Three years ago, when Gordon Brown decided to make a populist cause célèbre of Laura Spence, a girl with excellent exam results from a Newcastle comprehensive who was rejected by Magdalen College, Oxford. I said on this page that the Chancellor had just made the biggest mistake of his political career. This comment has turned out to be more accurate than I expected. Although this month’s university funding Bill, whether or not it is passed, will do more damage to the Prime Minister than the Chancellor, nobody in the Government will emerge unscathed from this morass.
In fact, it looks as though higher education could become the Blair administration’s poll tax. Like the poll tax, the Higher Education Bill represents a nemesis, reflecting the qualities which brought the Government initial success. Just as the poll tax was the apotheosis of Thatcherite arrogance and intransigence, the university policy represents the logical conclusion of Blairite “triangulation” — the powerful idea that by delivering different messages to different audiences, a government can be all things to all men. The Government has tried to please everyone — the universities and science lobbies with extra money, the middle classes by avoiding the taboo of “tax”, the Labour Left by attacking “elitist” university admissions. But instead of satisfying all the conflicting interests, Mr Blair’s endless compromises have ended up alienating them.
The comparisons with the poll tax can be taken further. Like the poll tax, university funding is an essentially trivial issue which will bitterly divide ministers and corrode public trust in the Labour Government for years to come. Like the poll tax, this Bill is a purely symbolic policy — a non-solution to a non-problem.
The Bill is not a solution because the revenue raised will be insignificant. Not only has Mr Blair now agreed to freeze top-up fees until 2010, but he will also force universities to hand back much of their new income as bursaries to poor students. The Bill now before Parliament addresses a non-problem because, instead of restoring adequate funding, its main effect will be to create a new regulatory bureaucracy, the Office of Fair Access, dealing with the totally irrelevant issue of university admissions. Meanwhile, all the genuinely important questions about higher education in Britain will be rendered politically untouchable because of the traumatic impact of this one small reform, just as local government financing remains toxic more than a decade after the poll tax.
As a result, British higher education will be condemned to another generation of decline. For nothing can be done to restore the status of the universities until some fundamental questions are answered. Should all higher education institutions, ranging from elite international academies to local vocational colleges, be covered by the same policies on funding and state control? Should higher education be organised by government, rather than by independent private institutions? Should half the population spend three extra years on academic education? Can the Government stick to its 50 per cent graduate target without branding the other half of the population as dropouts, failures and intellectual inadequates?
Instead of addressing such important issues, the Prime Minister and his backbenchers are now engaged in an unseemly auction which will make British universities weaker, even more beholden to government and perhaps even poorer than they are today.
The Labour Government’s promise last week that the £3,000 fee ceiling would not be raised throughout the next Parliament means that leading universities will remain in penury until 2010 and beyond. The increase in funding will be even smaller than it seems. Most of the top universities have generously “decided” (under intense pressure from the Government) to hand a large part of their extra income back to students through bursaries. Cambridge, for example, plans to spend £8 million a year on extra student bursaries, wiping out almost half the £20 million the university expects to receive from the £3,000 top-up fee.
But if the universities and the Government hoped to placate the Labour Party’s class warriors with such gestures, they made a big mistake. On the contrary, the poisonous feelings can only intensify on both sides of the class divide. With new funding now reduced to a minimal level, the main effect of this Bill will be to to turn Britain’s universities into instruments of social engineering through the Office of Fair Access. This offers the Tories a perfectly principled reason to oppose the Bill, but more importantly it leads Labour into a political quagmire.
Every time a future Laura Spence faces rejection, the Government will be held responsible — whether the disappointed candidate comes from an underperforming comprehensive or a top private school. In the former case, the Government will be blamed for failing to stamp out elitism; in the latter case, for turning middle-class children into pawns in its class war.
Ironically both accusations will be valid. The Government will fail to eliminate “elitism” because world-class universities must by their nature be elitist institutions. It is inevitable, therefore, that top universities will take more candidates from good schools than from poor ones and that a high proportion of their students will come from ambitious upper and middle-class families which value education highly, often to the extent of spending crazy amounts of money on private schools. At the same time, it is also inevitable that higher education will be sucked ever more deeply into class warfare. Under the new funding formulas, university administrators will be ever more desperate to curry favour with the Government and (as we have already seen in the health service) will do everything possible to meet government targets, however arbitrary and bizarre.
The Government will, of course, protest that all it is doing in its new legislation is trying to create absolute “fairness” — to ensure that the best-qualified candidates are admitted to the best institutions, regardless of background or wealth. But such protestations will cut no ice for one simple reason: it is impossible for university admissions to be absolutely fair because there are never enough places at the top institutions for all the qualified candidates.
There are, in principle, only four ways to eliminate the apparent randomness and injustice and create some kind of equilibrium between supply and demand. The first is to ration admissions through very high fees. This is a course rejected even in America, where university fees may be enormous, but equally vast student loans and bursaries allow admissions policies to be, at least in theory, “needs blind”.
The second method of whittling down candidates is to keep raising entry qualifications. This would appear the most rational course but it would require a major restructuring of Britain’s secondary education and public examinations. A-level grades are simply not sufficient to produce the “right” number of candidates for the top universities. In last year’s A levels, for example, there were 22,353 candidates who got three or more A grades. This compares with just 7,000 British students admitted each year by Oxford and Cambridge combined. GCSEs offer more discrimination, since only 3,500 pupils got 9 or more A stars last year (and only 1,500 got 10 or more). But British academic tradition has, rightly or wrongly, regarded good performance over a wide range of subjects as far less important than excellence in a few.
If money and a dramatic tightening of exam standards are rejected as methods of rationing, only two options are left — selection by the subjective judgment of university dons or by pure chance. Judgment is clearly the better of the two, but it is also the less fair. The National Lottery is objectively the fairest institution in Britain, but it is not the best.
If the Government imposes its concept of “fairness” on the universities, higher education will become even more of random process than it is today. But that will not be how voters see it. In the past, the Laura Spences of the world could simply blame bad luck or the don’s bad judgment when their achievements were unrecognised and their ambitions thwarted. In future, every disappointed family in the country will blame the Labour Party and Tony Blair.
