a summary for those with no time: it's about changes to higher educaiton policy - but we would do well to think about how these changes will affect the standards that we've been discussing. My students may become even more privately educated (and I would regard a lessening of diversity as a bad thing - particularly in medicine but also in science).
Disclaimer: I am not Stefan Collini, though I would like to be!
Original article here
www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n16/stefan-collini/from-robbins-to-mckinsey
Summary below:
He starts off by talking about how certain buzzwords and buzz-phrases are very identifiable as to decade of origin, and how one can date official government publications because "They tend not to bear the marks of an individual sensibility, but rather to deploy the idioms and arguments thought to command the widest acceptance, even when ? perhaps especially when ? the proposals they contain are novel and controversial." He develops this into the argument that since the 1980s, a lot of official discourse has been colonised by "the language of management schools, business consultants and financial journalism", because of the idea being pushed from powerful quarters that it's a great idea "to elevate the status of business and commerce and to make ?contributing to economic growth? the overriding goal of a whole swathe of social, cultural and intellectual activities which had previously been understood and valued in other terms."
As he points out it wouldn't have been possible to do that if everyone else had been heading down a different track. But the way he puts it, looking back is gruesome:
"Very broadly speaking, the extension of democratic and egalitarian social attitudes has been accompanied by the growth of a kind of consumerist relativism. The claim that one activity is inherently of greater value or importance than another comes to be pilloried as ?elitism?. Arguments are downgraded to ?opinions?: all opinions are equally valuable (or valueless), so the only agreed criterion is what people say they think they want, and the only value with any indefeasible standing is ?value for money?. Government documents issued in the last 20 years or so are immediately identifiable by the presence of such buzz phrases as ?it is essential to sustain economic growth and maintain Britain?s global competitiveness,? ?consumers must have a choice of services,? ?competition will drive up quality? and so on."
The argument applied to higher education is an extended comparison of the 1963 Robbins Report (expand access to universities, turn colleges of advanced technology into unis) with the 2010 Browne report and the recent White Paper on HE funding (turn universities into a market economy by removing public funding for teaching and tripling the allowable fees to recover costs).
Responsibility for HE and its funding has been shuffled round through a variety of departments in recent decades, essentially moving from a position of autonomy for the universities, to a position where "Universities and research have come more and more under the aegis of bodies whose primary concerns are business, trade and employment. The terms in which the activities of universities are now discussed have been honed in shaping other kinds of ?corporate and business unit strategy?." He points out how far this position (universities = there for economic growth) is from the 1963 Robbins report, which said that universities were places of research and should be connected more with museums and goverment research institutions, than with schools; also that both sides of politics have done their share of bringing about this change.
Lord Browne's report is exposed as being produced by businessmen apparently in the government's pocket, producing a report (and eventually a white paper) that is astonishingly close to the aims of the Comprehensive Spending Review, for an independent report produced before other aspects of policy came to light. The report was widely criticised, but the government accepted its main recommendations (and subsequently abandoned several of them, "partly because of political pressure, especially from the Liberal Democrats, partly because the financial implications were frightening, especially to the Conservatives, and partly because they came to seem, when looked at more closely, unworkable.") He also points out that
removing public funding from teaching and tripling undergraduate fees "hadn?t been in the election manifesto of any party ? indeed, the Liberal Democrats had made a commitment to abolish fees ? and hadn?t been subject to proper democratic scrutiny". Also, the normal way of doing things (white paper -> criticism, consultation -> draft legislation -> parliamentary debate & vote -> law) was completely reversed with the Browne report, where the Browne report came out in late October 2010, the legislative decisions were taken in early November, andthe White Paper came out in late June this year, i.e. "more than six months after the legislation it was supposed to prepare the way for, and long after universities had been forced by that legislation to draw up financial plans without knowing how the new scheme would operate."
The policy is then shown to be based on the premise that the Office for Fair Access had the legal power to force universities to not charge the maximum allowable fees - but unfortunately OFFA doesn't have that power, so most universities will charge 9000 pounds, and actually the cost of providing student loans for 9000 pounds a year is going to cost the government more than the old scheme of block grants for teaching, which cost about 7500 a year for the "average" student. So it fails in its aim of the government spending less. There is also the bizarre and unpleasant ?core and margin? model of allocating places and funding for students, which has the effect of not much change for "top" universities with high admission criteria, but which forces down the fees chargeable by the low-end universities, and leaves them under-resourced, to a point where they will not be able to recover costs and will go bankrupt; meanwhile it will be easier for new private institutions to get university accreditation - i.e. having government funding go to for-profit companies to make shareholders happy. Because children at private schools do have a dramatically better chance of getting high A-level scores, and it's the admissions criteria on A-level scores that will determine whether you can charge 9000 or less, essentially this is entrenching social inequality and destroying social mobility, in the name of market freedom.
The government will also provide a direct teaching grant to some, but not all lab-based courses - according to government priorities - so medicine gets money but engineering, physics and chemistry don't. Similarly they will fund some courses that not enough people want to do but that need people in them. This is strangely at odds with the idea that it should be consumer choice driving provision (which is the point of the idea of making univresities a market economy).
So if the consumer choice model is flawed, why adopt it? It seems to be based on the idea that unless you pay for something it's worthless, and it's only you paying for "the student experience" that confers any worth on university study. The student experience seems to be conceived rather like a hotel's customer satisfaction survey: "Were the fluffy towels fluffy enough?" - "The paradox of real learning is that you don?t get what you ?want? ? and you certainly can?t buy it. The really vital aspects of the experience of studying something (a condition very different from ?the student experience?) are bafflement and effort. Hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility to a few small clearings of partial intelligibility is a demanding and not always enjoyable process. It isn?t much like wallowing in fluffy towels. And it helps if you trust your guides rather than assuming they will skimp on the job unless they?re kept up to the mark by constant monitoring of their performance indicators." It also depends on university students behaving like consumers - but most people only do one undergraduate degree, they don't change their behaviour according to satisfaction (and certainly won't if they're being charged 9000 pounds a year for it); also, universities choose students to about the same degree as students choose universities.
Collini goes through some calculations to show that there is no way the government will save money (or even recoup its costs) by adopting the scheme, and that it won't fix basic problems of student-staff ratios or low contact hours either. He points out that one option open to the government is to sell on the student debt to some private company - who will of course have to increase it to behave as a proper company should and make profits. Universities will also be foced to turn private as a way of surviving. Analysing why it's being done, if it seems like economic suicide, ineffective on fixing problems, bad on social equality, Collini says:
"The inescapable conclusion is that this huge gamble with one of the world?s most successful systems of higher education is being taken in order to bring universities to heel. From the mid-1980s, when the minister responsible for higher education, Robert Jackson, complained that universities were frustrating government efforts to ?reform? them by acting as a ?cartel of producer interests?, successive administrations have sought for ways to make universities conform to their will. But these efforts have run up against the tension at the heart of all higher education policy. Whatever other functions societies have from time to time required universities to fulfil, they are primarily institutions devoted to extending and deepening human understanding, and if they are to do this successfully, students and teachers must be allowed to pursue whatever lines of inquiry seem likely to be most fertile without being entirely constrained by immediate practical outcomes. All kinds of benefit may flow to the host society from such inquiry, but will only do so via a route that is indirect and at one remove. This makes good universities maddeningly resistant to the government wish that they contribute more directly to current policy objectives, and the resistance is all the more maddening since universities are the recipients of large amounts of public money. UK governments over the past 30 years have made a series of attempts to square this circle by means of the spurs and whips of targets and assessments."
He goes on to talk about the clear-mindedness of the Robbins report, saying "pointing to the damage likely to be done to universities by the application of business-school models of ?competing producers? and ?demanding consumers? is not to indulge a nostalgic desire to return to the far smaller and more selective higher education system of 30 or 40 years ago. The expansion of the proportion of the age-cohort entering higher education from 6 per cent to 44 per cent is a great democratic gain that this society should not wish to retreat from. To the contrary, we should be seeking to ensure that those now entering universities in still increasing numbers are not cheated of their entitlement to an education, not palmed off, in the name of ?meeting the needs of employers?, with a narrow training that is thought by right-wing policy-formers to be ?good enough for the likes of them?, while the children of the privileged classes continue to attend properly resourced universities that can continue to boast of their standing in global league tables."
and concludes:
"There is nothing fanciful or irresponsible in believing that this great public good of expanded education can and should be largely publicly funded. This White Paper and the legislation already enacted are not about finding ?fairer? ways to pay for higher education or, in any meaningful sense, about putting ?students at the heart of the system?.[...]"