As part of its austerity plan, the United Kingdom's governing Conservative Party wants to make the Britishuniversity system a little more like ours: more responsive to market pressures, less expensive for the state. The nonrich will still be given places at Oxford and Cambridge, but many more of them will have to borrow money to pay their fees.In theory, the reform will improve the overall quality ofBritish universities because students will decline to take onlarge loansfor amediocre education -- or for an education of nofinancial benefitto them oncethey havetheir degrees. The government will still grant generous subventions to the sciences, but the humanities will have to fend for themselves. If classicists can convince bright young working-class students that a degree in Greats is worthgoing into massive debt for, then nothing needs to change. If not, then maybe the study of ancient literature --along withmodern languages and philosophy -- willjust have to go back to being what it wasuntil not very long ago: a special preserve for the well-to-do. Everyone elsecan do themselves and the rest ofsociety a favor by getting a moremarketable degree.In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, Howard Hotson argues against the assumption that the American model of higher educationis more effective than the British model. Yes, the best American private universities do very well in international rankings, but so do the best British universities, which are public. Andonce America's much larger population and economy are taken into consideration, the rankings give the British government no reason toworry thatwe in U.S.are doing better by our students than they are by theirs. Hotson concludes:
The natural interpretation of the World University Rankings flies in the face of the key assumption underpinning current British government policy. Market competition in the United States has driven up tuition fees in the private universities and thereby sucked out the resources needed to sustain good public universities, while diverting a hugely wasteful share of these resources from academic priorities to improving the student experience and debasing academic credentials through market-driven grade inflation. The partially privatised university system in the United States is not the best of the best. In terms of value for money, the British system is far better, and probably the best in the world.
Whatever the British government does, a few famous British academics -- includingthe philosophe mdiatique A. C. Grayling, Richard Dawkins, andNiall Ferguson -- have decided that the timehas come to bring the Ivy League to the Thames. They aresetting up a private college in London that will charge students18,000 pounds a year for weekly one-on-one tutorials and pay its star faculty handsomely.Terry Eagleton thinks it's abad idea:
[W]hy should anyone be surprised at the prospect of academics signing on for a cushy job at 25% more than the average university salary, with shares in the enterprise to boot?What would prevent most of us from doing so is the nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit. British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, are not best served by a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded. It is as though a group of medics in a hard-pressed public hospital were to down scalpels and slink off to start a lucrative private clinic. Grayling and his friends are taking advantage of a crumbling university system to rake off money from the rich. As such, they are betraying all those academics who have been fighting the cuts for the sake of their students.
Eagleton is writing in a British newspaper (the Guardian) for a British public. Here in the states, where much of our higher-education system and most of our health-care systemare already private, Eagleton's analogy between academics opening a private college and doctors opening a private practice doesn't have the same punch. "So what?" many Americans would ask.But most Britons are still quite attached to their National Health Service, believing as they do that health care is not the sort of thing that ought to be left tothe market. Eagleton and Hotsonbelieve the same is true of education. Just as health care ought to go to those who need it most (the sickest), education ought to go to those who can make the best use of it (the brightest). The idea of the commonweal -- or of a commonwealth -- isthat we're all better off as a community if some thingsaren't allowed togoto the highest bidder.
