New Labour's plan for higher education

...How they will do it, they promise to tell us before the next general election...

...Because nobody understands university financing— it is not the most exciting subject even for those who spend their lives trying to make ends meet—the political debate became extremely heated but not very enlightened...

...that British Nobel prize winners were few and far between (and mostly employed in the United States...

...it can either force universities to take under-qualified students, whom the more prescriptive syllabus of British universities will treat much more harshly than the looser syllabuses of American schools do, or it can force universities to drop their standards so that underqualified students survive and leave with an apparently reputable degree...

...The teachers and researchers observed that their salaries had dropped some 30 percent behind their former peer group, which included Members of Parliament...

...This is partly because the Conservatives have no policy whatsoever...

...They have been greeted with universal derision—rightly...

...In 1997, the government's allpurpose troubleshooter, Lord Dearing, authored a report recommending that students should pay a tuition fee, and that they should receive a small grant for living expenses and be able to borrow enough to make up the difference between the grant and their costs...

...Within wide limits, it was up to institutions to balance the need for human and material resources, and to balance spending on academic staff and support staff—whence a long tradition of having quite generous ratios of faculty to students and just about no secretarial support at all...

...Basically, it has been saying that it will ensure that working-class students will find it easier to get into elite universities that they presently shun...

...It is a measure of the government's desperation that they have just given a peerage to the former general secretary of the Labour Party—who is, as it happens, an old friend of mine whom I first met when he was leading the Trotskyist radicals at the University of Essex in the mid-1960s...

...So, we should begin with the most alien feature of all: Britain possesses only one institution of higher education whose teaching receives no assistance at all from the taxpayer...

...Of course, innumerable critics complained that other countries, notably the Soviet Union and the United States, converted pure science into economic growth and technological advance in ways the British didn't...

...British academics looked with horror at the interfering habits of American trustees when it came to private colleges and universities and the interfering habits of state legislators when it came to public colleges and universities...

...A government that was always longer on rhetoric than on delivery took no very great notice of all this, insisting that standards were rising in all directions, and that in the absence of their pressure for efficiencies, British teachers and researchers would work less enthusiastically...

...It will fall to him to try to steer through the House of Lords a measure that he would have gone to the barricades to defeat, not only when he was a student thirty-five years ago, but when he led the Association of University Teachers a mere five years ago...

...They were—this being Britain—very conscious that their standing in the eyes of the public was not that of the "real" universities...

...where universities had been the destination of better off eighteen-year-old, white, young men, they now took in more mature students, more women, more ethnic minorities, more part-timers...

...But what the government did was commit itself to increasing tuition by two and a half times—to some $5,500 a year in 2006...

...they provided a lot of sub-degree level courses...

...Government decided that Britain needed more students in higher education...

...the maintenance backlog is conservatively estimated at some $15 billion...

...The cold war era of loyalty oaths in the United States was the golden age of publicly paid for academic independence in Britain...

...It also says that it will not dictate entry standards and will not force affirmative action on universities...

...F, ROM THE universities' perspective, the poisonous feature of all this is that the government has made increasingly farfetched claims about the quid pro quo it will exact for the new money that will go into higher education...

...The alien aspects of British academic life are harder to explain, partly because most of them can be found in some shape or form somewhere on the American scene...

...DISSENT / Spring 2004 • 13...

...All the same, viewed in Labour Party terms, there had been real progress: 35 percent of young people went on to higher education of some sort, and that was four times as many as thirty years before...

...ALAN RYAN is a warden at New College, Oxford University...

...Studies related to business became overwhelmingly the most popular courses for the new students...

...But forty years ago, Harvard and Princeton envied Oxford and Cambridge for many of the things for which Oxford and Cambridge now envy them...

...their mandate was vocational, local, and practical...

...This is the University of Buckingham, a tiny college founded some thirty years ago and that has proved beyond much doubt that the British will not support private higher education if they can get the taxpayer to provide instead...

...The real fun will begin in a couple of months when the House of Lords gets the bill...

...The result is that the increased income for higher education comes to perhaps $1.75 billion—a bit above half the recurrent shortfall, and a ninth of the backlog...

...The newly elected Labour government was terrified of accusations of profligacy, and made its first fatal mistake by refusing to restore grants for living costs, though it cut the cost of tuition for the poorest students—a pretty meager concession, because tuition was a maximum of $1,500 a year and living expenses five times that...

...The origins of the arm's length system of distribution, however, go back to an age when governments were much more hesitant about trying to dictate to other institutions...

...The people in the Treasury from whom it emanates almost invariably went to Oxford or Cambridge, and in their own lives would never for a moment believe "that a history course is a history course is a history course," no matter who delivered it, where, and to what level of student...

...This irritated universities, which found themselves facing the wrath of students who were paying the fees and getting nothing for their pains...

...It worked very well for temporary reasons, however...

...The real shortage of funds in the British system is on the capital side...

...The consequences are that the "unit of resource"—management-speak for what a university has to spend every year—has dropped by 40 percent over the past fifteen years...

...For half a century, the system worked rather well...

...Even more striking, this government, with a majority of 161, only got its bill through the House of Commons by five votes...

...It turned rather swiftly into old-fashioned British class warfare...

...Imagine a measure coming to a Senate in which there are twenty-five former university presidents, all of them with a powerful hatred of the government agencies that had starved their POLITICS ABROAD schools of funds...

...At this moment—early March—the higher education bill is sitting in committee...

...To say loudly that low-status institutions would have less money because they were teaching less demanding courses to less well-qualified students was quite beyond the Labour Party...

...None of this would surprise an American observer who took it for granted that Britain experienced the social transformations that the United States experienced, but rather more gently and twenty years later...

...and it seemed absurd to many critics who contrasted government rhetoric about wanting to get more students from poor backgrounds into higher education with the sociological evidence that poor students were the most likely to be deterred from taking on debt in the form of student loans...

...it achieved some of what it wanted by a move that is probably quite inexplicable in American terms...

...So, in 1992, the Conservative government of the day turned the polytechnics into universities, doubling overnight the proportion of students attending university...

...In the United Kingdom, funding is absolutely uniform...

...and it cut no ice with students, who were perfectly aware that a place that demanded the equivalent of SAT scores of 1600 in school-leaving exams was going to carry more weight with employers than one that was content with the equivalent of SAT scores of 850 or so...

...Only a few universities did a lot of expensive science— Oxford was not among them until the 1950s—and the liberal sentiments that led governments to support the arm's length system of payment also led them to favor pure science done by pure scientists...

...The government of the day also set out to ensure that any course in any university cost no more to deliver than it cost at the cheapest university...

...Tuition was also negligible and paid by the state on the student's behalf...

...For a long time, Britain had two parallel higher education streams: "polytechnics" were owned, run, and managed by public education authorities...

...More practically, they were conscious that their staff were paid worse, had less agreeable working conditions, and were subjected to a management that was more City Hall than Ivory Tower...

...Universities were chartered to award their own degrees and could within limits lay on whatever courses they liked...

...and that they knew their students were generally getting a worse deal than twenty years before...

...Every institution receives grants from a Higher Education Funding Council that acts as a conduit through which tax-generated funds are channeled to each institution for a variety of purposes...

...And then it made large numbers of concessions to alleviate the impact of this rise on poorer students...

...And this all had an impact on the educational offerings available to students...

...because it was low, governments cheerfully subsidized students to live away from home with generous living allowances, so that a student who lived reasonably economically got a genuinely free education, with no loans to repay...

...This meant that every time a new institution was accorded the title of "university," it claimed, or pretended, that it was exactly like the institution last admitted to the fold...

...It's familiar to the extent that during the 1980s and 1990s Britain experienced something very like the surge in enrollments and the change in demographics that American higher education experienced in the 1960s...

...The delay was testimony to the extraordinary passions that higher education policy has aroused in the past three years...

...staff-student ratios were worsening...

...For a rather charming reason, or at any rate for a reason that reflects a certain credit on DISSENT / Spring 2004 n I I POLITICS ABROAD British academics...

...the aim was to allow universities the widest possible freedom of action, especially in matters where academic judgment was called for, and to protect academic freedom from the desire of funders to dictate how their money was spent...

...Unlike the American Congress, the British Parliament gets bills in and out of committee very swiftly...

...And the grants that students had once received for their living costs were not just held back below the rate of inflation, but increasingly cut outright and the gap filled by loans carrying interest at low but nonetheless real rates...

...At any rate, it allowed the Labour backbenchers who have never seen the point of education beyond the level of the local technical college to denounce the intellectual snobbery of Cambridge and Imperial College, London...

...One of many paradoxes about educational policy in Britain is that so much of it is driven by a rather Victorian view of value for money emanating from the Treasury...

...The funding council system is a typically British device for squaring the legally independent status of universities with the brute facts of public funding—unlike the hospitals through which the National Health Service operates, they are not publicly owned, and unlike the doctors who are employees of the National Health Service, professors are not public employees, but the great bulk of the fundDISSENT / Spring 2004 n 9 POLITICS ABROAD ing for teaching comes from government funds...

...And it allowed everyone who was fed up with the leadership of Tony Blair to give him a bloody nose without running any great risk of letting in the Conservative Party...

...What universities received were "block grants," which is to say, money that had to be spent either on the teaching or research functions of the university, but was not otherwise earmarked for particular aspects of teaching or research...

...Why was it so hard to fix the problems...

...The average is now lower than it was at the under-resourced polytechnics of the 1980s...

...This carried no conviction with the public at large, since it was like pretending that CalTech was engaged in just the same activities as a community college up the street...

...Still, faculty were underpaid, universities were broke, and taxpayers were averse both to signing a blank check and to seeing students turned away...

...But even if it cut no ice with the public, its effect was to make it just about impossible to ration resources in the way that, say, the state of California rations them between the University of California, the state universities, and community colleges...

...The other crucial factor was that the cost 10 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 of scientific research was not outrageous...

...They were several cuts above an American community college, but several cuts below a California state university...

...Such is the environment that ennobled vice-chancellors will provide for the bill...

...The percentage of young people going to university rose from around 15 percent to around 40 percent...

...One was that the proportion of young people going into higher education was very low—it rose from around 3 percent to around 8 percent in the early 1960s...

...By the mid1990s, it was clear that higher education was under pressure...

...WHAT HAPPENED next was what happens when public provision is expanded against the background of sharp inflation in the seventies and increasing tax aversion in the eighties and nineties...

...Anyone with a reasonable understanding of higher education in the United States will find the British scene both very familiar and very alien...

...They did only small amounts of research for the benefit of local industries—so you might get aeronautical engineering in one place, hotel management in another, and packaging design and technology in another...

...they claim they will abolish tuition fees but make the universities more prosperous by so doing...

...When it comes to controlling public spending, though, they run exactly that line...

...The oddity is that in many respects higher education has been a British success story, so government timidity on the one side and public fury on the other side seem hard to explain...

...New Labour's second fatal error was to claw back from the universities' funding almost all of the money the universities took in from student fees...

...Polytechnics gave degrees that were certified by a public body—the Council for National Academic POLITICS ABROAD Awards—and their courses had to be approved by that body, too...

...this was perhaps a relief for many people who had found the politics of Iraq I2 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 complicated or frustrating...

...Universities had diverted money needed for maintenance into staff salaries in order to avoid layoffs, so universities were increasingly shabby...

...As a result, universities are in no position to question the terms on which the government provides the funds they need to remain in operation, faculty are in a poor position to negotiate over pay, and students regard higher education as a social service rather on a par with health care...

...Because the fundamental problem is the absence of working-class applicants with adequate qualifications—the British class gap is much like that in SATs in the United States—the government cannot have what it wants...

...students wrote less and had their work looked at less carefully...

...The government issued its White Paper on Higher Education in January 2003—"White Papers" are arcane BritSpeak for the publications in which British governments set out their finalized views on what legislation will contain when it is eventually put before Parliament—but only brought its legislation before Parliament in late January of this year...

...Although the British are much given to snobbery, they are very averse to academic snobbery...

...They were also not academically autonomous...

...So, the government dug itself a deep hole and lowered itself into it...

...The White Paper was in fact described as "Greenish" a year ago—"Green Papers" are the consultation documents that governments issue, either to test opinion and provoke more debate or else to deflect attention for long enough to bury an issue without further action...

...Buildings are decayed, eminent scientists are working in rundown labs with out of date materials...

...The recurrent deficit is only about a sixth of that...

...Liberal arts courses did not diminish in absolute numbers, but they diminished very dramatically as a proportion of course offerings...

...So, what has been happening...

...It annoyed the students, who had thought a Labour government would sympathize with them...

...Moreover, British completion rates remained higher than in most countries-80 percent of students finished in the three years they were signed up for, while barely a half of American students finish in five years, and German students rarely escape in less than seven years...

...0 NE MIGHT nonetheless wonder how this adds up to a political disaster for Tony Blair and New Labour...