Job fears have been credited this year with a surge in university applications. Yet the UK is making “limited progress” in making higher education accessible enough to poorer students.
“A university education remains the gateway to the professions and a ticket to higher lifetime earnings on average,” said business secretary Lord Mandelson in a speech at Birkbeck College, London.
His speech outlined how business might be involved with university education, and how we might improve the mobility of people from lower socio-economic groups, as per Alan Milburn’s report.
As a dual citizen, originally born and educated in the US, but who has made my professional life in the UK, I find all of this rather confusing.
If the objective of his speech is to find ways of opening the opportunities for higher education in the UK to those from more deprived backgrounds, there are several obstacles in the way which you don’t find in the US.
First of all, most students work and attend US universities at the same time, because of lack of state funding and/or grants/loans — and it is part of the American culture of paying for your own education.
In addition, US universities are organized on a course credit system, which means you can do a degree in four to 10 years or even beyond, as well as move from university to university or state to state depending on your personal circumstance (eg. change of job).
This system allows a flexible relationship between employer and student. Yes, there are different types of US universities, some higher status than others, but the opportunities of gaining access to a variety of US universities is much greater, even if your grade point average may not be very good in high school, as long as one can pass an entrance exam and/or in some highe education institutions have demonstrated that their life experience makes them a viable candidate.
Second, British universities are constantly evaluated by the quality UK press, in terms of their Best University Guides, which come out every year. One of the main criteria of these guides is the average A-level score, so there is an incentive by the universities to continue to increase the ‘A-level ask’ to move up the rankings on this guides.
This militates against universities taking students with poorer A-levels, even though they may have wonderful life and work experiences.
Third, if we are going to move toward higher tuition fees, universities will need to continue to demonstrate their added value and ‘differentiated quality’ by maintaining and even enhancing their A-level requirements to justify their fees.
It is true to say that many UK universities, like my own (Lancaster University Volunteering Unit), have schemes where students work in the community with under-privileged children to encourage them and help them aspire to attend university, but this is a drop in the ocean to a system that is not fit for purpose in terms of social mobility into the professions.
We also have to admit that much has improved, in access terms, in getting more students from lower socio-economic backgrounds into higher education, a remarkable transformation over the last two decades.
Nevertheless, the current university system is inadequate for the times ahead. We need university
- To be for all, not just the 18-year-olds;
- To be more flexible (have a national credit system for courses);
- To be evaluated on a range of criteria excluding A-levels (on the success of their students over the medium term — this is how the FT evaluates the impact of MBA programmes);
- To work more closely with businesses of all sorts (from small businesses in the local community to large corporate);
- To get the professions to have a more transparent system of selection that isn’t biased toward their own constituents. This is the real challenge ahead of higher education, new ideas rather than ‘old ideas dressed as acceptable new ones’.
