Marketization and Nationalization in Britain

U.K. higher education is certainly going through challenging times. They are not as difficult as some overseas commentators have suggested. It is not like California. Home and E.U. students of all stripes will still have access to loans and no one will have to pay up front. Students from less well-off families will be better off. The science and research budget has been protected. And so on.

So what exactly is happening? There is, of course, the immediate politics of the situation to be confronted. But what sense are we to make of the changes in the longer run? And what lessons do they hold for other national higher-education systems?

From the longer-run perspective, what seems to be happening is something quite unusual. We are now seeing a conjunction of two forces that are meant to be inimical. The first of these is marketization, at least to the extent that core government grant is gradually (or not so gradually) being withdrawn. Government funding is being replaced by increased student fees (which are still paid in the first instance by government, it should be noted, so we should not make too much of the marketization argument).

Marketization has been a feature of the British system for some time now: after all the fees for overseas students are already set in an open market. But this is still a substantial phase shift, especially when coupled with the government’s avowed intent to bring more private providers in to higher education.

But then there is the second force. There is at least a possibility that to assuage the concerns of students who will have to pay higher fees (however delayed) and because of the inevitable bias to more regulation of regulatory agencies (especially when they are threatened) we will be surrounded by thickets of regulation which will amount to something like nationalization. Many universities will find themselves increasingly operating in a heavily prescribed and proscribed environment just at the point when they are meant to be operating in a market.

This conjunction is not as unusual as all that. I hear hair-raising stories of the ways in which U.S. state legislatures are withdrawing money from universities but becoming ever more prescriptive, far worse than anything happening in the U.K.

So what is to be done? There are three possibilities. One is corporate action. Universities would work out what they want and lobby for it. The number of stakeholders and intermediaries make this unlikely, even without the fact that many universities interests now seem to be structurally opposed on so many issues. Another possibility is that we all go our separate ways, seeking our own salvation. But there is an intermediate solution which I will keep pushing. That is that limited groupings of universities can agree on what their values and goals and intentions are and can go forward as cooperative ventures. There can be no promised land but it might be possible to construct some high plateaux.