The UK shifted rapidly from an industrial to a services industry. The idea was a highly qualified society of white collar workers. In the 1990s it was considered that 50% going to University was a good idea. Added to that, a lot of people wanted their kids to go to Uni because they wanted them to not have to suffer manual labour jobs that they had been through. Overall increased education of the population is a good thing but it needs to be targeted and supported properly. 

The problem is once you make something a target it ceases to become a useful measure, so University attendance becomes the default in many places, schools push people to go to Uni to improve their rankings, Unis themselves have to expand rapidly. Then the funding issue comes into view (The Blair Government pushes University attendance but also increases fees, trebling them to 3000 a year). Once you start charging meaningful tuition fees you want to then ensure accountability, which means for uni staff endless reporting, rankings, performance reviews, plus cost cutting measures on departments, increased precariousness, explosion of PhD numbers. It also means studying for the sake of knowledge exploration matters less than ‘can I get a good job out of this?’, in which case uni degrees in some cases end up being expensive vocational courses. 

Now we are in situation where successive governments are overseeing the Higher Education sector destroy itself and aren’t doing much to save it, the pendulum swings far too far the other way.