This government says it is a great champion of student choice. Yet it is on the brink of legal reforms that risk restricting the options to the kind of choice car-maker Henry Ford famously offered customers in the 1920s: “a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it’s black”.
The diversity of UK higher education is one of its outstanding strengths. Large multi-faculty universities in big cities, smaller specialist universities for subjects like agriculture, performing arts and creative art and design; musical conservatoires; institutions founded by the churches; higher education in FE colleges; new providers opening up new areas of specialism, such as modern music. Students aren’t homogenous; institutions should not be either.
But the government isn’t doing enough to preserve and promote the different types of university that are essential to real choice. When some members of the House of Lords have tried to help them do more by amending the Higher Education and Research Bill, they have been stonewalled.
Fix the funding
The government says it wants to encourage flexible learning and see more people completing full degrees in just two years. But so far it hasn’t taken the opportunity provided by its own Bill to remove the obvious barrier and fix the funding. Some of the newer, private providers have tried to innovate – but they face an uphill struggle.
So why not look at setting a total cost limit for a degree rather than an annual fee? Or, if you really want greater innovation and flexibility, look at funding by academic credit.
Widening the range of higher education providers isn’t just good for students. It’s good for the economy too. Universities that specialise have close links to the professions, industries and creative sectors they serve. Teachers and researchers are often industry professionals. They help students understand the world they want to work in and help businesses use research to innovate.
It’s as if the bill hasn’t caught up yet with the government’s industrial strategy. That strategy says “place” matters, and that every part of the country needs to reap the benefits that universities can bring: better skills, a more productive workforce, and research that helps companies turn ideas into new products and services and sell them round the world.
Creative-focused universities alone contribute at least £8.4bn to the UK economy. But these benefits they bring cannot be taken for granted. They depend on central decisions about funding and regulation as much as on choices by students.
That is why the Lords have been right to try to improve the Bill, including by encouraging government to report any need for new providers, for example, where there are skills shortages, not enough part-time provision, or places that are lagging behind because they don’t have a university.
As Baroness Wolf said, when introducing the amendment: “Diversity will not happen by magic.”
Leaving it to the market
The government’s response is that is has already done enough because the new Office for Students (OfS) will have duties to promote choice and encourage competition.
But leaving it to the market won’t work. And what if the OfS interprets its job narrowly, as being about choice of courses? Then the decisions about money and how you regulate and what you plan won’t happen in ways that support and encourage truly diverse learning environments.
The OfS should have a clear duty to promote and maintain diversity. The newly announced preferred candidate for its chair, Sir Michael Barber, might even agree. He once co-authored an essay on higher education called An Avalanche is Coming, which said that if you didn’t want to be swept away you needed to understand there would be no single successful model of a university. “On the contrary,” it argued, “diversity will be the key.”
The government is fond of fast food analogies when it comes to higher education – often repeating references to McDonald’s and Byron Burger – so here’s one for the risk they’re running: a sector where student choice looks increasingly like most high streets – plenty of places to buy a cappuccino, so long as you don’t mind sitting in a Costa or a Starbucks.
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