Sold Out

By Stefan Collini

London Review of Books
Vol. 35 No. 20 · 24 October 2013pages 3-12 | 10518 words

It’s time for the criticism to stop. Whatever you think about the changes to higher education that have been made in recent years, in particular the decision in the autumn of 2010 largely to replace public funding of teaching with student fees, this is now the system we’ve got. Carping about the principle or sniping at the process is simply unhelpful: it antagonises ministers and officials, thereby jeopardising future negotiations, and it wins little sympathy from the media and wider public. This country is in desperate need of jobs and of economic growth, and in higher education as in every other sphere we are now competing in a global market. So pipe down, and let’s all focus on making this system work as effectively as possible.

If this is your view, you may not wish to read on – or you should at least be warned that this article contains material of an economically explicit nature and some strong language (not all of it mine). But everyone else, including those who are being cowed by their local variant of the pragmatist in a suit, may be interested to learn from these two exceptionally well-informed books just how far-reaching are the changes now under way in British (or at least English) higher education. The provenance of their authors could hardly be more different. Roger Brown has been, successively, a senior civil servant, the chief executive of the Higher Education Quality Council, and vice-chancellor of Southampton Solent University; he is currently professor of higher education policy at Liverpool Hope University. Andrew McGettigan did his doctorate at the highly regarded Centre for Modern European Philosophy that Middlesex University summarily closed down in 2010; in recent years he has distinguished himself as one of the best-informed analysts of the legal and financial changes reshaping universities in this country. Brown’s book is a sober, data-heavy overview of higher education policy in Britain since 1979, drawing on extensive secondary and comparative scholarship as well as first-hand experience. McGettigan’s is a detailed, at times technical, analysis of the funding of English universities since 2010; he explains these arcane matters with exemplary clarity and spells out the long-term financial implications of the new arrangements. But for all their differences, these two books provide a chillingly convergent description of the huge gamble that is being taken with higher education in England: an unprecedented, ideologically driven experiment, whose consequences even its authors cannot wholly predict or control.

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