Given the cuts already announced to Higher Education (HE), a leading group of professors was asked by The Guardian (19th October) what HE would look like in 10 years given the Browne report. The comments were startling but not surprising. The block grant for teaching, which is to be cut by 80%, has always provided the infrastructure, the publicly funded buildings where teaching takes place. If your subject does not have, in the eyes of the government, an economic or utilitarian value, therefore is not a “priority subjects” – like science, technology, maths or languages – you could find yourself teaching in the streets with English literature in “tents in the car park” and an end to the teaching of history except in a small number of universities. Libraries would be stocked with priority subject books and the rest put into storage or pulped. Courses will close, choice will be much more limited and overall provision cut.
We will move away from the trend “in the affluent world in which a majority go to university and where student numbers are rising.” We will have a “relatively small number of people in small campus-based universities studying full-time for expensive degrees.” We would become the most expensive country in Europe to do a degree, putting less public money into HE and less into research than any other developed country. Students from rich backgrounds will have a great time – modern languages are dominated by students from the private sector – and those from poorer backgrounds will do what their counterparts do in the USA, “work and study and hardly sleep.” The gap between those who get into HE and those who don’t will widen the “existing class divide” even more. Universities will become much more “hierarchical.”
Provision will be on the basis of what people can afford, not what is necessary. Some parts of the country will have adequate provision, in other parts colleges will close or merge as in Further Education (FE). Former polytechnics, such as Coventry University, will “concentrate on areas where there is a lot of employer support.” Courses will therefore reflect the needs of business, not on teaching people to think and reason. We will have the emergence of an even more tiered structure of provision. At the top will be a small group of universities charging “premium fees.” They will educate and train the directors of industry and the diplomatic service. In the middle will be a “band of large, economically marginal, all-purpose institutions,” which will be under “perpetual threat of closure.” From these will come the managers. At the bottom will be large numbers of “convenience providers,” not necessarily in the state sector, with “no frills” courses for older students and those in work. Staff will be employed on the same basis as present FE staff; “heavy teaching loads, unsociable hours, no time for research and little control over the curriculum.”
So, in the opinion of leading academics in the world of education but in words that they do not use, the future of FE and HE will be of superior provision for the offspring of the rich and of mediocre or poor provision for the offspring of working class people, a provision that is severely limited in choice and constantly under threat of closure. The old tripartite system from secondary education will now re-emerge in post-16 education. This is what the sixth richest economy in the world can offer in the 21st century, a return to a system of education that we last saw in the 1970s.
What else can be expected under capitalism? Most employers no longer offer education or training. This cost eats into profits. So, in the future unskilled or semi-skilled workers will be trained to do the minimum that is required by an employer and be paid for by the workers themselves.
Education should be about developing the capacity of individuals to think, to reason, to understand. It should also be about developing skills to increase the production of goods and services in the most efficient and effective way possible to meet the needs of everyone in society by increasing economic and social wealth. Under capitalism, however, a large part of the wealth that is created by the labour of working people is creamed off by the private owners of the means of production for the gratification of the rich minority who sit at the top of society. This can only end when capitalism itself is overthrown. Then we can have a real education system at all levels where the needs of society as a whole can be married with the abilities of every member of society to arrive at a position where we have “to each according to his/her needs and from each according to his/her abilities.”
