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Invest in higher education, and watch it grow
There is mounting pressure on governments to get more deeply involved in higher education, but academic freedom is pivotal to societal development. In the long term, the consequences of increased regulation could be severe. Higher education is an investment in our future and should be treated as such.
When it comes to investing money, I am an amateur. I don’t have the detailed knowledge and experience to be sure of what to expect if I make all my own decisions on where my money should go. Sure I have some broad ideas about ethical investment and the Far East, but when it comes to the specifics of which companies or commodities in which to invest, I am simply not an expert. As a rational individual, I place that responsibility in the hands of somebody that does know what they are doing... a financial advisor or investment manager. In the developed world, knowledge discovery, generation and transfer are at the centre of everything that civilisation has achieved. The protection and development of the higher education sector in any given country ought to be amongst the central tenets of any modern, effective government. As the character John Keating states in Dead Poets’ Society, “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world”.
In that film, Robin Williams plays an inspirational high school teacher. In the UK, and I imagine in many other countries, that concept verges on archaic – not because today’s teachers are less enthusiastic or less capable, but because they are less free. The onward march of curricular and classroom control from central government has hobbled the capability of a teacher to run with an idea that they see capture the imagination of the class – they have to move on to the next topic or make way for another literacy hour.
Of course, this “progress” has dramatically reduced the number of poor teachers, but in so doing has helped to homogenise schools across the country and across the world, there are fewer poor schools but also fewer truly great schools, truly great teachers, truly great pupils. In an age of equal opportunities this may seem a fair price to pay but, in truth, the more polarised reality may have been more likely to yield high quality leaders of science, business, industry and government.
Universities have been in the news a great deal recently; it seems that the media is determined to encourage stronger political involvement in the higher education sector. Two stories featured in this week’s newspapers – one lauding universities for establishing their own entrance exams due to the increasingly indiscriminate nature of A-levels, and the other criticising them for independently setting their own curricula and standards for exit exams. The bottom line is that a generation of over-involvement from government in secondary education has resulted in a reduction in excellence (as well as a welcome reduction in negligence) and the same will be true if similar involvement is permitted in higher education over the next 20 years.
Worse, university is all about choice, and all about diversity of choice. Despite a drive to change it, with the exception of a few countries (e.g. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea), university is still undertaken by a minority. The very concept of a standard curriculum for any subject directly speaks against this and would be an effective way to deter international students from our shores and encourage the brightest from amongst our own to migrate. This week’s stories in the British press are the equivalent of the Washington Post lobbying the Bush administration to interfere in the curriculum at Harvard – it might sound more reasonable – but ultimately the potential conclusions are catastrophic and should be viewed as equally inappropriate.
A first-class degree from Cambridge is, always has been, and always will be worth more than a first-class degree from London Metropolitan University (unless we are talking about a niche specialisation in which the latter are known to be strong in). The same would be true if we applied a different measurement system – 80% at Oxford is better than 80% at the University of Bedfordshire. The only way to standardise the system would be to prevent lower quality universities from awarding firsts and upper seconds at all. We would enter another deeply subjective and political evaluation process that would help nobody.
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