Robbins and After

The early 1960s saw the biggest transformation of English higher education of the past hundred years. It is only matched by the break-up of the Oxbridge monopoly and the early Victorian reforms. It will be forever associated with the name of Lionel Robbins, whose great report came out in November 1963: he is for universities what Beveridge is for social security. His report exuded such authority and was associated with such a surge in the number of universities and of students that Robbins has given his name to key decisions which had already been taken even before he put pen to paper. In the 1950s Britain’s twenty-five universities received their funding from fees, endowments (invested in Government bonds which had largely lost their value because of inflation since the First World War), and ‘deficit funding’ from the University Grants Committee, which was a polite name for subsidies covering their losses. The UGC had been established in 1919 and was the responsibility not of the Education Department but the Treasury, which was proud to fund these great national institutions directly. Like museums and art galleries, higher education was rarefied cultural preservation for a small elite. Public spending on higher education was less than the subsidy for the price of eggs. By 1962 there were 118,000 full-time university students together with 55,000 in teacher training and 43,000 in further education colleges. This total of 216,000 full-time higher education students broadly matches the number of academics now. Young men did not go off to university—they were conscripted into the army. The annual university intake of around 50,000 young people a year was substantially less than the 150,000 a year doing National Service. The last conscript left the army in the year Robbins was published. Reversing the balance between those two very different routes to adulthood was to change Britain. It is one of the many profound differences between the baby boomers and the generation that came before them. Just over half of students were ‘county scholars’ receiving scholarships for fees and living costs from their own local authority on terms decided by each council.

Driver of Innovation

We saw in Chapter Four that the UK can be proud of the quality of the research conducted in its universities. But we need to be clear what this success is. Success means relentless pressure on academics to produce papers that are going to be assessed by fellow academics as of the highest quality and frequently cited. For most academics today that means getting published in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals which is what matters for promotion, even though the assessment of their research excellence in the REF is supposed to be independent of the status of the journal in which their work appears. That drives competition in research performance whose logic is as obvious as rewarding a football team for scoring goals. The sure way for a university to move up the rankings and boost its prestige is to promote or hire hot-shot academics with strong publishing records. In science as in football we run the most open and most competitive league in the world—and hope to continue to do so even outside the EU. It has projected our universities high up the rankings, alongside the US. (There is one important difference from football—under the rules of the REF, academics could take their publications with them when they moved. It as if when you buy a star striker you get the goals he scored in the previous season as well. The logic is that it is part of their personal research performance that is being assessed. It has driven up the pay of the academic stars but also provided opportunities to younger post-docs after they get something published. Nicholas Stern’s review of the REF in 2016 proposed that such portability should end.) The high rankings of our research-intensive universities are a real achievement. But that is not the same as having the best national R&D system or contributing to tackling big global challenges or successfully commercializing new technologies or making a region a lively innovation cluster. We might hope that our research strengths contribute to these wider goals. But we may have been forced to make trade-offs to achieve research excellence which can actually make it harder to achieve other objectives.

Getting in to University

Our system of university admissions is medieval—and was created in 1961 when UCAS, originally called UCCA (the Universities Central Council on Admissions, now the Universities and Colleges Admissions Services), was set up. We have a single national system of competitive application to university, based on the assumption that most students will move away from home. It is very different from the classic Continental and American model in which you go to your local college or university for a tertiary education, which is neither highly selective nor highly specialized. Nearly half of American undergraduates study at a two-year college and then obtain what we would have called an ordinary degree. If they have higher ACT or SAT scores they are more likely to start at a university providing a full four-year course from the beginning but this is still likely to be in their home state and open to students who can arrive after two years at a college. Then if they really have an aptitude for academic study and wish to specialize or need to get a professional qualification they do a postgraduate Masters course: perhaps at this point they may move out of the state. Ask an American professional where they went to university and you will be told which business or law or medical school they went to as a postgraduate. But they may well have started their undergraduate studies somewhere very different and much closer to home. And their whole time in higher education is likely to have been longer than in England. The English system by contrast is the medieval model of a young gentleman leaving home (or boarding school—meaning it would be very peculiar to return home for university) to go to Oxford or Cambridge. It has been shaped by a long history as a unitary state with very few universities and nationwide migration of students to get to them. It is so deeply embedded that the decision to set up the nationwide admissions system provoked very little discussion or challenge. So that medieval model now applies to a million English undergraduates and over a hundred universities.

Why it’s Worth Going to University

You may well have gone to university. If so, would you do it all over again? I expect so. One survey of recent graduates found 96 per cent of them would do it again. If you haven’t gone but are thinking about going to university you should almost certainly go for it. You won’t regret it. It may well turn out to be one of the most rewarding and transforming experiences of your life. But what is it that makes more and more of us go to university when the media are full of stories of graduates who are unemployed and the usual clichés that too many people go to university? And why are record numbers of young people going even after the changes in student finance, which I helped to bring in, mean that graduates are likely to be paying back more over their working lives? Just look at the newspaper headlines: . . . Thousands of new graduates out of work, figures show. Expansion of the university sector has destroyed its status. UK graduates are wasting degrees in lower-skilled jobs. Today’s university students are being sold a lie. . . . Is College Worth It? is a very fair question, and the American book with that title answers with a clear ‘No’ for many people, many courses, and many institutions. The conventional wisdom is that going to university is often an expensive waste of time. But for most students the truth is the opposite. For most young people it is a deeply rewarding, life-changing experience. And it matters particularly if you come from a poor background because then it really could transform your chances in life. I meet parents who think that too many people go to university but definitely want their own child to go—it is the other parents’ kids who aren’t supposed to go. But the other parents might not see it that way. A survey of mothers of children born in the year 2000 showed that even for the mothers with the lowest qualifications 96 per cent wanted their child to go to university.

Conclusion

Universities are important, sophisticated institutions but they are not well understood even by academics themselves who are busy researching gravitational waves or the rise of populism. They may, very reasonably, find their discipline much more interesting than their institution. Instead the campus novel, from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim to Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, David Lodge’s Brummidge, and Howard Jacobson’s Sefton Goldberg, is the main way people working in universities investigate what they are like and communicate it to the wider world. But they can’t tell the whole story. There are also academics in British universities researching universities but not many of them— most of the books about the university are American. Meanwhile crude conspiracy theories claim to explain what is happening to a complex institution. One such narrative is ‘the university is under attack from managers/ministers/ markets threatening my/your/all disciplines’. Another narrative is ‘Universities are ivory towers: there are too many of them and too many people go.’ That is why I have tried to convey what I have learnt from my university education over the past decade and assembled the evidence to explain why both of those narratives are wrong. Such is my respect for the values of academia that, even if one might suspect this is just a heavily disguised ministerial memoir, it is at least the first example which has been subject to academic peer review. The behaviour of our universities is influenced by their environment and the incentives they face. That environment is very unusual and took its modern form as a result of a series of haphazard decisions taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Competitive nationwide entry gives our universities exceptional power to decide who they admit. That in turn has driven an intense educational arms race in our secondary schools which in turn has led to very early subject specialization. The behaviour of schools is shaped by the competition to get into the ‘best’ universities. However, we have seen that there are different types of universities, each well adapted to a distinctive role.

How: EdTech

I have attended the launch of an education programme. It was blasted into orbit. I was in French Guyana for the launch of an Ariane rocket carrying a telecommunications satellite which would deliver broadband access to educational services for parts of Africa not reached by fibre or mobile phone masts. Many education programmes and teaching materials are available on-line but schools and colleges in parts of Ethiopia or Kenya or Rwanda do not have the broadband connections to access them. A small and affordable satellite dish at a local school or college opens up higher education to them. For centuries our picture of education has been very different. A wonderful image in a medieval illuminated manuscript shows a professor lecturing a class. It is a scene we recognize today: students at the front who are keen and attentive and others at the back who aren’t. The place is Bologna and the lecturer is Henry of Germany so the university is international. Some of the most profound features of university life are not very different from what those students experienced centuries ago, even whilst at the same time a student may be learning about the latest intellectual advances. This mix of ancient and modern is part of the particular appeal of the university—graduates dressed up in medieval robes and perhaps with some Latin thrown in are awarded doctorates for research out at the frontiers of knowledge. We are now at the moment when the technological revolution which has changed so much else in our lives is going to transform education. It won’t be the first time innovation has had this effect—the Victorian Penny Post made the correspondence course and the University of London external degree possible. There are sceptics who doubt the balance of ancient and modern is about to change radically. They argue that even whilst technology has changed the classic forms of academic study—the lecture, the printed book, the essay—are going to continue to be impervious to innovation because they meet deep human needs. Moreover there have been bold claims for the impact of technology on education which now sound pretty silly.

How to Pay for it

Paying for university education has been one of the most acute and politically fraught challenges in public policy. Both the Blair government and the Coalition had some of their smallest Parliamentary majorities for votes on this issue, such are the emotions it arouses. It sparked violent protests in November 2010 and was seen as one of the issues boosting support for Jeremy Corbyn in the General Election of June 2017. It touches such a raw nerve because people worry that we are imposing costs on the younger generation which previous generations of young people did not have to bear. Having written a book myself about the importance of fairness between the generations I well understand why this matters so much. One can only tackle this anxiety if the new way of funding higher education is better for the younger generation than any likely alternative. When I was Opposition spokesman before 2010 I said that the test of any changes we brought in would be if they were in the interests of students and that is the test I tried to apply throughout my time as minister. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s higher education faced persistent financial crises. Higher education was one of the public services facing particularly rapid growth of demand. For the amount of public spending per student to be maintained there would have to be very large increases in total public spending on higher education. Expecting such big increases in spending for any programme was difficult enough. But at the same time higher education was not a political priority. Indeed this view was reinforced by universities. I would encounter protesters on university campuses demanding free higher education whilst inside the university’s own social scientists repeated the conventional wisdom that it was the early years that really mattered and the Vice Chancellor told me he could not do any better on access for disadvantaged students unless schools improved and that should be the priority. Moreover, as it is usually the quality of its research that makes a university’s reputation, pressures to maintain research funding were greater than for teaching.

What: A Broader Education

The value of universities is not simply their contribution to human capital and economic growth, welcome though these are. Universities should enable a graduate to lead a flourishing, fulfilled life. That must mean the capacity to engage with the wide range of extraordinary intellectual and cultural achievements to which we are heirs and to which we should add for the next generation. It is the most important single responsibility of our universities and it is where the most significant reform is required. English education requires 16-year-olds to take life-changing decisions to specialize in just three subjects, and indeed allows students to drop a range of subjects at the age of 14. No other major Western country does this. It is the source of many of the other problems which we worry about. Fewer girls do STEM subjects after the age of 16 than in most other countries because in England they are presented with irreversible decisions to give them up when they are much too young. We suffer particularly acutely from C. P. Snow’s two cultures because our teenagers can join one of two apparently deeply hostile gangs—the humanities or the sciences, the Montagues and the Capulets of intellectual life—when most other countries avoid promoting such divisions. When employers complain about employability they often mean that young people have been force-fed for a narrow academic curriculum without a wider range of subjects and skills. Above all, as I look back on my education, my greatest regret—and that of many friends and contemporaries as we get older—is that we missed out on great scientific or cultural achievements of our age because of early decisions whose long-term significance we completely failed to recognize. I greatly enjoyed studying History, English, and German for my A levels but now I am shocked at the barbarism of a system which restricted my studies to those three subjects at the age of 16. This is the intellectual and cultural damage inflicted by our educational system when above all it should broaden our horizons and enlighten us. That this system is preserved on the claim it is necessary for high academic standards is even more scandalous.

Vocational Higher Education

A beautiful large stained-glass window dominates the end of the Great Hall of Birmingham University. My great-grandfather was one of the glaziers who made it—my family were Birmingham artisans, craftsmen, and engineers. His son, my grandfather, remembered being taken to the opening of Birmingham University in 1902—Joe Chamberlain, the founder of the university, believed that the workers who had built it should be invited, not just the academics. From a distance it looks like the stained-glass window in an ancient cathedral with figures of saints, but close up you see the radicalism of Joe Chamberlain’s vision. It is dedicated to the arts and sciences. Instead of saints and bishops the figures represent disciplines like geometry or music, but alongside them, equally prominent, are contemporary trades: there is an electroplater, a rather Michelangelesque miner, and a demure bookkeeper too. It is a celebration of the range of trades and professions of the early twentieth century, ‘as practised in the university and in the City’, said the local paper. England’s first university in one of its great bustling industrial cities was claiming a new role for the university based on its civic commitment. This great window embodies a very different idea of the university from the Oxbridge tradition. It is a vigorous statement in an argument that was raging within Government at the very time that Chamberlain was planning his new university. The question was whether public funds should go to help pay for higher education courses outside Oxbridge on a systematic basis and if so which courses at which institutions. (At this point what would become our Redbrick universities were typically university colleges teaching for the external degree of the University of London and funded locally, though with occasional public grants.) The question came to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1895, who replied: ‘As an old Oxford man myself I must confess to a feeling, which you may call a prejudice, that University education, in the full sense of the term, can hardly be obtained except at our old Universities.’ The Treasury consulted Oxford and Cambridge on what they should fund.

Which Three Years?

I meant it when I said that I loved universities. But attitudes to universities are mixed. Other stages of education do better in winning hearts and minds, and politicians react accordingly. The target of three million apprenticeships was celebrated as a popular policy whereas there was little celebration of the reality of two million students in British universities. Telegenic rows of students serve as a backdrop for politicians’ speeches on any subject—apart from higher education itself. Legislation on schools was seen as popular use of parliamentary time but there was reluctance to devote any parliamentary time to sorting out an incoherent legal framework for universities which lagged way behind our reforms. Above all the early years of childhood were seen as far more important than later stages of education in shaping life chances and improving social mobility. I do not begrudge these other stages of education their political appeal— honest! Anyway politicians and their advisers are just reflecting a wider conventional wisdom. Universities themselves helped shape this view of educational priorities. I would go to university meetings where protesters outside demanded more public funding so higher education could be ‘free’ whilst inside earnest public policy students and academics told me that actually public funding should be shifted to the early years or that primary school literacy and numeracy programmes were the real educational priority. These attitudes are influenced by the tendency of educators at whatever level to blame the previous stage of education for their problems. Universities say they would love to recruit someone from a disadvantaged background but prospective students have been let down by their schooling so their A level grades just aren’t good enough and the university cannot gamble on their being able to catch up at such a late stage. Colleges say it is hard for them to focus on helping students get good A levels when they are also expected to provide remedial education for 16–18-year-olds who have failed at secondary school. Secondary schools say it is hard for them to deliver good GCSE results when too many kids arrive from primary school without the basics of reading and writing.