Government reform of Higher EducationWritten evidence submitted by the Campaign for the Public University

We write to you about the very serious concerns we have for the future of higher education in the light of the Government’s proposed reforms. The Campaign for the Public University (http://publicuniversity.org) is a broad-based campaign with no party or other political affiliation. We are a group of concerned academics (professors, lecturers, research fellows and research students across the sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences) seeking to defend and promote the idea of the university as a public good.

1.0 We believe that the public university is essential both for cultivating democratic public life and creating the means for as many individuals as possible to benefit from education and to find fulfilment in creative and intellectual pursuits. Precisely because of these wider public benefits we believe that undergraduate degree programmes should continue to receive public funding. We believe that, if implemented in their current form, Government policies would: damage the teaching of social sciences, arts, and humanities in many UK universities; impoverish the diverse communities of research and teaching that universities now represent; encourage the belief that a university degree is little more than a transaction through which individuals buy themselves a highly paid job; and discourage a significant number of people from taking up a place in higher education. We believe that the university serves a range of functions, from teaching the next generation, to cultivating knowledge and culture, and developing the research that underlies innovations in technology. However, they are also a significant part of our democratic culture. They facilitate proper public debate by generating knowledge, evidence and argument that bear upon pressing public issues (frequently by providing the knowledge base that can be drawn on with regard to issues that are below the public radar, but beginning to emerge as public issues). We also believe that with the growth of public education and mass suffrage, universities have been increasingly important in facilitating social mobility and maintaining the openness of elites that is essential to a properly functioning democracy. It is precisely because university education meets these public goods that its costs should not be borne only by students.

2.0 We share Stefan Collini’s powerfully articulated criticisms of the introduction of a market in higher education. We do not believe that a system of higher education can be properly directed through simple student choice (though the latter is an important aspect of any system). Indeed, the designation of some subjects – primarily those of science, technology, medicine, and some modern languages – as priority subjects that will retain some public funding indicates that the market principle is not pursued consistently. We believe that the decision to leave the arts, humanities and social sciences to the vagaries of the market will create serious disruptions in the short run and will also have wider negative consequences. We do not believe that these subjects deserve public support only because of their economic significance, but as the British Academy has noted, the culture and media industries are now bigger employers and exporters than the science and technology sectors in the UK, while the social forecasting undertaken within the social sciences is essential to the functioning both of markets and government.

3.0 The Government recognizes that the UK currently has a world class higher education system and argues that the reforms are necessary in order to maintain it. However, it proposes to cut higher education spending more severely than other areas of public spending and to do this when other countries are increasing their spending on higher education. A recent poll, conducted by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, shows overwhelming public support for spending on higher education, with 80% saying it should increase or stay the same. Yet UK public funding of higher education is set to become the lowest among comparable OECD countries. In the context of the global challenges that the UK confronts, which are not only economic, but also social and political, and, perhaps, most of all challenges of cultural understanding, we believe that this is quite the wrong time to be cutting public spending on higher education. It is also dangerously short-sighted to seek to narrow the perspective within which higher education is viewed and valued.

4.0 The present proposal is that fees will be set between £6,000–£9,000 (although it is clear that the £6000 fee may be undercut by FE Colleges and for-profit providers, while the Browne Review itself contemplated no upper cap on fees and envisaged fees at the upper level being significantly higher than £9,000). This is accompanied by claims that under a market-oriented system, student choice will drive quality. However, if fees are set at £6,000, this will involve a significant cut in funding (approx £1,250 per student for most courses in the social sciences, arts and humanities). It is hard to see how a 20% cut in teaching resource can secure an improvement in teaching quality. Students are being asked to pay fees that are nearly double the present amount for fewer resources to be devoted to their education. Reference is made in a number of documents (for example, the Browne Report) to “achieving efficiencies” in teaching, but it is difficult to see what this will mean in practice other than a reduction in teaching standards, by the reduction of face-to-face teaching or increased staff-student ratios.

5.0 Any institution that charges the premium fee of £9000 will be able to cover its current teaching costs and, perhaps, be able to invest additional resources in teaching. However, it is clear from comments by some Vice-Chancellors that the expectation is also to use the additional income to cover the reduction in real terms of research income. This should not be surprising. The Browne Review’s recommendation for differential fees did not envisage that the additional income would straightforwardly be invested in teaching. Indeed, the US Universities that are the model for a system of universities with differential fees use their fee income for a much wider set of purposes. It is clear, that the Browne Review is arguing for higher fees in order to strengthen the research capacity of those universities charging higher fees. While we accept that the integration of research and teaching defines a university education, and, therefore, that it is appropriate that research should be funded for its benefits for teaching (one of the justifications of QR funding), we do not believe that student fees should be seen as a way of supplementing declining research funds and we are very concerned that some Vice-Chancellors advocate the lifting of premium fees, as recommended by the Browne, Review for precisely this reason.

6.0 Universities in the UK are not currently differentiated in terms of teaching quality. The National Student Survey shows that there is a very high degree of satisfaction of students across all universities with their courses (in the region of 85%). Although there are various rank orders of Universities that are produced using the NSS (by THE and the Guardian newspaper) all studies and evaluations of NSS show that those rank orders are illegitimate, precisely because nearly all Universities are clustered within a few points of each other and the differences among them are, for the most part, not statistically significant. In fact, we are concerned that with the introduction of a market, HEFCE is seeking to enhance the use of the NSS to facilitate student choice. We strongly recommend that Universities UK be required to establish a Code of Practice on the Use of Information to prevent misleading claims and the mis-selling of courses.

7.0 We believe that differential fees will not reflect current differences in teaching quality. However, if some universities suffer a significant cut in their resources and others an increase in resources, then such differences will be produced as a consequence of Government policy. The only current difference among universities is in the entry qualifications of the students and the selectivity practiced by the university with regard to those qualifications. Just as we would not contemplate that secondary schools should receive less funding according to the abilities of their students, we do not believe that universities should receive differential funding for their teaching.

8.0 We are aware that it is not entirely clear how the new fee system will work how many universities will charge £6,000 and how many the premium fee of £9,000. We believe that the Higher Education Policy Institute has provided conclusive evidence that it is likely that most Universities will seek to charge £9,000. It has also shown that on the current mode of repayment of fees, this would be in the interests even of low-earning graduates, who would pay just about £300 overall than they would for a debt based on tuition fees of £6,000 (for which they would then have the benefit of having their teaching better resourced). We believe that HEPI has also shown that the costs of the system of student finance are such that any savings to the public finances are “artefactual” and arise only because their costs do not appear on the books. They are, however, no less real. They are real both to the students who will incur the additional debt and to the Government finances.

9.0 This brings us to broader issues of fairness before addressing specific aspects of the present proposals. The Government justified the cuts to higher education funding in the broader context of the fiscal deficit, arguing that it was unfair to future generations to burden them with repayments for this debt. In the context of student tuition fees, the proposal is to do exactly this, burden future generations with debts that current and past generations never had (while receiving the benefit of public education).

10.0 There has been some debate about the “fairness” of the new system of student support. Of course, with increased fees the issue of fairness becomes more acute than it was in the past. However, the debate has not addressed the consequences of the emerging system of differential fees. Lord Browne’s Review argued that the introduction of fees in 1998 after the Dearing Review did not affect the pattern of applications. However, Lord Browne’s review did not consider the impact of differential fees, despite the fact that this is what it was recommending. This will be further compounded in postgraduate education (where fees will also rise in line with undergraduate fees and where students must contemplate a significant rise in the cost of postgraduate education on top of an increased burden of debt). Here the Browne Review relied on the Smith Report to suggest that the introduction of fees in 1998 had no impact on postgraduate applications. Once again, the Browne Review failed to address the consequence of differential fees and the consequence, too, for the lifting of postgraduate fees.

11.0 This introduces another issue of fairness. Students whose families have previously paid for private secondary education will face three further years of university fees at about the level they have been paying in school fees. Students from low income backgrounds will potentially have access to bursaries (we will return to this). The group that will be most seriously affected are those middle class parents with high aspirations for their children who have used state education. Recent research reported by the Sutton Trust (http://www.suttontrust.com/news/news/comprehensive-pupils-outperform/) is illuminating about who does best at University. Students from state schools do better than those from private schools. This is so across the university system, and at the most selective universities. As the report states, “Comprehensive school pupils also performed better than their similarly qualified independent and grammar school counterparts in degrees from the most academically selective universities and across all degree classes, awarded to graduates in 2009.” In fact, we believe that a new divide in education will emerge, with universities increasingly responsible for creating a division within the middle class by distinguishing an upper layer from other, lower middle-class positions. Rightly, much attention has been given to the problems of recruiting children from disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education, but less attention has been given to a new alignment that is being created between universities charging “premium” fees and independent schools that will also serve to create differential recruitment with students who have previously attended state secondary schools. We believe that the introduction of higher fees and differential fees will have an impact at all levels of family income, but the impact will be disproportionate for those on middling and lower incomes.

12.0 We are also concerned that children from poor backgrounds (in receipt of free school meals) will also be discouraged from attending university, notwithstanding the suggestion that they might have a bursary to cover two years of premium fees. It is not clear why this should be so only for premium fees and not for all fees. However, what will dissuade prospective students is not only fees, which after all are not paid up front, but also living costs which do occur as upfront costs. The support for these, whether in terms of grants or loans, is less than the real cost of maintenance during the period of study and so the emphasis on the fee component of indebtedness seems misplaced. Studies suggest that such students seek entry to Universities where they can live at home to reduce their costs, or where they can work during term-time (something explicitly denied by the two most selective of our universities). We believe that the same studies show that a high level of prospective indebtedness, as such, is a disincentive for some students, no matter how favourable the terms of repayment. Many students from poor backgrounds are being asked to contemplate a debt that their parents could not contemplate. The sums of money involved will seem daunting to them. This is not simply a “perception” that can be overcome by better “information”, since the very information about the scale of their potential indebtedness is precisely the problem.

13.0 We are also concerned about other aspects of policy toward higher education, for example, the attrition to QR funding and the concern to achieve greater concentration in the distribution of research funding. The language used is “concentration and selectivity”, but we believe that this masks a contradiction. “Selectivity” should entail funding the best research. This is not the same as “concentration”. The latter is driven by a requirement of efficiency in research infrastructure, but is being pursued regardless of whether the research in question has demand of large-scale facilities. The way in which the Research Assessment Exercise functioned was precisely to be selective in its judgments about excellence. These showed that excellence wasn’t concentrated but distributed. The argument about concentration uses concerns about efficient use of research infrastructure, which apply to some activities within some disciplines – for example, “big science” - and uses them to apply to all.

14.0 We are also concerned that a market-driven policy for higher education is being used to direct research-funding toward short-term economic objectives and toward “bureaucratically” determined research objectives. We believe that this involves an attenuation of the Haldane Principle by which government-funding of research was administered through autonomous Research Councils which funded the best proposals, as determined by peer-review. We are concerned that increasingly Research Councils are being asked to provide research on themes and topics determined (or approved) by Governments with the balance shifted too far away from project ideas generated from within the different research communities. We believe that this is not only damaging to research, but also self-defeating in so far as research success (as considered in terms of the impact of the research upon other research activities and knowledge transfer) cannot easily be predicted in advance.

15.0 Taken together, we believe that Government proposals represent a fundamental change to higher education with potentially very serious and deleterious consequences. We believe that one of the likely outcomes is that a number of universities may be forced to close. We do not believe this to be warranted in terms either of quality or contribution. Every location with a significant HE presence benefits because of raised skill levels in the local population, engagement with local industries and community groups and in terms of contribution to the enhancement of local cultural life. In all the discussion of universities as international players, we should not lose sight of their important local and regional contributions, especially in a context where regional policy has been disrupted by the closure of Regional Development Agencies.

Conclusion

The present reforms were not put to the electorate and no mandate was secured for them. Some Vice-Chancellors, who believe that their own institutions may benefit financially, have supported them, but the overwhelming view of commentators and those who work within universities is that they are misconceived and threaten to undermine the diverse functions that we mentioned in Paragraph 1.0 and will diminish the international reputation of UK higher education. For those of us who work in universities, this is not a matter of protecting our jobs. It is a matter of protecting our vocation for the wider values that the public university represents.

It is sometimes said that the Browne Review, itself, represents a proper consultation. However, it was set up as a five-year review of the introduction of fees. As Baroness Blackstone put it in the debate in the House of Lords, “no-one could have predicted that such a review would double the fees then proposed and assume that the public funding of 80% of undergraduate tuition would be abandoned. Nor would anyone have predicted that this review would be based on a commitment to the free market that is so extreme that it abandons, to quote Sir Peter Scott, a much respected vice-chancellor and former member of the HEFCE board, ‘the very idea of a public system of higher education, built with such care and effort since Robbins’” (Col. 1238-9)

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/101027-0001.htm#10102748000335

4 February 2011