As the academic year winds down into summer lethargy, the Association of University Teachers is getting ready to disrupt the August admissions season. Next term there will be a student campaign of refusal to pay tuition fees. Academics want higher salaries; the students don't want to pay fees. Because the taxpayer wants to pay no more taxes, solidarity between teachers, the taught, and the general public is unlikely. In the background are grumbles over falling standards, inadequate facilities and bureaucratic overload. The only thing about tertiary education on which everyone agrees is that it is a mess.
It is a big and expensive mess. Omitting Scotland, by 1996-7 there were some 1.7m students, of whom about 1m are doing undergraduate degrees, 260,000 taught postgraduate courses, 90,000 graduate work, and another 250,000 who defeated classification. Tertiary education employs about 110,000 faculty-76,000 men and 34,000 women. Higher education (a degree course) and further education (most other forms of post-school education) get ?11.6 billion a year between them in public money. About ?6 billion of it is spent by higher education and of this about ?4.5 billion-including all the money for teaching and much of what is given for research facilities-is allocated by the Higher Education Funding Council. The pace of expansion has been impressive: between 1980 and 1995 the number of men on degree courses doubled and that of women quadrupled. In class terms, the change is less impressive: 55 per cent of children from the top of the income scale used to go to university, now more than 80 per cent do; 6 per cent from the bottom of the scale went on to higher education, now 14 per cent do. And quality, too, has had to give. More than a third of school leavers today go on to tertiary education, but over the past ten years expenditure per head has shrunk by 25 per cent. Most academics prefer the figure of a 40 per cent reduction since Mrs Thatcher took office in 1979.
Even those of us who regard the complaints of academics with some equanimity may be anxious for the future. There are only half as many places for new post-graduates in philosophy and politics as the number of staff retiring each year. Few really clever and ambitious students now go into academic life. The brain drain to the US is less serious in the humanities than the brain drain into the City, journalism, law and commerce. Economics graduates with first class degrees avoid academic life-and rightly. Academics' pay has fallen far behind that of their peers-schoolteachers, civil servants and politicians-while the demands on them have increased. Professors used to be paid the same as under-secretaries in the civil service; they are now paid half as much. ?35,000, which is the base pay for professors, is what a national newspaper journalist gets after a couple of years on the job. An engineer, who would start on ?17,500 in the academy-aged 28 and with a PhD-would get ?20,000 and more if he went straight into employment with a decent first degree.
The answer is certainly not to pay all academics more. The Bett Report on academic pay is a disaster in this respect, because it proposes to retain the root cause of the problem, which is the national pay scale. The solution is to pay some people a lot more and some even less-to let different institutions and different subjects sort themselves out in the market. The reason why the pay scales are a mess is precisely that they are uniform across subjects and (largely) across institutions. The government won't allow Cambridge to pay enough to hire world-class physicists, because it wants to avoid seeing colleges of higher education paying over the odds for lecturers in primary education. But this is only one of the many absurdities which spring from an over-centralised and dysfunctional system of public funding and control.
The happy truth is that Britain can enjoy both a mass higher education system and one which boasts elite centres of excellence. The unhappy truth, at least for the government, is that it cannot achieve those two objectives within the existing monolithic institutional framework. Too often, what is good for Bournemouth University is bad for Cambridge University, and vice versa. The only possible higher education system for Britain is a local version of the US system. The US combines mass higher education with elite excellence (in both its state and private sectors), but it only achieves this through allowing wide diversity in standards, salaries, tuition fees and so on. This is the direction in which Britain is inevitably heading; we can either get there in two years or ten.
the british system is built on contradictions, some greater, some lesser. The government claims that its funding and inspection methods-regarded as intrusive and inflexible-are essential to maintaining uniform high standards throughout the system. In fact, goals and standards vary hugely-and not only between the ex-polytechnics (which became universities in 1992) and the rest. Yet one government minister has actually claimed that it is "snobbish" to argue that a degree from Luton does not have the same value as a degree from Oxford. Furthermore, most of the government's quality control measures are irrelevant. The Teaching Quality Assessment system rewards departments which waste the time of two faculty members for a year to assemble the paperwork that will get the department a perfect score. The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is a flat-footed five-yearly form of peer evaluation; in the US, informal but continuous peer competition and peer evaluation produce widely accepted rank orders that anyone funding research would go along with. Princeton has a Nobel prize-winning physics department because it is always looking over its shoulder at its rivals, not fidgeting about the RAE.
The popular image of a university is far removed from reality. The public thinks of Oxford as a place where most students get a liberal education in the arts and social sciences, and a few brave souls learn physics and chemistry. It is true that 60 per cent of the 11,000 undergraduates are non-scientists, but 25 per cent are physical scientists, and another 15 per cent study the biological sciences and medicine. But the research money at Oxford is spent not on history but on science: ?70m a year on research in the biological sciences, ?24m a year on research in the physical sciences-and only ?700,000 on research in the humanities. One eighth of Oxford's annual budget of ?400m goes to the medical school. The biological sciences and medicine have 1,800 research and "other" staff-the teaching staff is about 200. The research staff in the humanities are almost too few to count. So-called "research universities" are just that, with the big money going nowhere near the classroom.
Of course, only a few universities are research universities in that sense. Oxford, Cambridge, University College London (UCL), Imperial College, and one or two others each collect over ?30m a year from the Research Councils for research-and between ?80m and ?110m a year each from all sources (public and private). Of the 71 universities, the 16 independent Schools of London University, and 48 higher education colleges funded from public money, most get much less than ?1m for research. Thus we have more than 100 very different institutions doing very different things-not to mention another 172 further education colleges doing degree-level teaching on the cheap.
The fact that the system does not meet uniform standards is not deplorable-it is essential. It would be absurd to parcel out equal sums of research money to everyone. The Committee of Vice-Chancellors tries to preserve solidarity by concentrating on the few things that all universities have in common. But the system does three very different things-all legitimate, all done in very different ways. None is readily assimilable to the others-or to the single undifferentiated system we are supposed to have.
The first is vocational education-or, more grandly, investment in human capital. As economies become more technically demanding, so the quality of their human capital has to improve. Thirty years ago, a semi-skilled worker could make a decent living on the assembly line; now he couldn't secure the same income without a different set of skills. If the British economy is to leave its low value-added, metal-bashing past and join a fleeter and fitter world, lots of young people need several years of post-16 education.
This is the main impetus behind the expansion of further and higher education in the past dozen years. From a world in which 5 per cent (before 1960) and then 15 per cent (up to the mid-1980s) of school leavers went on to higher education, we have entered a world in which 35 per cent-45 per cent in Scotland-go on; and women students outnumber men (by 842,000 to 819,000 in 1996-97) for the first time.
What most of these new students want to do is heavily vocational; business studies faculties already outnumber humanities faculties by two to one. The British future is the American present-30 per cent of American students do some version of "business studies." In Britain, straight economics is declining as A-level business studies takes off. Visit the website of the University of Bournemouth and you find yourself deep into hotel management studies. Even reviled subjects such as media studies attract students because of their seeming relevance to media jobs, not because students have a passion for Baudrillard.
The second thing that some universities do is provide liberal education for its own sake. There are vocational arguments for traditional liberal education. The "transferable skills" beloved of ministers are, indeed, a feature of liberal education-which is predicated on reading accurately, writing lucidly, and discussing courteously. But pure liberal education exists to civilise its beneficiaries rather than to fit them for employment. What a decent liberal education does for students was well described by Robert Hughes in The Culture of Complaint. It takes them out of whatever insular environment they may be stuck in, and gives them ownership of the whole of human culture-in the sense that they feel that the hopes, beliefs, and cultural allegiances of any human being and any human society are, with sufficient patience and attention, accessible to them. Cardinal Newman thought the aim of a liberal education was to produce a "gentleman." Unfortunately, the upper-class connotations have stuck to the notion of liberal education, but the idea that it is "elitist" would have driven earlier generations of left-wing liberals and socialists wild with irritation. What they wanted was to make the cultural riches of the world available to people who had few other riches to hand.
The third task of universities is a sort of Olympic games for intellectuals. This is usually described as "pushing back the frontiers of knowledge," by doing "cutting-edge research." It also means teaching very clever students to become the next generation of cutting-edge researchers and scholars. In its pure, uncommercial form, it is both a dispassionate and a highly competitive activity. We want to know who is absolutely the best at whatever it might be-hunting quarks, deconstructing Shakespeare, rethinking the thoughts that Plato might have thought.
If you ask why anyone should try to understand Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories, you get Mallory's answer to the question of why anyone wants to climb Everest. But if you're asking governments, students and parents for their money, the more avowable answer is economic; an efficient economy is one in which the competition of individuals and companies produces the public benefits of innovation, low prices and high quality. Competition between very clever people to be first with the best answers yields the progress on which technological improvement depends. Academic life sorts the contributors to knowledge into the various levels of excellence of which they are capable and provides incentives to make them as good as they can be. It is this kind of higher education which British governments have been wrecking for two decades by making it increasingly unattractive to clever graduates.
these three different tasks for a university give different answers to the question of how many people should be there. The Olympic games version would settle for less than 10 per cent of school-leavers. For building human capital, the sensible policy is to educate everyone who will give you a positive return on your investment, probably at least 50 per cent of school leavers. If you take vocational education seriously and want to push up productivity and employability at good salaries, you cannot have nose-in-the-air responses to courses in golf management or catering. Certainly, the virtues of a liberal education are not prominent in courses in hotel management-but why should they be? Few people will get the intellectual buzz from portion control that philosophers get from Plato-but few of us would hire a philosopher to cook our dinner. Different goals need different approaches, and that's the end of it. Different people get different sorts of education, delivered at different degrees of intensity, and at different periods of their lives. The great shift in the take-up of higher education in the US has been from 18-year-old young men to mature women-and the same process is taking place in Britain. (The ability of several of the former polytechnics to attract a new generation of ethnic minority women is an unsung success story.)
It doesn't follow that a big institution cannot embrace different intellectual activities, or that vocational courses must shut out liberal education. Cornell University teaches quantum mechanics and also runs the world's best school of hotel management. Still, it is likely that geography, demography and resources will mean that one sort of enterprise will predominate inside any particular institution. Liberal education, for example, is best given in small colleges, in a tutorial mode. The Americans understand this. The undergraduate schools of Harvard, Chicago and the like are only 3,000-5,000 strong; free-standing liberal arts colleges, such as Williams or Amherst, rarely number 2,000 students. Keele University was a model of a liberal arts college in the US mode; its combination of a broad foundation year and a requirement that all students learned something of arts, social science and science subjects, achieved exactly what is needed. The foundation year has fallen victim to the erosion of university funding over the past two decades, and Keele has been normalised. So much for the commitment to diversity.
Many of the objectives of liberal education can be met in secondary school, out of school, or anywhere where there are people to talk to, books to read and art to appreciate. But a mass tertiary system providing vocational education for 60 per cent of the population ought, perhaps, to have some element of liberal education (to civilise our accountants a bit). Alternatively, you might think that 20 per cent or so should receive the American liberal arts experience-and that the vocational sector be left illiberally to get on with it. If you thought secondary education did a good job of general education, you would probably mind less that most tertiary education was vocational.
It certainly follows that there is no single set of high standards. If you measure the Oxbridge- London research universities in human capital terms, they do not do very well. They don't look for hidden talent, they polish visible talent; they don't do remedial work, because they reckon that they need highly trained young people to work with. But they often provide an excellent liberal education, and they rightly gobble up a disproportionate share of the research money awarded by the government and private bodies. Conversely, most of the students who thrive at the University of North London would have a tough time at Imperial College. It would be odd if students with ten starred 'A's in GCSE and three or four 'A's at A-level couldn't tackle more demanding courses than students with five 'C's and a couple of 'E's. This doesn't mean that the students at Imperial are in any deep sense "better students" than their peers elsewhere; it means that they seek different things, have different skills, and are at different stages of their intellectual careers. American "value added" tables show the California Institute of Technology-the most demanding of all US universities-producing negative value-added. It is not unlikely that the same criteria would reveal the same for the corresponding institutions in Britain. But they do well in "Olympic games" terms.
what does all this imply for the relations between government and higher education? The best step would be to take America seriously. Not all of it: there are some 4,000 tertiary institutions listed in the guides to post-high school education; many of these are storefront colleges of variable quality. But browse through the annual US News and World Report, which lists the best universities and colleges, and you see what a mixture of private and public initiative, and a largely "hands-off" approach by government, can produce. About half of all tertiary institutions are private and half-public, but 80 per cent of students go to the larger state-run public institutions, which include some of the best universities in the country (at least at graduate level), such as Berkeley and Michigan.
But the better-off private universities are another world again. Princeton is only 40 per cent of the size of Oxford-4,700 undergraduates and 1,500 graduates compared with 11,500 and 5,700. But its budget is about as big-$600m against ?400m. Princeton has an endowment of $6 billion. (The Oxford and Cambridge colleges are together worth about $5 billion, and much of their income goes on medieval roofs.) Almost half of Princeton students get financial aid, and the university spends $30m on them. Without help, the bill for an undergraduate education is steep-$33,000 a year. Tuition fees are $23,000.
British tuition fees, introduced last year at a flat rate of ?1,000 (rising with inflation), are one tenth of Princeton's. British tuition fees are paid in full only by parents with a combined annual income of more than ?35,000 and, of course, bear no relation to costs-clinical training for a doctor costs up to ?40,000 a year; an Oxford humanities undergraduate costs something like ?8,000 a year to teach.
It is essential to bring the marketplace further into the academy. This means allowing colleges and universities to pay faculty what they can afford, and to charge students what they will pay. The only immediate candidates for membership of a British Ivy League and full private status are Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Imperial College. (Legally, all universities are private bodies; it is their funding-and therefore governance-which is largely public.) But a plausible model for Britain as a whole is California, which has large numbers of private universities and colleges, ranging from the immensely rich Stanford through to lots of hand-to-mouth operations, as well as a highly subsidised public sector. The state runs a two-tier public system: the senior universities-Berkeley, UCLA and seven others-take the top 12.5 per cent of the state's high school graduates, while the 23 component colleges of the state university system take a further 350,000 full and part-time students. Fees at the senior universities are $3,700 this year, and the total cost for a student per annum is about $13,000. If you come from out of state you pay an extra $9,000-but still a lot cheaper than Princeton.
The lower tier state colleges are not vastly less expensive, but they are geared to students who attend part-time, or who want to return for a graduate top-up which will advance their careers. It is dearer than anything in Britain. On the other hand, Americans have struck a bargain under which they expect to pay for higher education; this is less painful than in Britain, because few pay for secondary education, and Americans pay lower income taxes. Thus far, British governments have lowered tax rates without persuading the middle-class public to draw the obvious conclusion. But "free higher education" is nonsense; the only question is: who pays for it and when. At present, even with tuition fees, British higher education remains a large subsidy to the top half of the income scale.
The American system is by no means perfect. It is far from a meritocracy-not only private institutions give preference to athletes and the children of alumni, so do public ones. The drop-out rate is too high. The children of well-to-do parents do much better than the children of poorer parents-just as they do here. There are some pretty crummy colleges, and exploitation of the part-time, adjunct teaching population is appalling-just like in Britain. But American diversity allows serious research institutions to hire the world's best researchers and scholars; and competition between them, rather than centralised inspection, keeps them up to the mark. It also allows cheap and cheerful post-secondary education to thrive without being held up to obloquy for not being some other sort of activity entirely-the complaint of many in the ex-polytechnic sector who now believe that achieving university status was a mistake.
For such a transition to work we need a cultural shift as well as a change of mind in government. David Blunkett and Tessa Blackstone, the relevant ministers, are said to be reluctant to go any further in the direction of market prices on grounds of access. But the scholarship system in the US has a better record on access for the non-privileged than our system has ever had. In any case, the anxiety about raising tuition fees in Britain is misplaced. The less well-off pay little or nothing in fees; it is the abolition of grants which is more likely to put off poorer students.
At present, the talk is of "top-up fees" for elite institutions. Better to let institutions charge what they think the market will bear. It is not beyond the wit of man to devise a scholarship programme based mostly on need. The state would have to help, for a transitional period in some cases, for ever in others. Elite universities could build up big scholarship endowments from a combination of the new super-rich alumni (if the tax incentives were right) and recycling the fees of the better-off. Meanwhile, better-off parents would have to accept that if they can afford private schools or houses in the catchment area of decent state schools, they can also afford to pay the tuition for their offspring at college, thereby securing them jobs and pay prospects far superior to non-graduates.
The transition need not be a big bang. A gentle migration could allow institutions to set their own tuition charges within limits, while a private/public scholarship system became established. Pointless mechanisms of supervision could be disbanded, but if the DfEE disliked losing the ability to waste everyone else's time, it could always follow the US pattern and appoint members to the governing bodies of publicly-funded higher education institutions.
The new system could account for public money without forbidding one institution to pursue excellence in its own way for fear that it might embarrass some other institution. The true test of an institution's use of funds (public or private) is the success of its graduates. Vocationally-oriented institutions would have every incentive to keep costs down because their competitors would try to undercut them; and whatever an institution charged above the going rate would have to pay off for its graduates in the job market.
In the 18th century, the French monarchy supervised French manufacturers in the interests of keeping up quality. Adam Smith pointed out that this was both ineffective and retrograde, when the market could stimulate innovation and improvement in a way that no centralised supervisory system ever achieved. When New Labour catches up with old Liberalism, we may hope to apply the lesson to our universities.
