Last month exam results in the United Kingdom were released. Once again, the news has been about the record number of passes, grades and the amount of people heading off to university.  Parents, students and teachers are, in the most part, rightfully delighted by these outcomes but they fail to see that politicians of all parties have betrayed, not just this year’s students, but an entire generation.

In 1997 New Labour swept to power espousing mantras such as ‘Education, Education, Education’. They set ambitious targets for university enrolment and the levels pupils achieve in exams.  In theory, such targets were all well and good but in practice it was quite a different story.

The ambitious 50% target for university enrolment meant that there had to be more universities and more courses in order to cope with the increasing demand.  This inevitably led to unsustainable levels of government spending on higher education.  This expenditure helped to contribute some of the economic problems we are currently facing.

The growth in university courses gave us many that were useless or unattractive to employers. This created an entire swathe of people who had degrees which could not get them employed.  These graduates were victim to the hyperbole about university education: Degrees are essential in order to obtain good employment.

The 50% target is problematic because is consequence is that degrees are no longer a sign of academic excellence. Graduates are not helped either by equal quotas that employers are obliged to fulfil. Whatever merit university degrees hold, the employers are forced to devalue their merit further.

The major part of the betrayal of university students is the political lie that a university education would open up opportunities and employment to graduates when there was not enough jobs to go around.  The 50% target was a cheap gimmick.

The betrayal of university students cannot just be attributed to New Labour. Governments in general seek to increase exam pass results because they can be manipulated to convey the appearance of successful administration.  However, under the Labour government the problems became exacerbated.  The worst of these problems was the rampant grade inflation which meant that almost everybody passed and with better grades than before.

As a result, the most intelligent and hard-working students could not stand out.  More so, all exams and subjects are treated as equal, which deprives the harder and more traditional subjects of their prestige.  Quite reasonably, many students opted for courses that were virtually impossible to fail.

A generation of students have been betrayed, and had their life prospects compromised, all for the sake of  political point scoring and social engineering.