The university funding debate continued

University funding is beginning to dominate op-ed pages. Yesterday, Matthew d’Ancona put the case for a graduate tax from the conservative perspective; and to which Douglas Carswell has responded. Today, Professor Alison Wolf, a specialist in Public Sector Management at KCL, makes the point that any debate about higher education funding is prejudiced because Britain’s politicians and policy makers are predominantly Oxbridge educated, and the structure of Oxbridge undergraduate degrees is radically different from anywhere else. Writing in the Times (£), she asserts:

‘I’ve sat in many meetings, in Whitehall and Westminster, where people have talked up credit systems (a modular system of assessment) without the faintest idea that we have one. The middle-aged were educated in a different system; at Oxbridge, our future rulers still are. There, full-time students take final examinations set centrally, not by the people who teach them. They learn in tiny groups, and receive weekly personalised feedback on non-assessed work: by far the best way to learn, and something that has pretty much vanished elsewhere.