As many final-year students do, we may scoff at the wide-eyed freshers flooding into Fallowfield, optimistic about their three years ahead. Having been scorned by 9am seminars and back-to-back deadlines, the light behind our eyes has long dimmed – leaving us with mounting debt, and, for many, without a clear path forward.
At some point, we’ve all asked ourselves whether a university degree is really worth it. It’s a fair question – as apprenticeships rise in popularity, and the cost of living climbs up year after year, we often joke that university is only worth the social experience of sports-night Wednesdays and 42s Fridays. Half in jest, half in truth. The social side matters, of course: it gives us space to mature and figure out what we might want to do – as well as postpone the inevitable doom of a corporate job.
Yet, in an era of anti-intellectualism, which has seemingly become a must-have position for any rising right-wing populist, the value of higher education feels more urgent to defend.
Disregarding claims that universities are “woke” spaces of indoctrination – which ironically exposes how anti-intellectualism functions as political control – I believe its mainstream adoption stems partly from our reduced tolerance for discomfort and difficulty. This is not the fault of a so-called “strawberry generation,” but a universal consequence of convenience, with technology and short-form content like TikTok frying our attention span.
Intellectual engagement demands sustained attention and patience to read long-form arguments, engage with theory, and follow complexity. But our culture of short attention spans rewards quick takes and soundbites, flattening nuance and making serious ideas seem overcomplicated, out of touch, and irrelevant.
This erosion of patience coincides with a broader shift: the opportunity to acquire knowledge and interrogate the world now appears secondary to pursuing fields promising financial returns. If you’re not in a certain tax bracket within five years of graduation, you’ll likely be reduced to a statistic in the Daily Mail about economically inactive graduates with supposedly “nothing” to show for their eye-watering student loans.
We are in an era where instant financial recompense is valued more than challenging our perspectives on society, politics, or the arts. Young people, stuck between a rock and a hard place, are squeezed by the cost of living and doubts over whether a non-vocational degree is useful – more or less like Han Solo in the waste compactor, walls closing in while hurriedly scanning JSTOR for answers.
Then comes the fearmongering: The Times ran a piece on downcast Oxbridge graduates whose intellectual engagement yielded only job centre appointments and rejections, while doomscrolling delivers articles and ads titled “These are the degrees with the WORST job prospects” – a lamentable sight en route to a lecture on sexuality in Francophone cinema. Concerns about employment in today’s volatile climate are real, but to view a degree as merely a path to riches is reductive. What if we reject the idea that to be worthwhile, a degree must lead to a six-figure salary at JP Morgan?
In fact, on the topic of pragmatism, I would argue that the rise of AI and its implications for our future make higher education more essential than ever. As AI edges closer to what seems like ‘divine knowledge’ with each new ChatGPT model upgrade, we risk forgetting the one thing that makes us distinctly human: critical, independent thought and innovation. These are skills that large language models cannot replicate, as they merely repackage existing knowledge. But these are also skills that require converted effort and demand deliberate development, which a university education is uniquely placed to provide.
If anything, anti-intellectualism has made the ‘soft skills’ cultivated at university more vital than ever. Critical thinking is essential in a world edging toward a real Fahrenheit 451, where Truth Social is anything but truthful, political discourse is anything but discursive, and free speech is anything but free.
