THE number of students going to university should be drastically slashed, Monmouth MP David Davies has said.

The number of university students in the UK has risen year-on-year since records began. In the 2015-2016 academic year there were 1.75 million undergraduate students in the UK, and 532,970 studying postgraduate courses.

But Conservative Mr Davies has said this has damaged the value and prestige of a university degree and left many studying subjects with little application to their working lives.

"I didn’t go to university and when I left school I had two Es at A-level, which isn’t an extraordinary academic result, but by the standards of the 80s it was enough to go and get a job at a management trainee scheme at Tesco or one of these big companies," he said.

"Now they all want a degree because everyone's got one.

"What I would do is slash the number of people going to university and I would slash the time it takes.

"Why do we do three years? It goes back to the Middle Ages or something, people have got a mentality of three years."

He said he would like to see quotas of students studying essential subjects such as engineering, medicine and law while offering "far more generous" financial support packages. But he said he would like to see less courses with less application to the world of work, singling out gender studies as an example, scrapped altogether.

"I'm not saying scrap everything," he said. "We need people doing English and History, History's very important, and Geography, but we don’t need quite as many and there are some that are a total waste.

"Plymouth is still doing Surf Studies I think

"I've gone through and looked at some of them and I'm horrified by it.

"The thought that some poor guy or girl is going to do three years, rack up a massive debt and think they're coming out with something an employer values is laughable."

The idea has been met with a mixed reception.

The Welsh Government's education secretary Kirsty Williams said: "I reject the notion of access to higher education being exclusively for the 'elites’.

"Unlike Mr Davies who wants to close down opportunities for learning, I am proud that from 2018/19 Wales will be the first country in Europe to introduce equivalent maintenance support across full-time and part-time undergraduates, as well as post-graduates.

"We believe every student that has the ability to attend university should have that opportunity.

"It's good for individuals, good for society and helps improve prosperity for all."

And chancellor of the University of South Wales Rowan Williams said he was sceptical about the idea.

Speaking the university's graduation ceremony yesterday, Wednesday, he said: "I have yet to meet a single business leader who believes that having fewer graduates is in our economic interest."

Saying "universities are not simply a cog in an economic machine", he said the role of such organisation is "to educate citizens who can understand the complex world in which we live and ask constructively critical questions of those in public life."

"In this there are no inappropriate subjects for a university to teach," he said.

"To access talent wherever it is, we need to provide plentiful and diverse opportunities to people from every background.

"This is something in which my own University of South Wales excels, and to which higher education across the UK is firmly committed."