University of life beckons for more in UK

Apr 10 2008 by Peter McCusker, The Journal

THERE will be a fall in the number of UK students at our universities over the next decade.

A report for Universities UK predicts 70,000 fewer full-time undergraduate places over the next 10 years, despite the Government’s aim of getting half of school leavers into university.

In truth, the Government has been making very slow progress here, with just 39.8% of 17- to 30-year-olds in England going to university last year, compared with 39.2% in 1999 – hardly a social revolution.

The problem is, although half the population may be capable of going to university, not all of them necessarily want to. The ranks of our successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs are packed with those who shunned academic life, preferring to get straight down to earning a living.

If their counterparts today also opt for the “university of life”, then the Government will only be able to achieve its 50% target by press-ganging the less academically minded into university.

Neil Kinnock, for example, once famously asked, in one of his rhetorical flights of brilliance, why he had been the “the first Kinnock in a thousand generations of Kinnocks to get to university”?

Part of the answer is, of course, that a thousand generations ago there were no universities for his voluble ancestors to attend – or anybody else’s, for that matter. Indeed the taxpayer would be justified in asking, why, despite his history degree, Mr Kinnock seems not to have known that, and therefore why the Kinnock family’s higher academic debut couldn’t have been put off for another couple of generations.

A friend of mine, who is a maths lecturer at one of our newer universities in another part of the country, recently told me his colleagues were terrified by talk of a European standard in degrees, a standard they knew all their courses would fail to meet.

Should this ever come about – and it could under the 1999 Bologna Accords – then the Government will be in big trouble. If it has to raise the standard of degrees, it will be faced with three unpalatable choices: it could drop its 50% target, it could see thousands of students go heavily into debt to pay their tuition fees and then fail their degrees, or it could do something about standards in schools.