Nationalising The New Universities?

Martin Meenagh has several good posts at the moment, including this one:

In the nineteen eighties, Britain chartered more and more universities. These became lucrative. They attracted so many students that lecturing became a business, research became a government tickbox-driven necessity, classes expanded, and students were forced into borrowing to pay for courses which were devalued as more and more people passed at a lower standard.

The pretensions of an academic class that didn’t actually think or teach independent thought were favoured with titles but less and less pay and fewer tenures. This in itself has effectively flooded the urban areas of England with people who are not so much over educated--I don't think you can be, frankly--as thwarted, and alienated from communities their talents might have been directed towards.

In the meantime, people were discouraged from becoming carpenters, plumbers and electricians. These jobs became associated with programmes that sought to save the flotsam of devastated former industrial communities, and bad students, from prison. Numbers were made up by the mass importation of immigrants from poorer but more disciplined countries.

Now, students are waking up to the fact that one can have titles and pass courses and be worked to death on management trainee programmes to the hearts’ content of employers; but true understanding, and the happiness that people ask for from the life of the mind or from the understanding of a proper trade are not evident in their lives.

It is also obvious to the dogs in the street that not all degrees are equal. Soon, the funds for new students, and their incentives, are going to dry up. Some of these new universities, already shorn of science or language departments, are going to approach bankruptcy.

When they do, why not establish a state university system? Instead of getting universities to buy each other, or letting them disappear, why not introduce a National University of England? Each campus could be ‘topped up’ by local funds from slimmed-down councils or commissioners made up of elected representatives and people elected from the universities.

Examinations could be national, with scope for a little local variation, and job-related or professional development could be retired to professional bodies, with money coming from the new professional associations. Public money would not, at first instance, be spent on educating people for the service of the state or the pseudo-state.

Those Universities (almost certainly the British ‘Ivy League’ or Russell group) that did not want to be part of the system could be given endowments and allowed to float away. They would be free to set their own fees, syllabi and standards, and to disburse monies as private foundations.

We won’t get to such a system immediately. But why not start planning for a new England of national colleges, specialist institutions, and private bodies? This would also require a rethinking of sixth-form, pre-university education, and perhaps the case for school vouchers for post-sixteen education.

The temples of a false and money-driven system assembled like an abomination from the combination of late sixties philosophies, eighties economic cults and unsustainable credit are crashing down. We should start thinking about what we are going to do with the rubble.

However, it must be said that not all the new universities are as bad as the products of the older ones tend to assume. And not all the older universities are anything like as good as they think they are.