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Research Universities |
NUMBER 49, FALL 2007 |
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Sustaining Oxford as World Class
David Palfreyman
Let's be forthright in acknowledging the miniherd of elephants now ensconced inside the Oxford University senior common room (SCR), one in each corner and one wallowing by the sherry decanters in the middle of this elegant room. The five are labeled: "Remaining World Class," "Raising Tuition Fees," "Protecting Tutorial Teaching," "Widening Participation," and "Defending Academic Self-Governance" (the last subtitled "Keeping the Lunatics in Charge of the Asylum"). For space reasons we will concentrate on only the first four of those five elephants. There is, of course, some overlap among these five themes, and much of what is said here about Oxford also applies to Cambridge, the other UK "top ten" global player—an institution similar to Oxford in terms of intensive and expensive undergraduate teaching (via "supervisions" rather than "tutorials"), costly research activity (even more "big science" than in Oxford), and the socioeconomic background of the students (posh!). Parts of this essay relate to other elites such as University College London, Imperial, London School of Economics, Manchester, and Edinburgh. Put simply, if we want to maintain the lucrative export industry that is "UK higher education plc" (worth some €3 billion per annum to gross domestic product on top of UK higher education's ca. €40 billion general contribution within the economy), these flagship universities must be adequately funded. The whole national higher education brand depends on the continued success of these elite subbrands. Hence the presence of the elephants in the SCR needs to be addressed if we are to avoid the mediocre and moribund nature of higher education systems in other major European countries. Remaining World ClassIn 2004 the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies (OxCHEPS) and the Ulanov Partnership costed Oxford, using the methodology developed in the United States for the National Association of College and University Business Officers "Cost of College Project" and hence allowing a direct comparison of metrics with Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley. The essence of the OxCHEPS message was that Oxford needs another €150 million a year on top of its €500 million budget if it is to remain globally competitive. In the context of a halving of the taxpayer-funded "unit of resource" within UK higher education for undergraduate teaching over some 20 years, the 2006 increase in tuition fees to €3,000 is too little, too late for either Oxford or universities generally. Government is putting in more money for research, but Parliament at the 2009/10 review of higher education funding must not dodge the lifting of the cap on tuition fees for UK/EU undergraduates to a realistic level of at least €10,000. Such additional monies, along with Oxford's own determined efforts at fundraising from alumni and its exploitation of intellectual property, could mean it keeps pace with its US rivals that currently have three or four times its spending power. It is astonishing that Oxford continues to punch so far above its financial weight, reflecting a combination of praiseworthy academic productivity from underpaid and overworked "dons" compared with their US colleagues and a worrying risk that in living off past investment it is now on borrowed time. Raising Tuition Fees Any talk of raising tuition fees immediately unites the cunning self-interest of the wealthy middle classes with the naïve residual socialism of Old Labour backbenchers and hence the furor around the 2004 higher education bill that proposed fees of €3,000 and that Prime Minister Blair got through by a mere 5 votes despite a theoretical Commons majority of some 150. Lord Desai, an academic economist Labour peer, has commented: "For 35 years I have heard the same argument: if we charge anything, the poor will not get access. The middle classes are clever; they always use the poor to justify their own subsidies. . . . What is happening now is that by charging a single [low] price we have to ration. Such rationing results in bad education. . . . Who gets such bad education? People from lower income classes and ethnic minorities. . . . The problem is that people around the country, and especially in another place [the Commons], mistake uniformity for equity. . . . The higher education system in this country has been the biggest robbery the middle classes have perpetrated on the welfare state." High(ish) fees combined with generous grants and loans carefully targeted at students from the lower socioeconomic groups create a higher education system that is far more socially equitable than the supposedly fair free public good systems. On grounds of both social equity and also a good business sense Oxford should be charging annual undergraduate tuition fees of about €10,000 to those students and their families who can afford to pay (and many of them will anyway have been paying private school fees of around that amount or even higher). In charging such fees Oxford must, of course, be utterly needs blind in selecting students, operating a rigorously fair and methodologically robust student financial aid system of grants and loans so that no applicant is unable to take up a place for financial reasons. At the same time annual increases in fees clearly need to be kept within reasonable bounds (unlike the runaway hikes characterizing UK independent school fees and US private universities) by applying firm cost-control, maximizing alumni giving, utilizing corporate bond cheap debt, achieving full economic cost recovery of overheads on research projects, managing endowment investment with flair, and generally earning income wherever possible from conferences, tourism, and other sources. Protecting Tutorial Teaching Oxford and Cambridge, unlike many elite universities in the United Kingdom and United States, still take undergraduate teaching seriously. Notably, the Oxbridge colleges as teaching machines, countering the weight of the academic departments as primarily research operations, protect the institutional commitment to education, in contrast to other elites where teaching has been shortchanged to free resources to pursue "the kash & kudos of research." That said, tutorial teaching is under pressure in Oxford: it is an expensive commodity at 1:2 rather than the 1:12/15 seminars norm elsewhere; it is dependent on both tutor and tutee making the best of it. The Oxford tutorial has an almost mystic, cult status. But is it also an anachronism, a sacred cow to which Oxford pays mere lip service as it quietly shifts to "small-group teaching"? Or is it to be preserved at all costs as a pedagogical gem, the jewel in Oxford's crown as the best way to challenge, stimulate, and truly educate young minds in the crucial "lifelong-learning" skill of a liberal education, and as sound analysis and critical thinking, to the wider benefit of society and the economy? Is the added value of demanding from students more written work than their counterparts at other universities get the opportunity to submit—and then putting them on the spot to discuss the work in a way that now rarely happens at other elites—worth the expense and duly appreciated by the students and their future employers? A proper market in tuition fees may answer at least the question of whether the student or family is really interested in intensive undergraduate education. Conclusion The United Kingdom is a world leader in financial services (the City of London) and in higher education (Oxford and Cambridge). The former was saved from oblivion by major deregulation in the 1980s; the latter now needs to be liberalized by way of a much higher fees cap (if not uncapped fees) from 2010 onwards. Along with other sources of increased income, enhanced tuition fees will enable Oxford to keep up with its global competitors. It would be a bonus to do all this while remaining a self-governing academic community; and it might anyway be wasted effort if Oxford were to damage itself by becoming corporatist and managerialist. It would be a pity if Oxford's exceptionalism is not allowed to thrive at a time when another major European country (Germany) is, at last, beginning to reform its higher education system by granting greater autonomy to institutions, introducing tuition fees, and funding 10 of its universities as elites to compete with Oxford, Cambridge, and the US Ivy League. Life in the top echelon of globalized higher education is not going to get any less competitive (not least as China's universities develop), and the best chance of survival lies in being as free as possible from the dead hand of government interference in pricing the product—a freedom, however, that rightly demands in return that Oxford remains an open and accessible academic meritocracy. Author's note: This article is a short version of the author's chapter in Hugo de Bergh, Jeremy Black, and Anna F. Fazackerley, eds., Can the Prizes Still Glitter: The Future of British Universities in the Changing World (2007). See www.agora-education.org. [Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number49/p7_Palfreyman.htm
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