Higher education at a turning point

One of the deepest of the onslaughts unleashed by the Coalition Government in its Spending Review is the attack on university students and higher education institutions in England writes Harry Blackwell.

The combined implementation of the ‘Browne Review’ on student fees and the draconian cuts in funding for universities announced in the Spending Review will devastate the landscape of higher education.

These attacks have the following underlying rationale and consequences:

* A massive transfer from public to private funding and the expansion of the debt mountain faced by those leaving higher education is underway. Under the Browne Review proposals, university tuition fees will become unregulated for students starting degrees in September 2012, and will rise to at least £6,000 per annum, with some likely to rise even further, maybe even to £12,000 annually, putting university education beyond the reach of all bar the richest. At the same time the government will cut the funding that universities currently receive, as part of the 40% (£2.9billion) reduction in government spending for higher education that will produce massive job losses. As the lecturers’ union, UCU, has pointed out, the UK already has one of the world’s highest proportion of funding for higher education from private sources. For much of higher education these changes effectively privatise in one fell swoop the whole of the funding.

* A major restructuring of higher education institutions will take place into a layer of comparatively wealthy, primarily privately funded universities with the bulk of the public funding for research, and a group of poorer teaching-based institutions, some of which will close, alongside the growth of a new profit-oriented private sector. For generations the UK has had a largely publicly funded higher education sector and access has expanded and widened significantly from the previous highly elite system. The Browne Review will now move the most successful and elite universities firmly into the private sector, with a rump of mainly former polytechnics surviving as second class ‘cheap’ institutions. There is likely to be the wholesale closure of a swathe of institutions and hundreds of courses, with a devastating impact on student access opportunities and jobs. The growth of the private sector, seen by the recent take over of a major private ‘University College’ by a US for-profit company, is indicative of the direction HE will go after that.

* There will be a shift in the role of state from funder to regulator. With the bulk of funding moving to student fees, a new super-quango, the ‘Higher Education Council’, will shed most of its current funding role and move to become regulator of universities, in the name of safeguarding ‘quality’. Those most at threat are the former polytechnic institutions that have done most to widen access to higher education from the working class and disadvantaged groups (the London Metropolitan University, for example, has more black and minority ethnic students than all of the 20 institutions in the elite ‘Russell Group’ put together). The government’s agenda is to remove the ability of the non-elite institutions to devise and award their own degrees, and transform them into a subsidiary role of teaching the curriculum imposed by the elite institutions, stifling any hint of innovation and creativity in favour of the needs of the wealthiest in society.

* A rebalancing of the curriculum away from arts, humanities and social sciences, towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics will move apace. As the Marxist writer Perry Anderson pointed out in the 1960s, the British ruling class failed to embrace technological change and educational reform in the nineteenth century and reorient education towards emerging sciences. We are now about to pay the price for this, over a century too late, as the Tories and Liberal Democrats move to restrict access to arts, humanities and social sciences to all bar the rich. The effect of this will not be to focus science teaching on solving the problems that capitalism has created, such as climate change and the human-made environmental problems that blight the 21^st century, but rather to serve the needs of industry and private sector. Access by mature and working class students to courses that do not require years of preparatory study will be massively restricted, at a time when the further education investment that could boost access to sciences among working class people is also being slashed.

The outlook for higher education is bleak as the government turns back the gains made since the 1960s in creating higher education for the vast majority of the people. More needed to be done to make universities more accessible to the working class, but the government’s plans will turn the clock back decades. While the Tories and Liberal Democrats bear the brunt of the blame, the Labour Party must also face up to its responsibility for the crisis that higher education is entering. It was the Blair/Brown Labour government that introduced tuition fee loans in 1997 and massively further increased the scale of fees in 2005, against its own manifesto commitment. It was a Labour Government that created the Browne Review, with its elite-oriented membership, and paved the way for the Coalition coming in to finish the job. While there will be the usual ritual hand-wringing and talk about ‘jam tomorrow’ by the Labour leadership in parliament, on the ground the situation is screaming out for a united resistance to the Government’s agenda.

Such resistance must involve student protests, industrial action by university workers, and action focussed on the new generation of sixth form and younger students and their families who face exclusion from higher education over the coming years. The leadership of the National Union of Students and the most significant trade union, the UCU, show little better understanding of the drastic needs of the situation than the Labour leaders. While their student and trade union counterparts in France are leading a massive wave of protest and industrial action, the NUS and UCU are instead talking about using the joint demonstration on 10^th November to ‘influence’ the government. The demonstration on 10^th November must be built as a massive protest against the government, but what is needed is also a major programme of fightback and resistance. Student and union activists fighting the higher education changes need to demand their leaders do more to fight the devastation. Linking up with other activists fighting the government cuts, nationally and globally, is raised by the opportunity of the Coalition of Resistance and its conference on 27^th November.

Higher education is at a crucial turning point and only a programme of mass resistance will be able to stop the government’s devastation.