English universities could be on the point of an experiment that no person alive today has experienced: a vital and sustained decline in student numbers. Except a downward blip between the wars, higher education have been on an inexorably upward trajectory for the reason that birth of the trendy age.
There is lots of talk today a few triple-dip recession. In universities there’s a parallel fear. There has already been a double-dip – 13% fewer students accepted this year. Applications for next autumn, initially well down, have struggled to recover to simply above last year’s disappointing total. Despite this (sort of) recovery, student numbers will continue to fall because the big cohorts of 2010 and 2011 work their way during the system. So a 3rd year of decline can’t be discounted.
Two questions immediately arise. Will it happen, and could it matter
The government’s official line is that it still expects expansion. Nevertheless it is tough to suppress the suspicion that the Treasury is betting on decline, if only since the half-baked reforms on student fees and funding will cost a fortune otherwise.
Those people who argued that tripling fees would scale back demand were dismissed as Cassandras. Dubious data from other countries, and the experience when Charles Clarke raised fees to £3,000 and insist bounced back, were cited as evidence. But things are different now. First, when Labour increased fees the variety of teens was rising. Today the demographic tide is flowing in reverse. Second, the united kingdom Border Agency, because it blunders to implement the government’s anti-immigration policies, is discouraging international student recruitment in important markets.
Third, Michael Gove is popping the clock back in schools. GCSEs are being replaced by English Baccalaureate Certificates, with unpredictable consequences. A-levels are being restricted in two ways – by cutting the links with broader AS-levels and dividing them into “U” and “non-U” subjects. An integrated system of state schools is rapidly being superseded by a chaos of academies and “free” schools. It was the introduction of comprehensives and GCSEs that increased the pool of potential university applicants. Also, AS-levels and modular courses unfolded student choice.
The main drag factor on student expansion is more fundamental, though. It’s now clear that Britain will experience a decade of lost growth. If we’re lucky, by 2018 we shall be back where we were in 2008. That have is already being etched at the mood of the nation. Attitudes to raised education, and everything else, can be deeply marked.
Although the foremost deprived had been hardest hit by the recession (and the government’s ill-chosen remedies), the aspirational classes haven’t escaped. Free, or subsidised, public services are dwindling while secure professional careers have become scarcer. Costs are rising, putting pressure on family budgets, just when some great benefits of investing at some point are harder to spot.
Transformative
Finally, there are some ugly attitudes some of the powerful and influential. The misguided at the left are losing faith within the transformative impact of upper education and mutter irrelevantly about reviving apprenticeships. The proper slavers for a shrunken system reduced to its elite core – floreat Bullingdon Club.
So the reply to the 1st question is that a semi-permanent decline in student numbers is becoming much more likely. Does it matter For universities it matters rather a lot. Put simply, higher education, just like the economy, is hooked on “more”. Its intellectual creativity and scientific productivity depend upon growth – of student numbers (whether “additional student numbers” awarded by Hefce inside the bad old Labour days or relaxed “student number controls” in Brave New Willetts world) and of study income (by improving research excellence framework performances and more aggressive grant seeking). The entire values of upper education – both widening participation and boosting reputation – assume growth. So too do its management systems, incentives and daily habits. There’s a risk, with out a or reverse growth, that the system could come with reference to collapse morally and managerially.
For our nation – and world – it matters much more. No other country is so complacently contemplating decline. Most are pushing hard for growth. The reason being simple. The collection of what the political economist Robert Reich called “knowledge workers”, most of whom should be graduates, is increasing exponentially; high-tech and “knowledge services” drive the economy.
But it isn’t just the economy. To confront the challenges we are facing we have to cultivate a critical humanity, open minds in open societies. After all, you do not need to be a graduate to try this. Nevertheless it is becoming progressively more difficult actively to have interaction without at the very least, in Lord Robbins’s famous phrase half a century ago, “the smell of a better education”.
• Peter Scott is professor of better education studies on the Institute of Education
