Thirty years ago, I was a geographer. Not a ‘proper’ geographer, I was too interested in social, economic and political theory. But staff to student ratios on field trips had to be obeyed. So, twice a year I clambered up mountains, paddled through streams and dug soil pits, having been released from nineteenth and twentieth-century doctrines by my physical colleagues. High up in the Langdales, I broke the spade.
Re-purposed, the flow meter slipped from my grasp, crashed into the rocks and raced down the hillside, taking the left-hand of the three routes the fast-flowing stream took to the valley floor. Alongside opprobrium, I discovered trifurcation.
Trifurcation, to split into three. Increasingly that word has re-entered my vocabulary over the past twelve months. Will higher education seven years hence look like it does today and how it has through much of my tenure, or will it trifurcate?
There is no doubt that there is a perceived ‘gold standard’, a three-year full-time residential degree, consumed in late teens and early twenties, away from home, ideally in a university regarded as part of the perceptual ‘elite’. The demand is strong, a ‘rite of passage’ built into most every middle-class parent’s life plan, a transition between late adolescence and early adulthood, an award that enhances life chances and acts as a badge of rank.
