In 1881, the entire student body of Somerville college, Oxford numbered 18. At Corpus Christi college, down the road, a total of 15 freshmen matriculated and started their degrees that year. Today these colleges enroll over 300 students each; yet they remain the intimate, elite corner of university life. British universities these days conjure up images of vast examination halls, packed lecture theatres and overcrowded libraries catering for 1.5m students.
In that same year of 1881 the mining workforce numbered millions. In the London docks, thousands were hired by the day to handle goods by hand. This industrial working class survived well into the postwar period, but today it is gone. The typical workplace today employs only a few dozen people, has a flat management structure and rising skill requirements. But while workplace numbers have been shrinking, university numbers have been exploding. These numerical changes determine the choices individuals make for themselves; they affect the whole internal structure of education; and define the limited number of policies that governments can adopt.
The educational take-off
In the second part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the educational system throughout the industrial world was pyramid shaped. The bulk of the population attended only elementary schools, where they were taught the 3 Rs, and left at about 13 for work. Some went into formal apprenticeships, a few into craft or technical schools, but the majority learned on the job in manual occupations. A small middle and upper class population followed a curriculum which, uniformly, focused on the classical languages or mathematics. This was true in state-funded gymnasia, or lycea, or lyc?es, or in privately funded "public schools." A high proportion of this already elite group progressed to universities, which in Europe in 1900 were enrolling less than 1 per cent of the age cohort.
Today, the developed world shares a very different educational structure. The majority of young people no longer leave school at the first opportunity, but stay in formal education, and collect formal qualifications. This shift to post-compulsory education happened very quickly. In the space of just 14 years-the time it takes a child to proceed from nursery to filling in university entrance forms-the participation rate of 16-year-olds in England and Wales rose from 42 to 72 per cent. Similarly, in just over 20 years, the percentage of the age cohort taking A-levels (or Highers in Scotland) has doubled. They are now taken by well over one third of the age group; yet they were designed for only 5 to 10 per cent of students. During the early to mid-1950s, for example, A-levels were attempted by only 6 per cent of young people .
In higher education the change has been yet more dramatic. At the turn of the century less than 1 per cent of the age group entered British universities; on the eve of the second world war this had just about doubled; by 1953 it was still only a little over 3 per cent. Today it is ten times that figure. Nearly one third of all young people now enter higher education. Universities have become mass institutions. Elsewhere the picture is similar. In France over the past 15 years the number of university enrolments has doubled to 1.5m. In Germany the number of university students had swollen to 1.3m by 1993, with an additional 400,000 higher technical students.
How do these number tyrannise? Once a society reaches a certain point on the participation curve, it seems that it is doomed to carry on. This is not because of any governments' particular policies or because education has changed, or got easier, or more relevant to the workplace. The reason is that once a certain proportion of the population is obtaining particular credentials, the pressure on the remainder to do so increases enormously. Imagine you are living in England in 1953, with only 3 per cent, not 33 per cent of the age cohort attending university. In that situation, an employer looking for able and desirable employees knows that they are to be found in the non-graduate pool. It may be very enjoyable to go to university, and, indeed, be the route to the top of the steep pyramid, the elite. But for most people, in most working and social environments, it is irrelevant.
But what happens when the higher education participation rate starts to move up fast? Suppose you move to a situation where three quarters of the young population have baccalaureats, and one quarter have degrees? It is, theoretically, possible that many or most of the new graduates are not the most able in the age cohort. But this is not a very plausible conclusion for an employer to reach. It is much simpler to conclude that the increase in the qualified population has all come from the upper end of the ability distribution. In practice, this is exactly the simplifying assumption that employers do make. They hire the qualified.
From the point of view of 16 or 17-year olds, the dominating fact of life is competition: they are in competition with each other all the time. Their aim is to make themselves visible, different from their peers, desirable to the gatekeepers who control opportunities. The vast enterprises which used to offer jobs to school leavers in their area have gone. Instead, to enter the job market you have to stand out among a mass of applicants and catch the attention of an employer offering one, or very few openings.
Some teenagers will conclude-consciously or subconsciously-that they are stuck at the bottom of the distribution. Because they have not done well up to now, whatever effort they make will come too late. This group is very likely to stop studying and drop out; and it is noticeable that most countries do indeed have a group of about 10 per cent whom they cannot reach educationally.
But for the majority of young people the calculation is different. Once a certain proportion of their peers has a given qualification-and are perceived by the world as belonging to the top end of the ability distribution-the pressure on the others to follow is great. By not acquiring that qualification, they would effectively portray themselves to the world as belonging in the tail. Hence the sudden acceleration in staying on in full-time education-reinforced by the disappearance of the mass industrial workforce.
Vocational education and training
What impact on vocational education and training does the tyranny of numbers have? Training in Britain has recently enjoyed an undisputed reputation as the engine of future economic success and the panacea for the unemployed. Politicians affirm their commitment to "parity of esteem" for vocational and academic awards. But when you look at the pattern of demand, not only in Britain but throughout the world, you find a flight away from vocational education and towards general academic education.
The main European countries all provide examples of this trend, although the details vary. The Netherlands, for example, has a tradition of high quality and respected full-time vocational schools which provided full-time craft training to a significant portion of the population. No longer. In the words of Jaap Dronkers from the University of Amsterdam, these schools have become "a rubbish bin," used only by those whom no other school will accept.
In Germany, too, the last few decades have seen a flight away from the vocational schools. The numbers taking the academic Abitur have risen steadily; but so, too, have those taking the intermediate certificate, with its broader educational content, at the expense of the shrinking vocational option. The flight from vocational qualifications is particularly striking to a British observer because of the way the German post-school "dual system" of apprenticeship has been idealised in Britain. Meanwhile Britain's own figures for vocational training continue to stagnate, despite the best efforts of government and the training industry. Interest in A-levels continues to grow as does the popularity of the intermediate route-BTEC Nationals and GNVQs-while vocational awards proper are failing to attract many teenagers. However good the vocational courses, however well managed and well conceived, if enough young people are doing academic qualifications then the mere fact of taking a vocational one implies, to the outside world, that an individual is at the bottom end of the ability curve.
Huge increases in numbers also mean that awards and qualifications which were originally seen as equivalent become stratified. This can be a complicated and messy process; but it happens in every country, and that country's inhabitants-especially its young people-very quickly learn to "read" the system. France is a case in point because it has developed what is apparently a unified system of upper secondary education, with a range of different programmes leading to baccalaureats, all of which enjoy the same official level and status as university entrance qualifications. In reality these different baccalaureats enjoy quite different prestige, and any French 18-year-old can give you the pecking order immediately-with the mathematics bac at the top.
Qualifications: Tariffs and trade
The sheer volume of qualifications means that we are forced into ways of counting and comparing them with one another which may be quite unjustified on substantive grounds, but are otherwise simple, quick and numerical. And the volume is enormous. In England and Wales alone, the examination boards dealt in 1994 with 5,341,623 GCSE entries. In 1953 only 901,300 students entered for comparable public examinations (O-levels). In 1994, A-level entries stood at 979,769, compared to 117,975 at the earlier date. For each one of these numbers there are papers and coursework which must be organised, collected, logged, marked, entered as a statistic, conveyed to school and candidate, and stored against possible appeal.
In the process of expanding participation at all levels of education we have also moved to a situation where we reduce public examinations to a simple points system. You get so many points for an A grade, so many for a B, so many for a C and so on. These points totals are increasingly important in determining university entrance, as higher educa-tion, faced with ever greater numbers of students and worsening staff student ratios, abandons interviews in favour of a mechanistic, numerical and "fair" process of selection.
The process by which numbers breed numbers has at its heart a disturbing paradox. We are being forced by the scale of the educational enterprise to reduce things to numbers because numbers can, on the face of it, be added and equated. Two points plus two points makes four, wherever those points come from. Yet that same educational expansion means that things are actually less standard, and therefore probably less comparable, then ever before. For points purposes, a C in A-level business studies has to be counted as numerically the same as a C in photography or further mathematics; but the more you think about it, the more unclear it becomes what this actually means. If one economics undergraduate combines his main studies with English literature and another with mathematics, can we really treat the different assessments as somehow the same for calculating degree class? What, in this situation, does it mean to say that both received a 2.1 in a joint economics honours programme? The result of our current need to translate everything into a single numerical tariff is that standards become at once more heterogeneous and far more political.
Standards are also an economic issue. All important commodities are traded; and education is an important commodity. In 1992-93 the export value of international students to the British economy was at least ?716m-twice the value of coal, gas and electricity exports, and over half that of inorganic chemicals, one of the sectors in which Britain is a global leader. These figures reflect the perception that a British degree is good value in the global market.
The growth of English as a world language has benefited British education; but its success depends ultimately on whether people feel that British education is of high quality and good value. If the perception changes, it is not simply that overseas students will disappear. In line with other countries, we will also find our own middle classes investing in overseas degrees and even secondary schooling. In an open economy, you cannot protect a large industry from global trends; and a large industry is what education has become. The growing importance of formal qualifications in a high skill economy has effected a transformation in British education in the last decades, creating self-perpetuating pressures on young people in this country as well as the rest of the developed world. The next century will, in all probability, carry this to an increasingly global level.
