There was a time when news about Britain’s universities was little noticed. Few cared because few were included. Higher education was for a tightly-defined group — doctors, teachers, scientists and priests, members of a revered cadre of professions and almost exclusively male.
Two world wars created the desperate need for people trained for a new world where science, engineering and mathematics was fundamental to defence and wealth. A new generation started on the path to a well-paid career by studying for degrees that would have been irrelevant to and beyond the ambitions of their parents. The grammar school boys and girls of the postwar years created an image of university as a focus for the hopes of ordinary families.
The path was still narrow, but there was a crock of gold at the end. So parents whose offspring were still excluded looked at the prosperity of university graduates, and said: “More, please.”
British employers joined this chorus. The government listened, and university expansion started, first by growing some of the older institutions and then by creating new ones, as recommended in the epoch-making Robbins report of 1963, which concluded that undergraduate places “should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment”. Some of this was achieved by converting technical institutes, followed by awarding university status to the former polytechnics in the early 1990s and then removing the cap on student numbers in 2015.
Nobody knows how to clear up this mess. The government has responded to intensifying political pressures with a review of higher education Now, more than 50 years after the Robbins reforms, Sam Gyimah, the higher education minister, criticises universities for taking a “bums on seats” attitude to recruitment. But he is attacking a reasonable response by the sector to a sustained political push to produce ever more graduates.
The economy, meanwhile, is no longer absorbing the supply of graduate recruits at the same rate. The first generation of grammar school graduates had emerged to take new jobs created in a booming economy. Their successors were still well off. But as more graduates emerged, and as the global economy changed, the financial advantage in life of a degree was bound to drop off.We must be careful not to overstate this. For most graduates, the economic return on their investment of time and money is good, but it gets harder and harder to make a beneficial choice; there is now an enormous range of places and courses to study. As the system has expanded, however, first to meet former prime minister Tony Blair’s target of 50 per cent participation in higher education among young people, and then to continue this goal of wider access under Conservative ministers keen to promote aspiration, parents became worried — about the quality of the education their children receive, and about whether a degree will any longer secure them that gilded life. The government did not want to pay any more for this expansion; in fact, it wanted to pay less. So ministers of all parties collectively decided: “Lets marketise it!” A regulated market with a well-produced website to tell you all the metrics you need as a consumer. We will get those students who can afford it to pay through a loan scheme. We will encourage new private universities to compete. The students will make better choices and the quality of higher education will go up.This did not work.
Higher education is now a mess. Two-thirds of UK students will never pay off their loan debt. Last month’s House of Lords report on the sector described the present university finance system as “inefficient”. The maintenance loans system designed to support disadvantaged students is rightly condemned as “deeply unfair”. And, their lordships conclude, the incentives offered to students and universities have a negative effect on both provision and demand.But nobody knows how to clear up this mess.
The government has responded to intensifying political pressures, particularly the repayment costs on student loans, with a review of higher education, led by Philip Augar. But the review is not framed to address the most critical question: what and who is higher education for?Meanwhile, in our new marketised environment, financial constraints dominate (ministers have capped the amount a university receives to teach each student) along with tough targets for inclusion . We work hard to ensure a good experience for students newly empowered to give unvarnished feedback that affects official rankings. Attracting fee income means attracting more students. The approach to admissions we see today is exactly what you would expect given the market in higher education the politicians have created for us.
Source： Financial Times
The writer is vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield