Does Education Matter? (Penguin Business) by Alison Wolf

Author:Alison Wolf [Wolf, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780140286601
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2002-05-29T18:15:00+00:00

6 The tyranny of numbers and the growth of the modern university

For the state… higher education has become a crucial asset.

Lord Dearing, 1997

World class higher education ensures that countries can grow… It is therefore at the heart of the productive capacity of the new economy.

David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education and Employment, 20001

Looking for a large, global industry combining a long history of sustained and rapid growth with excellent prospects for even more to come? This is harder to find than you might think. Internet companies may make profits, one day in the future; but five years ago hardly any of them even existed. The giants of the early twentieth century – mining, shipbuilding, steel – are shrunken vestiges of their former selves. The car industry has massive excess capacity worldwide; agriculture, however productive, is in crisis as an industry, with farmers leaving the land in their thousands as incomes plummet. Entertainment is vast, growing and global, but definitely for those with roller-coaster tastes: of the companies that created the American film-studio systems in the early twentieth century, just two entered the twenty-first as major players.

And then, on the other hand, take higher education. Take any country, anywhere in the world – developed or developing; capitalist, ex-Communist or Communist still – take the Americas, Europe or the Pacific Rim, and the story is one of meteoric expansion. Higher education has become, over the last century, one of the few truly global industries. The university sectors of the twenty-first century are of a completely different order of magnitude from those of a century before. They have also been completely transformed in a way which most adults (and almost all politicians) have not yet fully grasped, since they either remember a long-vanished university world or never knew that world at all.

For believers in education for growth, this must be good news. Successive UK governments have made university expansion one of their major policies, alongside the campaigns for vocational training analysed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. A Conservative Secretary of State, launching a national higher-education inquiry during the Major government’s closing years, explained that ‘Higher Education has a vital role to play in raising the levels of the nation’s skills and competitiveness and thus enhancing our capacity to generate wealth and improve our quality of life.’2 Her Labour successor promoted his government’s goal of 50 per cent of young people undertaking higher education by explaining that universities are ‘powerful drivers of technological and other changes… critical to local and regional economic development… They are the seed bed for new industries, products and services and they are at the hub… of the knowledge economy.’3

The CBI, representing the country’s large businesses, would cavil only at the speed of progress. Throughout the 1990s it argued for 40 per cent of the young to participate by 2000, and 50 per cent by 2010. ‘Higher education is a prime source of highly skilled people, a key contributor to a dynamic economy and central to the future competitiveness of UK business,’ it argued.

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