One cannot forever be nagging and scolding. Sometimes even the most sceptical of us must cast aside the whips and goads and pat a government minister affectionately on the muzzle. God bless Charles Clarke! Unless reporters have read him wrong, we at last have an Education Secretary brave enough to take the most misshapen of manifesto pledges, and wring its neck. It is reported that he rejects the target of getting 50 per cent of all young people into degree courses by 2010. Instead he will concentrate on giving the brightest and most academic — of all social groups — an equal chance, and otherwise encourage shorter courses, training, and distance learning.
Obviously, he can’t ditch the target openly. Too humiliating. But his remarks represent a long overdue breach in the dam. I am, admittedly, a heretic in the management-school world because I consider most numeric “targets” to be a waste of time, using up energy which ought to be spent pursuing the actual function of the organisation, rather than daydreaming about its future and inventing baroque excuses when you fail to hit the number you first thought of. But even as targets go, this one is toxic.
For seven years, ministers have tried to persuade us of two incompatible things. First, that half of all 18-year-olds are suitable and motivated to take three-year, full-scale, university degrees of undimmed rigour. Secondly, that graduates all earn “£400,000 more” over a lifetime than their peers, so it’ll be worth it even if they have to spend years repaying what those three years cost them. That this forecast is economic nonsense, based on the days when only a few went to university, did not seem to bother them. The 50 per cent ambition refuses to acknowledge anything less than a full “university degree”: thus the target is helped by some kid getting a third-class pass in American Table Manners (With Film) at a virtually bankrupt fringe college, but does not recognise skilled mechanics, craftsmen, rigorously trained singers and dancers or someone like Viscount Linley, who studied furniture-making and ended up lecturing at the Smithsonian. He’s not a graduate. Socially excluded, poor chap.
The effect of the 50 per cent obsession has been a desperate expansion of degree courses, with some struggling universities more anxious about their glossy brochures than their teaching. It has aggravated the anxiety of parents and schoolchildren to get to any “uni” at any cost, because they fear that no employer will look at anyone without a degree. The madness reaches its nadir in the August scramble of “clearing”, when places are hawked around asking for A-level grades as low as EE: an almost sure indication that the holder has had enough of academe and would do better to get useful for a few years, and maybe return later.
The accursed target means that a lot of students now live far from home, in squalid accommodation, racking up frightening debts for courses which are frankly not worth it, and which are so minimally taught that they deliver no intellectual excitement. The university system creaks under the strain: one lecturer recently wrote that the rooms where she teaches could not actually accommodate all the students enrolled on the course, so it was lucky that they never all turn up at once because they work in burger bars.
It has meant that excellence — which still abounds, and is not confined to traditional subjects by any means — has become a prize to be stalked by the well-informed and wily. Students with savvy parents or go-getting head teachers corner the best courses, and naive aspirants from poor backgrounds get lumbered with the worst. Only they don’t realise this until it is too late, because Government is terrified of admitting a “two-tier system”.
Arguing against the 50 per cent target is traditionally caricatured by new Labour ministers as a selfish attempt to perpetuate middle-class elitism in university education. Actually, the reverse is true. Statistics show that the highest dropout rates are at universities whose students have the lowest socio-economic profile. The poor get shafted, yet again. For may I remind you what “dropout rate” means? It isn’t some dry industrial statistic. It means disappointment, tears, self-disgust, wrecked hopes, and money wasted on fruitless debt. And all of this hurts people not yet 20: a new generation, which trusted us.
Ditch the silly target, widen your vision to encourage shorter courses, part-time learning and acquisition of practical skills, and suddenly you see light at the end of this stifling tunnel of hypocrisy. Without the target you have more chance of funding good universities properly, rewarding good teaching, and pointing 18-year-olds at education which genuinely suits them. Many three-year courses, spared the need to pose as “degrees” and follow a medieval year culminating in processions with Renaissance hats, could profitably shorten to two years or even one, with year-round teaching and generous loans. Full degree courses could be less crowded, better taught by better paid lecturers, and could set their entry criteria with proper rigour, interviewing and testing candidates instead of relying on wonky A-level predictions.
Obviously, they must be socially inclusive, provided the intellectual criteria are met. At first this will be difficult, because the least privileged children so often go to the worst schools and accumulate least “cultural capital”. There is a real risk that money, private tuition and the middle-class talent for packing the top schools would skew the system against those without such assets. The answer lies in improving the worst state schools’ staffing, funding, and discipline — very fast. Otherwise those who collar the best education will always produce the applicants that universities need. It’s not a matter of snobbery but of preparedness: you cannot expect universities magically to make up for years of neglect. While schools are being sorted out — and that is Mr Clarke’s most urgent job — the best hope for disadvantaged potential boffins lies in expanding the summer schools, university trawls, and pre-entry courses developing vigorously in several places. It would also help if more state bursaries were available. With fewer students, they could be.
As the social mix of the academic elite improved, another interesting result would be that there wouldn’t necessarily be room on full degree courses for some middle-class applicants. So what? Upward mobility implies that downward mobility is also possible. If degrees are real and rigorous, demanding hard work in termtime and reading in vacations, we should face that fact that some of the well-heeled skivers who currently swan around on a three-year coffee break could profitably be replaced by poorer kids who are genuinely excited by learning. If the parents of this minority of affluent idlers want a finishing-school, fine. Let them pay for it without subsidy. There is no place on serious degree courses for the lazy, dim or bored student of any social class.
Sensible families know this. One which I admire has a son who — though privately educated and intelligent enough — is not a university natural. So, instead of finding him a wally degree in order to hold their heads up at cocktail parties, they are supporting him through the excellent Boatbuilding Training School at Lowestoft, whence he will emerge with a skill that could take him all over the world, with work he loves. What’s wrong with that?
There is another reason why Charles Clarke may want to back off from the strict 50 per cent target, and accustom us to diversity in higher education. Recently an academic pointed out to me that in 1999, unnoticed by most of us, we signed the Bologna Agreement on the “Single European Educational Space”. By 2010 we must be “harmonised” into a common university system, insisting that Bachelor degrees take three years, Masters a further two, and a PhD three more. Farewell to the four-year degree and university autonomy over length; but note also that any courses which sensibly shorten themselves to one or two years will fall glaringly outside the pattern and look incongruous. So if we’re going to start accepting that we need many different types and durations of post-18 education, we had better settle the system down confidently before 2010.
But, with luck, by then we could be freed from the deadening, homogenising, dumbing conviction that “uni” is a necessary rite of passage for any kid with half a brain, and a three-year degree the only key to a decent life. It isn’t.
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