In this article, Fighting for a Free Future Associate Luke Lucas continues to explore Dr Nigel Ashford’s Principles for a Free Society, focusing on the fifth principle: freedom and looking at it through the lens of state planning of young people’s futures. Each month, Luke will examine one principle and tell the stories of the people who put them into practice and the barriers that exist to reaching a free society.
“So, which university are you going to?”
The conversation every 16- and 17-year-old is going to face for the next year or so of their lives. The number of times they will have this conversation, they will stop counting. The pleasantries of someone taking an interest in your future.
But what does this actually mean? The decision has been made. You are already predestined to go to university.
They have done their research, their time, their choice. Choosing their first choice, a lovely university that resonates with them, people they associate with, classes they like and a prospectus that feels like them. Still, this isn’t good enough. “Oh, but you can do so much better.” The remark, filled with good intent and praise, indicates a higher intelligence that they don’t feel they have. Yet it makes the young person’s ambition and happiness sound like a disappointment.
Another young person saw an alternative course, a carpentry apprenticeship. They did woodworking at school and enjoyed it. It wasn’t their best GCSE, but they never really got on with long written assessments and much preferred the practical element. They visited the workshop; they liked the people, and they enjoyed their banter. The idea of bringing an idea and vision into the real world as a product is something that interests them, and they can picture themselves honing their craft.
Once again, “you can do so much better”.
Both phrases are a product of a faulty “degree by default” culture identified by the British Government. But this has been the attitude since 1999, when Tony Blair announced his 50% target of higher education participation. The impact is that the number of undergraduates receiving a degree in 1999 was 265,000, and this has only increased since, with the number of students accepted in 2026 being 518,000.
Blair raises a question that a box-ticking exercise can’t answer: who should decide your future? His target did cover higher education, including vocational qualifications rather than purely academic university degrees. However, it expresses a political idea about the destination towards which all young people should strive. Blair reduced individual ambition and the freedom to choose one’s own future to something a government could count towards fulfilling its ambition, a policy metric.
On paper, this seems like an attractive measure: the United Kingdom becomes more educated, average wages go up, and so does GDP. But this isn’t the reality of what has happened. Unsurprisingly, there have been unintended consequences of central planning of young people’s futures. We’re currently seeing an education bloat and a youth unemployment crisis. Nearly a third of graduates are not in high-skilled work and youth unemployment stands at over 16%. Pushing young people towards university may have good intentions, but these good intentions do not translate into the government knowing which path each individual should take for their future.
And the state does not need to physically assign a person to university when the overarching system operates to finance the conditions attached to support, and they embed a culture that looks down on those who choose other paths. The government constructs the expectations that individuals are then told they have freely chosen to satisfy.
And this concern continues. In 2018, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee concluded that post-school education in England was unbalanced towards full-time university degrees. The 2012 financing reforms encouraged universities to recruit undergraduates. It identified incentives for schools to favour academic routes, creating institutional pressures for students to attend university rather than simply ambitious parents offering advice.
Returning to the young person deciding on university. They can picture the satisfaction of turning an idea into something tangible that someone will use for decades. But where does that satisfaction appear in a governmental metric? The official cannot experience their life on their behalf, nor will they bear all the consequences of choosing the wrong life.
Once government sets a preferred destination, institutions have an incentive to achieve that goal. Success becomes easier to demonstrate through the number who enrol than through asking whether those decisions serve the individuals making them. The question gradually shifts from “is this the right decision for you?” to “does this help meet the target?
Although university attendance can indicate opportunity, maximising attendance does not maximise opportunity. The education bloat we have suffered in the United Kingdom illustrates the danger described by Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
This has created a culture shift. The only way to be successful is to go to university. And the only way a school is successful is based on how many students are going to university. The education ladder is not freedom; it demands that everyone climb it and removes your ability to choose when to get off.
Individuals need to have the freedom to choose their paths in life. The actual meaning of what is ahead for them. Take the time to consider the years spent studying versus the experience and earnings they could acquire elsewhere. Above all else, they need to ask what they want to become capable of doing with their life.
No one else can answer that.
Equally, a person may choose university knowing that their subject does not offer much financial reward. Just because someone wants to study English Literature doesn’t mean they shouldn’t, just because Economics on average will earn them more in their lifetime. Honest information should be provided to help the person choose what’s right for them. It should leave room for values that cannot be reduced to statistics.
In both cases, the principle of freedom must protect both choices. But the principle of freedom has a distinction between pressure and compulsion. This distinction does not make the surrounding elements irrelevant. Young people should have clear information about costs and outcomes, with universities being accountable for what they provide. Freedom does not require an unlimited public subsidy for every preference.
However, it does require resisting the temptation to organise lives around a single official measure of success. A target cannot tell us whether a young person has found a worthwhile and meaningful purpose in life. Neither can a target for apprenticeships. The individual disappears from view when their decision matters chiefly because it helps complete somebody’s narrative and statistics.
One path leads to lectures, examinations and the study of a subject that may become a lifelong passion. The other may lead to early mornings, practical training and the satisfaction of making something physical.
Both demand effort. Both carry uncertainty. Neither guarantees a fulfilling life. But both allow someone the freedom to carve their own path and find what is fulfilling to them off the back of their own curiosities and not a coercive idea of what’s the correct path.
We can ask better questions than embrace young people’s freedom of choice.
“What do you want to build with your life?”
And we should respect the answer because when future generations are reduced to a statistical box-ticking exercise, they become instruments of somebody else’s ambition. Freedom means recognising that the future they are building belongs to them.
Luke Lucas is a Fighting for a Free Future Associate and also runs Voices for a Free Future’s monthly column, Liberty Around the World.
A free society depends on more than the absence of government restrictions; it depends on respecting individual choice, personal responsibility and the freedom to make decisions about our own lives. The challenge is finding the right balance between individual liberty and the role of the state in protecting the rights of others. An important discussion, and one that remains central to the future of free societies.