Ex-conservative minister warns baby boom in early 2000s will soon drown universities education policy

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The UK’s baby boom in the early 2000s is about to flood universities and colleges with tens of thousands of school graduates each year, according to former Universities Minister David Willetts.

Willetts, in a report published Friday, warns that a comprehensive spending review needs to fund the expansion of additional and higher education to accommodate the increase, or risk putting too many young people into low-wage work.

Willits said, when releasing a new report on the impact of the baby boom.

But basic demographics show that there is a real increase in the birth rate. I’m not sure people are aware of how severe the spike has been over 10 years, from less than 700,000 to more than 800,000 babies born annually.

“If you’re looking at 15 to 20 years after that, that’s a 15% increase in people trying to get into college and college.”

According to Willits, demographic pressures mean that government efforts to cut spending on higher education by limiting the number of young people enrolled will be doomed to fail.

“If you say, ‘We want 50% of school leavers to go to higher education and we don’t want more than that,’ you should still plan for a big increase in absolute numbers, which in peak years would be an increase in annual intake to 50,000.”

But Willits said the surge in the young demographic was an opportunity to reshape the British job market, despite recent evidence they were focusing on the retail and hospitality business.

“At the moment, it seems unusually that young people work in fairly low-wage sectors, and are not concentrated in the higher-paying sectors of the future, whereas in earlier periods of the British economy, there were young people,” he said.

The report, written by Willits and Maja Gustafsson for the Resolution Foundation, says the government has failed to predict changes in student numbers after age 16, meaning university and college funding is facing relentless demographic pressure.

By 2025, the number of people aged 16-18 in England is set to increase by 278,000. At current rates that would see an estimated 90,000 studying in sixth grade and further education colleges by 2024-25.

The report states that “the further education sector is in dire need of a structural financing solution that can deal with the demographic changes the country is facing.”

The demographic increase alone will see about 40,000 more students enroll in higher education each year until 2035. But if university drop-out rates continue to rise as in recent years, an additional 358,000 places will be required.

Willetts said he was frustrated by the “media narrative” against expanding access to higher education.

In all developed countries, there is a hunger for more education. “Given how Britain will invest and pay its way in the world in the next decade, it looks like a growing higher education sector will be a part of it,” Willetts said.

In government, Willetts was the architect of the current student loan and tuition fee system, introducing £9,000 as annual tuition fees for undergraduates. He prefers keeping tuition fees at their current levels while lowering the repayment threshold at which graduates start repaying their loans.

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