One of the few things we still excel at is our top University education with Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College and the LSE all regularly appearing in the top 10 in the world. There is a middle tier of excellence from many other colleges. BUT we also have a mass of dross - so called “universities” which appear to have little or no academic standards, existing merely as a means of keeping more of our youth off the dole, while making them build up debts that they have little prospect of ever repaying. The trouble is that the government seems to be unable to distinguish between between the groups!
Now the best universities are under threat from the government’s dumbing-down process which ditches any respect for academic standards in pursuit of accessibility.
In this as in this week’s complaint about access to the professions there appears nowhere to be any recognition of the central fact that to gain access to the professions which they cite requires rigourous study and high standards. These cannot be achieved in many of our sub-standard state schools.
The whole problem with under-achievement lies with several interconnected factors: (1) lack of commitment by parents; (2) downgrading of academic standards in schools; (3) the pernicious effects of the culture of ‘all shall have prizes’ which produces a climate of opinion that the young have the ‘right’ to go to a top university without first reaching the standards it requires.
As a country we depend on the standards of the leaders of many disciplines. We cannot afford to let our standards fall further.
Christina
TELEGRAPH
22.7.09
How Labour keeps the lower classes in their place
State schools have been wrecked and now it is the turn of our best universities, says Simon Heffer.
The Department of the Bleeding Obvious is one of the most cash-hungry in Government. It employs politicians and bureaucrats at huge expense to inquire into the failings of society, and discuss how they might be put right. It has just published another report, of an inquiry led by Alan Milburn, the former cabinet minister, into the lack of social mobility for the lower classes. Various reasons are advanced in this DBO tract, such as the children of the lower classes lacking ambitious parents, or contacts who can get them work experience, or who might advise them how to undertake a university or job interview. But it wouldn't be the DBO if there weren't something even more bleeding obvious at fault, which is our shocking state education system, and the handling of our universities.
It is a tribute to 12 years of the Blair and Brown Terrors that social mobility has declined, and that the professions appear to be open only to those from the "right" schools and therefore the "right" universities. In an interview yesterday Mr Milburn was asked precisely the sort of question the DBO dislikes intensely, which was whether the winding-up of so many grammar schools since the heyday of social mobility in the 1950s had had a damaging effect. He couldn't possibly admit that it had: he said they were fine when only a small elite was needed for the professions, but argued that our country now required a much higher number of educated people than the grammar schools could have provided. In part he was right, but in part his logic is bogus.
Mr Milburn spoke of 2.5 million people going to university. What he did not speak of was the proportion of those who turn up inadequately educated to use a university properly; or the proportion that goes to establishments offering courses of such limited rigour that their degrees are probably worth less than the A-levels of the 1950s and 1960s. As with so much of what the DBO does, stating the obvious goes hand-in-hand with failing to understand it and its causes; and there is rarely a chance of getting the right solution.
I am sure we need more professionally qualified people than in the 1950s, because we are a more developed economy. Yet there is no point sending people to university for the sake of it. Labour's target of 50 per cent of people having a tertiary education was a rhetorical device rather than a practical policy. It would be wonderful if 50, 60 or even 70 per cent of people went to university, provided they had been educated to a standard where they could benefit from teaching that would be of an appropriately high and demanding standard. We are some way from both of those things, and the Government still contrives to make the situation worse.
Many intelligent young people are denied a place at university or in the professions because their schools fail to develop their talent. This was routine a century ago. It is an outrage now, after decades of welfarism and the superb framework established by the 1944 Education Act. Mr Milburn says there wouldn't have been enough grammar schools to cope with all the people we need. Then, quite simply, open more; a lot more. Nor would this harm those who didn't make the cut. In Northern Ireland, which still has grammar schools, not only are the results from the selective schools superb – so are those from the non-selective ones, where teachers concentrate on developing the particular aptitudes of children in specific ranges of ability. Ladders that existed in the 1950s, and which still exist in a few fortunate parts of the country, have been pulled up. If we want social mobility, particularly from inner cities, we must drop them down.
But there are even more serious questions about universities, towards which the Government's policies are shameful in their dereliction. The benefit of what the best of these institutions do for the nation and wider world is, again, bleeding obvious: yet the Charity Commission, which I wrote here last week is seeking under Dame Suzi Leather (its card-carrying Labour supporter chairman) to close down parts of the private school sector, is now turning its attention to three of our finest universities – Oxford, Cambridge and Durham. All are collegiate, and the colleges have hitherto been exempt charities. However, under the Charities Act of 2006 the colleges must register with the Charity Commission and be subject to its brand of politically "independent" scrutiny. For good measure, a Cambridge college bursar told me last week that HM Revenue and Customs is investigating the subsidised accommodation and food that colleges have historically given to fellows as a perk on top of their meagre salaries. We know how Gordon Brown ignorantly regards these places as bastions of English upper-middle class privilege – who can forget his bigoted attack on Oxford after the failure of a girl from the north of England to win a place to read medicine there? What further damage does he hope to do to them before he leaves office?
Those who overcome the hurdles put in their way by the state education system and get into Oxbridge should be aware of the cost borne by the universities, because the Government isn't. King's College Cambridge says it subsidises students to the tune of £6,000 a year each. Corpus is £3,500; Emmanuel £2,000. Tuition fees are £3,225 a year, but there are bursaries paid by the university (and largely funded by Trinity, which is almost the only truly wealthy establishment in the university) of up to £3,250 a year. Many colleges are raising money from old members to top up their endowments to enable not the quaffing of port at high table, but the provision of money to many more undergraduates from poor backgrounds who otherwise could not afford to come to Cambridge. Endowment income has collapsed for many colleges because of the credit crunch and near-zero interest rates.
The Government will not let universities charge what they like for courses, which is the only sensible way forward: it would raise money from abroad, it would stop universities being a benefit match for the middle classes, and would bring in funds to allow colleges to be generous to many clever but impecunious students. No one would ever be denied a university education, or a shot at one of the professions that often follows on from it, because of hardship. But for the moment the universities' hands are tied. At Oxbridge, the rate of subsidy will entail some colleges reducing admissions or going broke within three or four decades.
The Government probably cannot, or will not, understand that letting universities charge what they like would be the best way to guarantee not just their survival, but also the grant of the widest possible access to students of whatever means. There was a story last weekend about a 20 per cent cut in university funding being possible under a Tory government, because of the dire economic situation. Perhaps every cloud has a silver lining; for if such a cut forced the hand of a government into deregulating universities, then it would be one of the greatest advances in social mobility imaginable.
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