Amid all the scepticism swirling around the UK about the value of degrees, a university leader opining that a degree is no longer a “passport to social mobility” was always going to make headlines.

Just three days into a year during which sector leaders were hoping to refocus the nation’s attention on the value of universities, Shitij Kapur, vice-chancellor of King’s College London, that the competition in the UK job market is such that a degree is now more like a “visa for social mobility”, rather than the “passport” to it that it used to be.

“So the simple promise of a good job if you get a university degree has now become conditional on which university you went to, which course you took,” Kapur said.

His comments were debated in newspapers and radio stations across the country, and Kapur was accused by critics on social media of “firing the starting gun on sector self-sabotage” and of trying to please his “government masters”.

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The debate about the value of degrees has moved on in recent weeks to student loans, with numerous graduates taking to the airwaves to complain that they are impossible to pay off even as they significantly diminish already squeezed incomes. But the wider debate about social mobility continues in the background.

Everyone agrees that social mobility is a good thing. But what does it really mean? How can it best be achieved? And is it really the silver bullet to addressing inequality that its advocates depict it as?

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One metric of social mobility is the number of people from poor backgrounds who end up in professional occupations. And, last year, research by educational charity the Sutton Trust found that one in three graduates from non-graduate families are in the top quintile of earners, compared with one in eight non-graduates from similar backgrounds.

But tthat those from lower socio-economic backgrounds do not benefit as much from educational opportunities as their peers do. found that, despite progress, a child’s education level – and, therefore, likelihood of going to university at all – is still heavily dependent on their parents’ background.

There is also a question about what universities contribute to social mobility, over and above prior schooling and innate academic ability. As recruiters of higher proportions of students from non-traditional backgrounds, post-92 universities often describe themselves as doing the “heavy lifting” on social mobility within the higher education sector. But Kapur’s remark on the importance of “which university you went to” seems to cast doubt on that claim.

Graeme Atherton, associate pro vice-chancellor for regional engagement at the University of West London, said a degree has never been a guarantee of social mobility, but he disputed Kapur’s qualification to speak about social mobility given that he leads an institution that admits fewer non-traditional students than the sector average.

“If [King’s’] students are from higher socio-economic backgrounds, they’re not going to be socially mobile anyway: they’re going to be socially static,” said Atherton, who is also vice-principal of Ruskin College, the West London-owned Oxford institution that offers accessible adult learning. “Maybe [Kapur] still thinks social mobility can only be [plausibly claimed] if people go on to do very highly paid occupations, often associated with extra professional qualifications. But the reality is that…many students…make progress – but it may be shorter-range progress.”

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Kapur noted that the promise of a good job has also become conditional on “which course you took”. And John Jerrim, professor of education and social statistics at UCL, agreed that a degree is not a “silver bullet”, with opportunities depending heavily on institution, degree choice and level of attainment.

“If you do something like medicine or economics at a high-status university, then you do tend to go on and get good labour market economic rewards. There’s good evidence behind that,” he said. “[But] if you do an arts degree from a less prestigious institution, essentially you don’t get any return, and you might even get a negative return on your investment.”

Indeed, for Jack Britton, a reader of economics at the University of York and a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, low graduate earnings are “more of a subject story than a…[type of] university story”.

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Yet the debate about social mobility continues to focus primarily on how many poorer students get into top universities – most of all, Oxbridge. That is why news that Trinity Hall, Cambridge is targeting recruitment from several elite private schools, reported just a week after Kapur’s remarks, caused such dismay in some quarters.

The college said its policy was designed to improve the “quality” of applicants, amid concern that “the crucial task of securing greater fairness in admissions” is unintentionally resulting in “reverse discrimination” against well-qualified applicants from private schools. But Lee Elliot Major, former chief executive of the Sutton Trust and now professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said the college had fallen into the trap of failing to see through “the polish and preparation that comes from privilege with natural talent”.

Moreover, his view was that “universities should do the harder work of nurturing talent, irrespective of [the student’s] starting point…[because] this is about levelling the playing field”.

The University of Cambridge has also been criticised for dropping its targets for admissions from state schools in 2024 to focus on wider socio-economic factors; last year, the proportion of state school pupils accepted by Cambridge fell by a record amount. Oxford’s proportion of admissions from state schools also fell sharply last year.

But does the constant handwringing over Oxbridge admissions afford too much focus on two institutions? Britton said the Oxbridge effect on social mobility is certainly true for those who study economics and other more quantitative subjects, but not for all subjects.

“The [claim] that Oxbridge is just a pure ticket to the top is not really borne out in the data. My suspicion is that a lot of the benefits of going to Oxbridge if you’ve not done a quantitative subject come through other means like meeting rich people,” he said.

Nevertheless, Jon Datta, head of university access and digital at the Sutton Trust, said that the UK’s highly stratified higher education system is one of the reasons why increasing university participation has not improved social mobility as much as advocates of university expansion had hoped, while the payoff from degrees has fallen.

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“The strongest labour market returns are concentrated among graduates of the most selective institutions – where disadvantaged students, of course, remain underrepresented,” he said.

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Critics of “rip-off degrees” – a phrase trumpeted by the last government – gleefully demonstrate their claims after graduation, which reveal that graduates of certain degrees earn well below the median national wage. But many argue that five years is far too short a timescale to judge the value of any course.

“Looking at people in their very early career, it’s very difficult to say much about what they’re going to be doing in their late thirties, forties and fifties, which is when the returns to higher education really seem to kick in,” Britton said.

Indeed, are graduate earnings even the right measure of social mobility? Exeter’s Major said that metric unfairly discriminates against certain types of institutions: “Many universities will produce graduates that go on to do incredibly valuable jobs in their local communities: teachers, social workers, nurses. Social mobility isn’t just about a narrow pipeline of catapulting people into high-earning jobs,” he said.

That is why some in social mobility academic circles would prefer to use occupation as the primary measure of progress, rather than income.

Anna Mountford-Zimdars, professor of social justice at Exeter, said the disparity of graduate employment opportunities across the country poses a dilemma for policymakers. Noting that King’s’ ability to promote social mobility is boosted by its location within London’s vast graduate labour market, she continued: “The choices and opportunities are just so different if [a graduate lives] in a more rural, coastal, sparsely populated part of the country. So you might not always be serving young people by saying they should go into higher education because then…they might have to move region and be dislocated.”

On the other hand, London has by far the UK’s highest cost of living – another confounding factor in the social mobility debate. And, more generally, we are seeing an “unravelling” of the “basic life model” whereby a degree was a passport to a graduate job that would allow its incumbent to start a family and buy a property, according to Major. “It’s challenging the notions of what education is for, so I think many people now are starting to question the role of higher education in their lives.”

by the Institute for Fiscal Studies also found that the property price boom has hindered social mobility – and not just for the poorest. That may be thought to lend weight to UCL’s Jerrim’s feeling that the near exclusive focus of the social mobility debate on individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds is shortsighted. For him, there is an argument that more emphasis should be put on pushing those in the middle of the income distribution into the very top social strata.

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Jerrim also noted that there is evidence that students “tend to overestimate the value of university and how much they’ll get afterwards”. But while sceptics’ claims that higher education expansion in the 1990s eroded the graduate premium “have not stood up”, in Britton’s estimation, he conceded that it is very hard to say what the returns are going to be for people who have attended university more recently, particularly given the developments in AI.

Mountford-Zimdars, too, said that the “jury is out” on whether universities will remain able to drive social mobility in a rapidly changing labour market – and, crucially, whether they will continue to be seen to have that ability.

“Ten years ago…the middle classes would have certainly said that going to a Russell Group university and getting a good degree in anything is a really good strategy. But I’m not sure that those same parents…are necessarily still thinking that at the moment,” she said.

For West London’s Atherton, too, graduate debt has created a “new perspective” among UK school-leavers outside Scotland that “it’s better to do it without a degree” if you can. And to the extent that getting a degree is still seen as crucial to employability, it is seen as akin to “swallowing some medicine you don’t like to get better in the end”.

Jerrim suggested that one upside of the increased scepticism about degrees could be an increase in the number of young people willing to consider apprenticeships or other alternative routes into gainful employment.

“If that message is getting through to the right groups…then that actually could be helping the social mobility story,” he said. “[For] the marginal kids – the kids that may or may not benefit from actually going to university – if it’s giving them more realistic messages and expectations, you could argue it’s actually quite a good thing.”

But does that mean that, in the end, universities have proved not to be the engines of social mobility they always saw – and marketed – themselves as?

“The great aspiration to level the playing field: we have to be honest [and admit] that if we look back at the last 50 years, we have not actually delivered on that promise,” Major conceded.

But it is unfair to blame universities alone because a big part of the social mobility equation is employment, he added. And research has shown that among people with the same degree, those from a more privileged upbringing will still be more successful in the workplace and earn more.

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“Ultimately, I think some of this debate comes around much more to things like inequality and whether we’re paying people the right salaries, whatever jobs people are doing,” said Major. “Universities can’t solve all that…It has to be a societal approach that involves universities. They aren’t going to level the playing field on their own.”