‘If you could change one thing about higher education policy, what would be it be?’

We need to repeal the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, in particular the seven duties of the Office for Students and the requirements for higher education providers.

What does the State have the right to require from higher education providers in exchange for licensing degree awarding authority? The State can only require what it is competent to judge. How do we know the State has the right to require and the competency to judge:-

The protection of institutional autonomy;
Quality, and greater choice and opportunities for students;
Competition and collaboration;
Value for money;
Equality of opportunity;
Efficient, effective and economic use of resources; and
The principles of best regulatory practice.

In order for these requirements to be possible, a set of rules must exist which proves higher education providers do and can conform to these requirements. The rules are supposed to be inducted from past experience of higher education providers conformation to the rules and their capability to continue to conform, but all of the requirements use concepts originated from elsewhere in the history of State administered regulation for public services or business and industry. Not only must the State know standards of comparison for conformation, it must also be institutionally competent to judge conformity to the set of rules and the institutional competence of higher education providers in general to conform. Neither of these conditions are proven from past experience with higher education, so how did ministers and their advisers reason otherwise? Academic judgments are non-justiciable, so what higher education provides is neither a good nor a service. All of the assumptions about rules, requirements, conformity, and competence have been worked out using false analogies that higher education is a mixture of a business and a public service, when we know that idea is not the history of higher education. Higher education was originally an academic guild consisting of subject-specific academic communities within the legal person of a university for the intergenerational ownership and control of assets, first licenced by the Church and then the State. The adumbration of charities and companies attached to the university is for express charitable or commercial purposes, but the original purpose of the academic guild remains the same and is sustain the existence of the academic guild and its academic communities in order to teach knowledge independent of other institutions.

The State and its agents do know what to judge and how to judge higher education.

Universities should be required to publish an annual report on the amount of money they pay to consultants. The lanyard class has been farming their work out to external consultants for years, and when they run low on money to pay for it, the redundancies start.