Stefan Collini

If the language we use to talk about universities represents them as being principally institutions that provide narrowly vocational training for employment and the application of technology to promoting economic growth, and if the language we use about student represents them as being consumers who shop in the educational supermarket purely for what provides the most remunerative future job at the lowest cost, then those are the kinds of universities and the kind of education we shall end up with.

[...]

Thus, both externally and internally a pattern of providing long-term funding in ways that are most conducive to good intellectual work has been largely replaced by a system of artificially contrived short-term competition for the necessary resources. Stable and adequate, if limited, funding is derided as extravagant feather-bedding inimical to innovation. Systematic under-funding plus competition and punitive performance-management is seen as lean efficiency and proper accountability.

[...]

The ceaseless rhythm of the waves of everyday life causes a deposit of insensibility to build up that clogs our perceptions and dulls our responsiveness. Procedures established for a series of transient and ad hoc reasons acquire that patina of inevitability with which economic logic needs to coat its operations if we are not to rebel against its unconscionable exactions.

[...]

We risk denying the true benefits of higher education to those newly recruited students, including large numbers of mature and part-time students, if we try to concentrate the activities of universities on what the government considers promotes economic growth. Of course, those new students also want their education to be, among other things, a preparation for employment, but policy-makers risk a kind of condescension when they say in effect that although they themselves benefited from the culturally rich education they received, current and future generations, at least outside a few elite institutions, will have to be content with something more narrowly practical.

[...]

The fatal conceptual error involved in the new university funding system introduced in Britain in 2012 is that it treats the fee as a payment by an individual customer to a single institutional provider for a specific service in the present. By contrast, the proper basis for funding education is a form of social contract whereby each generation contributes to the education of future generations. It cannot be for a specific service because the ‘customer’, in the form of the student, is not in a position to know in advance exactly what benefit they may obtain from a university education. And it cannot really be to a single institutional provider because each university is only part of the world of learning: none of what they provide for their students would exist except for the work of many people over many generations in many other institutions.