The White Paper on Higher Education, delayed from last November and finally published last week, is both bad and dangerous. Bad because it lacks both a credible vision for education and because it will put in place the opposite of what it espouses: a massive regulatory system. Dangerous because its proposals will further divide an already divided society.

It is already the case that attainment in education is strongly correlated with household income and family background. To appropriate a tired metaphor, the playing field is not only not level – it is laid out on the side of a steep hill. The effects of this are indicated by a range of measures. To take just one, more than twice the number of A-level candidates from a single leading public school achieve three grade A results than do candidates from low income households across the entire country.

Coalition policy is focussed strongly on access to the “top” universities. “Top” is never defined, but it certainly does not indicate the value that is added for individual learners by comparing their level of attainment when they enter university with their subsequent levels of success, because this is not measured.

The front cover of the White Paper on Higher Education

“Top” presumably means the twenty or so universities ranked highest in newspaper league tables, but an analysis of the metrics that these league tables use shows that the primary determinant of rank order is the average A-level grades of the students that they admit. The White Paper falls headlong into this trap of circularity. Universities are “top” because they only admit applicants with the highest A-level grades. Because they are “top” they should be rewarded by being given unrestricted places for students with the highest A-level grades which, of course, guarantees that they remain “top”.

Coalition policy is also strongly focused on the virtues of the market, and on “efficiencies” that can be gained by forcing down the price. By making 20,000 places “contestable”, with both public institutions and new private providers eligible to enter the auction if their average fees are £7,500 a year or less, they hope to maintain or improve quality at a lower cost to the Treasury (there is little benefit to the student in attending a lower priced university, because the rate of repayment on a student loan is a proportion of earnings over an annual threshold, irrespective of the size of the loan, with the loan balance forgiven after thirty years).

“Efficiencies” is a euphemism for cuts.  Because universities typically spend between 55 per cent and 60 per cent of their income on salaries, the only way to compete on price in the market that the White Paper seeks to create is by increasing the size of classes and tutorials and by reducing face-to-face staff-student contact in other ways. Both Ministers and clever economists in BIS know only too well that education throughout the world suffers from “cost disease” – it is not possible to maintain quality while making cost efficiencies in the same way as in a manufacturing production line. “Contestability” for student places on the basis of price is a race to the bottom in quality.

When the enhancement of access at the top is combined with the race to the bottom on price, and with the Treasury restriction on expanding the number of available places, the only option is to squeeze the pips out of the middle; out of universities charging fees that average around £8,500 per annum and which meet the needs of able and committed students who have good, middle range A-level results; universities like Salford. 

Vice-Chancellor Professor Martin Hall speaks out against proposed reforms to Higher Education in the Manchester Evening News

The White Paper is silent about the social consequences of squeezing the middle in this way. BIS’s own data shows the size of the participation gap that persists between National Statistics’ socioeconomic classes 1-3 (in essence, graduate households) and socioeconomic classes 4-7 (families in non-graduate professions). When the correlation between household background and A-level attainment is taken into account, there is a clear danger that the Coalition’s proposals will further accentuate the social and economic sorting effects of higher education.

A framing disappointment in this, and the string of changes that have preceded the White Paper over the past twelve months, is the lack of any compelling vision of what higher education is for.  Clearly, the quality of teaching matters and has mattered greatly to a lot of people working in the sector for a long time. Graduate employment matters and breadth, transparency and comparability of publicly available information are important.  But the benefits of being at a university are far more than this. 

For instance, we recruit heavily from the North West and from families that have not had the opportunity to attend a university before. We also recruit from over a hundred other countries, providing the basis for friendships and professional relationships that will last a lifetime and will empower graduates who will work across a rapidly changing world. 

We offer a rich co-curriculum that embeds formal learning in community service, sport and student societies. The Coalitions’ proposals put much of this at risk by applying the inappropriate model of a managed market that will force down quality. 

And, particularly, by squeezing the middle in the way that is proposed, these pale and disappointing proposals may mean that, even more than at present, young adults spend their time at university studying and socialising with those most similar to themselves. This will further accentuate an already heavily-divided society.

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Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, June 2011: Higher Education White Paper.
http://discuss.bis.gov.uk/cloudfiles/11-944-WP-students-at-heart.pdf

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