Our universities are in a mess. Too many degrees lack intellectual quality and utility, and leave those doing them with little but disappointment and debt. Nor is the debt limited to students. Foreign student numbers, on which many institutions rely, are drastically down, and it is an open secret that three big names (Cardiff, York, and Goldsmiths) and at least three less prestigious institutions (notably Lincoln, Kingston, and Middlesex) are making cuts or haemorrhaging money.
We clearly need to think radically, both about the purpose of university education and how many institutions a government with limited funds should support
We clearly need to think radically, both about the purpose of university education and how many institutions a government with limited funds should support. Unfortunately the government intends nothing of the sort, and has instead opted for a comfortable life.
At last week’s annual conference in Reading of Universities UK, the trade body for academic top brass, science minister Peter Kyle airily denied that that there might be too many universities. He went on to scold the Conservatives, who to their credit had before the election been asking some very awkward questions about the sector, for having ‘called into question’ the value of a degree. A couple of days earlier, universities minister Baroness Smith (ex-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith under Blair) hinted at some kind of financial rescue for hard-hit institutions. Cuts might be required, but largely it was going to be business as usual. A big university sector is, as she put it, ‘vital to delivering the skills that we need’, and does research ‘vital to shaping the economy of tomorrow.’
These indications of governmental intentions are depressing, for several reasons. One is their sheer superficiality. Peter Kyle’s speech included the line that universities were no more in excess than sandwich shops:
‘I don’t think the [university] sector is too big at the moment. This is the problem… You wouldn’t say that about any other sector. You can’t walk down the street without passing ten sandwich shops. Well is the UK sandwich sector too big? It’s seeped into the narrative in the last decade about higher education.’
This rather ignores the fact that most branches of Greggs or Gails aren’t propped up by the taxpayer on the pretext of being a public good.
The speech also confirmed Kyle as someone who – casually combining blasé philistinism with intellectual myopia – sees higher education in terms of colleges selling goods in much the same way that baristas peddle black coffee.
Baroness Smith for her part neatly glossed over the fact that many of the skills that Britain has in short supply aren’t provided for, or aren’t best provided, by university degrees. Or that many publicly-funded research programmes, in such things as ‘Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism’ (a genuine example, unfortunately not that untypical) are, to say the least, problematic when it comes to either intellectual advancement or the promotion of the technological revolution.
Secondly, while a programme of bailing out failing universities no doubt sounds good to an audience of those who manage and teach in them, not to mention giving useful help to MPs in these constituencies, its benefits for higher education as a whole are less obvious. For one thing, one might have thought that allowing some of the less successful institutions to fail and distributing at least some of the public monies saved among the rest was a fairly obvious way of raising standards as a whole. By contrast, ruling out such closures while demanding savings in the hardest-hit institutions is a sure-fire recipe for making a mediocre sector yet more mediocre.
It would also incidentally endanger the very international student income which the government wishes to encourage. The international student market may be lucrative, but it is also fiercely competitive. If Britain insists on spreading funding thinly in order to save mediocre institutions, there are plenty of other universities in Australia, Canada and elsewhere prepared to take up the slack.
It is all very well for Baroness Smith to talk of preserving a large university sector as necessary for giving as many young people as possible a chance to succeed. The reality may be rather different. Increasing numbers of young people regret that they have been pushed into university by schools and careers advisers insisting that it is necessary to get on in life. If they find that their degree gives them no particular advantage, they may well wish that they had saved a good deal of the time involved, and most of the debt, and found some other way into their chosen career.
In higher education, as in many other things, Labour is showing itself not as the party of change but as a deeply reactionary force. Rather than asking difficult questions and being prepared to embrace uncomfortable answers, it has taken the easy way out by placating the Blob and perpetuating an outdated view of university study as a rite of passage and entree to middle-class life that needs to be spread as widely as possible.
Voters will in time cotton on to the fact, perhaps sooner than Labour hopes, that this retreat into platitudes and comfortable words is not benefiting young people, nor universities, nor the country as a whole.
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