Higher educationThe ruin of Britain's universities

British universities have too little money to do their job properly

THE procrastination would impress the idlest of students. During last year's general election campaign, the government discovered that changes it had made to the way universities and their students are financed had peeved many voters. So in October 2001 it announced a review of the system. Because whether and how students pay for tuition is inextricable from how universities themselves are funded and organised, the review came to encompass a general, ten-year strategy for higher education as a whole. After repeated delays, its outcome was due this month. Then Estelle Morris, the education secretary, resigned, and the announcement was delayed again.

In mitigation, this extended essay crisis has been provoked by a particularly tough assignment. The malaise that afflicts Britain's universities has been brought about by decades of haphazard, myopic and self-interested policymaking, and the mishandling by successive governments of the transition from an elite to a mass system of higher education.

As in many other western countries, the number of students entering higher education in Britain has grown enormously in the past 40 years. Whereas around one in 20 school-leavers went on to university in 1960, more than one in three do so now. There was an especially big boom in the number of young people going on to higher education in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which has since levelled off: Tony Blair wants to revive it, and has set a target for 50% of 18-to-30-year-olds to experience higher education by 2010.

Many countries have struggled to manage such educational explosions, but in Britain it has been handled especially badly. Kingsley Amis, a novelist and academic, famously grumped in 1960 that “More will mean worse.” To an extent, that was inevitable: different standards of entry and teaching are bound to obtain when, as is now the case, higher education is provided in around 170 universities and higher education colleges, plus a variety of other facilities, rather than in a handful of elite institutions. But British governments have helped prove Mr Amis right by refusing to ask people to pay, either directly, through fees, or indirectly, through taxes, for all the extra students.

Expenditure per student has declined steadily, with a more rapid fall during the early 1990s (see chart). Since 1989, funding per student has fallen by 37% in real terms, while student numbers have increased by 90%. The income per student at Harvard and Yale is now, respectively, 4.5 and 3.2 times as much as Oxford's.

This squeeze has had predictable results. The ratio of students to teachers has doubled from around 9-1 ten years ago to 18-1 now. Dons' pay has declined not only in relation to the private sector, but also to other public-sector jobs: a new lecturer at one of Britain's old universities now earns about the same as a new policeman. Some universities are looking to poorer countries—South Korea, China, Eastern Europe—to fill junior posts.

Buildings, facilities and equipment have deteriorated. The higher education sector as a whole is in the red. Despite the dollop of cash for science that last year's government spending review provided, Universities UK (UUK), which represents higher education heads, reckons that in addition to the around £8 billion ($13 billion) of public money it receives annually, the sector needs an extra £9.94 billion over the next three years to put things right—a fantasy, says the government.

Money is not the only problem. Within the broad economy of higher education, many different types of students study an enormous variety of subjects in a wide range of institutions. Unfortunately, the tendency of policy has been to erase or deny the differences between them.

This tendency was most starkly manifest in the decision by the last Conservative government, in 1992, to scrap the distinction between universities and what were previously known as polytechnics. Martin Trow, of the University of California, Berkeley, a long-term-student of British and American higher education, says that this was a move “exactly in the wrong direction”: whereas what was needed was a clear articulation of the different characteristics and callings of different institutions, the reform obliged many of them to compete for the same resources and be judged (in some cases unfairly) by the same criteria.

No Nobels

It is difficult conclusively to prove the notion that Britain's top universities are falling behind their international counterparts, such as Harvard and Yale. There is, after all, no internationally agreed definition of what a university is supposed to do. “Fitness for the world”—what J.H. Newman, the great 19th-century advocate of a liberal education, saw as its ultimate aim—is tricky to measure. Teaching is obviously part of any definition; but it is difficult to compare the modular education offered in top American colleges with Britain's single-subject approach.

The creation of wealth, directly as well as indirectly, is increasingly regarded as part of a university's role; and in terms of the efficiency with which they spin off companies and pull in outside investment, British universities seem to be doing rather well. They still attract more than their fair share of foreign students.

Only 80 of the world's 1,200 most-cited scientists are working in Britain

But there are some indications that Britain's share of top-level research is diminishing. Britain won 11 Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine in the 1960s, 13 in the 1970s, four in the 1980s and two in the 1990s. Of the past five British scientific Nobel prize-winners, none worked at a British university (they were at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and government research laboratories). According to Andrew Oswald of Warwick University, only 80 of the world's 1,200 most-cited scientists are working in Britain, compared with 700 in America, whose lead is growing.

Leaders of the top universities—such as Sir Derek Roberts, provost of University College London (UCL)—are convinced that a crisis is impending. By British standards, UCL has a vast research budget; but it is running a deficit and has lost academic staff to America, though Sir Derek is more worried about the exodus of PhD and post-doctoral students to more remunerative countries. Because of the continual erosion of funding and salaries, he says, prestige institutions such as his are now “living on borrowed time”. To help secure its pre-eminence, UCL is considering a merger, combining with Imperial College, another premier London institution, to create a university with far greater clout than either Oxford or Cambridge.

Across the Thames in unfashionable Elephant and Castle, though a long way architecturally and academically from the academics at work around UCL's neo-classical quad, is South Bank University (formerly South Bank polytechnic). Deian Hopkin, its vice-chancellor, is a passionate advocate of higher education for all. He is, he says, much more worried about standards at the end of a student's course than at the beginning of it. South Bank has an agency to help students find part-time work. It also runs schemes in which employers try to persuade local pupils of the benefits of going to university. But because of a high drop-out rate, and its failure to meet student recruitment targets, South Bank has been obliged to cut academic jobs, and give back some of its grant to the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the primary government funding agency for universities. The problem, says Mr Hopkin, is that institutions such as his have been forced to compete for students and money with old universities that have vastly superior resources.

The government sees the problem but not the solution. It tinkered with funding arrangements in 1998, when it introduced small student fees to cover part of the cost of tuition, and supplement the much larger state subsidy. At the same time, the maintenance grants that students had previously enjoyed were replaced by loans.

One of the stated aims of these changes was to improve access to university for less-well-off teenagers. But the wide gap between the proportions of students who come from the top social classes and the bottom ones hasn't shrunk. Partly because of that, and partly because students and their parents don't like stumping up the cash, the government has come under pressure to scrap the fees (£1,100 for this academic year). In fact, only about 39% of students pay the full (if piddling) amount; 42% of them pay nothing at all. But replacing grants with loans too mean to cover living expenses seems to have frightened off some students. The government is likely to bring back grants under some new name.

Bring back Smith

Economics argue for cutting universities loose from government and allowing them to raise money through fees, for which students could borrow, either privately or from the government. Fees would rise a lot. The government says that the current £1,100 fees cover a quarter of the cost of educating students. UUK says the real cost is higher, and the difference appears in the deficits that around half of Britain's universities are running. Sir Richard Sykes, the rector of Imperial College, recently calculated that Imperial loses £2,800 annually on every undergraduate, and proposed charging the full cost, around £10,500, to students whose families could afford it.

In its last manifesto, Labour promised not to introduce top-up fees, but Tony Blair is now believed to favour them—persuaded, it is said, by Lord Jenkins, a former Labour chancellor of the exchequer, now chancellor of Oxford University. But other cabinet members, such as Gordon Brown, the current chancellor, are reckoned to be hostile. They fear that fees, even if introduced with a state-backed loans system, would put off poorer people.

If ministers shy away from this solution, there is talk that some top universities may decide to cut themselves loose, and do without government subsidy. Adam Smith would approve. He taught at Glasgow University, where academics were paid directly by students, and he thought the teaching was better in such universities than in those subsidised by the church or the state. A teacher's diligence, he observed, “is likely to be proportioned to the motive which he has for exerting it”. Britain's universities have been subjected to socialist centralism for too long. It would be good to bring a bit of Smith back into them.

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