Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Educational economies

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0308514042000285314

1469-5766

Diverse Education Studies and Reforms

Abstract Contemporary public discussion of and policy formation with respect to higher education pay scant attention to the history and structure of the modern university. In part this is forgivable, since educational historians deal almost exclusively with schooling to the neglect of any wider assessment of formal education within the public sphere. Nonetheless, personal ‘experience’, much less sheer prejudice, is no substitute for an understanding of ‘higher learning’. This review essay considers the outline history provided by Robert Stevens’ From University to Uni and suggests that we are now entering an era of a ‘postmodern’ university whose purposes are both incoherent and implausible. Keywords: higher educationHE financeschoolingeducationtrainingaccess Notes The same goes for schooling. Despite the immense social significance of the development of universal education and the almost entirely negative impact that compulsory schooling appears to have had upon an existing culture of self-education (see Rose ), there is still no coherent and plausible account of compulsory education as a social phenomenon comparable with, for example, James Van Horn Melton's () account of eighteenth-century schooling in Prussia and Austria. As noted below, British educational historians have addressed themselves primarily to formal schooling at the primary and secondary level, and with few exceptions a preoccupation with ‘access’ obliterates any consideration of what pupils had access to – what the actual content of their educational experience was and how this shaped them socially and intellectually. Schools are simply treated in the literature as social black boxes with little serious reflection on their institutional structure and function. The leftist variant on this rehearses a critique of schooling in terms of ‘social control’, as if there were some conspiracy through which ‘the state’ deliberately maleducated its citizens. Even if this perspective were accepted, it still fails to shed any light on a possible connection between the rise of compulsory schooling and the demise of self-education. In 1876 University College Bristol opened mostly on the prospect of a £25,000 Appeal Fund, which by 1881 had still reached only £22,437. Up to 1905 total capital spending amounted to £49,000, and it was only at this time, with the beginning of agitation for a chartered university and the intervention of the Wills and Fry families, that serious financial support was gained. In mid-1909, when the College was chartered as a university, the endowment fund stood at £203,000, 79 per cent of which derived from the Wills family. Johns Hopkins also opened in 1876, but here the financial circumstances were rather different. Johns Hopkins’ initial endowment was $3.5m – almost £730,000. See Tribe () which outlines this and similar examples. Compare p. 61 with pp. 107–8 of the book under review. This usage survives – in the English-speaking world a ‘seminar’ is a session dedicated to the discussion of a specific topic; in Germany it is still more or less equivalent to an academic department. The post-bellum boom in the USA more or less coincided with the rapid economic and cultural development of Germany following unification in 1870. This is elaborated in Tribe (). In this respect Stevens’ account of the English model is flawed, since he tends, quite understandably, to write from an Oxford perspective. This is unhelpful, since a clear view of the structural evolution of the English university system has to be sharply detached from any assumption of the ‘importance’ of Oxbridge to British culture. The important point is that Oxford and Cambridge, until the London developments the only English universities, managed to retain pre-eminence in the evolving system by successfully imitating the educational innovations of others. Until very recently, the hallmark of a university was that it was chartered as an independent institution with its own degree. Hence the University Colleges of Leicester, Nottingham, Reading and so on, originally offering the London external degrees, became universities at the point where they gained the right to teach and examine to their own curricula. University College of North Staffordshire was the first of the post-war university foundations, opening in 1950, and while it offered its own degree from the first it was under the joint supervision of the Universities of Oxford, Birmingham and Manchester. The next university to open, Sussex, offered its own degree and was free of such tutelage, like York, Kent, Essex and the other ‘new’ universities. Or the old GDR economy, where the socialist reforms of the 1970s created this characteristic division between management units and production units that enlightened American corporations had abandoned in the early 1900s. See Alfred Chandler's classic accounts of this in his Strategy and Structure () and later The Visible Hand (). During the 1980s, for example, universities had their student numbers centrally capped by subject, while polytechnics were able to expand their numbers without such intervention and hence to weather the worst of the funding cuts. The Patient and Community Trusts (PCTs) will in all likelihood take us all back to where we started in the early 1980s, with Acute Trusts made ‘accountable’ to patients through a PCT run on a daily basis neither by patients nor by GPs but by managers as remote from ‘production’ as the RHAs were; that is, back to the old pre-1989 East German model. The organizational structure that the NHS stumbled into by around 2000 was probably as optimal as it gets, but this is now disappearing under further waves of ‘reform’. The comparison with the National Health Service is important to an understanding of educational reform since both health and education became components of a ‘planned economy’ public sector during the 1990s, and not before. The central direction of health and education systems was very patchy until then, but has since been relentlessly elaborated. A key problem with central planning relevant here is that planners act under the illusion that their plans will be realized in the form that they anticipate; when this does not happen, they introduce reforms intended to reinforce their original intention, but which simply introduce another set of variables which go off course just as surely as did the first. Apart from the way in which the reform imperative is an important tool for the construction of individual careers, ‘reform’ becomes in this way an unending process precisely because it never turns out the way that the planners anticipate. The Kombinate were manufacturing combines where the production units lacked anything but the most elementary managerial structure. On privatization they simply collapsed, since they had never been capable of the most elementary decisions regarding products, sales, finance and workforce. Hence one of the real but unrecognized problems of the modern university system is governance. Although formally a university and an NHS Trust have similar legal status, an NHS Trust chief executive can be dismissed by the Trust board or by higher authority whereas this is virtually inconceivable for a vice chancellor. The unceremonious dismissal of chief executives in the NHS is commonplace, but this is a fate from which vice chancellors are insulated. An NHS Acute Trust board is jointly responsible for the safe and effective provision of health care when the best efforts of all concerned will most certainly fail to prevent death or injury. A university VC does not carry such a burden of responsibility. To forestall misunderstanding of what follows, I use the term ‘modern’ university to refer to the older structure now being displaced by this ‘postmodern’ university. I do so to emphasize that, while it is the attributes of the ‘modern university’ that are generally associated with university education, these attributes cannot be realized in the postmodern structures that are now being created. One feature of recent developments generally unremarked is that the distinction of teaching from research functions has already become established within, rather than between, institutions. It was always true that research grants took individuals away from teaching, but under the old regime it was still possible for individuals to carry a full teaching load and also pursue research. Changes to the university year and increased teaching loads now mean that leading academics in all subjects will spend little time teaching since they require a succession of research grants in order to remain ‘leading academics’. De facto this is strictly comparable to the French CNRS system. I am afraid that I cannot be more specific than this since educational historians do not seem to have thought the shift important. My own knowledge of the pre-1950 system is based on interviews made during the 1990s with senior economists which, among other matters, covered their early education (see Tribe ). The Higher School Certificate usually included three subjects in the core school curriculum, and so was in the number of subjects covered similar to the A level system. During the 1970s rising demand for university education in the USA was closely linked to the expansion of the 18-year-old cohort, so that expansion of the system merely kept pace with the year-on-year growth in the number of 18-year-olds (see Tribe ). Stevens has a useful page of these and similar abbreviations – see p. xviii. Until the early 1970s most schoolteachers were educated in teacher training colleges. Teaching was then transformed into a graduate occupation and many of the colleges turned into HE colleges. Likewise nursing education used to be quite separate from higher education, but is now included in it. And before we get into an argument about the use here of IQ or SATS, all this means is that I am using a standardized measure to rank a population according to intellectual competence. Note that 100 is a median, such that 50 per cent of the population is above it and 50 per cent below. For example, the story of the railways. Although the significance of ‘lifetime’ earnings is broadly accepted, there is a failure to link this idea to the life-cycles of individuals and cohorts. University loan schemes place an added burden upon lifetime earnings at the same time that housing costs and pension requirements have sharply increased, both of which are also lifetime investments. It is also plausible that the recent increase in house prices and the associated prevalence of equity withdrawal is at least in part related to a sharp increase in the present cost of education, so that households are being induced to over-anticipate lifetime earnings, or even in effect to try to spend the same resources twice. We should perhaps in this context reconsider the validity of John Stuart Mill's ‘rebuttal’ of the wage-fund argument. Shifting this issue out to lifetime, rather than annual, earnings, a ‘time-augmented’ and individualized version of the ‘wage fund’ doctrine – that there is a fixed fund in the economy for the payment of wages – is perhaps today the most appropriate shorthand conceptualization of an individual's total earning capacity. Such a system could only ever be ‘self-financing’ if the upfront costs for the initial years were simply written off together with the long-run losses from running a scheme with an interest rate fixed below prevailing commercial rates. Possibly because nursing as a predominantly female occupation has benefited from equal pay legislation, so this result flows from changes in the general labour market framework and not from any special characteristic of the nursing occupation. Perhaps students have become more ‘realistic’ in recent years, but my own random experience suggests that, over a range of occupations, students think that average salaries are getting on for twice the level they are. In my own working lifetime mainframe computer programming has come, gone and come back again as a remunerative occupation. You don't have to be Harry Braverman to see that this sort of problem will become more widespread in the future. On her album Dark Chords on a Big Guitar, from Steve Earle's ‘Christmas in Washington’.