It’s taken me almost 20 years but, over the summer, I eventually got around to reading a book I’ve been wanting to read on higher education policy since I started working in the area over 15 years ago: University to Uni – The Politics of Higher Education since 1944 by Robert Stevens.
It was 20 years ago today…
The summer of 2024 seemed a good moment to pick the book up as it is exactly 20 years since the Higher Education Act (2004), which the book is pivoted around. Stevens, whose roles included serving as Chancellor of the University of California-Santa Cruz and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, had first-hand knowledge of both the UK and US higher education sectors but he is sadly no longer with us, having passed away in 2021 – though anyone with young children may be familiar with his daughter’s immensely successful series of books, Murder Most Unladylike.
Based largely on lectures delivered on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, University to Uni has a lively pace reminiscent of other books that began as a series of lectures (such as Robert Blake’s on the Conservative Party). But it also suffers from its origins, most notably the disjoints caused by a surfeit of ridiculously long footnotes covering details that could not, presumably, be squeezed into the lectures.
Nonetheless, the book includes some neat historical facts that had either passed me by or which I once knew but had largely forgotten. For example:
- the linkage between the IMF’s demands of the UK in the 1970s and the increase in international students’ fees in the early Thatcher years;
- how the Jarratt report on the efficiency and management of universities (1985) and the Croham report on the University Grants Committee (1987) helped set the scene for Kenneth Baker’s important expansionist speech at Lancaster University in 1989; and
- the fact that one reason the polytechnics were upgraded to become universities was, at least in the eyes of some people, ‘the need to keep up the supply of foreign students’.
And in Stevens’s brief retelling of the story of NVQs and GNVQs, we are reminded that turmoil in vocational qualifications, seen currently in the latest battles between BTecs and T-Levels, is nothing new.
Vivienne Stern of Universities UK has recently rightly reminded us that there was a time not so long ago when international student fees were supplementary to other institutional income whereas they have now become central to the very survival of many institutions; this book in contrast reminds us that there was an even earlier time, in the late 1990s, when international students were also crucial to institutional survival: ‘their contribution through fees to the survival of the UK universities was impressive, although it probably should have been embarrassing.’
In a few other areas covered by the book, we can see clearly how time has marched on – for instance, there is more information provided here than one would wish to include in any new book on the slightly tedious battles over Oxbridge college fees, which were a bugbear of some parts of the Blair / Brown ascendancy. Some of the language has dated too: the anger of Labour MPs is described as being ‘as violent towards Oxford and Cambridge and the selective universities as it was to those who wore the pink in pursuit of the fox.’
Nationalising the universities
Above all, Stevens follows Simon Jenkins and others in arguing that, while Thatcher privatised the utilities, she nationalised the universities by putting them at the whims of the state and the economy: ‘Thatcher’s free-market Cabinet loved it! They had destroyed the collegiate model and substituted the dependency model.’
Stevens also reminds us that the big expansion of higher education in the late 1980s and early 1990s spooked the Treasury, forcing cuts to the resources for teaching and the reimposition of control over student numbers, not to mention the splitting of public funding for teaching and research (initially within the old block grant, ‘emphasising research support based on excellence … just as the funding of teaching was reduced to the egalitarian mean’).
His book also intriguingly foresees the squeezing of institutions between the ancients and the older red bricks on the one hand and the former polytechnics on the other, specifically listing institutions like UEA, the University of Hull and the University of Kent as heading for trouble – all of which are known to have faced recent challenges.
Part 2 of the book starts immediately after a general election (1997) in which the two main political parties colluded to keep higher education out of the campaign, just as they did in in 2010 and, arguably, 2024. It is a familiar story: when compared to the past or to competitors abroad, we are reminded that universities were underfunded to the tune of billions of pounds a year by the time the Major Government succumbed to New Labour’s election-winning machine.
Equality or excellence?
If there is an overarching theme of the book, it is equality versus excellence: or to put it another way, equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity. Time and time again policymakers, both politicians and civil servants, are divided into those who prioritised equality over excellence (apparently, Department for Education civil servants, old Labour and the past leadership of Universities UK) and those who preferred excellence (some Conservatives and older universities as well as those in charge of distributing research income).
The former group are seen as making solid progress, with public policy ensuring ‘elite universities had been increasingly frozen’. Stevens quotes Lord Renfrew approvingly for saying just after the millennium, ‘Britain’s world-class universities and Britain’s other universities besides have fallen into deficit through what has become a bankrupting funding policy … that is beginning to lead to irreversible decline.’
The parallels with 2024 in the book are less to do with 1997, even though both years saw a newly installed Labour Government back in office after years in the wilderness. The parallels are instead stronger between 2024 and 2003/04, when the Blair Government in its second term was having another go at sorting out university financing – with, according to Stevens, ‘remarkable courage’.
One key question at the time was whether it was possible to maintain a world-class system university, just as the Sunday Times recently posed exactly the same question on its front page. Stevens notes Kenneth Baker’s useful contribution to a parliamentary debate in the early 2000s: ‘When great institutions decline, they do not decline precipitously; there is no precipice. They simply decline very slowly. Higher education in this country is now heading down that slope and I believe that the Government are doing very little to arrest the decline.’
Another live issue 20 years ago was whether the Labour Party could be held together on such an important issue, one which split the Blarities and the Brownites. The eventual answer was ‘just’, as the legislation introducing £3,000 fees pipped through Parliament with a majority of just five (thanks in part to Tory abstentions and one Tory rebel as well as Scottish Labour MPs voting on an England-only measure). The key to this success was, we are told, ‘the drip-drip’ of providing additional maintenance support to poorer students. Given today’s woeful maintenance settlement, the sound of those drips should echo through the years.
One notably big difference between today’s debates and those of a generation ago is the centrality of ‘differential fees’. The Labour rebels in 2003/04 were most exercised about the risk of a two-tier system, in which some institutions charged more than others. In contrast, Stevens regarded a two-tier system as the price of excellence, condemning those seeking equality of outcomes in a style that sometimes veered on the snobbish: ‘they would rather see Oxbridge, UCL, Warwick and Imperial underfunded than see such institutions given different capitation fees or allowed to charge variable fees.’
As we have since had differential fees in theory but not in practice, with pretty much every full-time undergraduate course now priced at the same level for home students, much of the fuss on both sides in 2003/04 looks today to be smoke with no fire.
Biting the bullet
Back then, New Labour Ministers bit the bullet, ripped up their own 1997/98 settlement and put in place a system for the long term. To take the bullet analogy one stage further, the 2003/04 fees settlement in England was close to being that rarest of items in public policy: a silver bullet.
It solved a funding crisis and has outlived many different governments: it is the underlying legislation from 2004 that continues to govern institutional and university funding today, 20 years on, and upon which the Coalition’s bold increase in fees back in 2012 was built. If the settlement looks outdated today, it is because the parameters were fixed rather than allowed to float up with inflation as the value of each pound fell.
Will the latest crop of Labour Ministers be similarly brave enough to put a long-term funding solution in place that enables our universities to remain globally competitive and gives our students sufficient income to live with dignity and to play a full part in student life? And given that in both 2004 and 2012 (as well as at the 2015, 2017 and 2019 elections), the main Opposition party played politics rather than seeking to help deliver a long-term solution for higher education funding, will the Conservatives this time around recognise there are, in fact, few – if any – net gains in votes to be won by opposing more help to students and more help to universities? From the vantage point of the early 2000s, Stevens said Conservative higher education ‘policies since 1997 have been, to put it mildly, strange.’ Back in Opposition today, they have an opportunity to learn from this error.
In the end, whether policymakers want to emphasise equity or excellence, they have to recognise – like Blair and Cameron / Clegg before them – that it costs money to deliver.
The University of Kent and UEA are two of the seven ‘plate glass universities’, which were established in the 1960s. The article only lists ancients, red bricks and polytechnics as types of universities in the UK.
Very thoughtful article.
You are right to say “……..equity or excellence, they have to recognise – like Blair and Cameron / Clegg before them – that it costs money to deliver.”
The equity wing are keen to spend more on expansion of both the number of Universities and colleges and the number of students. We must remember that Blair talked about the expansion of Higher Education and if they were to focus on this (rather than University under graduate and post graduate degrees) it would have my support and result in much lower costs while making many more young people happier and better skilled for life and work.
The excellence wing could be pacified by a “less is more” approach. Fewer under and post graduate students but over all better quality students and higher funding for these students and investment in research.
To do this would require the end of “the £9,250 u/graduate universal benefit “and a change to multiple pricing of courses, universities and fees that brought the sector closer to the real world.
As a nation, we need to accept that HE is about excellence, quality, ability, character, attitude and ambition and is meritocratic and competitive.
The sector would serve society better if undergraduate fees at the best places were over £40,000 a YEAR and around £2,000 a year for lesser subjects and locations and around £1,000 a year for certain level 4 and 5 qualifications, which in some cases would only need one year to complete.
As for who pays what, that would depend on the fees for each course at each University with the state contributing a flat grant of £20k pa for each funded student which would also be the base amount for each student’s basic loans.
Additional loans would be available to cover individual fees /costs and designed so that full costs would be recovered by the state over a maximum of 30 years from the student so that Universities could be paid in full.
I was once told by a Vice-Chancellor who had also been leader of a polytechnic that Sir Keith Joseph who heartily disliked local authorities was instrumental in ensuring that they and larger higher education colleges were removed from local government control via the Education Reform Act of 1988.
There is also more to say about social justice, funding and the doctrine of ‘excellence’.