One term in, and those working in Higher Education are doubtless feeling the initial effects of the cancellation of the university block grant, and hiking of tuition fees.
For the uninitiated, the block grant was what the government used to pay to universities, in large part, to subsidise tuition fees for UK and EU students. With its cancellation, this year’s fees have taken quite a leap. Roughly speaking, if you began your degree in September 2011 you will probably be paying around £3,500 this year for tuition. But anyone who started September just gone will be paying £9,000 – not far off the £10K+ already being charged to international students. Such a big increase was bound to have big consequences. For many school leavers the choice now is either to forget all about university, or accept that most of their working life will be spent servicing debt to the Student Loans Company.
For the universities this has raised a range of fears. Here are six of the predicted horrors I have heard mentioned since the cut was first proposed. I will leave it to colleagues in the sector to decide how many are coming true:
- A decline in the number of applicants
- A particularly steep drop in EU applicants as they desert the UK for more affordable countries
- An unspoken lowering of entry requirements to permit more applicants, followed by a lowering of academic standards to retain them (and thereby avoid….)
- The closure of less popular courses
- The tendency for HE to become restricted to the children of the materially better-off
- The transformation of the university degree from a symbol of ability to a luxury product, one that the purchasing customer will fully expect to be delivered once the invoice has been paid.
As they say in question papers, ‘….discuss.’
Rather than get entangled in that, this will be a look at alternatives. How might things be done differently? One option would be no change, or rather a straight swap back – the re-introduction of the block grant and return to the previous cap on fees. This is perfectly possible. Regardless of what politicians might suggest, the UK economy does not stand or fall on this issue. To be tautological about it, this is just what we would be doing now if the whole question had never been raised. Instead we would all be complaining about higher taxes, or worse public services in other spheres, which of course we already are. As long as there are Jaguars on our roads, and swimming pools appearing in back gardens, there is clearly enough money about to subsidise HE. It’s just that subsidies to HE have been identified as money badly spent. At a time of crushing fiscal squeeze HE has been selected to be squeezed out.
One reason is the belief that Higher Education has grown too big. It’s certainly undeniable that it has greatly expanded. Only thirty years ago it was very much an elite enterprise, serving two elite groups: A moneyed elite – the children of the wealthy; and an intellectual elite – academically bright kids, regardless of background. Over the past few decades however, the student body has swollen to include people from neither group. The not particularly wealthy or particularly glowing have been allowed to gain entry. I certainly include myself in this group, and my full BA, ⅓ BEng and ½ MA attest to it. Indeed I can’t think of many of my contemporaries at Poly who fell into either of the original two elites.
However wise this expansion ever was, the current economic disaster supports the arguments of those who always saw it as economically untenable. Indeed the quiet growth of our more inclusive and less elitist HE was always accompanied by the quiet chipping away at the finances that make student life possible. First the Housing Benefit dried-up, then the grants dwindled and the maintenance loans came in, then the tuition fee loans, then the cancellation of subsidies for second degrees. The removal of the block grant is only the latest, most decisive, stage in the process.
If the government’s aim was to create a smaller HE sector then cancellation of the block grant certainly looks likely to achieve it. But it is hard to see how this is the most intelligent approach. The new system seems to favour mediocre applicants as long as they can pay, while dissuading bright applicants if they can’t. Most rational people would see this as perverse, and slightly demented. Outside the Khmer Rouge there is broad agreement that educational favour should be bestowed upon the intrinsically bright and able. It’s not just a matter of fairness – it’s in everyone’s interests that the excellent have the chance to excel.
So there’s one possibility. Turn the clock back to the 1970s: Raise entry requirements to the point where only an intellectual elite can get in, but then make it free for all who do. Full grants to cover fees and living expenses, and full Housing Benefit. Or if you want a more frugal model we could add a means test, so that the very well-to-do would still have to pay an appropriate fraction. The money recouped could then be used to subsidise the whole enterprise.
Again, this is certainly a workable model, one that worked for decades. But it has its downsides, not least that I never would have gone to university – in itself a national disgrace. But as this is all about reducing numbers, then something or someone has to give, so let's run with it.
Central to support for a return to elite HE is the idea that university really isn't for everyone, even if they might think it is. Perhaps there are things some of us would be better-off doing instead? How many workers genuinely contribute extra value to their organisations through their ability compose a 10,000 word dissertation? Teachers and lawyers certainly, but nurses? Couldn't the world do with less engine designers and more engine repairers, less architects and more carpenters, less MBAs and more small businesses? Might HE subsidies not be better spent on other more vocational forms of training such as apprenticeships or free evening classes?
Besides, if degree certificates aren’t restricted to the intellectual elite what’s so great about degree certificates? If as many people can now write ‘BA’ on a job application as used to write ‘School Certificate’ then hasn’t the degree been devalued to the level of a School Certificate?
If all that sounds unpalatable here’s an alternative. Rather than be elitist about the students, we could be elitist about the courses. Rather than remove tuition fee subsidies across the board, we could reinstate them for those courses we deem worthwhile. This is obviously a controversial proposition. Different people have very different ideas about what constitutes ‘worthwhile’ study. It all boils down to what you believe to be the point of Higher Education.
Some suggested purposes for Higher Education
If the block grant had been fully and rapidly recouped by extra revenue generated by graduates, we can safely assume that it would never have been cancelled. This hints at one perceived purpose for HE. For many of its critics, the point of HE should be the same as the point of life itself - to generate wealth. ‘Pay your own way’ has been the central political mantra of the past thirty years, and many influential people would like to see it applied as firmly to HE as everywhere else. Any subsidies tax-payers invest in HE should be seen to turn a profit, and sharpish too. Perhaps the panel from Dragons Den can be drafted-in to decide which courses meet the criteria?
Aside from the cultural narrow-mindedness, as a strategy this is completely self-defeating. Even if you do hold that the purpose of HE is to make money, the ethos of the Lancashire cotton mill is not the way to achieve it. The unique opportunity provided by HE is that it gives people the chance to think outside the box, or climb whatever shoulders it takes to see outside the box. The potential wealth created by Universities might take decades, perhaps centuries, to pay out. Research, particularly, necessarily entails a large amount of waste. A thousand blind alleys may need to be surveyed before any treasure is found. Crick and Watson would not have fared well on Dragons' Den, but 60 years on and their discovery is certainly paying out.
A less vulgar, but similarly utilitarian, view is to see HE as a means of staffing the economy - supplying all the doctors and teachers and lawyers and managers society needs. This is still all about the economy, but the wider needs of the economic are also taken into consideration. Such graduates may not generate any wealth directly, but they are needed to keep the rest of us bandaged-up and on course.
A closely related, but possibly more subversive, view is to see HE as a means of engineering a better economy, even a better society. Through the judicious application of subsidy we might wean business graduates off the city and back into manufacture, or wean engineering graduates off arms, oil and aerospace, and onto development of renewables. It depends on your politics which one you pick.
Then there are the less quantifiable, more lofty, benefits. Many believe the purpose of Higher Education should be to enrich human existence: University should be about nurturing excellence across the board - art, science, philosophy, literature, without thought to material consequences. While this view does not necessarily preclude profit, it allows for all those courses which never will. Indeed it even makes room for courses that positively oppose profit (a good example is the one degree I did manage to complete. That might well have been subtitled “how to hate capitalism and encourage other people to do the same”.) Some would argue that such courses are a crucial element of a free and progressive society, and underscore what will be lost if business is given too large a stake in functioning of the universities. If HE is to enrich human culture and broaden our horizons it must maintain some freedom and independence from political and economic pressures.
Finally, a couple of more questionable rationales for the existence of HE, or rather, for going to university. The first is ‘for the fun of it’. Although not widely acknowledged, this has always been a serious pull. Long before the term was coined, many of us went for the ‘student experience’ as much as from a burning desire to learn. We’d seen Chariots of Fire and Animal Houseand didn’t want to miss out on this rite of passage. All very fulfilling on a personal level, but you can see why some tax payers might not want to subsidise it. If anything, this ‘purpose’ is growing, and is now employed as a recruitment device. Universities are vying with each other to be the hippest, with the hottest social whirl. If, as feared, the current set-up of HE is favouring ability to pay over ability to achieve we can expect increasing emphasis on these extracurricular selling points. Wealthier parents can look forward to packing their underachievers off to a three-year holiday camp(us), much as they buy them InterRail tickets during gap year.
Which brings us to neatly to the last and possibly bleakest purpose of University: To give school leavers something to do. The desire to go to University rather than into the workplace is being supplanted by the need to go to University because of the near-extinction of the workplace. With job opportunities ranging from terrible to non-existent, University is becoming a place for many young people to hide away for a few years. This is another ‘purpose’ that both tax-payer and treasury will not be keen to subsidise. If university has become, for some at least, a less humiliating form of unemployment, then government subsidies to HE unavoidably become welfare payments – another reason for them to be cut. Like the official unemployed, the student ‘unemployed’ are forced to turn to their families to bail them out, or to the money-lender in the form of the SLC.
Any campaign to get subsidies reintroduced into HE will be a struggle. The universities’ strongest hand is their cultural and economic worth, but clearly these terms are open to interpretation, if not abuse. Rather than a dogged insistence on a return to the funding of the recent past, perhaps a more forceful argument can be made for funding a more meritocratic and intellectually elitist HE – however that might be achieved. It’s got to be better than the brand of elitism the current set-up seems to be encouraging.
