Universities, the Conservative MP Robert Halfon has warned, are “obsessed with academic degrees”; these degrees do not prepare students for the workplace, where nobody cares how much TS Eliot you can quote. Consequently, they represent poor value for money, in a marketplace where students have been sold their debt on the basis of its future wage returns. As hazards go, it’s somewhere in the region of “warning: scientists obsessed with measuring stuff”. Yet such is the Tory worldview that perfectly legitimate human endeavour – tertiary education for its own sake – has indeed become quite perilous as a lived experience.

The idea that a degree should result in a definable return was a necessary – indeed, the single most necessary – element of the introduction of £9,000-a-year fees. Unless students could be persuaded that their degrees would net them well in excess of £27k when it came to earnings, the offer would have been much simpler: you can’t have what generations before you had, because … tough.

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Unfortunately, it was never true: the figures given by universities minister Jo Johnson last year were that a graduate woman would earn £250,000 more over her lifetime than her non-graduate counterpart, a graduate man £170,000 more. The original modelling for the student loan book was based on an average £150,000 gap over a lifetime and didn’t take into account the fact that some would earn much more than that, yet still repay only their loan, while others would earn much less and never be in a position to repay. Put more simply, whatever you think of the debt burden landed out of nowhere upon a generation, the public purse would be much better served by progressive taxation. But that’s a niggle for another day.

The reality is that many students are taking degrees in which they will never secure work, high paid or otherwise.

A Leeds councillor once told me there were more photography students in his city than there were photography jobs in the whole of Europe. The Royal Society published a report in 2010 that mentioned, almost in passing, that the proportion of Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) postgraduates who would end up with professorships was 0.45%. I mention science and photography simply because they are considered vocational: it is so embedded in the humanities experience that you’d never get a job in it (whether Egyptology or English; history or theology) that nobody would even bother to commission research.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Conservative MP Robert Halfon has warned that universities are ‘obsessed with academic degrees’. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Before the Dearing report in 1997, nobody tried to monetise learning on an individual basis; higher education was accepted as a public good. Post-Dearing, the goal was for everyone to get a degree, and a crucial element of that was for the state to stop bearing the cost, since that was “designed in the 1950s for an elite system”. Only the elite are worth spending money on, in other words: once everyone else came rushing in, the market should provide.

Like any argument that has its arse on backwards, these assumptions failed: there was never any guarantee that a degree would proceed, uninterrupted, to a relevant and suitably remunerated job. Subsequent pressures – principally, stagnant wages and the growth of unpaid work at professional entry level, have rendered ridiculous the notion that graduates would be rewarded for the financial risks they were taking.

The tragedy is, those who recognise this are punished: I interviewed an ex-student in Liverpool just before the 2015 election. He’d dropped out of a business studies degree in the south becauseeven after the rudimentary lessons he learnt in the first two terms, he couldn’t see any way to justify spending £9,000 on information he could quite easily peel off the internet. This left him with the debt of that first year, no degree, and the unenviable status of Neet. Student debt is like the climax of Toy Story 3: a conveyor belt from which you can’t alight, even if you can see a roaring furnace of impecunity at the end of it.

There is nothing less surprising than the surge of anxiety in university life, so pronounced that some campuses even have petting zoos for exam time, emotional support dogs (and horses. And rabbits!)attempting, with their big eyes, to fill the gap between what students are required to believe and what they know to be true.

Halfon is entirely correct: for a party that understands nothing but the market, the value of learning will always be a puzzle unless you can count it in pounds (though not for their own children, of course, for whom they can always see the poetry of learning Classics for its own sake). The underlying problem is a politics of superiority, in which the poor aren’t worth educating, because if they had fine minds they wouldn’t be poor. Universities, with their academic obsessions, their erudite, philosophical bent, should concentrate on overturning that.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

• This article was amended on 9 November 2018 to reinstate the full list of Stem subjects; technology and engineering were lost in the editing process.