|
November 8, 2010
In his Browne’s Gamble in the London Review of Books Stefan Collini reviews Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education: An Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance by Lord Browne et al. Collini says:
Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities).
He adds that the single most radical recommendation in the report, is the almost complete withdrawal of the present annual block grant that government makes to universities to underwrite their teaching, currently around £3.9 billion. This, says Collini, signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state from financial responsibility for it.
Instead, Browne wants to see universities attracting customers in a competitive marketplace: there will be a certain amount of public subsidy of these consumers’ purchasing power, especially for those who do not go on to a reasonably well-paid job, but the mechanism which would henceforth largely determine what and how universities teach, and indeed in some cases whether they exist at all, will be consumer choice.
The Browne report proposes to scrap most of this. In its place, he wants to see a system in which the universities are providers of services, students are the (rational) consumers of those services, and the state plays the role of the regulator.
Collini says that this report displays no real interest in universities as places of education; they are conceived of simply as engines of economic prosperity and as agencies for equipping future employees to earn higher salaries. He adds that what is at stake is whether universities in the future are to be thought of as having a public cultural role partly sustained by public support, or whether we move further towards redefining them in terms of a purely economistic calculation of value and a wholly individualist conception of ‘consumer satisfaction’.
|
The idea of converting universities into human capital factories is hardly a pleasant one. However, I do think it is right that young people be able select higher ed institutions and programmes on the basis of what the education they receive will actually do for them, and that is not really possible at the moment.