Brace yourself, this is a longer-than-usual blog piece, and one that is close and personal.

Recently, I came across a report from the Sutton Trust that reignited an old debate: is university education still worth it? A new survey found that the proportion of people who believe a degree is not worth the time and money has risen from 14% in 2005 to 34% today. As my own journey in this field keeps changing shape, I find myself constantly reflecting on why I came into it in the first place.

Where it started

I was the first person in my family to go to university, and as a recent migrant to the UK, I hardly understood the significance of a degree. And yet a few moments stand out clearly.

I had a difficult time adjusting to a grey, dull, cold country, and I struggled at school until my A-levels. That was when I discovered the power of studying and the possibilities that education could open up. My preference had actually been art, but Thatcher’s Britain left an indelible mark on me, and on my politics. It taught me how much history and politics mattered, so much so that I abandoned the idea of studying art at university. Even so, influences from the art world, such as William Morris, remained with me.

And, like the 1983 film Educating Rita, directed by Lewis Gilbert and starring Julie Walters, I wanted something else. Having grown up in working-class Coventry among people with few aspirations, I found it hard to want something different, something beyond marriage and children. I took my cue from a few of the “clever girls” at school who were applying to university, and since my A-level results were decent enough, I thought: I too can do this!

My mother

While Educating Rita was the external inspiration, the real one was right at home. My single mother, who never benefited from formal education herself, constantly encouraged me to educate myself and make something of my life. She struggled throughout her life, but she was remarkably resilient and strong, rebuilding and reinventing herself every time life threw another challenge at her. I drew strength from that then, and now when she is no more.

She would have preferred that I became a doctor, a lawyer, something “respectable,” but she supported my decision to study politics and history anyway, despite pressure from other family members who looked down on these subjects. I decided to stay at home rather than leave her alone, which narrowed my choices to Coventry and Warwick. I had offers from both, and to the dismay of my teachers, I chose Coventry.

Coventry, not Warwick

I would have started in 1992, the year 35 polytechnics became universities but, after deferring, I began in 1993. With little guidance or mentorship, I had almost no sense of the difference between Warwick and Coventry. Had I known, I might have made a more calculated choice. Instead, it was an emotional decision, based on instinct and on a course on India and Pakistan that caught my eye at Coventry, taught by someone who would go on to become my PhD supervisor.

Looking back, I think it was also a choice about fitting in. I simply sensed, as someone from a working-class background, that I did not belong at Warwick. Unlike Susan in Educating Rita, who studied English, I read International and Political Studies, a combination of politics, history, and international relations. Interestingly, this kind of combined degree has now made a comeback, partly as a result of rationalisation across the sector. Single-honours degrees are difficult to sustain in today’s market, and a combined programme can be an attractive package in the age of austerity.

Degrees then and now

Returning to the Sutton Trust report: the big difference today is that a degree is now intrinsically tied to employability. Students increasingly come to get a degree, rather than to get an education, and that distinction matters. I was incredibly fortunate to study without the financial pressures students face now. Had those pressures existed then, I probably wouldn’t have gone to university at all.

My undergraduate years were instrumental in opening up my world and my life. They transformed my ability to think, to articulate, to reason, and to question what I thought I knew. I left university without much clarity about what I wanted to do next, but that didn’t matter, because the three years themselves had taught me so much. Far more than the rigour of eight courses a year, each ending in a three-hour exam meant to prove I’d learned something. There were essays too, handwritten at first, typed by my final year, but the ratio was 25% coursework to 75% exam. Everything rested on those three hours at the end of the year. We thankfully now have much more diversity in assessment, but with the challenges of AI, the classroom exam is also making a comeback.

Like Susan, I left university a different person: more confident and genuinely surprised at how much I’d enjoyed the experience. So much so that I decided to keep studying part-time while working. I wouldn’t have made it through my undergraduate or postgraduate years without paid work on the side, even though fees were nowhere near today’s levels. During my MA, I worked first in academic bookselling until I was made redundant as the early tremors of Amazon (which launched in 1998) began shaking the book trade and then in banking, which simply didn’t fulfil me. Interestingly, I was working at a major high-street bank that was closing down branches at the time. The signs were all there in the late 1990s about how innovations in technology were changing our high streets and retail habits.

A turning point

I eventually decided the private sector wasn’t for me and chose something that felt more virtuous instead: the public sector. Of course, I quickly realised that this wasn’t any better! At the same time, I continued with my part-time MA, operating on something close to a pay-as-you-go model. That kind of flexibility barely exists today, outside perhaps the Open University, yet with the support of my tutors, it was possible then. In today’s system, I would likely have been terminated from the programme for missing coursework deadlines. But in a more generous era, when academics still had some autonomy and personal relationships mattered, you weren’t just a number.

Then, one day, a letter arrived with an advert for a PhD studentship. It was from Professor Ian Talbot, Coventry University. I saw it and dismissed it almost instantly; truthfully, I barely knew what a PhD entailed. But the seed was sown, and the rest is history (pun intended).

The studentship, covering fees and maintenance for three years, had been established by the nephews of Sir Penderel Moon (Indian Civil Service). They wanted someone to examine the violence and casualties of Partition; a subject long mired in debate about the true scale of loss at the time of British departure from India. Penderel Moon had produced his classic study Divide and Quit in 1961, drawn from his postings in Punjab, and afterwards edited volumes 5 to 12 of the Transfer of Power (1970-83) documents.

The PhD years were a constant exercise in pinching myself and thinking, is this really me? Am I really doing this, meeting these amazing people and minds? Some of that, I think now, was lacking what Bourdieu meant by cultural capital: the sense that certain ways of speaking, certain reference points, certain forms of ease in a room, are themselves a kind of inherited wealth, one I hadn’t been given. And some of it was what Appadurai calls the capacity to aspire: the idea that aspiration itself is unevenly distributed, that some of us have to learn, almost from scratch, how to imagine a future different from the one we were handed.

The Sutton Trust puts it plainly: graduates from non-graduate families often don’t catch up with graduates from graduate families, because higher education improves social mobility but doesn’t erase the effects of family background. While meritocracy in education is a wonderful idea, and it has helped to uplift many, the internalised habits, manners, language and style that come from our background remain with us. That feeling of being an impostor is directly related to what Bourdieu and Appadurai describe, not a personal failing, but a structural one. But through my academic journey, and in my first monograph, I turned to Catherine Hall, who writes:

For the most part, however, in all sectors of higher education we remain on the margins. But the margins can be a very productive terrain — a space from which both to challenge establishments and develop our own perspectives, build our own organisations, confirm our own collectivities. The hopes for feminist history in the 1990s cannot be the same as they were in the 1970s, for we are living in a very different political world, and some of the harsh lessons we have learned about both exclusivity and marginality must inform our practice in the future. The dream remains — a kind of history that excites and engages, that retains its critical edge, is open to new voices, and always in a dynamic relation to the political world in which we live. Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 34.

The inspiration I drew from this ultimately led me to revise and publish my doctoral research as my monograph, From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab (CUP, 2018)

Shrinking UK HE

I felt more at “home” in a post-92 institution, and the opening up of education was crucial for me, both as a student and eventually in my professional capacity. But since then, so much has changed in Britain. The optimism of the Blair years and “Cool Britannia” has given way to a “Global Britain” that is anxiously searching for a place in the world beyond Europe. We are on our way to having a seventh prime minister in the past ten years; the longevity of Thatcher and of Blair as her true successor seems like a different age in this era of musical prime ministerial chairs.

This rise and fall in political and national fortunes are being mirrored, brutally, in the education system itself, and post-92s have been absorbing the impact longest. As far back as 2015, the withdrawal of the teaching grant from non-STEM subjects hit post-92s hardest, prompting warnings that humanities provision would shrink back to “a narrower and narrower social circle of those who could afford to indulge their interests.”

A decade on, that warning reads less like a prediction than a description. Modern foreign languages provision has nearly halved since 2011; English studies have fallen by close to the same margin. In 2026, the University of Hertfordshire, a post-92 institution built on access and employability, suspended recruitment to its undergraduate history, philosophy, English, linguistics and creative writing degrees outright. As John Holmwood of the Campaign for the Public University has put it, post-92s have long been the “heavy lifters of social mobility,” the institutions through which working-class people bettered themselves through higher education. It is precisely that function that is now being dismantled.

Specific discipline studies, such as the Royal Historical Society briefing, confirmed that 88% of history departments in post-92 universities have seen explicit staffing cuts, compared to a lower (though still severe) 68% in pre-92 universities.

What makes this a class story, not just a funding story, is where the losses land. A 2025 British Academy report found large parts of the country are already humanities’ “cold spots,” with no provision at all within a commutable sixty kilometres, a divide that falls hardest on students who cannot simply relocate to wherever a course still survives. A student in a well-off city with three universities on their doorstep has choices. A student tied to a single local institution by money, family, or circumstance does not.

It would be wrong now to pretend Russell Group universities are exempt from the above; they are not. The UCU’s tracker recorded 105 institutions pursuing redundancies, restructures or closures as of late 2025, with Russell Group members accounting for 41% of the sector’s £303 million severance spend in 2024–25 despite being a smaller and wealthier cohort. Nottingham seeks to cut 150 posts, mostly in the humanities, and has withdrawn language degrees. Exeter is consulting on cutting a similar number, 85% of them in humanities, arts and social sciences. Sheffield cut 614 jobs in a year. Bristol pushed voluntary severance specifically at its humanities faculty. Leicester closed Film Studies and Modern Languages entirely, rescinding around 300 offers. A small example in a pool of many.

The consumer vs public good

So, the crisis has widened. But it has not reversed the underlying pattern: market competition means students increasingly gravitate to the universities with the strongest reputations, which makes closures disproportionately likely at exactly the lower-tariff institutions that working-class and first-generation students are more likely to attend. Post-92s were hollowed out first and hardest; the Russell Group is now losing humanities jobs too, which are largely at the margins of institutions that remain, on the whole, intact. Peter Fleming makes a good case for linking the neoliberalisation of HE and its ultimate decline in Dark Academia: How Universities Die.

That distinction matters because it is the same distinction Bourdieu and Appadurai pointed to. The people most likely to need the humanities to develop the cultural capital, the confidence, the capacity to aspire that I stumbled into almost by accident, are the people increasingly least likely to have local, affordable access to them. A degree in history or politics did not just give me a qualification; it gave me a way of thinking that money and background hadn’t. Strip that access away from the institutions serving people like the one I was, and you are not trimming a subject choice. You are closing a door that, for a certain kind of working-class kid, was the only door going.

The current implosion taking place across the sector does not seem to concern people; there is an almost visceral lack of trust and faith in “experts” and universities. This, of course, is not accidental. People who question, challenge, and think critically are inconvenient in a populist, post-truth world increasingly shaped by AI. Education should be a safe space in which we can teach and debate ideas freely. Except, right now, it is not. History itself is contested ground.

What lessons should we be learning? How do we make sense of the present through the past? Everything we experience, personally or politically, has a historical context, and that context is the key to understanding now. History gives us the tools and the language to articulate our thoughts and make sense of the world around us. I went to university as an idealist. I left with some of that idealism intact, but with a good deal of cynicism too, the kind that teaches you to always ask questions, never assume knowledge, apply reason, be critical, seek evidence, and fact-check your sources. This is why history matters, and why we must defend it. And more so in the age of AI.