NADINE DORRIES: Tony Blair was wrong - university ISN'T for everyone.
Yesterday in the Mail, Gillian Keegan boldly acknowledged what no other Education Secretary has dared to: that for too many young people, often from poorer backgrounds, university offers little but the burden of debt.
Their poor-quality degrees fail to deliver on the glittering promise they were sold of an interesting and well-paid career.
Exploited by greedy institutions, they end up unemployed for months or even years after graduation, or are forced to take on lowly jobs that don't require an A-level, let alone a degree.
They have every right to feel cheated — as do their families who supported them and taxpayers who help fund higher education.
She graduated from Liverpool John Moores University via an apprenticeship at General Motors, so it's fair to say she knows what she's talking about. If anyone can reverse the most misguided policy ever introduced into our education system — courtesy of Tony Blair and New Labour — then she can.
In 1996 Blair announced that should he become prime minister his top three priorities were 'Education, education, education'. It was a laudable aim. Less laudable was a target of getting 50 per cent of all youngsters to university.
In practice, it was a policy that preyed upon aspirational families from poorer backgrounds who could see that the well-paid careers were dominated by those who had attended a university and had a degree.
Which caring parent doesn't want better for their child? And which child wouldn't want to claim the mantle of being the first in their family's history to graduate and to make their parents proud?
The reality, however, was an explosion in the number of students, a drop in standards generally and the devaluing of degrees overall.
We saw the emergence of second- and third-rate 'universities' offering starry-sounding but useless generic courses in 'creative writing', 'music production', 'entrepreneurship', 'culinary arts' and 'business and management', to name but a few.
They cost peanuts to run and after three years, graduates — if they hadn't dropped out because of substandard teaching and the realisation that they had been sold a pup — would find employers less than impressed with degrees barely worth the paper they were written on.