|
Magazine
Making students pay
BILL KIRKMAN
|
Many students emerge from universities now with large debts, which is the background to a controversy in the U.K. that is raging about the funding of higher education.
|
Nurturing the institutions which cater for an intellectual elite is the key.
MY generation in Britain has been particularly fortunate in its access to higher education. We reached university age just as grants became available, automatically, to cover both tuition and maintenance charges. Later, as numbers in higher education began to grow, tuition grants remained, but maintenance grants were adjusted according to parental income. More recently, students have had to pay fees towards the cost of tuition, and for most people, except those from families with very low incomes, maintenance grants have been replaced by loans. Many students emerge from universities now with large debts.
That is the background to a controversy that is raging about the funding of higher education. Should students pay substantially more towards the cost of their education — through what are euphemistically called top-up fees? Or should graduates, after leaving university, pay a graduate tax? Or should more money be found for universities from general taxation? The Prime Minister seems to favour top-up fees, though as opposition to them has grown, among Labour Party backbenchers as well as students, he has been back-tracking. Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the other hand, is said to favour a graduate tax. Current thinking in the political world is that any increase in general taxation is a bad thing.
Universities, meanwhile, are under funded, which affects the quality of research, and the quality of teaching, that they can provide. That they need more money is generally accepted.
There are several factors which cloud the debate. One is that the huge increase in the proportion of 18-year-olds entering higher education has not been matched by a corresponding increase in funding. A second factor is that it has changed the nature of higher education, underlining the difference between institutions which are research-based, and have international standing, and others which emphasise teaching, often of "vocational" subjects, and whose reputation is more local. This leads to talk of dumbing down, though in fact the academically very able still flourish; what has changed is that higher education is now open to far more of the less academically able.
To my mind, that is good. If the country is to compete in the international academic race, it must of course continue to nurture the institutions which cater for an intellectual elite, but that does not mean that that the less academically able should be handicapped by exclusion.
A third factor is that much thinking now about higher education is utilitarian; the purpose of going to a university, the argument runs, is to get a better paid job. That is a dismal approach. The real purpose of higher education is to develop independent thought, and to offer opportunities for personal betterment. Graduates quite often do get well paid jobs, but that ought not to be the only, or even the main, measure of success.
Many people in poorly paid jobs contribute at least as much to society as their well paid contemporaries. Working with the mentally ill, for example, is neither well paid nor fashionable. Is it therefore less useful than moving money about in the City of London? I ask the question in a deliberately loaded way, but even when it is posed quite neutrally, the answer must surely be "no". Society needs social workers, primary school teachers, nurses, plumbers and so on. The fact that many of those doing such jobs have been through higher education is surely good for them, and good for society.
If we agree with the concept of higher education as a public good there is at the least a strong case for treating it as something properly funded by the state — that is to say, through general taxation. If we accept that, it of course follows that those with large incomes (including well paid graduates) pay more than those with low ones, but we avoid the risk that people from poorer backgrounds are put off entering higher education for fear of acquiring ever larger debts. Widening access to higher education is accepted politically as good. There are contradictions between that acceptance, and some of the suggested means of paying for it.
Perhaps we need to go back to the philosophical drawing board, and re-think what higher education is for. We can then appropriately encourage those who benefit from it to support voluntarily the institutions of which they are alumni.
British universities are now doing this, catching up with the long-standing tradition in the United States. A special — compulsory — tax on graduates would be likely to discourage the growth of that tradition of voluntary support.
The writer is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, U.K.. E-mail him at wpk1000@cam.ac.uk
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
