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I recently walked into a conversation between some university vice-chancellors about how to convince the UK government to raise tuition fees. My grumpy suggestion was that, before they increase their prices, they should ask themselves what value they’re actually giving students. I’m still amazed there hasn’t been a riot by kids who have amassed debt, were largely abandoned in the pandemic, then had to graduate this summer in the middle of a boycott on marking their degrees.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When tuition fees were raised in 2006, part of the argument was that it would make universities far more responsive to students. After fees were raised to £9,000 a year in 2012, proponents waxed lyrical about how it would inspire a host of exciting new providers offering different kinds of courses, at varying prices, which would raise everyone’s game.
Instead, Britain has largely retained the medieval model of three-year (four in Scotland) undergraduate courses, often in one subject, with long holidays. Many students rarely see a professor, sit in lecture halls crammed with extra people to make money, and endure 24-hour online exams in their rooms — these should have expired with the pandemic.
There is no competition on price: by 2017, all but one university were charging the maximum. And now, a damning parliamentary report warns that the sector faces a looming financial crisis, with the Office for Students, the regulator, adding unnecessary cost burdens. It is far too hard for new providers: since 2020, only 13 new institutions have been allowed degree-awarding powers.
Britain has many tremendous universities and does world-class research. But far from setting them free, the report finds that bureaucracy has increased. The OfS opines on everything from sexual misconduct to diversity, and the knock-on costs are considerable. One institution told the committee it had 10 members of staff engaged simply in complying with its requests. Money should be spent on teaching, not form filling.
More than 20 years after tuition fees began, it’s clear that we were sold a nonsense. There is no “market”, just a profusion of compliance and virtue-signalling. Poor-quality courses have not fallen away, many students will never earn enough to repay the loans, and those that do are in effect taxed at rates that are unacceptable elsewhere in the labour market.
Regulation must be drastically pared back. Should we also drop student loans? That would still be unfair to the general taxpayer, who may also be called upon to support life-long learning in some form. We need to be fashioning a world where we can all go back to school, not leave at 21 brandishing one qualification.
Part of the answer must be to encourage challenger institutions. Talking to some of them this week has been energising. In Hereford, the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering offers a three-year engineering degree in two years, with shorter holidays. Its first cohort is set to graduate next year; already, half have job offers. Crucially, its chief executive says, they are closing attainment gaps between students with and without maths A-level, and with vocational rather than academic qualifications.
The London Interdisciplinary School is offering what sounds like a psychedelic version of an American liberal arts degree. Each term, students examine a different problem (such as sustainability), then address it through lenses ranging from ethics to data science.
Carl Gombrich, an academic who co-founded LIS, is emphatic that rigour does not depend on rigid subject boundaries. He previously headed the combined arts and sciences degree at UCL, itself radical in a European context, but says that LIS has allowed him to get away completely from department-based thinking. He paraphrases the philosopher Karl Popper: “We are students of problems, not one particular subject — and problems may cut right across the borders.”
Pioneers such as this are questioning long-held assumptions: that the value of a degree depends on how many applicants were rejected; that you can’t combine the academic and the practical; that you will be taken more seriously if you study a single subject. There must still be a place for the passion, depth and intellectual beauty of a degree in English literature, say, or music. But eventually, maybe we will compile our own “degrees”, even taking courses at multiple institutions.
The state should be far more supportive of such enterprises, as it is with other start-ups. What may be harder is changing attitudes. Students flock to top universities for the brand, believing that just getting in may be as important to their CV as what they learn while there. This kind of credentialism is “the last acceptable prejudice”, according to the philosopher Michael Sandel.
Given that cachet matters, it’s important that one LIS student has secured a placement with Goldman Sachs. Similarly, America’s Minerva University is sending one of its graduates to Oxford this year on a highly prestigious Rhodes scholarship. This is despite the fact that Minerva looks unlike any traditional academic institution. It has no central campus, but takes its students to cities across the world. They are expected to master basic facts from the internet, and to use contact time with tutors to develop their thinking.
What has struck me this week is the contrast: it is much more fun to run a start-up in higher education than a big institution. I do feel for university vice-chancellors, stuck between rising costs and capped fees. But students deserve more.
