The first thing to be said about Lord Mandelson's Framework is that, although it has been some time in gestation, it does not and cannot prescribe the future shape of higher education.
This is not only because even the First Secretary of State cannot foresee all future events and developments – the "unknown unknowns"– but also because the Framework is necessarily silent on three crucial issues: the matching of places to demand, the likely future costs (not only tuition fees, but also subsidies for tuition and living costs), and the consequential unit of funding – the statistic that is more crucial to the future health of the system than any other.
The broad themes are not new. The need for higher education to be more responsive to the needs of the economy goes back at least to the 1987 White Paper "Higher Education: Meeting the Challenge" and indeed to the Green Paper "The Development of Higher Education into the 1990s".
Nevertheless, the Framework does represent an intensification of the trend towards a demand-led system, with the academia forced to give ground to students and employers. Whether this is a positive development for higher education is another question.
Two proposals stand out.
The first is the idea that students should have access to a wide range of course-related information, including retention and graduation rates, employment and earnings etc. The rationale is that as "paying customers", students should be able to make a better choice and universities will be stimulated to raise quality. This is futile, a waste of resources and dangerous. Higher education is a post-experience good, the quality of which can only be judged through experiencing it.It is a waste of resources because even if such information were available (and could be relied upon), it is unlikely that students will make better (i.e. more rational) use of it than other consumers. It is dangerous because it marks a further step in the "commodification" of higher education and the infantilisation of students as consumers, rather than as participants in a scholarly community devoted to the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge for its own sake.
The second proposal is that business should have a bigger role in determining the university curriculum, in return for making a greater contribution to costs. Leaving aside the question of precisely which firms these will be, this is highly questionable. Designing and delivering a programme of study requires a specific set of aptitudes and skills. It is far from obvious that business has these aptitudes and skills or that it has any better idea of its likely skills requirements in 5 to 10 years' time than anyone else. As for the idea that business should pay more, one can only refer to Oscar Wilde's thoughts on second marriages: this represents the triumph of hope over experience.
Lord Mandelson has been at pains to emphasise the broader civilising role of higher education, and to deny (on the BBC's Today Programme on 3 November) that he wants to turn universities into "factories for workers". This is either breathtaking ignorance or stupendous hypocrisy.
• Roger Brown is professor of higher education policy and co-director of the centre for research and development in higher education at Liverpool Hope University.
