The young have just had their first brush with the brutal cynicism of politics. Those fearful that a Labour government will lead inexorably to Venezuela-style ruin will have welcomed the downgrading of the party’s £100 billion pledge to wipe out student debt to a mere aspiration. But it will have come as a cold shower to the countless others who were led to believe that Jeremy Corbyn plays by different rules to other politicians.

Or will it? The contention is that once young people realise that the bribes will never materialise, they will vote for a party honest about the disastrous long-term state of the public finances. But it is far more likely is that they’ll continue their march Left, unless we address a problem that anyone who believes in aspiration will be squeamish about tackling: too many go to university.

Tony Blair’s target of getting 50 per cent into university was a pernicious exercise in social engineering. A graduate degree does not necessarily lead to a graduate job. There is a chasm, for example, between the number achieving legal degrees and those receiving training contracts. Where do they end up? Presumably in careers far less lucrative than the law.

This is not true everywhere: there is huge demand for engineers and scientists, and evidence that higher tuition fees have incentivised students to take courses more likely to result in better pay. But given that universities face no real downside to churning out enormous numbers of unemployable humanities graduates, we’re rapidly creating an educated, bitter underclass with ever more devalued degrees – the number of Firsts awarded has soared eight percentage points in the last five years. With the earnings premium from a degree declining too, this isn’t about debt but prospects.

Quite frankly, too many students are going to university. credit: Rex Features

Institutions once at the vanguard of liberal thought have also succumbed to a kind of intellectual Stalinism, influencing the politics of professors and students. Just 7 per cent of academics voted Tory in the last election, with more than 80 per cent backing Left-wing parties. Vast quantities of research is produced, much of it never cited again, and yet the number of Tory‑supporting academic historians, for example, is vanishingly small.

In this stultifying culture of uniformity, different views are discouraged through “safe spaces” and “no platforming”. Even free market capitalists aren’t safe. A talk at Exeter University last year by Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute was disrupted by student activists.

The solution lies partly in creating a proper market in education, which to the Government’s credit is beginning to happen. When students can more easily identify which courses are worth pursuing and where, they are less likely to be so dispirited by their prospects that they become easy prey for the far-Left. But we also need far greater diversity of provision. There are currently only a tiny number of fully private higher education institutions in Britain. Unless we have more to compete with the Left-dominated incumbents, universities will continue to be factories for Corbynites.