Universities should focus on high-level achievement, not on developing marketable skills, argues Lincoln Allison
THE earnest young man almost snarled as he left the lecture. "Seventeen bucks? That wasn't worth 17 cents." This was Stanford Business School in the Seventies. It was the first time I had ever come across a student carefully calculating what his education was costing him, and I did not find it especially attractive.
The issue of whether students should pay for higher education has never been more important. All across Europe, most people in the relevant age group think they ought to go to university. Even in war-torn Georgia, where the economy has been destroyed, new "universities " are springing up in every major town, and a higher proportion of youngsters are going to university than the 31 per cent in Britain.
Democratic governments find the demand for higher education impossible to resist, and the supply equally impossible to fund. Across the continent, there are queues for lectures, universities designed for 20,000 students accommodating 100,000, and students whose most intimate contact with a member of academic staff is an occasional meeting in a group of 50.
The situation in Britain is quite different. Yes, there are pockets of overcrowding and a shortage of resources in many instances, but there are also plenty of empty places (particularly in engineering and the sciences), and a solid core of universities that have more or less maintained the same level of service.
This is because Britain has a much greater degree of independence than continental universities. We can organise our own admissions, rather than having to accept everybody who reaches a state-defined standard; we have also learnt to broaden our sources of income. In particular, because we speak English and some of our universities are relatively prestigious, we can make a lot of money from students from outside the European Union, especially those from rapidly growing Asian economies.
So the great debate on the financing of higher education, which is currently being chaired by Sir Ron Dearing and is due to report later this month, is not so important to some institutions as it is to others. Two thirds of the students who come to my room for supervision or tuition are paying their own way already: they are postgraduates, overseas students and part-timers.
It is different when people spend money on their education that they could have spent on something else. You do not have to nag them to hand in essays or turn up for seminars; there is none of that sense that they are doing you a favour that you sometimes get from the undergraduates whose fees are paid by a local authority.
Yet there is also a lot to be said for the traditional British undergraduates who are not meeting real costs. They are good to be with, possess a kind of relaxed, sceptical intellectual curiosity and are more likely to ask the really difficult question (such as, "What are we doing this for, anyway?"). They are better at enjoying the whole milieu of university life, rather than just working away at a course. In a word, they are less narrow.
So, should everybody pay? The orthodox answer, given by Left-wing parties all over Europe, is that such a notion defies some fundamental morality. But does it?
Higher education is not about equality, because it always privileges a minority at the expense of the majority. And as for justice, what could be more unfair than the present system, in which people who have not had the benefits of higher education, and whose children are unlikely to get it, pay for other people to be awarded what is in effect a certificate of privilege in the labour market?
In most cases, it is fatuous to argue that sending some people to university benefits everybody. It might have been true about an intellectual and scientific elite, but extra law degrees benefit only those who receive them - and it is not clear whether many degrees even benefit the recipients. It is sheer myth to think that education as such is going to make us prosperous. There are some very poor countries with quite high levels of higher education, and some quite rich ones where the level is much lower.
Admittedly, almost nobody in higher education could live with the idea that there were bright, keen potential students who just could not afford to go to university. Loans do not seem much of an answer: they raise the prospect of starting adult life unemployed and in debt.
What would solve the problem is state scholarships based on A-level performance and tenable by a winner at the institution of his or her choice. They should be exclusively for the scientific and philosophical disciplines and not for qualifications that play a part in the acquisition of professional privilege in, for example, law or business.
Of course, unless the scholarship system were to be inconceivably well-founded, all of this would lead to contraction in the university system. Good! All over the world, millions of people are wasting time at universities which they attend for no good reason and which do not benefit them. University systems ought to be narrowed back to high-level academic activity, and other means sought to give people marketable skills.
So far as I know, only the Dutch government has faced up to this and developed a policy for drastically contracting university size. Will ours have the same courage?
Lincoln Allison is reader in politics and international studies at Warwick University.
