A return to rigour is required here
Tony Blair’s insistence that half of young people attend university was a dreadful idea that embodied everything that was bad about New Labour. It was gimmicky, votechasing, ill-conceived and left a long, pernicious legacy. Today, standards in admissions have slipped so far that the number of unconditional offers has doubled in five years at some universities as they scramble to fill places.
The consequences are felt not only in higher education but in wider society; the idea of free and diverse academic debate is under attack.
Mr Blair’s promise was superficially attractive because university can be a wonderful experience: many graduates would say it was the best time in their lives. But it is not for everyone. There is no reason why vocational training cannot occur in the workplace, where it is combined with practical experience. Setting an artificial target for university attendance had the unfortunate effect of eroding the link between individual talent and further study.
When the Tories came to office in 2010, they should have reversed Mr Blair’s goal. Instead, they went even further. In 2015, they lifted the cap on the number of places that English institutions could offer – a policy to be financed by selling off the student loan book to private companies. George Osborne gave the green light to chase undergraduates for cash.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with introducing free market-style incentives to higher education. Tuition fees have not, as the Left predicted, put the poor off further study, and asking students to pay something towards their learning ought to encourage them to study hard and choose courses that are more likely to deliver a return on the investment.
But that has not necessarily happened. The problem is that while successive governments have introduced the profit motive to higher education, they have combined said reforms with bureaucracy, state meddling and targets. Universities try to attract students regardless of their aptitude, while their reputation for financial profligacy and waste has grown.
The average pay for a university vice-chancellor now exceeds £275,000 – more than six times the average earnings of a member of staff – although they would doubtless insist that they are worth every penny.
George Holmes, vice-chancellor of the University of Bolton, raised eyebrows when he said that students benefit from being taught by someone who is successful and owns a Bentley. Whether this is true or not, they still graduate with whopping debts and insufficient skills to pay them off. No wonder so many of them were attracted to Labour’s promise to abolish student debt – an offer it hastily retracted after the election, presumably when it discovered that the cost has now topped £100 billion.
Corbynite students have become consumers who sometimes confuse consumer rights with political prejudices. The growing assumption that, because they have paid towards their courses, they call the shots is evident in their campaigns to tear down colonial-era statues, put trigger warnings before violent content in class or ban allegedly controversial speakers.
The modern university has thus been occupied by an unholy alliance of radical Left-wing ideas and corporate culture. Baroness Deech, a former senior proctor at Oxford University and principal of St Anne’s College, recently warned that “university authorities are complicit in allowing the free exchange of ideas to be closed down, and students are ever more censorious”.
When students demand “safe spaces” administrators give in because they are terrified of losing their custom.
The higher education sector needs to regain its sense of priorities. Free speech should be encouraged on campus; a diversity of opinion should be regarded as a sign of success. Scholarly standards have to be raised, which begins by returning to an admissions process that seeks to connect undergraduates to the courses and institutions that they are best suited to attend. Britain’s global reputation will not be helped by any appearance of a rush to the bottom. Rigour should be the watchword of the academy.