Fighting for Funding
All the educational chatter this morning is about the funding of Higher Education.   Vince Cable and friends are flying kites for graduate taxes, two-year degrees and other whizzo-ways to save our money (or generate graduates on the cheap, depending upon which way you want to look at it).

And, inevitably, the HE community has responded with a round of retaliatory fusillades.    A Guardian piece from Malcolm Grant, head of University College London, for example, calling for student places to be cut rather than funding, generated over 200 comments in its first day; or about one every 7-8 minutes.

There have to be changes to HE.    I think everybody acknowledges that.   But finding consensus as to what those changes should be is a bit more tricky.   All too easily it ends up with a parade of prejudices (loans are better; grants are better; no, no taxes are best; no, no, shorter degrees; no, no, distance learning is the key, etc etc) and a menagerie of hobby-horses being trotted out into the parade ring for general ridicule, or whatever.

That said, there are a number of truths which are worth repeating, not least because they are too easily overlooked.

What is HE for?

One, there are a lot more students in HE now than there were 40 years ago.    That has changed the nature of HE.    It is, like it or not, more vocational.

At the size the sector has become, it has to be;  we are not rich enough to indulge in HE on such a scale simply for its own sake.

But HE must be more than vocational.    The way we have gone risks losing sight of other, equally important goals.    (As one pundit put it, when the polytechnics became the new universities, a few decades ago, the result was not the increase the number of universities in the country, as politicians liked to claim, but to force all universities to become polytechnics.)

We need, as a nation, first class scholarship and research. We need it both for enhanced prosperity, but also for cultural enrichment, for a sense of a civilisation growing, not stagnating.

Most of that research is best undertaken in universities. And most researchers (and therefore their research) benefit from having to teach as well.

But then to argue that all “universities” need to do research is rubbish. You have only to wade through the acres of educational research papers, as I do from time to time, to know that most of it is tripe, of no value other than to offer some small boost to the academic credibility of its authors within their own, ultimately incestuous, communities.

So we need a range of different types of HE institution.   We need an elite where scholarship at its best can be pursued, unfettered by petty political and economic considerations.   But we only need a handful of such institutions, not 50 or 100.

We need institutions dedicated to research across the whole range, from blue sky to green-fingered, but where new generations of researchers are trained as well.

And we need a wide range of institutions dedicated to training graduates equipped to enter the many and varied professions we need for society to flourish.

They don’t all need to be called universities.   Indeed, it is probably counterproductive to do so, since it implies similarities of purpose and outlook that simply are inappropriate.

Where should HE be?

Alongside the debate as to what, is where.   If more students went to university in their home town, argue some, they could live at home, and everything would cost less.   Or how about doing more of it by distance learning?

Yes but, argue the opponents, something of the essential rite of passage of “going to university” would be lost.

Even worse, argues Jonathan Wolff in another Guardian piece, the “danger of distance learning is that it may make second-class citizens of students who choose it”.   It is cheaper, and hence more likely to appeal to lower socio-economic groups.  And they will miss out on the other benefits of “going to uni” which, as university outputs become  more uniform, employers will increasing look to as a way to differentiate the excellent from the ordinary.

That is a very biased view.   For instance both the Open Universities of the UK and the Netherlands show higher levels of student satisfaction than almost any comparable face-to-face universities in their respective countries.   And much of that springs from the much higher levels of commitment and dedication their students bring to their undergraduate experience.

Distant is different, true.   But distant can be better, Professor Wolff.   It certainly doesn’t have to be worse.

It is different.   But different individual want different opportunities and experiences.  One size only fits all if it is shapeless.    We need to fit our HE to our needs.

Sources: Vince Cable; Malcolm Grant; Jonathan Wolff