduate profile attribute.

In the book of Proverbs (chapter 9), Wisdom builds a house. She sets her table, pours her wine, prepares her feast. From the highest point of the city she calls to the simple, young, and those who lack understanding. “Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed. Leave your simple ways and you will live; walk in the way of insight.” It’s an invitation, urgent and open.

Folly also builds a house. She also sits at the highest point of the city. She also calls out, in identical words, to the same people. The two voices are easily mistaken for one another. The difference isn’t obvious from the street.

In the end what makes the difference isn’t credentials or information. It’s a set of loves shaped slowly and patiently. Wisdom in Proverbs is less a skill-set or worldview than a settled affection in the right direction in God’s world.

That’s why it begins with the fear of the Lord—being rightly related to the one who made you. All of which gives a very different account of education from the one we currently operate with doesn’t it?!

A Pundit’s Realism

Meanwhile, the Preacher of Ecclesiastes joins the conversation with the voice of a seasoned pundit. Think of a political pundit offering election night commentary, or a sports pundit providing half-time analysis.

Except this pundit has a bigger view: he has read everything, watched everything, tried everything, accumulated everything. He has given himself to wisdom and folly in turn. He has built houses and planted vineyards and gathered silver. He has accrued the treasure of kings. He is the quintessential pundit on life itself.

At the end of it all he sits with this: “Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).

It’s not anti-intellectualism. The Preacher isn’t telling students to throw away their reading lists (much to the dismay of many a young reader of Ecclesiastes!). He’s identifying the fact that accumulation without formation produces exhaustion rather than wisdom. More information, more credentials, more options, and still the gnawing question of what any of it is actually for.

That weariness is what you feel after three or four years working very hard towards a goal whose value you’ve never been able to understand, let alone articulate.

At its worst, the modern university seems pretty good at producing that. It generates enormous quantities of knowledge, qualification—and debt—while remaining largely silent on the question our pundit-on-life keeps pressing. Given that all of this passes, given that you are unavoidably limited, given that you will die and be forgotten, and given that the rivers run to the sea and the sea is never full, what are you actually doing, and why?

The pundit's answers are ultimately subversive. Fear God. Keep his commands. And enjoy your limits. Perhaps not the conclusion you’d expect from someone who has read all the books and tried all the pleasures and found them wanting. But it’s the same answer Proverbs gives. The question of how to live well and how to be genuinely wise rather than merely capable, turns on whether you are rightly orientated toward the one in whose image you were made. That’s the settled affection in the right direction which is wisdom itself.

Making Life Legible

Working with students across the UK, I see this. It’s a yearning for something more than choice, or salary, or the acquisition of transferable skills. Students arrive at university asking the oldest of questions. What is this for? What kind of person do I want to become? Is this something worth giving my life to? Is there something out there really worthy of that?

Those questions don’t go away just because universities stopped taking them seriously. They dive and resurface in anxiety, burnout, and that feeling my Cambridge friend couldn’t name—that something important must be missing if the subject she loves isn’t legitimate unless converted into a career trajectory.

For Christians, all this points beyond wisdom as an abstract ideal. The New Testament presents Christ himself as "the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:24). The deepest purpose of education cannot merely be intellectual achievement—or even the ability to choose what sort of ‘economic unit’ to become in a productivity obsessed society. Rather, it must be learning to perceive reality itself more clearly and to order our loves rightly under the lordship of the one who grounds it all.

This is why I love UCCF’s emphasis on forming student leaders. True formation will produce student leaders whose delight in Jesus has grown deep enough, and persisted long enough, that it has begun to reshape what they love and how they see. Students like this don’t just declare him because they’ve been taught to, but because they can’t help it, all because the house Wisdom has built has become their home. And they know that home to be solid as a rock.

So here’s my contention: A university sector which has given up on these sorts of questions has become thinner and smaller. It has formed students to expect to make economic choices as they become dutiful economic units. But that is a deeply unsatisfactory answer to the question ‘who am I becoming?’

That’s why reducing university to a salary calculation is so inadequate. The question is not only what graduates will earn, but what they will love, what they will worship and which house they will spend their lives building.

I spoke with that Cambridge student again recently. She’s still studying English and still not entirely sure what she’s doing there. When she told me that, I wasn’t sure what to say, but as she wrestles with how her Lord (not just her government or culture) views her time at university, I wonder if she has begun asking better questions.

As she navigates her education and her faith, I hope she is finding (to her surprise), that faith is less like adding a religious layer to life of utility, and more like finding the thing that makes life legible.

Perhaps the real challenge is not whether universities are worth it. Perhaps it is whether we still believe this kind of formation is.