The assumption that universities outside a charmed circle should know their place has been challenged
It is now likely that the great majority of universities in England will charge a figure either of, or close to, the maximum annual tuition fee of £9,000 a year. This is clearly not going to be good news for the coalition government. It is very bad news for many students.
But another interpretation of the result of allowing tuition fees is that the concerted action by universities shows a welcome refusal to accept the government's implicitly hierarchical view of the value of a higher education. For some time now many of those writing about higher education have made sharp distinctions between the value of a degree from the charmed circle of (usually) Oxbridge and the Russell Group universities and the rest, particularly the post-1992 universities. They base their comments on evidence such as the refusal of certain major firms to consider recruiting from these apparently unloved institutions and reiterate comments about the worthlessness of non-traditional degree subjects.
This evidence is used to support the assumption that the "post-1992 students" are wasting their time and (if they are lucky) their parents' money. Such has been the acceptance of this view that the present government perhaps assumed that the post-1992 universities would accept this account of their worth and agree that their fee level should fit with the assumed market value. It seems to be taken for granted that post-1992 universities will have internalised a sense of their own (low) worth, just as those blind to any experience of higher education outside Oxbridge will have done.
Happily the universities in question seem to have done no such thing. Indeed, they have done something that universities might well have done more often since the start of the slippery slope in higher education that began with the Jarratt report of 1985: they have stood up for their institutions, if not their students. They have said that what we all do is of value. Moreover, it is of the same intrinsic value throughout the sector, whether it is done at the more prestigious, famous and powerful institutions that are more often than not the training ground of politicians of all parties, or at those more local and more vocational institutions.
In this assertion, universities are making a comment (however implicit and unintended this might be) that allows us to consider two things. The first is that difference (in higher education as elsewhere) does not have to be hierarchical. Although the recent history of forced competition between universities has made it more difficult for universities to escape various forms of league table, this seems to have been achieved by blind faith in the judgment of the market of the present government. What this government is now faced with is the assertion that all contributions to higher education, while different, have the same ultimate value of the enrichment of individual lives.
The second thing that universities have done (and are apparently doing) is suggesting that it is mistaken to confuse narrow market values with the values that people put on their own work. The consequences for students of generally higher fees are anything but positive; yet at the same time generally higher fees might suggest a path out of some of the divisions and prejudices within and about difference in higher education.