Will they never learn?

by Anthony Smith, President of Magdalen College, Oxford

IN the past 20 years the student population of our universities has doubled while the cash spend per student has halved. In the United States during the same period, the amount spent on every student has doubled. That, put simply, is why our universities are facing a financial crisis.

At the same time, they are being goaded into expanding student numbers even further. For five years now the Government has offered only haphazard measures, complicated by ideologically driven interventions over tuition fees, access and student loans.

New Labour vowed to increase the number going into higher education to 50 per cent of the young adult population. Ministers said that no "top-up" fees would be permitted and that all students would pay the same fee whichever institution they went to.

The key questions however have proved unavoidable - should students be made to pay much higher fees (up to pounds 3,000 a year more than they do now) and, if so, should there be repayable loans on offer to them or should they pay through additional income tax? If the latter view wins the day, the country will be embarking in effect on a new hypothecated tax.

I am suspicious enough to wonder whether, under such an arrangement, the money will remain in the long run with the universities or quietly absorbed over time by the Treasury. The repayment of a fixed loan would be a more reliable solution to our funding shortfall.

The central oddity of the-White Paper being published tomorrow is that it rams two very different concerns together - university funding and the class makeup of universities. The Government intends to manhandle the elite institutions into taking poor students even when they leave school without the necessary qualifications.

The Chancellor, anxious to appease the more egalitarian Old Labour MPs, will not accept, even after the misjudged "Laura Spence Affair" - the spurious row about the failure of Ms Spence, a comprehensive school pupil, to win a place at my own college, Magdalen - that the so-called elite universities admit their students in open competition.

Applicants are chasing a specified number of places and the best ones available get them, whatever school they happen to have attended.

Of course, allowance can be made for poor teaching, but at the end of the day the university and not some outside body has to be the judge of potential excellence. And the pursuit of excellence, not social engineering, is what all this should be about.

THE unpalatable truth for some politicians is that universities can only very marginally improve the number of students who come from deprived homes, though they can and do work very hard to increase the number who apply. To increase the number significantly would require considerably upgrading the quality of state schools.

New Labour demeans itself with these sudden interpellations of we- know-best authoritarianism, which will cause much resentment and do little to lift the proportion of working-class students. That has remained stubbornly unchanged for 40 years. Even the highly egalitarian Scandinavians have found it impossible to make much headway with this issue.

The proposed "access Czar" - an idea Gordon Brown has rehashed from Estelle Morris's tenure at the Department of Education - will merely rile university admissions officers and achieve less progress than that we are already making on the basis of moral commitment to encourage a range of applicants.

We either have a liberal society or a Stalinist command system: you cannot mix them. The latter always ends in selfdestruction. Further attempts to interfere in the autonomy of universities will end in an explosion of indignant fury, not in a rationally thoughtout improvement in respect of a problem of access for poorer students which we all recognise and want to alleviate. As for paying for the universities, the options are simple: the cash can come from government or from the students, that is to say, from general taxation or from personal debt.

The appetite for further tax rises being slight, we shall be obliged to confront another range of personal debt and the repayment of high tuition and maintenance loans. It will become, like the mortgage, one of the common burdens of adulthood.

And what about the other 50 per cent of the cohort who are not expected apparently to benefit from higher education? Is it possible to have a national policy which addresses the opportunities of one half while ignoring the other?

WHAT we need is surely a national policy for young adults, opportunities for teaching and training the entire generation, not an obsessive insistence that universities should conscript half of them, while the rest are neglected. We have too many institutions trying to act as full-scale universities and not enough that concentrate on the equally important needs of the less academic.

If New Labour really wants to use the education system for socially beneficial ends, it should now provide large numbers of scholarships to cover the increased fees, especially for families with several university-age offspring. And it should reduce the repayment for anyone who chooses to work in the underpaid professions: school teaching, nursing, working in the Third World, and so on.

If we want world-class universities, we have to pay for them. We have now slipped so far behind that another hike in income will be necessary very soon and it is better to be honest and admit that the new fees only be the beginning The proposed pounds 3,000 "cap" is a tactical political figure. It will eventually be removed, so it would be better to leave it out from the start.

The only really effective policy would be one based upon university autonomy.

We don't need a regulator; we need people to understand that education should be valued for what it is worth - and paid for accordingly.

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