The University Conundrum

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath has become notorious as the highest-paid head of an English university. While the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford has [in my view, mistakenly] defended her more modest stipend by drawing comparison with US salaries and footballers' wages, nobody doubts that she has been attracted to Oxford in international competition because of her proven talents and experience. The lady at Bath, however, appears as a sort of machine product: she was deputy V-C before being given the top post in the same institution - very rarely a good thing - and before that she was a professor in a middle-ranking university. There is no evidence at all of her exceptional abilities or achievements.

How have the Vice-Chancellors come to be so highly paid? This is an intriguing story: especially as the number of universities has risen from fewer than 40 when I was a student to about 150 now. Long ago the universities ceased to be part of any national plan for 'manpower' development. The last serious attempt to do that was in the nineteen sixties with the Robbins Report. They proposed, and the government accepted, very significant expansion of the system, both by increasing the number of universities and increasing significantly the student population in the existing institutions. Some - notably Loughborough - were designated as Colleges of Advanced Technology [CATs] and although that status has been eroded away Loughborough stands well in the league tables of universities because it has stuck closer to its founding mission than have most other institutions.

The University in which I was employed for a quarter of a century had a world reputation in materials science: metallurgy, glass, ceramics etc. Robbins recommended further strengthening this orientation, and new buildings were provided with superb facilities; even a small steel rolling-mill.. But UK students were not interested. The a few students who were UK citizens rattled around in the workshops and laboratories, as an increasing number from emergent countries came, learned assiduously, and took the most advanced skills home to build up Britain's competitors.

Ever since then, there has been a nonsensical push for a higher proportion of the population to get degrees; but this has never been linked to building up the skill base that Britain requires. I was horrified this year to see that the Faculty of Social Sciences [of which I was Dean more than thirty years ago] produced nearly four times as many graduates as the whole of engineering and applied science: and while the majority of the Social Sciences people were UK nationals, the majority of engineers and metallurgists were from overseas. As emergent economies forge ahead, Britain is being clogged with 'skills' that are not needed: some are even socially and economically destructive, as with Economics [see this blog, passim].

As this daft situation has been built up, the universities have been decoupled entirely from the local authorities who used to have some control of funding as the bodies that paid for students fees, maintenance grants, union membership, sports subscriptions and so on. Councillors and Directors of Education had some power of the purse over higher education, and their representatives served on governing bodies. Technical colleges that had been directly controlled by local authorities merged with teacher-training colleges and gained designation as polytechnics: and at that time there was a genuine hunt for real talent to head these rapidly expanding institutions. Salaries of Directors of Polytechnics shot higher than the universities paid their V-Cs; so when the polytechnics became redesignated as universities the established V-Cs were able to demand parity. Thus the racket began of ratcheting-up the boss-man's pay; as a prestige game rather than evidence of performance.

Since nobody now has the slightest idea what the lower-ranked seventy or so 'universities' are for, there can be no criteria for assessing the performance of their heads that reflects the national interest. So at present students borrow billions of pounds to buy 'education' which is aimless and not properly quality-controlled. A really great British achievement!

Tuition Fees

Due largely to the naivete and inflexibility of Mrs May's thinking, combined with the hegemony that her clique of advisers has achieved, the Conservatives are losing ground to Labour significantly as the election campaign continues. Two obvious areas where the Tory vote could crumble quickly are a consequence of the threat to the incomes and assets of older people - most of whom have worked all their lives, in the belief that they had a social contract with the state [pay national insurance and receive benefits in health care and pensions] - and the opportunity offered to students, their parents and their younger siblings to be emancipated from tuition fees.

Within my personal memory are the facts that in 1960 only about 5% of eighteen-year-olds could go to university: they paid no fees, and were eligible for means-tested maintenance grants that were sufficient to maintain a young person in modest comfort during termtime. There were plenty of casual jobs to be taken up in the vacations, also; but the majority of students were from the middle class who were happy to support their children to the extent of topping-up their maintenance grants and keeping them in the vacation.

In the late nineteen fifties Harold MacMillan's Conservative government became concerned as to whether the UK was preparing enough graduates in science and engineering, and eventually they appointed a Committee of the 'great and good', chaired by Lionel Robbins the dominant Economist at the London School of Economics. The government welcomed their report, which recommended a massive expansion of the university system to cover both the expansion of the existing universities [and colleges of advanced technology] and the foundation of several new universities. The government accepted the report: hence we have the universities of Warwick, Sussex, Lancaster, York etc. There was also a parallel expansion of city technical colleges into polytechnics, which later merged with local teacher-training colleges to become nascent universities [to be 'legitimated' as universities in the early 1990s].

The system grew; but it grew awry. Far from producing an abundant supply of scientists and engineers, the universities struggled to fill their spanking new laboratories with adequately prepared students. Even when they offered introductory programmes for students whose maths and physics were shaky, the science faculties were under-employed with teaching: so the staff spent more time and resources on research, which benefited the economy in general and attracted overseas students to take up some of the vacant places. For half a century the British schools system has failed to inspire young people in sufficient numbers to take the preparatory subjects they would need to study science or engineering; while the universities have prepared tens of thousands of engineering graduates from Asia. Asiatic countries have continued to send their students to the UK as fees for 'international students' have increased massively; maintaining some [but not all] of the engineering facilities envisaged by the Robbins committee.

Higher education was made a 'right' for all qualified eighteen-year-olds and 'mature students'; but maintenance grants were reduced and fees were imposed as the numbers rose to more than 40% of the age cohort and most of them opted to take non-scientific subjects. University became a growing-up experience for the millions: as Oxbridge had been for hundreds of the most privileged youths before 1850. Tuition fees have risen to £9,000 a year, loaned to the individual on apparently-manageable terms. Labour has promised to abolish the fees, that have never been imposed in Scotland.

The question of whether university is worthwhile for the nation would loom large, if Labour won the election and implemented its promise to end the fees. Billions of state funds would be spent on young people to study 'useless subjects' for a few hours a week, as the economy continued to go down the pan.

More on this issue tomorrow...