Chris Hansen’s blog

fj said, in part:

Furthermore, this raising fees goes hand in hand with killing the block grant to universities, basically making them dependent only on tuition fees, strongly commercializing education as a product. It will kill less popular and artistic studies that do not have that return in the marketplace on money invested by the student, thus destroying that knowledge.

I don’t believe that the number of arts and humanities students in the United States has been lessened by the “commercialisation” of university education.

British universities need to take their heads out of the Middle Ages and start raising their own funds and endowments. For too many years they have been dependent on the state for all funding. This has made them into tools of whichever government is in power, and has made students totally dependent upon the government to fund their educations. This removes incentive, and prepares students for a life of indolence (if that’s what they want). It also means that alumni/ae are disinclined to contribute to their almae matres studiorum. The government has faced up to this, and assuming that they can fend off the students who believe that the world owes them a living and an education, this action will be a success.

What does need to be done is this:

First, establish a set of state universities which are subsidised to a greater or lesser extent by the government. Tuition fees would still be charged, but at a somewhat lower rate than at the redbrick establishments.

Second, set the well-established older foundations free to charge what the market will bear, subject to large scholarships for those who cannot afford to pay full tuition but who would benefit from the educational experience that these institutions can provide. These universities must step up their fundraising apparatuses to a professional level (note that the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge was the Provost of Yale—this is already happening in certain places) and set aside funds for scholarships. The government support for tuition (as opposed to support for research and development) should be tapered off and consist of loan guarantees by the end of the process.

Third, the government should make contributions to tertiary educational institutions tax-exempt, on the American model. What fat cat wouldn’t like a building at their university named after them? It works in America, and if the government would get its head out of its arse and recognise that the structure of charitable giving needs to be overhauled, it would work here too.

By the way, it is a general problem with charity giving here in the United Kingdom that people give money to animals and diseases, but not to anything else. The Church of England would be self-sufficient if the people in the pews actually believed what is the honest truth: the government does NOT contribute a farthing to the Church by law Established. It the universities could more easily tap into the fat cat funding stream, and divert some of the moggy-money to education, there would be no problem funding tertiary institutions.

The largest number of universities in all the ranking lists of world universities are in the United States. There’s a reason for this. Oxford and Cambridge are there mainly because of their antiquity, and because they have tapped the government for lots of research funding.

I have to disagree with you, fj, as much as it pains me to do so. The European model of state-funded tertiary education can no longer compete, even on its own territory. Changing it gradually to a student and alumnni/ae funded model, with government grants a distant third, is the only way to ensure that all those who want an education can get it.

And, by the way, I think that too many people end up going to university now in any case. Degree-inflation has made it impossible to get a good honest job without GCSEs or A-levels, and most employers now look favourably only on degree-holders. This is rubbish. We need to ensure that education in the United Kingdom is tailored to the wants and needs of the student, and the wants and needs of the labour market. As a Latin and Greek major, I was woefully underprepared for the labour market, and I have never actually taught the Classics. However, it did fit me for software testing and test management, and I’m glad I took it.

And as for debt? I had a lot of debt vis-à-vis my income, and I was terrified. But even on the meagre salary I got working at Columbia preparing transcripts for posting, I managed to pay it off. The conditions under which the student of England will be paying off his or her debt would have been awesome to me. I don’t believe that I would have started paying off my 1970-74 debt until the early 1990’s, which is when I started to make the equivalent of £21,000. Some students will never pay off their debts, legally, and the remainder of whatever they owe will be written off 35 years after graduation. I would have KILLED to have had debt with conditions that lenient.

I would have loved to have gotten a free education, or to have graduated with no debt. However, I was a gifted student from a relatively poor family, and the system I was educated in gave me many advantages because of that, and I received the college education that only two other members of my family had ever gotten.

I know it sounds very American, but, dammit, I am American, at core, and I can really see English tertiary education becoming much much better for everyone if changes are made in its funding patterns. No one likes to go from getting something for nothing to having to pay something for something. But the bankers and fat cats have eaten our free lunch, and we won’t get it back again until they’re all convicted of something-or-other and jailed good and hard, and that won’t happen until the coming of the Coqcigrues.

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