The research industry looked in the mirror and didn’t like what it saw. At an MRS Social Equity Group webinar in July, reported in Research Live, chair Zoë McQuillin set out the figures from MRS’s 2024 Who do we think we are? report: 81% of the sector holds a degree, against 37% of the population at large. Two-thirds are middle class, nearly a fifth went to private school. The speakers’ prescription was to reduce the sector’s focus on degrees. I’m not convinced.

I run a university business school, so I would say that, wouldn’t I? But at the University of Roehampton, most of my students are the first in their family to go to university, from a wide range of backgrounds, and for them a degree is the way into careers like research.

Yes, a degree requirement pasted into a job advert out of habit is a lazy filter. Andy Crysell, founder of Crowd DNA and one of the speakers, has been calling out such adverts on LinkedIn, and of the 40 or so he flagged, about half the employers said they would think again. It suggests that putting in a degree requirement had become a habit. But if a role genuinely needs a graduate, the employer should be able to say why and if it can’t, it has its answer.

The trouble is the diagnosis. Research has to do two things at once: look like the people it studies, and know what it is doing. On the first, the reformers are right, and history backs them. In the 1920s, market research pioneer Pauline Arnold built a formidable American research business on fieldworkers drawn from the communities they surveyed. Her premise was that consumers were more complex than boardrooms imagined. The men of the Market Research Council, meanwhile, met in clubs she was not allowed to enter.

Arnold was proved right, but her fieldworkers needed a clipboard and comfortable shoes. Today’s researcher needs multi-level models, econometric forecasting, behavioural data science, and the ability to spot the risks, limitations and potential of AI.

What market research really sells is the habit of following evidence rather than instinct. That means research design, statistical literacy, ethics and the ability to be told by the data that you are wrong and to take it gracefully. Nobody is born with these. They are taught, and universities have become reasonably good at teaching them. Sampling theory and questionnaire design, not to mention multivariate data analysis, are specialist skills, and specialist professions tend to be full of specialists.

Nobody surveys the medical register and concludes that medicine has an unhealthy fixation on degrees. Market research is not medicine, and plenty of great researchers learned on the job. But we should beware the cult of the amateur, which treats lived experience as if it could do the work of trained judgement. The sector should resist it, not least because AI is about to make plausible, cheap and wrong insight more abundant than ever.

Nor do the numbers quoted at the webinar say quite what they are said to. The 37% benchmark includes millions who left school when few of their peers went to university. Among younger adults, and in London, where much of the industry works, the graduate share is far higher. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimate cited in the Research Live report, that about 20% of women and 30% of men will be financially worse off for their degree, reads like an indictment. Turn these numbers around and it says most come out ahead, with returns varying hugely by subject and institution. And lifetime earnings is a narrow yardstick for an industry that spends its days warning clients about reliance on single metrics.

Crysell warns that AI risks bringing “a sea of sameness” into research. He is right. But the best defence against machine-made insight is deep knowledge and trained judgement, which is exactly what the industry is being urged to weigh less. He also calls the divide between graduates and non-graduates a “false binary”, arguing that everyone needs training, degree or not. I couldn’t agree more. Training is what universities do, and increasingly do it in forms that fit around work. If the sector takes Crysell at his word, the people who do the training belong in the conversation.

A better policy on job adverts will help at the margins. What is missing is a proper relationship. In the UK, higher education and the research industry are on nodding terms at best. Firms turn up for the odd guest lecture or careers fair. Academics publish in journals few practitioners have time to read. As editor of one of those journals, the International Journal of Market Research, I plead guilty. Students learn research methods in seminar rooms a long way from the client meeting where a sample has to be defended. Medicine has teaching hospitals and engineering has degrees shaped by its professional bodies; market research has nothing on that scale.

That is a loss to both sides, because each has what the other lacks. Firms have live problems, real data and a direct line to the communities Pauline Arnold understood. Universities have method, time and, increasingly, the flexible routes the sector says it wants: apprenticeships, part-time study, credit for prior experience. If firms and universities designed those routes together, they could take someone with lived experience and add the technical skills, so nobody has to choose between the two. As things stand, employers complain that graduates are too theoretical, while most students finish their degrees having barely heard of the market research industry.

The webinar’s answer was to reduce the sector’s focus on degrees. I would put it differently. Pauline Arnold went looking for fieldworkers in the communities she wanted to understand. The industry’s task now is to recruit as widely as she did and then train those recruits properly for work that has become far more technical. Universities ought to be part of that.

Professor Dan Nunan is executive dean of the Faculty of Business & Law and professor of management at the University of Roehampton, London, and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Market Research (IJMR)