As we seem to be having what is now the semi-annual conversation about university funding in England I thought it was time to chuck a few more ideas and concepts into the pot.
The English debate has pretty much ossified between a kind of needs-blind gradualism (the 2012 settlement is nearly perfect, but this handful of tweaks or climbdowns will get it over the line) and a need to refight the Ed Miliband glory years (a “graduate tax”, for various values of the words “tax” and “graduate”), with the occasional intervention from the free education fundamentalists (worthy, principled, sadly unimplementable), and from the contrarian headbangers who want to burn it all down and rebuild it in their own image (not so much policy, more a cry for help).
All this dynamic cut-and-thrust in the offices of the kinds of think-tanks that bring Matthew Goodwin out in hives conceal a paucity of genuinely original thinking about what it is we are funding and why. I’m not conceited (and certainly not Oxbridge) enough to assume I hold the key to the One True Path, but it is surely worth making some efforts to widen the parameters of the debate.
An insistence on funding following the student is probably the biggest issue with the system we have. It elides the fact that so much of university provision in the broader sense is built on cross-subsidy and encourages the near-nonsensical idea that every year of every degree costs the same to deliver as any other (an idea that has leaked into the worthy-but-flawed Lifelong Loan Entitlement… unless anyone wants to explain to me why 30 credits of English literature is the same price to deliver as 30 credits of practical mechanical engineering or sports medicine).
