During the last government, Lord Browne was tasked with carrying out a review of how tuition fees should be modified as the cap was lifted – when the £3,000 tuition fee was introduced by the last government, a concession was that it would rise by no more than inflation and that it would be capped for five years. A change of government and the influence of the Liberal Democrats in the coalition means that all bets are off for how the fee system will evolve in the wake of Lord Browne’s review. What are the likely outcomes of the review and how can we expect the government to respond? And what is the likely impact on students and universities?
Lord Browne’s review was supported by all parties and he began his work under the previous government. Until the new coalition came in it was speculated that fees would be raised (and a figure of £7,000 was widely heralded). However, it is also expected that there will be some allowances for differentiation by university - universities have differing teacher to student ratios and styles of tuition - and by course. This fed from ongoing student unrest about the fact that fees are the same for arts courses as, for example, clinical medicine courses though their operating costs are wildly different.
Recently, a surprise intervention from the Vince Cable suggested the abolition of fees altogether and directed Lord Browne to consider a graduate tax, whereby graduates would pay a tax proportional to their earnings throughout their life. It is now seemingly supported by David Willetts and David Cameron and Lord Browne has been directed to consider it seriously, although there is some feeling that this concession to Liberal Democrat policy could diminish after the summer recess. However, what this clearly shoes is that there are significant funding gaps and there is no clear and fair way forward to meet that gap.
Running parallel to this, is the possibility of privatisation of universities. It is no secret that the top UK universities have long been examining the implications of freeing themselves from the government constraints of quality assessment regimes and reporting. They have made no secret of the fact that they have also evaluated the cost of doing so - the loss of quality-assessed elements of grant funding and a dependence on government funds channelled through metric based criteria are an unwelcome intrusion on universities freedom to mange their own affairs and one which they would gladly be rid of. For the top universities government funding now represents possibly 15% or less of their income - therefore they see the opportunity of being self-funding and independent.
Such a move would change the whole structure of UK higher education and make it similar to the US, creating a “premier league” of exclusive, highly selective universities similar to the Ivy League. Top universities would then be free to charge fees to meet their chosen market. Ivy League universities have sufficient endowment funds to ensure that all applicants, irrespective of income can be admitted - for example 50% of students at Harvard are funded by endowment bursaries. However, the UK is nowhere near having the funds to achieve such support - so if the top universities were to privatise the effect on the socio-economic student profile could be very damaging.
It is, I believe, inevitable that fees will continue to be charged to students (either contemporaneously with their study or as a post-study tax), albeit there will be some loan/deferment system in order to protect fair access. It seems inevitable that those fees will be variable and that students at “better” universities will be charged greater fees – probably akin to levels in the US. Thus fee levels of £25,000 per year at some of the better universities are not out of scope within the next few years.
There is no question that competition for university places is fierce and getting fiercer - this year 660,000 students applied for UK university places, up 12% on last year’s record breaking figure. The number of undergraduate places has increased but David Willetts, the Universities Minister has warned that it will still not be enough to stop high-achieving students missing out on places. When a place at university becomes a lottery for top students, parents and students will lose faith in an education system which fails to reward effort and the crisis in university funding will be matched by a crisis in confidence in the education system. How did we get here? ‘And how are the coalition government going to undo the crisis in British universities? And what does this mean for the Oxbridge applicant? The Labour government set a target that 50% of 18-year-olds should enter university. No-one ever explained why that was deemed a sensible, let alone an achievable, target but as the number has crept upwards (it is currently just above 40%) there has been a related devaluation in the value of a degree and a growth of expectation that anyone should have the option of a university place, almost irrespective of ability. With headlines like "250,000 to miss university places this year" the media can at times seem intent on portraying university as a right of passage, not necessarily earned through ability. Recently the new Universities Minister, David Willetts has launched the idea that people will not necessarily undertake their university education at the age of 18 to 21 but could embark on it at any time up until they are 30. One can see that this might defuse the expectation of an 18 year old and help to re-establish the idea of a university education as being part of the skill-set for a working professional life. However, one wonders whether the idea doesn’t also represent a much-needed (in terms of the government’s coffers) method of restricting university places, cutting funding to the universities (mature students are more likely to enrol on part-time courses) and generally curtailing the currently overstretched market.Whilst there is a hierarchy of universities with Oxbridge and other high-status universities providing overall higher standards of education and teaching, as evidenced in the league tables and by student surveys, these universities are increasingly finding it hard to select the best students given the qualification framework which has developed. Changes since 1992, including the 1992 creation of an integrated polytechnic-university sector and the use of GCSE, A and AS level examinations to determine student ability, have proved challenging. One might ask how a single exam system can possible be used to accurately determine the ability of the 50% of 18-year-olds whom the previous government determined should have access to university? Alongside this, the examining bodies have agglomerated and become commercial entities charged with delivering profits to their shareholders - in many cases the universities themselves. In fulfilling this pressure they have inevitably made the examination system more profitable through modular exams, retakes etc – all of which increases their income but makes it harder to judge the quality of the results. The number of students achieving top grades at A level is close to 5 times the number of places at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Inevitably and understandably top universities have introduced A* requirements and their own tests (BMAT, Law, TSA etc). Whilst such additional criteria may be good differentiators they also make the examining system more complex. And in being more complex they become more inaccessible to those who are from under-privileged backgrounds. Once again we are beginning to move towards an imbalanced socio-economic profile of university applicants.All universities claim success in providing a needs-blind admissions process. Indeed, large sums of money have been allocated by government, philanthropists and by universities themselves in order to provide bursaries and support to ensure that education is accessible to all. However, in the face of all this support, very little quantitative evidence-based evaluation has been undertaken to establish universities’ claims. Of the many millions spent by both Oxford and Cambridge on “Access initiatives”, it is hard to see just from the small changes in entries and applications from state schools whether this money has been well spent. We still do not know whether state school pupils stand a lesser, equal or even greater chance of getting a place at Oxbridge than their fee-paying peers. And much of the money to widen access has been spent in a pepper-shot, unfocused way too – many Colleges focus on just one geographical area in which to promote applications, but within those geographical areas there are often huge disparities. Few of the universities or colleges use freely available public data to evaluate who they should target to achieve change in their access statistics, let alone how to evaluate the success of initiatives.
MyOxbridgeChoice opened for business just under a month after the formation of the coalition government but even before then we all knew that great changes were afoot in the way university funding would be operated, the exams system and the structure of British universities. The £3,200+ tuition fee, set by the previous government, and the associated terms that it would rise by no more than inflation, came up for review by Lord Browne in November 2009. The outcome of this review, despite all-party support, was always going to be contentious and with the advent of Vince Cable’s proposals for a graduate tax these are interesting times in the world of student finance and university admissions.Whatever the results of Lord Browne’s review it seems guaranteed that university students and their families will continue to invest greatly as a result of the decisions they make about when and where they go to university and what they study. One of the reasons we do what we do at MyOxbridgeChoice is because we believe that significant investment warrants thorough research - pupils and parents don’t want to make financially life-changing decisions without easy access to all the information they need to make sure those decisions are right for them and likely to pay dividends in their futures.With this in mind, Dr John Green, currently Chief Co-ordinating Officer at Imperial College London and previously Senior Tutor of a Cambridge College (and one of our founders) has agreed to do three guest blogs for us to give an insider’s view on the background to the changes we might see to the universities system, fees, graduate employment statistics and examinations. He’ll also examine the implications of those changes and the impact they may have on students and parents.As always we are grateful for your feedback - we’d like to hear what students, parents, teachers and tutors think about what’s happening and how it has affected the decisions you’ve made or counselled. We’re especially interested to hear from previous Oxbridge applicants who’ve been rejected despite having the requisite grades or anyone who has considered studying overseas in order to avoid either the fees associated with British universities or the growing competition for places.
