I can’t add much to Ed West’s account of the new NUS president’s views of higher education — that equality and widening access must be prioritised “at the expense of quality if necessary” — except to put his quote in the context of these figures and this OECD chart of English schoolpupils’ cognitive abilities compared to their exam results. The most interesting thing about Liam Burns’ views is that he admits there is a trade-off between quality and equality, rather than trying to have it both ways as most politicians do. It’s the most naked admission I’ve seen yet of the contemporary left’s preference for equality over meritocracy, which I have argued delivers neither.
We can disagree with Burns without endorsing the market fundamentalism that would make higher education the preserve of the mediocre wealthy and a handful of brilliant scholar boys. I would suggest that, if savings must be made, universities should cut places rather than treble tuition fees. A glance at the dropout rates for Scottish universities suggests that there are a lot of people at university wasting their time (even if many of those, as Burns plausibly suggests, would stay on if grants were restored, which could also become possible if we cut places). We are also wasting their time by telling them this is their best, or only, option. I don’t know quite how, when and why the idea that it was better to do something academic than something technical came about — it seems such a perversion of so much of what the Victorians achieved — but the government and schools should now do all they can to equalise the two (as in Germany, which uncoincidentally has retained a high-value manufacturing base). Bear in mind also that foreign students, attracted by the prestige of British universities, are heavily subsidising native ones. If Johnny Chinaman decides that our universities are being devalued for some obscure domestic political reason, he will happily decamp to another European, American or Australian one and take his tens of thousands of pounds a year with him.
By limiting places (while also making radical changes to schools) instead of raising fees, we could preserve high academic standards and promote vocational alternatives, without forcing unrich, academically gifted but debt-wary potential students away from the idea of university.
How does this jibe with your earlier observation that there is a trade-off between diversity and equality?
I’m not sure that general point has much relevance to the universities debate: by ‘equality’ in the wider sense, in the other blog, I meant a lack of income inequality; in this sense here I mean something closer to dumbing down in the name of egalitarianism.
Here in the States the dumbing down is sometimes done as an accommodation to diversity — e.g., lowering standards to insure that every group passes in equal proportion.
Though in California there is a counter trend: they have recently mandated that everyone pass Algebra II to graduate from high school. That strikes me as both unrealistic and inappropriate, especially if it leads to higher drop out rates and more young people who’ve never mastered basic arithmetic and have no other skills.
Vocational education in the industrial arts is considered demeaning in our American democracy, as is manual labor; everyone should be prepared to go to college.
Personally I would rather see some vocational education made mandatory than Algebra II — a basic knowledge of cooking, household electricity, how to use a screwdriver, mortar one stone to another — along with a new emphasis on the dignity of manual labor, including Emerson’s fine essay on the subject. These things come in handy and can save money in everyone’s lives, including middle-class people who do go to college.
We’re really fucked up right now in America over issues of race and class. The basic problem, in my opinion, is that we have emphasized equality of opportunity to get ahead and ignored the possibilities of living for the average majority.