The US now boasts the vast majority of universities with any sort of
global reputation. It dominates the Nobel prizes in science and economics,
and attracts the world's best academics and graduate students, in search
not just of money but of excellence. Creating such universities is
incompatible with central control, and requires freedom for universities
to set their own agendas, hire their own staff at salaries they decide,
compete for students - and, above all, to set their own fees. Fees have to
play a large role in funding. They are the only way, in a mass system, to
secure high levels of quality; and they recognise the fact that a
university education is, first and foremost, of benefit to the individuals
who obtain it.
At one level, the government recognises the options and even, perhaps,
the choice it would like to make. The secretary of state for education,
Estelle Morris, has responded to the tide of complaints from the top
universities by reiterating a commitment to "diversity and
excellence." Labour's problem is willing the means. So far, any
suggestion from the elite universities that they should set their own fee
levels has been met with the threat that, in such a case, any extra funds
raised will be cut from their grants.
This has to change; and the simplest option would be to edge towards a
more explicitly two-tier system - a mass publicly funded system with a
part-privately funded British Ivy League on the top (with plentiful
provision for bursaries, scholarships, and assistance for poorer
students). This requires only modestly steady nerves; the difficult
decision was made in the 1990s, when the Labour front bench accepted the
need for fees. Enrolment figures have, since then, demonstrably failed to
plummet (contrary to many predictions); and since elite universities'
graduates earn more than those from other institutions, politicians can
surely argue with conviction that they should pay more for the privilege
as well.
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But an "Ivy League" plus the rest sounds uncomfortably like
the old bipartite system of grammar and secondary moderns, and it would
need careful handling to avoid creating a political backlash. It would
also mean relinquishing control in a way that modern governments find
extremely hard to do, even when it is in their interests to do so. Yet
allowing more of a marketplace in higher education, and divesting powers
to the regions, will help shift blame from Whitehall, and stop the current
fighting among universities over the same, centrally funded cake.
If, instead, we carry on as we are with increasingly uniform mass
provision, and uniformly low funding per student, we will lose any
universities which can claim to be world class. We will also lose many of
the foreign students currently attracted here. That won't matter to the
world at large. One huge, competitive, world dominant system may be all
humanity needs to keep research and knowledge generation boiling - and we
have that already in the US. Many of the world's rich and powerful already
follow Helmut Kohl, and send their children to university in the US, ready
for a global career: more of the British elite will do the same. But most
students, through choice and necessity, will still attend university at
home in the heavily subsidised mass system we have now created.
Should we, the British, care? Yes we should. Carrying on as we are
means spending vast sums on institutions which have uncertain economic
benefits for the country as a whole; yet cannot offer the sort of
high-quality education provided by their older, smaller predecessors. We
will not be doing much for social justice, though we will be subsidising a
desirable private good: and in so doing, drawing funds away from schools
and other social programmes which really can help to improve equality of
opportunity. We will have lost some great institutions, the creators and
guardians of high culture and innovation. And we will have done this
because we failed to ask ourselves what mass higher education is for.
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