I’ve just read a very powerful attack on the Browne report on University funding:
Essentially Collini argues that the press has missed the point by concentrating so hard on the questions of individual student funding. Of course raising tuition fees and loans is an important issue. However, it is more important to realise that Browne has recommended the removal of the majority of the government grant to fund teaching in universities and suggested replacing it with a market system.
All decisions on the teaching and funding of courses will effectively be left to the market to decide. 18 and 19 year olds are going to determine what is taught in Universities, which sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. This will surely lead to courses in playing video games, watching Murder She Wrote and how to cook a meal for four using just a tin of baked beans, some rice and a courgette. And no tin opener.
Students are the very worst people to decide what they should be studying! It’s like asking prisoners how thick they want the bars or how secure they'd prefer locks. Education should be about what people need to know, not just what they think they want to know.
Also, if we have a market forces system, that won’t improve the quality of the universities’ teaching. It will simply improve the quality of their advertising and marketing departments. Universities and colleges already advertise for students, boasting about their better facilities or cooler alumni. This will just get worse. Universities will start ripping out libraries and replacing them with cinemas, and their advertising will get more ambitious. I can just imagine new posters on buses: “Male graduates from Warwick have bigger penises.” Or: “Did you know that David Cameron went to Oxford? What a wanker.”
The bigger question must be: do we need so many students in so many universities? Labour’s aim to get 50% of young people into university was laudable to an extent, but only if the degrees were rigorous and useful. Degrees are now being devalued because the number of graduates has risen so much in the last few years. Jobs that never required a degree in the past are now asking for a 2.1 or above.
This means that poorer and less academic young people are hit with a double-whammy. Either they go to university, getting into a large amount of debt in the process, in order to have a chance in a crowded job market, or they decide not to get a degree and find themselves shut out of low paid roles that would once have been a good first step on the job ladder. It’s hard to see who wins in this inflationary environment.
The only thing that is clear is that the Browne report will do nothing to improve the situation. Elite universities will become more elite, but only in social terms. As Collini says:
“it is a necessary truth about markets that they tend to replicate and even intensify the existing distribution of economic power. ‘Free competition’ between rich and poor consumers means Harrods for the former and Aldi for the latter: that’s what the punters have ‘chosen’.”
Beautifully put.
Universities are a public good, like a health service, a road system or a collective understanding that Simon Cowell is a prick. They should be funded and supported properly, not abandoned to a free market experiment that could quite possibly lead to Cambridge and Oxford charging £40,000 a year and the University of McDonalds offering a six month course in advanced burger-flipping techniques. Applying a market system to the public sector is almost always a failure. Remember the railways. A free market university system will be a similar disaster. Lectures will be cancelled due to a lack of available staff or leaves on the lectern.
In terms of funding, we don’t need loans or a graduate tax. We already have income tax, which acts as a basic graduate tax already. If you earn more, you pay more. The Government always claims that graduates earn more, so therefore they pay more. Yes, non-graduates pay more too, but that’s just the price to pay for living in a progressive society. I don’t have children so I don’t use schools, nurseries or maternity services. However I have no objection to helping to pay for them.
Sadly this sort of thinking doesn’t appear very popular at the moment, in the rush to save money and slash budgets. I’m just very glad that I went to university before all of these reforms. Students are going to have to make some very difficult decisions in the years ahead. Universities will be very different places. Although they’ll have cool cinemas and amazing bars so the students probably won’t care.
3 comments:
Excellently put. I'm currently in my third year of studies, so although I won't be affected by coming changes, it's all too easy to see how they're going to help the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
Mr Green you are so right. I am a student at the moment, the job market is impossible, debts are rising, everything is going to hell... yet, although the world may see us as lazy slobs, we do know what is best for us, and maybe if adults were to listen to us for once, we can come to a sensible solution that is benificial for both students and the economy!
I opened a can of baked beans with an oyster knife once. I think I had a hammer too.
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