Corrupting the academy

David Willetts – the man they mystifyingly call “two brains” – has come up with yet another of his wheezes. He suggests that teenagers from the wealthiest families should be able to secure places at elite universities if they can pay the full fees up front. These extra students would not be eligible for student loans – hence only the very wealthiest would be able to take advantage (with fees at a minimum of £12,000 per year and an average national wage of under £25,000).

It has caused predictable outrage – and rightly so. It’s obvious – so obvious that it barely needs saying, but some people seem to miss the point – that the privileged have been buying preferential access to elite universities for decades. Private schools educate 8% of children but account for 50% of the intake at Oxford and Cambridge – a figure that has barely changed since I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1980s. They’re better resourced, better prepared, better connected – and that’s before we get on to the state subsidy that private education enjoys through charitable status and VAT exemption. And – as anyone who has been through the system knows – it means that Oxbridge places are taken by a wealthy minority who can’t hack it academically, taking places from state school students who could.

In one sense, then, Willetts is merely proposing to make explicit something that has gone on for years. But at least the high entry requirements gave the appearance of meritocracy – it’s difficult to see how the arrival of a cadre of the super-rich exempted from the usual applications process will do anything other than reduce academic standards and lead to a the two-tier system of the nineteenth century, with scholars doing academic work and gentlemen commoners essentially loafing at an elite finishing school.

But this begs some pretty fundamental questions about what universities are for.

The Robbins Report of 1963, which paved the way for the expansion of higher education in Britain, was in no doubt. It argued that university places “should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment” (the so-called Robbins principle). There should be four principal aims:

instruction in skills; the promotion of the general powers of the mind so as to produce not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women; to maintain research in balance with teaching, since teaching should not be separated from the advancement of learning and the search for truth; and to transmit a common culture and common standards of citizenship.

In other words, the aims of higher education were collective as well as individual. Economics – and especially the enrichment of the individual – take a back seat. Higher education should be made widely available because as a society we all benefit from it. And it follows that as a public good, it should be generously funded to ensure that the benefit is gained as widely as possible.

It is that principle that has been lost in the rush towards the marketisation of higher university. When I went to Oxford in 1980 I paid no fees and got a full maintenance grant. The move away from that provision has been justified in individual terms; the individual benefits and should pay. Graduates will earn more and will therefore be able to handle debt. And Universities are full, so why worry about whether people are being put off?

Allied with this is the quest for status and power. Degrees as the stepping-stone to higher salaries – elite universities not as places where study is undertaken but where useful contacts and the friendships that oil the wheels of political and financial institutions made, social refinements acquired and a certificate handed out at the end of it. The place where, as Ivan Illich put it, the head start is rationalised as achievement. If that’s what you think universities should be, then Willetts’ proposal is not without a certain logic. The logic only disintegrates when you start thinking that universities should be about learning and the collective good.

Two brains, neither working

Every so often, a Coalition Minister departs from the script in a way that reveals the reality behind the spin.  Thus with David Willetts, the Minister for Higher Education, known to Tories as “Two Brains”.

Nottingham Students against Fees and Cuts takes up the story:

A group of approximately 40 students from local universities and colleges confronted Universities Minister David Willetts MP outside the annual Lord Dearing conference on “The Globalization of Higher Education” held at Nottingham University. After trying to present the minister with a set of proposals from students about alternatives to the cuts that had been drawn on a banner, a number of the group engaged him in argument about the cuts to Higher Education and the fees being raised in universities across the country.

When confronted by female students with the charge that the cuts will hit Women the hardest, Willetts tried to argue the cuts were “progressive”. He claimed that women were less likely to have to pay back student loans, because they would be less likely to earn over the £21,000 threshold for repayment, heard to acknowledge that; “a lot of women will never earn enough to pay back their loans”. The students then politely suggested that the minister acquire a dictionary to familiarize himself with the term “progressive”. Willetts beat a retreat from the debate, at which point students took to shouting chants about ConDem policy and chased his car until it was out of view.

Let’s just review that comment.  The new fees are progressive because many women will not earn enough – £21,000 against a national average wage of over £25,000 – to start repaying them.  Has Willetts managed to get either of his brains around just how insulting to claim that a policy is progressive because it reflects the continuing gender bias in the workplace, and the prevalence of low pay in society generally?  Is he really saying that it’s just fine that women graduates can expect to earn considerably less than the average wage? 

Of course, there’s ample evidence that the coalition is comfortable with discrimination against women.  Take, for example, the Fawcett Society’s attempt to get a judicial review of the last year’s Budget announcement on the grounds that no impact assessment was preferred – although the action did not succeed the Government was forced to admit that it had failed to assess the impact of cuts whose burden falls disproportionately on women. 

Government in Britain remains a boys’ club.  The Con Dem government’s ideology is indistinguishable from that of a banking and financial sector that is notoriously a boys’ club, and is reported on by a tabloid media that is infamously a boys’ club. Most of them were even educated in boys’ clubs.  The presence of a few highly-placed women does nothing to change where power and wealth really lie. 

My own view is that to create a decent society the boys’ club must be broken open, and that the values of the boys’ club are a root cause of Britain’s crisis of democratic legitimacy.  This disgraceful comment from a man who is allegedly a leading Conservative intellectual demonstrates the depths of ignorance and stupidity that need to be overcome.

Two brains or no brains?

Universities Minister David Willetts – a man whose intellectual achievements (in the context of the Tory Party, anyway)has led to him being known as “two brains” has given an interview to the Guardian in which he claims that the current system of student funding means that students are “a burden on the taxpayer”.  The context is that the new coalition government appears to be setting the scene for a huge hike in student tuition fees.

There are two approaches to this issue: the economic and the social.  I’ll look at each of these in turn.

From an economic point of view, it’s difficult to know what Willetts means by “burden”.  I live in a city with two universities.  Several thousand students, supported by loans, live here, rent homes here, spend their money in our supermarkets, and, yes, in pubs and clubs.   The two universities directly provide thousands of jobs, and indirectly many more.  While you get plenty of moaning from the usual gangs of reactionary miseries in the letters columns of our local paper, there’s no doubt that the funding behind these students plays an important role in sustaining the city’s economy.  While it’s quite possible to see how a government fixated with cutting expenditure might come to the conclusion that this is a “burden”, I’d argue that this was an ideological rather than an empirical conclusion.

Secondly, the social issues.

Tony Benn has consistently argued – and I agree with him – that recent trends in student funding, leading as they have to situations where students leave university tens of thousands of pounds in debt, ensure that graduates become good, compliant employees.  When you’re immediately burdened by huge debt you have to get your head down, accept corporate values, and work.

Willetts says in the interview I’ve referenced above that students should see student debt as a down-payment on higher tax, rather than a debt.  But that presupposes that graduates will earn more; not an assumption that stands up in many cases (which is why there is a desperate shortage of well-qualified science teachers).  In an society in which a first degree is becoming a default qualification the marginal value of that first degree is declining.  Many of the most lucrative jobs remain in sectors like the law and finance where there remain crucial financial barriers to entry – periods of unpaid internship or pupillage which ensure that only those backed by substantial parental wealth get the opportunity to participate.  And of course an increase in tuition fees at a time when the marginal value of a degree is falling will have the inevitable effect of pushing those who are not backed by parental wealth away from the more prestigious educational establishments – or out of higher education at all.

The only conclusion one can draw is that this approach – whether intentional or not – is to entrench yet further a situation in which higher education is based on parental ability to pay.  The coalition philosophy of higher education – at least – appears to be encapsulated by Ivan Illich’s comment about how formal education seeks to institutionalise the head start as achievement.

The effect of pushing up tuition fees will be to widen even further the gap between rich and poor, and to deny young people from poor and middle-income backgrounds access to the education to which  – on the basis of their ability – they would be entitled (let’s not forget that the average wage in Britain is £25,000 per year, and middle income is a long way from where the right-wing press pretends it is).  It means more Old Etonians at Oxbridge and the Russell Group universities taking the most lucrative (if perhaps not the most useful) jobs, and persuading themselves it’s because they’re cleverer.

It looks very much as if what is in effect a piece of social engineering is being dressed up as economics.