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Free British university

education comes under threat

LONDON: British universities, creaking under the burden of a huge increase in student numbers, are warning that a tradition of free education is at risk.

They have threatened to impose an admission fee on students to plug a gap in revenue if the government does not act to improve their finances and scrap some public spending cutbacks.

"The funding has simply not reflected the fundamental change in what we are about. We simply cannot go on bleeding to death like this," said Professor Geoffrey Brown, deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia.

The government responded to the universities' threat by setting up the most fundamental review of higher education for a generation, under a non-party troubleshooter, Sir Ron Dearing.

It consulted with the opposition Labour Party in so doing, prompting the Times newspaper to say government and opposition had agreed "to make higher education a demilitarised zone".

Education is a hot political issue with an election due within the next year. Conveniently for politicians keen to delay painful measures, Dearing's inquiry will not report until mid-1997, after the last possible day for an election.

One in three school-leavers enters higher education, five times the number when the last review took place 30 years ago.

Everyone agrees a system that is feeling the strain after rapid expansion needs a lot more money -- but there is little hope of getting it from the taxpayer and not much scope for attracting more finance from business.

"If you're going to have this kind of mass education system, the public purse can't afford it," said Professor Gareth Roberts, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University and chairman of the universities' umbrella organisation.

Most colleges believe students should contribute to tuition costs, something that is common elsewhere in the world but would mark a radical change in Britain.

Universities want the government to introduce a loan scheme for tuition fees and have suspended their own threatened action for now. They await Dearing's advice, hoping it will not be too late -- some are already reported to be in financial difficulty.

As the century nears its end, the whole concept of what a university should be is under the microscope. Experts ponder how much they can use computers instead of classrooms, talk of the need for lifelong learning and refer to students as "consumers".

The Confederation of British Industry, the key employers' forum, wants even more expansion in higher education to help fight competition on world markets from booming Asian economies.

Education minister Gillian Shephard is also minister for employment and official speeches on universities are peppered with phrases about markets and competitiveness.

But the government has doubts about more expansion. The Times agrees, complaining that quality has suffered as student numbers soared, with close tutorial supervision giving way to "mass production methods more typical of European universities".

David Triesman, general secretary of the Association of University Teachers, also sees a risk.

"It is moving quite rapidly in the direction of the French and Italian systems with a large number of students going in and large numbers dropping out before they finish degrees," he says.

"So long as we fund higher education as we do, there is too little money for students to be taught individually."

But some richer universities such as Oxford still hope to keep most of their traditional ways. Not everyone bewails a move to a mass higher education system from a more elitist one.

"It may well be that we shall get to a point where the British first degree is, in the view of some, devalued but in my view finds a different role," Dr Robert Godfrey, Deputy Chief Executive of Kingston University, said in an interview.

His institution is one of the leading former polytechnics, local authority colleges that have converted to universities.

Godfrey supports the opening of higher education to a broader range of students and believes the British first degree need not be a passport to a career -- without further study -- any more than in France, Germany or the United States.

East Anglia's Brown agrees that producing a large number of flexible graduates will help business keep up in a cutthroat world -- even if they cannot expect elite salaries any more.

One scheme tipped for adoption here is an Australian one by which graduates repay loans for fees when their income allows.

Supporters, anticipating criticism that it could discourage poorer pupils when student debts are already high, say it has boosted the number of such students at Australian universities.

Not surprisingly, the National Union of Students has not given its blessing to tuition fees, having only just abandoned a campaign to restore public grants for living costs. But some in its ranks accept that students may have to pay more eventually.

Triesman says it is a shock to find that some university seminars have more pupils than nursery school classes now.

With the student/staff ratio doubling in a decade to around 20 to one, Kingston is looking at computer technology that could allow students to study more independently from home or college hall much of the time and make classrooms less vital.

But Godfrey said new technology would not be a complete or cheap solution and questioned to what extent some subjects like English literature could benefit from new methods.

"If you're teaching English literature, the essence is a group of people in a room tearing apart a text," he said.-Reuter