By Andy Ford, Unite
BBC Radio 4 recently carried a two-part report, The University Timebomb, on the disastrous state of British higher education.
The programme showed how, under both New Labour and the Tories, universities have been funded essentially by credit, while FE colleges have been starved of resources. But now a day of reckoning is approaching in the form of a review of post-18 education by Sir Philip Augar.
In theory, universities are funded by tuition fees paid by students taking out loans. But only 14% of students fully repay their loans and 24% never pay anything. All in all, about half of loans are written off. This means that each cohort of students costs tax-payers about £8.5 billion. And that cost has got too big to ignore.
It was Tory David “Two Brains” Willets who tripled maximum fees to £9,000 in 2010, sparking a huge youth and student movement. Far from having two brains however, on the evidence here it is doubtful if has even has one. Willets was shocked and surprised when all the universities decided to charge the maximum. He had no idea they would be so greedy. His former special adviser, Nick Hillman, even goes so far as to say that while the students were protesting in every city in the land, secretly, back on campus, they were lobbying for maximum fees so their university would look “prestigious”! Despite the fiasco created. Hamilton is now ‘Director’ of the Higher Education Policy Institute, which lobbies for grammar schools and of course has an opaque funding stream.
The switch to tuition fees has been accompanied by a collapse in adult part-time study, which has almost halved.
Ed Miliband’s weak-as-water pledge to reduce fees to £6,000 in 2015 was explored and shown to be nothing more than an attempt to cash in votes from Nick Clegg’s previous betrayal of students in 2010, when he promised to abolish fees in the election, only to help triple them once elected and in coalition with the Tories.
On the other hand, Corbyn’s clear pledge to abolish fees in 2017 forced May’s hand, compelling her to raise the repayment threshold to £25,000 a year and set up the Augar Review into the whole area of tertiary education. But such is May’s ineptitude, that she does not appear to have costed her change to the threshold, which raised the cost of each cohort of students from £5.6 billion to £8.6 billion.
One outcome that is rumoured to be coming from the Augar Review is a cut in fees to £7,500, with maybe no replacement funding. Another is to put university funding back ‘on the books’ as government expenditure which will mean universities could face the same austerity as FE and the wider public sector.
Ridiculous perks and salaries of Vice-Chancellors
Not surprisingly the universities are lobbying furiously, claiming that they bring wonderful benefits to the towns and cities that host them, while not mentioning the ridiculous salaries and perks of the Vice-Chancellors, or the over-packed courses, or the low amount of contact time, sometimes as low as 3 or 4 hours a week, given to students.
Admittedly many cities have come to depend on the (borrowed) student pound, but the benefit goes to a narrow range of city centre bars, clubs and takeaways, and also rapacious landlords.
Universities have used their privileged funding stream to become big players in urban planning, regeneration and regional economies. For instance, in Lancashire, Lancaster University somehow got themselves designated as the seat of a regional NHS laboratory network, despite not being the home of any significant NHS pathology. If the plan goes ahead, it will suck skilled NHS scientific jobs out of Blackpool, Barrow, Preston and Blackburn, only to recreate them in the university city of Lancaster. The university is even rumoured to be getting their own motorway junction built for it.
If Augar does lead to a funding gap, there is talk of two-year degree courses or more foreign students to fill the hole. But the universities are actually facing what the programme terms a ‘perfect storm’ of less funding, with Brexit cutting overseas enrolments and falling numbers of 18 year olds. Nick Hillman could see mergers and cuts to courses and did not exclude bankruptcies.
The other side of tertiary education is the FE sector. While universities have grown fat off the borrowings of students the FE sector has been hammered. When Tony Blair first instituted tuition fees (of £1,000) in 1999, he set a target of 50% of young people going to university. This is now achieved, but has it been worth it?
The OECD commented that although Britain has many people with qualifications, well above the OECD average, it lags behind on actual skills. In their words, there is “a mismatch of qualifications with skills“. This comes as no surprise to any worker in the NHS, where there are shortages in every skilled profession, from biomedical scientists to midwives and physiotherapists. There are 40,000 nursing vacancies alone. The OECD see the lack of useful skills in the workforce as one reason for Britain’s appalling productivity.
Meanwhile, young people with degrees are working in call-centres, shops and bars. A lot of universities sell and market their courses by offering degrees in attractive subjects such as music production, media or forensic science but the graduates then find employment in those fields is severely limited. A good example is that about a dozen institutions now offer degrees in Sports Journalism, and yet only 2 or 3 jobs a year come up in the field.
All the politicians interviewed agreed that the UK has gone overboard on 3-year residential degrees and need to revitalise vocational education and the FE sector. Yet those same politicians from Blair to David Willets to Teresa May have presided over the decisions that have led to this incredible mess. In this they have followed the well-established snobbery of the British ruling class (and their New Labour shadows) of looking down on anyone “in trade” or who works with their hands. Yet who is more useful – a care assistant or an investment banker? An electrician or a PR consultant?
Too few FE qualifications, too many degrees
In Switzerland, 70% of young people go into vocational training post-18, in Britain funding to the FE colleges, the main vocational providers, has been cut by 30% in ten years and while £16 billion is spent on tuition fees, the whole of adult education gets just one sixteenth of that. Then Teresa May gives a speech at Derby College bemoaning the fact that just 16,000 people completed FE qualifications in 2017, compared with 350,000 degrees awarded.
She has set the Augar Review very tight constraints – no cap on numbers of students, no increase in costs – and it is known that the Treasury want to get more back from students and graduates.
The BBC reporter tried to force Labour’s Angela Rayner to choose between funding FE (“benefits the working class”) and scrapping university tuition fees (“subsidy to the middle classes”) but she correctly turned it back onto good education for all. This fake concern about subsidising the middle classes was regularly trotted out by New Labour to justify fees and the whole marketisation of education. As the programme pointed out, the history of the last 20 years has been a widening gap between FE and the universities, and within that a massive differentiation within the universities. The effect has been to increasingly restrict employment in law, accountancy, journalism and the professions generally to the upper middle classes, whilst simultaneously developing massive skills gaps across the real economy.
Socialists should enthusiastically back the Labour plan put forward by Jeremy Corbyn and Angela Rayner for a National Education Service, proper funding for vocational and part-time education and for an end to the mis-selling of inappropriate degree courses with minimal contact time.
April 26, 2019
