The Great University Con

by David Craig

  Why has the Robbins Principle remained so influential throughout the last fifty five years? The answer lies in the benefits that the report associated with Higher Education, arguing that it provided a range of social, cultural and economic advantages not only for graduates, but also for the UK as a whole. These benefits included:

  “A skilled and educated work force” (paragraph 25)

  “(the production of) cultivated men and women” (paragraph 26)

  “Securing the advancement of learning through the combination of teaching and research” (paragraph 27)

  “Providing a common culture and standards of citizenship” (paragraph 28)9

  The era of the Robbins Report was that of Harold Wilson’s famous White Heat of Technology speech, which called for the British economy to capitalise on the opportunities afforded by emergent technologies. The most important contribution that universities could make to this putative national effort was to provide the skilled workforce necessary for the economy to adapt and profit from new technological advances. Then, as now, workforce development was the main driver for university expansion.

  Since the Robbins Report, the economic rationale for expanding Higher Education has rested on this basic idea: that an ever–greater supply of graduates is necessary to meet the economy’s need for a skilled workforce. But arguments about the less tangible social and cultural benefits, whilst de–emphasised, have also remained. These have gradually solidified into the commonly–voiced assumption that university is a “public good”, in the same manner as flood defences, street lighting and clean air. By 1997, the idea of universities and expansion as a “public good” were so entrenched that the Dearing Review of Higher Education began by stating that:

  “Higher Education is fundamental to the social, economic and cultural health of the nation. It will contribute not only through the intellectual development of students and by equipping them for work, but also by adding to the world’s store of knowledge and understanding, fostering culture for its own sake, and promoting the values that characterise Higher Education: respect for evidence; respect for individuals and their views; and the search for truth. Equally, part of its task will be to accept a duty of care for the well–being of our democratic civilisation, based on respect for the individual and respect by the individual for the conventions and laws which provide the basis of a civilised society.” The Dearing Report 199710

  Examined critically, these claims and the language used to describe them are verging on the hyperbolic, brooking no argument or discussion about the value, worth or importance of an expanded system of Higher Education. The idea of universities as a public good is so obvious, so self–evident that no right–minded person could even think to argue or criticise it. Thirty four years on from the Robbins Report, this choice of language illustrated how important the idea of Higher Education had become to the UK establishment.

  The most significant recent evolution of the case for expansion occurred as a result of New Labour’s Widening Participation agenda and the introduction of tuition fees. Attempting to attract more students from non–traditional backgrounds – essentially those from working–class and ethnic–minority families – the expansionist argument shifted from the socio–economic benefits of a skilled workforce to the individual benefits that these new graduates would receive. Chief amongst these were the additional lifetime earnings that a degree supposedly bestowed compared with the earnings of a non–graduate: the so–called graduate premium. Allied to this were the opportunities that degrees provided for increased social mobility, in particular providing access to professional jobs. To address concerns over rising levels of student debt, the official mantra was loud and repetitive: that graduates earn more than non–graduates and that they enjoy improved life chances.

  Unfortunately, this hard–sell of the graduate premium stifled any opportunity for a debate about the actual benefits of Higher Education expansion. Instead, all of the “benefits” of expansion were calcified into a self–evident truth for the UK’s political class, media commentators and universities alike. This “truth” has become the starting point for any public discussion of universities. It includes the beliefs that university is always a public good, no matter who attends, what they study or how university is funded and that there can never be too much of this particular public good. Over time, however, a growing gap between these beliefs and reality has exposed the fault line between the original laudable intentions and the harsh reality of the implementation of the Robbins Principle during the Great University Expansion. Underneath this fault line are a series of social, economic and cultural problems that expansion has created and which our universities are now struggling to deal with.

  Does more mean worse?

  “… more will mean worse.” Kingsley Amis (1960) on the proposed expansion of UK Higher Education.

  Over the last six decades this quotation has been roundly rejected by a long line of politicians, vice chancellors, academics and graduates. But to restate another, more famous quotation from the 1960s, it is hard to escape the feeling that “(they) would say that, wouldn’t (they)?” In 2018, though, we can reasonably revisit Kingsley Amis’s comment and ask whether or not he had a point. A good place to start is the gap between the intention and the implementation of the Robbins Principle.

  Figure 2 - UK university undergraduates by entrance qualifications, 201011

  This gap is evident in Figure 2. This shows the A–level grades (or equivalents) of domestic undergraduates enrolled in 2010 and reveals that the majority (51%) were enrolled with qualifications equivalent to below 3 grade Ds at A–level.

  Were these really the students that Robbins envisaged when he referred to “all those who are qualified by ability and attainment”? This seems improbable, especially when we take into account 35 years of A–level grade inflation, with research suggesting that C grades awarded in the late 1980s were equivalent to A grades by 2008. Recently some universities, mainly the newer universities, have been so desperate to fill up their courses that the number of unconditional offers made to A–level six–formers shot up from just 2,985 in 2013–14 to a massive 51,615 in 2015–16.12 A number of schoolteachers were concerned about how unconditional offers were being dished out “like candy” and how they removed pupils’ motivation to work for their A–levels: “It affects performance. I would say students with unconditional offers drop at least a grade.” Others saw these unconditional offers almost as a form of corruption: “I am worried about something that looks very much like bribery. ‘Come here not somewhere else because you do not need any grades’ they are saying.”13

  Whilst the entry requirements for undergraduates have been significantly lowered during the Great Expansion, there have also been dramatic rises in student complaints. In 2004, the government set up the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) to investigate complaints. In their first year of operation, the OIA received 300 enquiries and 120 official complaints. By 2016, this had risen to over 1,517 official complaints from students at 130 universities.14 Complaints can only be brought to the OIA after a student has already exhausted the internal processes of their university without satisfaction. As such, these submissions represent the tip of a student complaints iceberg. To provide some idea of the scale of this problem, in 2014 the BBC sent Freedom of Information requests to 120 universities. The requests revealed that those universities had received over 20,000 internal complaints in the 2012/2013 academic year.15 Many of these are settled internally. In other cases, the students simply give up or leave their university with debt but no degree.

  Students unhappy with either shutting up or dropping out are increasingly taking legal action against universities. In 2012, a postgraduate student was awarded over £45,000 in legal compensation against their university.16 In 2018, a student who got a First at Anglia Ruskin university launched a legal action against her alma mater for mis–selling the benefits and career oppor
tunities her degree would bring. All of this raises another question: what are students complaining about?

  In a protest at Bristol University in 2009, complaints were made about the quality and quantity of teaching. Students were incensed that they were paying more in tuition fees for less in terms of teaching and assessment. They have a point. Despite ballooning fees, UK undergraduates now receive notably fewer contact hours than their European counterparts. They also receive fewer contact hours than they would have done 30 years ago on a similar course.17 Post expansion, students have lectures with up to 500 other students. Many seminars run with 30 or more students. These are often taken by postgraduates only a few years older than the undergraduates, usually without any doctorates or teaching qualifications.

  This decline in Higher Education teaching standards became a political issue in 2009 when the House of Commons Select Committee responsible for universities took the matter seriously enough to undertake its own investigation. The resulting report and evidence base included 100 submissions from individuals, a total of nearly 800 pages. The evidence falls into two distinct camps. The first, provided by vested interests within universities, is gushingly positive, admitting to few, if any, of the problems created by expansion. The second camp, provided by individuals taught by or employed within universities, is negative, disillusioned and angry.

  The Select Committee was highly critical of both the evidence about degree standards and of the universities’ and sector bodies’ attitudes during their investigations. The report declared: “... the system for safeguarding consistent national standards in England to be inadequate and in urgent need of replacement”. It also accused vice chancellors of “defensive complacency” in their reactions towards evidence of falling standards within universities.18

  All things considered, post–expansion graduates could have a good claim against successive governments for false or misleading advertising about the benefits of a degree. There have been few confirmed sightings of the £400,000 average graduate premium announced by New Labour in 2003. Later government estimates put the figure at £160,000, or more recently at £108,000.19 Unfortunately for taxpayers and graduates alike, even this most recent estimate is a gross exaggeration and generalisation.

  The latest official figures show an enormous discrepancy between the returns from different degrees. Whilst male doctors might expect a lifetime graduate premium of £403,353, arts graduates on average can look forward to £34,000 over their 40–year working life.20 Male graduates in creative arts and design subjects receive, on average, a net liability of £15,302, in other words they will be £15,302 worse off during their lifetime than if they had only taken A–levels. It is worth emphasising that these latest estimates were calculated prior to the 2012 increase in fees from just over £3,000 a year to between £6,000 and over £9,000 a year and were based on data preceding the 2008 economic crisis.

  Of course, getting a degree is not purely a financial transaction as students will receive other benefits such as making new networks of like–minded friends and hopefully some intellectual and personal development. However, one could question whether, with most universities charging the maximum of £9,000 a year increasing with inflation, these friends and this personal development are really worth accruing debts of up to £60,000 for three years at Uni.

  As for the supposed economic benefits to our country, these have also been difficult to identify. There has been no step change in the UK’s productivity or output throughout expansion. Our gross domestic product (GDP) and economic growth have broadly continued at the same pre–expansion rates. Productivity per head has failed to register even modest growth increases during this period. Taxpayers, parents, graduates and employers might question: where are the national financial gains that justify snowballing individual and national graduate debt?

  It is certainly hard to understand who (beyond universities) has benefited from massive increases in the numbers of sports science, photography, gender studies and creative arts undergraduates churned out during expansion. Between 2002 and 2012, our universities more than doubled the number of sports science undergraduates from 15,000 to 34,000.21 They similarly more than tripled the number of photography students from 5,000 in 2001 to 18,000 in 2012.22 These increases have been offset by a few notable decreases. Despite the tripling in overall student numbers, engineering student numbers actually declined from 96,000 in 1994 to 84,000 in 2010. The number of chemistry undergraduates also managed to fall from 14,600 in 1994 to 13,800 in 201023.

  Moreover, there is little evidence that ever more university has produced ever more people with inquisitive, independent, open, questioning minds. In fact, the opposite seems to have happened – the last decade has seen a worrying rise in the scale and intensity of university self–censorship and an increasing demand for ‘safe spaces’ where students will be protected from any views which might disturb their intellectual, political and moral comfort zones. During this period, we have seen institutions condoning gender segregation during events, banning some national newspapers, demanding the removal of statues they find ‘offensive’, stamping out anything that could be seen as ‘cultural appropriation’ even down to protests over the naming of dishes in university restaurants and refusing a platform to speakers as diverse as Germaine Greer and Nigel Farage. In 2016, the magazine Spiked, which monitors censorship on campus, found that 90% of British universities now place restrictions on freedom of expression. 24

  In summary, student numbers are up, but the numbers of engineering and chemistry graduates are down. Class sizes are up, contact hours are down and student complaints are increasing. The UK’s rates of growth in GDP and productivity have remained bafflingly static despite continuous injections of drama, dance and sports science graduates into the labour market. Free speech is still tolerated within universities as long as you mind what you say or whom you invite to say it. Finally, graduate debt is soaring whilst returns on the investment in a degree are shrinking. These are just some of the results of the Great Uni Expansion.

  CHAPTER TWO: ADMISSIONS: GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  Many of us have our own individual memories of university. But we also share a number of collective expectations provided by books, films and television. Whilst it would take too long to list all of these, we could point to Brideshead Revisited, University Challenge and The Young Ones as three very different but enduring images of undergraduate life.

  In Brideshead Revisited, the university is Oxford in the 1920s. It is a place of glamour and entitlement, populated by bright and beautiful youth expectant of bright and beautiful destinies. University Challenge presents a succession of (mostly) young and (mostly) studious faces “reading” a variety of (mostly) serious subjects in a quiz show with no prize money, just the chance to demonstrate knowledge. Then, in the surreal, anarcho–comedy of The Young Ones, student life represents freedom from domesticity and convention. These three images: entry into an elite, a few years of serious study and student life as one big (irresponsible) party, each suggest part of a wider expectation of what a university experience should be. We think of students progressing towards a brighter and more entitled future as the privileged elite of tomorrow. We think of them achieving a depth of understanding and the ability to think and learn independently. Finally, we think of students as having the best years of their lives. We wouldn’t reasonably expect every undergraduate experience to meet each expectation in three years. Most students or parents would probably settle for a pinch of each, seasoned with some rites–of–passage experiences and hopefully some intellectual and emotional growth.

  The reality of the Great University Expansion is that only a tiny minority of students will encounter anything close to these expectations. The Brideshead doors are closed to most students before they have even accepted their places at the wrong universities. Beyond the walls of elite institutions, the brightest won’t receive the level of intellectual stimulation that they need to
shine. The least able won’t receive the support that they need and will drop out or struggle through three demoralising years. Those in the middle, intimidated by the brightest and irritated by the less able, will shuffle largely silently through seminars and lectures, pausing only to ask “will this be in the exam?” The challenge for most students will be how to motivate yourself when you find it far too easy, far too hard or you’re doing the absolute minimum needed to get your 2:1 degree. As universities increasingly become ‘degree factories’ trying to process as many students as possible with as few resources as possible, those students wishing to understand their subject in depth will gradually realise that just getting by – satisficing – is the name of this particular game.

  As for having the best years of their life, the staggering levels of debt now required to finance a university education mean that a “Young Ones” party lifestyle is no longer free, nor carefree. Moreover, the sheer size and scale of many of today’s universities is often alienating and isolating, whilst student accommodation is usually cramped, outdated and expensive. To cap it all, after graduation comes the realisation that a degree does not guarantee a graduate job. In the summer of 2016, 376,330 graduates arrived on the UK job market, 88,890 of them with first class degrees and over 252,000 of them – around two out of three – with either a First or a 2:1.25

  Whilst these three expectations of student life do still exist, they are only available to those limited numbers of students who do the ‘right’ courses at the ‘right’ universities. Without these golden tickets, the student experience is likely to be one long and expensive lesson in the gap between the great expectations raised by the politicians’ promises and the universities’ smart marketing compared to the harsh reality of a jobs market that has depressingly few opportunities for them.