What if?

Christmas rumour runs rife. Tony Blair and Charles Clarke are alleged to be willing to resign if their variable top-up fee solution to the funding problems of universities fails.

It seems unlikely to come to that. It even seems improbable that they will lose the vote on top-up fees. But it is certainly possible that the plan will have to be watered down so far as to do precious little for the universities - and in particular those that can still make some claim to being world class.

So imagine that, one way or another, the top-up fee debate is lost. How will the top universities react over the next 15 years or so? This is how it might look from the vantage point of 2020



The demise of English universities, especially at the undergraduate level, was relatively swift. Between 1983 and 2003 the number of university students doubled and, at the old universities, the amount spent per student halved. Staff-student ratios, once twice as good as the US, became noticeably worse. At the end of that period, Britain spent far less per student on higher education than the norm for developed countries. The tutorial at most universities disappeared (and was threatened even at Oxbridge). Staff-student contact was radically reduced.

These trends continued in the first decade of the 21st century. And without the new money that had been expected from top-up fees, many English undergraduate programmes came under serious threat in 2005-06. For most established universities, undergraduate programmes for local students were a financial loss leader, meaning that the universities spent more than the government gave them and made up the shortfall with fee-paying foreigners, or just ran up deficits. In 2006, many of the more prestigious universities began to try to "do an LSE," packing in non-EU students, mainly from the US and rich families in developing countries, in order to raise the income to produce a good education for local students. But the government, now led by Gordon Brown, passed a law in 2007 which held the quota of foreign students at 25 per cent, once more plunging the universities into crisis.

A few universities - in particular Oxford and Cambridge - talked openly about going private, as they were legally entitled to do. When they had mooted this in the late 1990s, Tessa Blackstone threatened that they might make themselves ineligible for research grants. The same threat was repeated in 2006. For a while the five big research universities - Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL and King's - which received more than half of government research money, acted together and it seemed they might call the government's bluff. But the vice-chancellors panicked at the last moment when scientists threatened motions of no confidence.

What then happened had been widely predicted. Undergraduate education in England became more obviously second rate at almost all universities. Parents in China, Malaysia and Singapore realised that undergraduate programmes at average US colleges had overtaken even the most famous English universities. The German and French upper classes also started to switch to the US. Moreover, many affluent British families or those with very bright children joined this European brain drain to the ivy league, Chicago, Stanford and the national liberal arts colleges in the US (which stepped up headhunting in English schools, offering attractive financial packages to potential students).

Despite the dubious statistics produced by the department of education, the brain drain to North America, especially in the sciences, was devastating. Even in 2003, one quarter of all fellows of the Royal Society taught abroad. In that year Britain won three Nobel prizes - two going to British scientists at US state universities.

For a while the research arrangements for English universities continued as before. But it soon became clear that in many disciplines, research needed to be attached to serious undergraduate programmes. With the best British brains in the US, two of the government's research-granting bodies declared in 2008 that they could find no good use for one third of the money they were meant to be distributing.

Not everyone was unhappy. The weaker universities were pleased that the top-up fees scheme had fallen, since it meant their funding was secure no matter what their merits. The Association of University Teachers had seen off merit pay and the other things associated with a vibrant university sector. Middle England seemed content that its particular niche in the welfare state was preserved - anything was better than having to pay for the "uni." And, if the truth be told, despite unease expressed by employers that all the best British graduates were being snapped up by American companies, the economy continued to perform well - marching a step or two ahead of continental Europe and a step or two behind the US.

Then a couple of strange things happened in 2020. The aged Lord Dobson, furious at the destruction of Britain's science base, introduced a motion in the House of Lords calling for the privatisation of English universities so that they might compete with US ones. And Dame Polly Toynbee demanded in the Guardian that England establish its own ivy league so that we might recreate an Anglo-European intellectual academy to engage with "our own distinctive political and cultural problems this side of the ever-widening Atlantic."