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Welcome to the age of the bog standard university
By Chris Woodhead Chief Inspector of Schools,United Kingdom, 1994-2001
(The comments here are relevant to Australia which generally follows sheeplike any trend emanating from "Overseas". - D.H-J)
SURPRISE, surprise - today's A-level examination results are a shade better than those achieved last year. The inexorable rise in standards continues. Ministers can rest easy. Should more sceptical observers of the educational scene agonise once again over the possibility, God forbid, that the intellectual rigour of the A-level is not what it once was?
No, they should not. A yet more fundamental question needs asking this year, namely: why do we bother with the wretched examination at all? Universities are now so desperate to pack student bums on to vacant academic seats that examination grades have become an embarrassing irrelevance. You want to study golf, or curry-making, or knitting? Fine, there is a course for you and the odds are that, if you can read a sentence or two and sign your name, you will be welcomed with open arms.
Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE and St Andrews have no vacant places. Every other university is touting for custom and it is the ex-polytechnics, of course, that are facing the greatest recruitment difficulties. Last year, more than 50 universities missed their recruitment targets: 9,500 places were left empty.
Many institutions have now experienced a further drop in applications. You might think that even the Department for Education and Skills would recognise that supply is out-stripping demand. Actually, no. Estelle Morris, in her wisdom, has funded another 16,000 places. The bottom of the academic barrel is about to be well and truly scraped.
Does it matter? Not, apparently, to the Prime Minister. We live in what Tony Blair likes to call the "Learning Age". This new epoch is characterised by, he tells us, "a new culture of learning and aspiration that will underpin national competitiveness and personal prosperity, encourage creativity and innovation and help build a more cohesive society". We are not quite there yet, of course. A recession looms. Racial tension smoulders across our northern cities. But the aspiration, if not the reality, is clear.
In the Learning Age, 50 per cent of those between 18 and 30 will go to university. Is this sensible? Do business and industry need all these people with degrees in curry-making and knitting? Will all these extra students be able to cope with the intellectual demands of a genuinely academic course?
The Government sweeps aside any such concerns with disdain. A target has been set. To quibble is to be dismissed as elitist, divisive, reactionary. Here is Mr Blair again, waxing lyrical in the run-up to the election: "As a nation, we are wasting too much of the talents of too many of the people. The mission of any second term must be this: to break down the barriers that hold people back, to create upward mobility, a society that is open and genuinely based on merit and the equal worth of all."
It is a vision that must have warmed the egalitarian cockles of every floating voter's heart. Mr Blair's problem is that the election is over. It is time, as he reminds us now and again, "for the Government to deliver". He is about to find out that his commitment to expand the number of students attending university is more likely to militate against than to deliver these meritocratic ideals.
Consider the recent past. In the late 1980s, 16 per cent of the 18-21 age group were studying at polytechnics or universities. In the 1990s, student numbers doubled, partly through the re-designation of polytechnics as universities. Were degree standards maintained through this period of expansion? Of course not. Academic after academic testifies, off the record, to the fact that things have gone terribly wrong.
Some, like Prof Kevin Sharpe of Southampton University, are courageous enough to speak in public. "Few first-year students," he wrote in this newspaper earlier this year, "have any idea of what constitutes even a basic argument and deliver three pages of simplistic narrative, based either on gleaning from an elementary textbook or from even more over-simplified lecture notes. What we have now in our universities," he concluded, is "a culture of minimum intellectual demands".
More, as Kingsley Amis famously predicted, has meant worse. Assuming (and it is a big assumption) the academic rigour of A-levels has remained constant, it is reasonable to expect that, as standards rise in schools, more young people will be genuinely qualified to study at university. To double the number in a decade is, however, to travel remarkably hopefully. To expect 50 per cent of the population to qualify for a degree that demands the same standard of intellectual achievement as degrees did in the past is simply silly.
Worse, it is cruel. The drop-out rate from the University of North London is nearly 40 per cent. Could this have anything to do with the fact that this is a university that prides itself on its policy of accepting students with the poorest possible A-level grades? The human cost of each failure does not seem to matter - to the university or to a government that wants its Learning Age and its 50 per cent target.
A decade or so ago, universities were institutions committed to scholarship, research and teaching in pure academic disciplines, where young people capable of serious academic study spent three years learning about the best that has been thought and written.
No longer. Scholarship has become an expensive irrelevance. What matters now is the contribution that the university makes to our "national prosperity" and "social cohesion". Judged even on its own warped terms, this argument is flawed. "The dirty little secret," as Robert Kuttner put it in Newsweek, "is the scarcity of the jobs that require more advanced skills." The Centre for Economic Performance has calculated that 30 per cent of adults in Britain are already overqualified for the jobs they do.
The Government's approach to higher education means that this figure is bound to rise. Bog standard comprehensive schools have failed, the Prime Minister's spokesman tells us, to deliver. The time of the bog standard university has, it seems, come. We pretend that the ex-polytechnic and Oxford compete on a level playing field, when everyone knows that the gap between them widens every year.
If it were not so tragic, it would be comical.
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