Opinion polls these days don’t normally raise more then passing interest. But there are always exceptions worth a second look. One such was a YouGov survey out on Wednesday on what people thought about university finance. The big question was whether they believed nearly £30,000 for three years at college was good value for money. Among graduates, many of whom will have paid these fees, the answer (by a margin of well over two to one) was clear. They didn’t. For good measure, nearly half of the graduates polled thought most degrees actually left them worse off overall, against just over a third who thought they led to financial benefits.
Many, no doubt, will draw a predictable conclusion. The government must be shamed or bullied into disowning the decision by the coalition ten years ago to set the present fee (which was about three times the previous one). England should be manoeuvred into following Scotland and Wales, eliminating or greatly cutting tuition fees, and correspondingly increasing its direct subsidy to students and universities.
For the more thoughtful, however, there may be some rather more radical, and indeed hopeful, inferences to be drawn. Whoever has the higher education portfolio next week could do worse than read this survey quite carefully.
Why not quietly take this opportunity to drop talk of scholarship as a commodity and students as consumers of it?
First, despite the comments on value for money, a clear majority actually liked the present system of fees plus loans, more than support through general or (hypothecated graduate) taxation. This is a relief for the government, which would otherwise face enormous cash demands. But it is also good for independent-minded students and academics: universities entirely, or nearly entirely, dependent on taxation are in danger of becoming politically subservient, as has been occasionally pointed out in the case of Scotland.
Secondly, if YouGov is right an intelligent government could, with apparent public approval, not only accept but actually run with the finding that university is not ‘value for money’. Why not quietly take this opportunity to drop talk of scholarship as a commodity and students as consumers of it?
This will admittedly come hard, especially to free-marketers. Indeed, it was one such, David Willetts, who airily but foolishly justified the 2012 fee hike by telling students that their vastly pricier degree remained a good buy because it was ‘an excellent investment in your future.’ The case is nevertheless becoming ever stronger for abandoning the make-believe that seats of learning are just a different kind of service provider that could use some private sector management, and students canny consumers raring to stimulate some healthy competition.
For make-believe it is. Universities are expensive to run and many of their benefits intangible. Fees, at almost any figure in reach of the non-plutocratic, cannot support them. It would be far more honest for government to see colleges not as sellers of a commodity but for what they really are, or at least should be: charitable institutions serving a social purpose and requiring subscriptions from those wanting to use their facilities, and as such deserving both top-up assistance from the state and the provision of help for those who cannot otherwise pay their dues. Seeing students not as consumers but as users would also reduce the pressure on universities to promote specious and distracting measures of quality such as ‘student satisfaction’, and concentrate instead on their core function: providing learning to those who really want it.
Thirdly, last week’s findings leave room for some serious thought about university numbers. From the figures given, it seems a fair inference that a goodly number of graduates believe – some no doubt as a result of personal experience – that a degree is neither a good bargain at the time nor very beneficial in later life. This is significant. If we are encouraging people to go to university when they think they get neither good value there nor later advantage elsewhere we should be worried; all the more so if we are subsidising them to do it with public money. The government may now find it increasingly easy to say what it has only hinted at obliquely before: that a fair number of people who currently go to our universities should not have gone there, but should have been encouraged to seek other, probably more beneficial, options.
Indeed, this last point gains force from a further number buried in the YouGov report. Just before Christmas last year, the government tentatively mooted an idea to deny student support from those without minimal GCSE qualifications, and encourage them instead to look elsewhere. Then howls of anguish followed from the academic blob at this squeezing of its power. In this week’s polling, by contrast, the respondents actually backed these proposals by something like three to one.
Whether the government will choose to take a cue from of all this and begin to think seriously about how many students (or universities, for that matter) it should support is not certain. But one thing is clear. Whatever the academic establishment says (and its spokesman was quick with a soothing assurance that high prices had not dampened demand for places), there is noticeable public unease at what has happened to universities, a surprising willingness to accept change, and a chance for an enterprising government to initiate it. Before university life became a middle-class rite of passage in the 1960s and an investment in earning power in this century, universities were genuine havens for those seriously interested in scholarship, without too much regard to their own future wealth. What about some serious planning to return to that situation?
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