White working class boys are not failing

Attendance at University is a terrible metric

“White working class boys” are the cause célèbre the centre-right in Britain whenever they feel they must make a case for white people. The thrust of the argument is essentially demeaning - that because the state has certain sensitivities about targeting ‘help’ towards white men they have failed to address the crisis in white male attendance at University. This is not just left to rhetoric; in March 2021 the Tory Government’s ‘Race Review Chief’ promised to focus directly on White boys leading to this barnstorming report which attributes the gap in part to the term ‘White privilege’, eventually culminating in a DfE funded research project into producing information sheets for White parents to help them take advantage of free money to send their boys to University.

I am reminded when I hear this lowering analysis by the reaction that one of my elderly relatives had when I told him I was going to University - “You’ll be turning up here in a Ferrari next!” - for somebody born in the 1930s or 40s their mental worldview is still that the act of going to University is a golden ticket to prosperity and fortune. At the time of New Labour’s expansion of the Universities (Blair set a target of 50% of school leavers in higher education) it was posited that Labour would lose it’s voting base because too many people would become middle class.

It cannot be emphasised enough how pernicious the international delusion around the value of higher education is, and just how catastrophic the expansion in this country has been - the demand for mass immigration that it causes but also the £500bn of debt that will accrue by the late 2040s.

The truth about our higher education system is that it is a transfer of wealth from the State, mostly to the young (although around 40% of undergraduates are now ‘mature students’ who perform worse than their young counterparts) which enables amongst other things three years of dossing about without gaining any useful skills. This does not describe the experience of all students, there are a proportion, perhaps 5-8%, for are intelligent enough to benefit both themselves and society from the experience, but for the most part it’s Nella Rose with the mandem. Graduates from low ranking universities often earn less than the national average.

That women and ethnic minorities are more likely to take advantage of this transfer does not indicate wisdom on their behalf, nor does it indicate some sort of moral crisis for young White Men - quite the opposite.