In order to understand the effects of neoliberalism on higher education and students’ experiences, it is necessary to understand some of the history of the higher education sector, and the impact the last 30 years of reforms in
particular have had on its institutions and students.
In many ways the history of higher education mirrors that of capitalism in the
UK, expanding alongside the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century,
adopting the peacetime ideals of the post-World War Two years, and finally subject to the market fetishism of the 1980s. Understood in this context, the effects of neoliberalism – itself an era of capitalism, rather than its
replacement – on the higher education sector become more prominent because of the foundations they were built on.
13 A choice that only has one real option and is offered on a ‘take it or leave it basis’, so is not really a choice at all.
With this historical context it mind it is worth noting early on that the State subsidised, grant-generous higher education sector of the post-war years may have to be seen as the exception, rather than the norm (Collini, 2012;
Williams, 2013). Prior to World War Two UK universities were largely civic rather than State institutions. They were financed by wealthy individuals, usually either from industry or the Church, and supplemented by students’ fees. Breaking away from the aristocratic and ecclesiological halls of Oxford and Cambridge, industrialists began to establish universities in the UK’s main manufacturing cities to provide the knowledge that would sustain the UK’s industrialised economy (Collini, 2012; Stevens, 2004). These new universities
were distinguishable by their redbrick facades, and were seen as sites of
Victorian social mobility.
It wasn’t until 1919 and the advent of the University Grants Committee (UGC) that the UK government began to take an active interest in the funding of higher education, an interest spurred on by the need to reinvigorate the country’s economic competitiveness following World War One (Collini, 2012; Stevens, 2004). Even with this interest, only 50% of higher education funding came from the government, with 14% still coming from private donations and 36% from student fees (Unterhalter and Carpentier, 2010). The cost to the government was radically different compared to today’s sector. In 1939 there were just 50,000 students and 21 university-level institutions across Britain to fund (Collini, 2012); in 2014/15 there were 2,266,075 students and over 130 institutions (HESA, 2016a). The landscape of the current higher education sector is far more crowded, and arguably more differentiated today. The
process of charting this new landscape begins in 1979, with the first indications of the higher education system that was to come.
In 1979, the newly elected Thatcher government announced that the remaining subsidies for overseas students would end and these students would have to pay full-cost fees for their course. This decision has been
overlooked, arguably wrongly, in many chronicles of the marketisation of
higher education: true, there were not as many international students in 1979 as there are today, and such a change could have passed below the radar with far more ease than is the case now, but it was the first time since 1962 that students in the UK were excepted to contribute directly to their higher education. Two years later the government implemented a ‘savage reduction in university funding’, a move Stefan Collini (2012: 33) suggests ‘appeared almost deliberately to undermine rational planning and damage morale’. This reduction amounted to 11% across the whole sector, though some universities experienced it far worse: for example, the University of Salford saw its budget suddenly cut by over 40%.
With fees introduced and funding cut, the next major hallmark of today’s higher education system came in 1986 with the separation of institutional funding for research and teaching, and the first Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Devised by the chairman of UGC, Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, the RAE was a means of measuring the quality of research carried out in different universities and departments; the results determining how much research block grant funding would go to any given university, and the whole process
contributing towards the competitive audit culture within universities that has now become inescapable (Brown, 2011; McGettigan, 2013).
Two years after the RAE came the 1988 Education Reform Act, which heralded the creation of an education market (Reay and Wiliam, 1999) and the abolition of the UGC, replaced by the short-lived Universities Funding Council. Events progressed rapidly from there. In 1989, Kenneth Baker, the then Secretary of State for Education, said that the 1988 Act’s aims, and those of his government, were to expand British higher education based on the American model, with greater engagement from private resources (Brown, 2011). By 1990, there was an increase in the undergraduate fee level, coupled with a reduction in the teaching grant given to higher education institutions, though both continued to be paid by the government (with the exception of international student fees, which had now been payable by the student for over a decade). 1990 also saw the Education (Student Loans) Act, and with it the introduction of student loans to supplement maintenance grants, while
1991 brought the publication of the White Paper Higher Education: A New
Framework, which outlined the government’s plan to abolish the dichotomy between liberal and vocational education by allowing polytechnic colleges and certain other institutions to apply for university status. This plan became a reality in 1992 with the Further and Higher Education Act that, in effect, cemented the low-funding, mass higher education system that had been waiting in the wings for over a decade. Collini (2012: 34) laments on how, at the time, ‘even the most prestigious of [universities] offered remarkably little resistance to these changes, bending the knee whenever their funding masters passed by’. These prestigious universities were the same redbrick institutions
that had begun as new, vocationally orientated civic universities, set up to offer an alternative to the dominance of Oxbridge. Over the course of a century they themselves had gained the reputational capital to become
prestigious, as the next wave of new, vocationally orientated universities
entered into the sector.
A major justification for both the 1988 Act and its 1992 predecessor was to
increase choice. In the 1988 Act is was parental choice over where they could
send their children to school. In the 1992 Act, it was customer choice, as
further education colleges – having been removed from LEA control and granted status as further education corporations – became a series of ‘individual education “businesses” competing with one another for
“customers” within the centrally controlled legislative framework’ (Benn and Chitty, 1996: 14). The aim with the 1992 Act was to create a State authorised, mass market of FE providers – the hallmark of what was to come in HE.
The reclassification of polytechnic colleges as universities led to an increase in participation rates in higher education, though this increase was not simply the result of the reclassification: students who attended polytechnics were already included in the higher education participation statistics. It was the expansion of universities of all levels of prestige that drove up student numbers. Simply put, there were more spaces for students in higher education, and these spaces were met with demand. There were 937,000 students in the UK in 1985-86, and 1.72m in 1995-96 (Brown and Carasso, 2013). Roughly 15% of people aged 21-and-under were university in 1988: this rose to almost 35% over the next decade. This rapid rate of expansion had a
large impact on the State’s student expenditure, so in 1994 the decision was taken to limit student numbers, instead of student grants, using the model of Maximum Aggregate Student Numbers or MASN (a method of cost control which would last almost exactly 20 years, being completely abolished in 2015). Institutions that went even 1% over their set quota incurred a financial
penalty, though the limit did not stifle demand.
This desire from students for universities, and universities for students found a champion in 1997 in (New) Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Blair’s rhetoric of ‘education, education, education’ led to a promise to have at least 50% of young people taking part in higher education. This expansion would come at a cost, yet funding per student had fallen consistently throughout the 1980s and 1990s (McGettigan, 2013). Blair’s answer to an underfunded sector, and an electoral commitment to expand post-18 education, was to switch the cost from the State to the student (via, the State), through tuition fees – introduced for home students for the first time in 1998.