Speaking of Universities by Stefan Collini

Author:Stefan Collini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

But the UK experiment is being conducted in a hurry, with no time to consider such evidence; as Brown notes, the average of the fees introduced in 2012 is already ‘higher than that of nearly every “public” university in nearly every comparable system’.

Many national systems of higher education consist, designedly, of different types of institution with markedly different functions. In the UK, there is very little explicit differentiation of function: almost all established universities pursue teaching and research, educate undergraduates and postgraduates, offer a range of subjects, cater to other than local students and so on. What we have instead is a definite, if informal, reputational hierarchy – or what Sir David Watson, another respected commentator on higher education (and another former vice-chancellor) calls ‘a controlled reputational range’ – and the ‘mission-groups’ into which most universities have now sorted themselves are at least as much to do with status as with function. As Brown points out, this was clearly signalled by the announcement in March 2012 that four members of the 1994 Group of ‘smaller research-intensive universities’ (Durham, Exeter, Queen Mary and York) would be joining the Russell Group. They had not changed their function at all: they were, in effect, cashing in on their success in recent research assessment exercises and, above all, on the strength of their undergraduate applications, as places where large numbers of well-qualified applicants thought it was desirable to go. The existing members of the Russell Group are, on the whole, larger institutions with big professional and medical schools and a higher turnover, but the new fees regime, and especially the attempt to rig undergraduate admissions via the AAB+ clause, means that the pattern of undergraduate applications may come to matter somewhat more in determining what counts as a ‘top’ university because it now has such financial consequences. The new entrants were reported as paying an entrance premium of £500,000: a spokesman for Exeter said that ‘membership of the Russell Group is a brand asset … so it is well worth the cost of joining’. The favoured institutions are thus triply advantaged: they get nearly all the research funding, they get more money per student from fees, and they get the reputational advantage. As Brown puts it, ‘we need to consider whether the benefits of such preferential treatment outweigh the costs to the system and the country as a whole’. The ‘controlled reputational range’ has been one of the huge strengths of the UK system, not least in terms of its standing abroad, but the free-for-all at the bottom end of this range will now severely damage that standing. As Brown continues, in best ‘stiff memo’ terms: ‘It is strongly arguable that what we need is not more “world-class” universities but a “world class” higher education system.’ Exactly so.

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