A call for ever greater university funding is understandable, but ignores the bigger picture affecting government and institutions
Stephen Court discussed the impact of the recession upon the financial health of Britain’s universities in last week’s issue of Public Finance. He concluded with a warning that some institutions will be forced to make redundancies to cover their costs. The sector, he suggested, is in urgent need of greater investment.
This argument has undoubted resonance following the news that thousands of applicants with good grades were not able to find university places in August. Yet a call from those within HE for ever greater investment in their sector, without any consideration of the strategic dilemmas facing universities and policy-makers, has an air of unreality about it.
Above all, this position does not take sufficient heed of the difficulties of public expenditure management in the current climate.
One major, but often overlooked, challenge arises from the propensity of government to burden higher education institutions with an increasingly diverse number of goals.
These include: a greater emphasis on teaching quality, in part because of the league tables associated with the National Student Satisfaction survey; teaching the skill-set that the economy will need as it moves out of recession, as well as retraining mature students; undertaking more entrepreneurial activity; developing outreach programmes into schools and colleges; and demonstrating the wider public impact of academic research.
There is a good case to be made for each of these goals. But is there a danger of overloading universities to the detriment of core strengths?
In terms of skills, the hazy assumption that increasing the numbers of participants in higher education has a direct bearing upon economic productivity is founded more on optimism than hard evidence, as Professor Ewart Keep argues in a report published last week by the Institute for Public Policy Research.
In the same way, prioritising the so-called ‘Stem’ subjects – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – made sense in the 1990s when Labour was trying to restore the country’s science and technological base. But is this still an appropriate priority given the likely balance of post-recession economic activity?
The funding issues that Court analyses also need to be set in the wider context of an intensifying debate about the role of universities in relation to social mobility. The Conservatives have made much of the social bias in admissions to universities, arguing that Labour has failed to address this major symptom of inequality.
Labour retorts that the apocalyptic predictions about access that were made at the time of the introduction of the top-up fees and students loans system have not been borne out. A paper by professors Claire Callender and Donald Heller in the IPPR report largely supports this argument.
And so, to funding. While moving the cap on fees does look like the best available way of releasing new investment for universities, it is important that the policy debate does not narrow around this option. The IPPR argues that ministers should keep an open mind about a combination of options to provide a broadly progressive and fair financial settlement in HE.
It might, for instance, recoup some of the considerable costs of its loans system through some variation of the rate of repayment for graduates whose families come from very different incomes. Or it might consider getting a portion of applicants from the very wealthiest families to pay their fees up front.
These kinds of ideas are not an alternative to the option of lifting the fees cap. But in combination with it, they could enable any new limit to be set at a level that does not decisively skew the availability of higher education towards the most privileged.
Michael Kenny is visiting research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research and a professor of politics at the University of Sheffield
