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Does the British higher education system have too many students?

By Alison Wolf - posted Tuesday, 15 October 2002


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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This article was originally published in the July 2002 issue of Prospect, www.prospect-magazine.co.uk.



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About the Author

Professor Alison Wolf is Professor of Education, Head of Mathematical Sciences Group and Executive Director of the International Centre for Research in Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. She is the author of Does Education Matter?

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