Real reform was needed. But this coalition fudge on tuition fees will leave our medieval institutions unruffled by change
There are three sorts of conservative: a conservative, a fanatical conservative, and a university. Change nothing, it cries. I am poor but perfect. I am special. I am the future. Just give me the money.
The coalition proposals on university tuition fees published by the business secretary, Vince Cable, this week should just about rescue most English universities from the horror of a 40% cut in teaching grant over five years. But that is all they will do. They keep institutions that should be made more autonomous firmly under the thumb of the government and, as if to compensate, they relieve them of the need to look inside themselves and see the spreading rot.
The retention of a "soft cap" at £6,000 and a hard one at £9,000, conditional on "meeting targets for access", is a quangocratic sop to the pledge to oppose higher fees made by some Liberal Democrats before the election. It never occurred to them they might have to honour, or dishonour, this vote-grabbing gesture. It was the sort of promise every candidate makes and then breaks. Labour MPs did not agonise over their pledge "to end child poverty" or "not return to boom and bust" or allow a referendum on the Lisbon treaty.
The cap plays into the hands of Whitehall hardliners who regard universities as an intellectual playground for Labour's social engineers. The institutions will therefore remain subject to quotas, targets, teaching and research controls and access conditions. They will be banned from competing for students and fined for failing to meet some norm of social deprivation among students. Demanding that universities devalue merit as an entry criterion to compensate for bad secondary schools both lets those schools off the hook and insults the status of a university.
The National Union of Students, Britain's home-grown Tea Party, has always screamed for subsidies for middle-class families and sees the tuition fee rise as "an unprecedented ideological move" against its members. Yet Cable's plan increases the amount of money available for maintenance. It increases the state first-year bursary scheme. It extends aid to part-time students that did not exist before. It raises the salary threshold for repayment to £21,000. And it penalises richer graduates who try to pay their debt off earlier – though it is hard to see why.
The new fees will see students accumulating £30,000-40,000 of debt, but the burden will be more like a time-limited graduate super-tax than a loan repayment. It may be irksome for poor students to see rich ones having their fees paid off by parents, but the rich are always different. What matters is that the poor should not be financially disadvantaged. By taxing them only when they themselves become (relatively) rich, the regime is as fair as makes sense.
What is doubly sad is the lost opportunity in this reform. The government has funked what it seemed to hint at last July, when Cable mooted the biggest shake-up in higher education in a century. He suggested shorter university courses, less emphasis on residential and full-time courses, more private universities, and a return to the "binary" structure of liberal arts versus technical colleges. We glimpsed a man ready to think the unthinkable, to set universities free to enter the 21st century world market in higher education. Instead he has let the control freaks from the old education department win the day.
Universities, and not just British ones, are astonishing. They are the revenge of the heirs of the medieval monasteries for the trauma of reformation. They spend huge amounts of time, talent and money on faux scholarship and publication. They occupy underused buildings. They pretend that teaching a degree requires three or four years of withdrawal from the labour market during the most energetic and potentially productive part of a young adult's life.
Ask any student's parent, indeed ask any honest student. Except at the very best universities, they all have horror stories to tell, of teaching confined to September to Easter, near zero personal contact, two or three poorly marked essays a term, teachers absent on trips and sabbaticals, days spent doing nothing much and almost half a year on holiday, much of it trying to earn money to pay for the nothing much. Universities take extraordinary amounts of time off, basing their teaching on the medieval calendar, observing harvest-time and holidays for religious observance.
Any other organisation that ran itself like this would be bankrupted or closed down. Much non-vocational higher education has degenerated into a three-year break for students living a life of impecunious leisure at parental or state expense. The idea that this is in the national interest is grotesque special pleading. It is rather a total waste of national resources.
Will the government do anything about this? Apparently not. There is no evidence that students need long holidays to endure the strains of university teaching, nor that they or their teachers benefit from inordinate amounts of effort put into research. There is no evidence that higher fees have deterred poorer students, despite categorical assertions from one and all to this effect. Come to that, there is no evidence that a large university sector benefits the economy as an "investment". It is chiefly a consumption good. Given that most degrees are non-vocational, universities are probably as wasteful of valuable labour as military conscription.
This state of affairs has come about largely because politicians expanded student numbers faster than they could either afford or reform universities to handle. They turned a university education into merely a cheap badge of family and personal status. Real spending per student has fallen in 10 years by over a half, with lecturers now seriously underpaid. Yet the cult of research continued. Peter Mandelson, during his brief reign as universities minister last year, cut the teaching grant by 1% while increasing research by 7%. Why, he never explained. Yet still teaching was spun out over three years of barely eight months' teaching a time.
Universities should be blown apart. Some should offer to operate full time to prepared students who want to win a degree in a year or two, but can't afford three years of leisure. There is not an arts course invented that could not be completed in 18 months, and probably not a science one. As for most postgraduate degrees and doctorates, they are plain indulgences.
In his attack on the Victorian educationist Arnold of Rugby, Lytton Strachey pointed out that Arnold's achievement was not to reform the English public school but to make its appeal irresistible to the new middle classes. To this end he deliberately left its structure and curriculum unreformed and medieval, to preserve its elitist appeal. English schools and English industries were soon to be overtaken by German ones.
Cable and his universities minister, David Willetts, are the Arnolds of our day. They have kept the universities in funds and on a state leash to appeal to the middle-class electorate. But they are to be allowed neither sight nor sound of the 21st century. There will be no murmur of change in the groves of academe under this coalition.