Labour's push for more students, linked with the lack of university funding, prompts the question: who will benefit long-term? Bahram Bekhradnia reports

A key element in the Government’s policy for Higher Education is to expand higher education. Whether to 50% of under 30 year olds or some other figure is barely relevant. The aspiration remains that very many more young people should have participated in higher education by the age of 30. The precise target is being refined, but the general message is clear: this is a serious policy with wide implications. In this article I identify some of the questions raised by the target, without attempting to answer them. But they really do need answering.

I have here taken as a given the Government's ambition to expand higher education and have not debated the case for expansion. The policy is based largely on the view that the UK has only one viable long term economic strategy - progressively to ‘move up market’ – and that to make that possible we must invest more in the intellectual and skills capital of our people. However, I note in passing the increasing body of argument that the national economic case for significant expansion of the number of graduates is debatable. Nevertheless, the non-economic benefits are substantial, the social equity case is overwhelming and the financial benefits to the graduate are, on average, very sizeable. There is, however, a question about the respective benefit of any expansion to the state and to the individual.

The issues can conveniently be brigaded under three headings - relating to students, institutions, and funding.

Students

The Government’s plans, as previously stated, implied an additional 330,000 or more full time equivalent students by 2010. In order to make the right kind of educational provision, we need to know the nature of those students. Government ministers have several times said that they will not be satisfied if the increase means simply ‘more of the same’. But how might the students be different, and do we have any reason for thinking that they will be? One obvious and much to be desired difference is that a much higher proportion of the additional students will come from social backgrounds which have not previously participated greatly in higher education. A second difference, and one which will have more profound implications for higher education institutions, relates to the previous educational background of the new students and that in turn has implications for their academic requirements. Will students increasingly seek vocational qualifications and, as the Government believe, at sub-degree level provided in FE Colleges?

Such a judgement needs testing. If wrong assumptions are made and investments follow which are wrongly based, then there will be a growing mismatch between demand and supply . Certainly, such assumptions would imply a reversal of recent trends: in particular, take-up of sub- degree undergraduate places in England has been weak in recent years and is declining. And the policy in the late nineties that an increasing proportion of places should be provided in further education colleges simply resulted in a large number of such places remaining unfilled. In order to assess the plausibility of any assumptions about the nature of future demand, we need to be able to assess trends at school. If the trend is indeed away from A-levels in the sixth form and towards other forms of level 3 qualifications, then these assumptions are plausible. If, on the other hand, there has not been a marked trend away from A-levels, then this brings into question the assumption that students in future will, in academic terms anyway, be very different from in the past.

One dimension of this is the increasing interest in an initial sub-degree qualification, articulated with an honours degree to which the student can progress seamlessly – a foundation degree, perhaps taken in a FE college, with the possibility of progression to an honours degree to be completed over one or two years in a university. As a model, this has a number of attractions: it is thought to be more attractive to students from poor backgrounds who tend to prefer to study near home; it provides the opportunity to students who may not be prepared to commit three or four years for an honours degree – particularly perhaps students from non-traditional backgrounds - to take on a lower level of commitment initially, and so at least get a step on the higher education ladder; and it offers the possibility of flexible study, enabling students to come in and out of higher education at appropriate points in their lives.

This too needs testing. First, if the alternative is a two year sub-degree qualification followed by two more years for an honours degree, then it is not obvious that students, particularly the poorest students, will prefer a four-year route to an honours degree if a three-year route is available (in contrast with Scotland, which is often prayed in aid, where either route to an honours degree takes four years). Second, the success of this concept depends on the initial two year qualification developing a currency and popularity in its own right, which in turn depends on students being satisfied that society in general, and employers in particular, will value it. That has not yet been demonstrated, and indeed in the past the rewards for sub-degree qualifications have been relatively meagre. If that remains so then students are likely to continue to opt for an honours degree at the outset.

A further issue raised by the ambition to increase participation, particularly if it means admitting students who might not otherwise have entered higher education, relates to the question of student achievement, and more particularly dropout. In an earlier article in the Guardian John Thompson and I showed the direct correlation between A-level achievement and average degree class. It is also well established now that there is an even closer correlation between previous educational achievement and dropout. Those with the most A-level points are least likely to drop out while those with the least A-level points are nevertheless less likely to drop out than students with GNVQs, who in turn are less like to drop out than those entering without formal qualifications. Moreover, this relationship holds good within institutions as well as between them -- that is to say that even if all institutions were to raise their game to the level of the best, it will remain the case that admitting students from a wider range of educational backgrounds will almost certainly reduce average completion rates and attainment. This is not surprising, and we have to face it honestly. But having to recognise, understand and deal with this issue is not an argument against widening participation and admitting students with a wider range of educational backgrounds. Let us remember that the great majority of students succeed - even among those with no recorded level 3 award, the great majority obtain a higher education qualification.

Institutions

Will all institutions participate equally in the expansion? Given that there is unlikely to be research funding associated with the funding provided for expansion, how likely is it that research intensive intuitions will be tempted to any great extent to dilute their research effort by taking large numbers of additional students? Will the expansion be concentrated in the less research active institutions? If so, this has implications for their character, and raises questions about whether substantial growth will of itself increase differentiation between institutions. And will research funding therefore effectively become even more selective, with corresponding questions about the nature of higher education institutions with little or no research?

If, as is speculated above, the concept of a sub-degree qualification articulated with an honours degree becomes widespread, what institutions will provide the initial sub-degree? Might this become a distinctive role of FE colleges, as it is in Scotland? Bear in mind that in Scotland there is very little franchised provision, and, unlike in this country, FE colleges do not provide degree level courses. Sub-degree courses in Scotland are the almost exclusive province of FE colleges, but they make little other HE provision.

Funding

The question of funding, and top up fees in particular, has been well trawled in the context of the Government’s forthcoming White Paper. First, it is taken as a given -- few people appear to disagree -- that the higher education system needs more resources. The trouble with top up fees – whether charged up-front or subsequent to graduation through income contingent payments - is that they will distribute the additional resources very unevenly: the most prestigious universities by and large will be those in a position to charge the most. Additional fees alone, unless accompanied by some form of further state support for those least able to charge, will not resolve the problem of the financial straits of many of the very universities which will be taking the wider spectrum of students planned by the Government and who will need the most academic support to succeed.

It is essential that whatever regime is introduced should not be such as to deter poor students – those who will need to be attracted into higher education to achieve the Government’s aims. But it is equally important that the message effectively reaches poor students that they will not have to pay high fees up front, even if top up fees - or a variant - are introduced. In this respect the statements of many student leaders, which suggest that higher fees will be a blow against the participation of poor students, are misleading and serve to deter those very students in whose support they are made. Indeed, providing that fees are never allowed to be a barrier to entry to any university, some might well say that higher student payments, by bringing more money into the system, could make it possible to widen participation and contribute to social equity. If the Government is not able to fund more high-quality higher education from taxation on the scale required -- and this Government clearly has other priorities for the use of taxpayers’ money -- then unless other sources of funding are available, the number of places will be limited with obvious implications for social equity. That point seems to have been overlooked in the debate.

One thing though that the supporters of top up fees need to address, and this will need to be addressed by the Government if it decides to allow them, is that we lack the infrastructure and the experience of the United States where high and differential fees are much more common. We do not, for example, have the tradition of parents saving from birth for their children to attend higher education, nor do we have the tradition or perhaps the facility readily to take out loans to pay university fees and maintenance costs. These are things which it is far easier for a Government to put in place than individual institutions, and that is why the Government will need to be closely involved, whatever financing regime is introduced. Otherwise, it may be the middle-class student, not the working-class student, that is squeezed out.