The government calls the issue a priority, but some say outdated policies hinder the efforts
Vanessa Channer was 19 when she first enrolled in British higher education. She found the program at the Royal Academy of Music to be too competitive and dropped out, eventually landing at a secretarial school.
Last year, at age 30, she decided to give higher education another try. She enrolled at Thames Valley University here to pursue a degree in English, and did well. But then a divorce changed her financial circumstances. “I was a good student,” she says, and so she applied for a hardship loan from the university. British universities charge annual tuition of 1,000 pounds, or about $1,600. “It took them eight weeks to decide,” she says. “And then I was offered 500 pounds to finish a three-year program. I said, ‘No, thanks.’”
Ms. Channer is back doing secretarial work through a temporary-help agency.
Her situation, which is not unusual, illustrates some of the challenges facing higher education in Britain today. While the government is striving to increase enrollment of “non-traditional” students, it is being criticized for not making more financial resources available to such students and to the types of institutions that tend to attract them.
“There is a tension between developing skills versus developing a learning society -- between short-term and long-term thinking,” says Tom Schuller, a professor of lifelong learning at Birkbeck College of the University of London.
The terms “lifelong learning” and “greater accessibility” are prominent in the Labour government’s education policy. The thinking is that universities should open up more to older, low-income, and minority students, and that the higher-education system should make it easier for students to interrupt and resume their studies, if necessary.
Not surprisingly, reshaping the traditionally elitist model of British higher education is forcing the government to grapple with a number of difficult issues. As it seeks to insure that high academic standards are maintained, it also is trying to determine whether the traditional performance indicators that have been used to measure a university’s standing -- and on which financial rewards are based -- might actually be hindering the new push to broaden access to higher education.
Geoffrey Copland, vice-chancellor of the University of Westminster and chairman of the Coalition of Modern Universities -- the 36 former polytechnic institutes that were made universities by government decree in 1992 -- says the government “is caught between two policy drivers. One is widening participation, and the other is raising standards. I have no problem with raising standards, but I do have a problem if traditional standards are the only thing used to measure universities.”
Many educators argue that new performance standards are needed, measures that would take into account the amorphous yet valuable contribution that the new universities make in bringing into higher education people who traditionally have been alienated from it.
Baroness Tessa Blackstone, the Minister for Education and Employment, says it is possible to maintain academic standards while increasing access and participation. “These performance indicators measure what they measure, and I don’t think they should be seen as the be all and end all of what constitutes good work in higher education. A lot of old universities have more to spend, but that doesn’t mean a lot of the new universities aren’t providing real value-added for many students.”
British higher education has long been dominated by two world-class universities, Oxford and Cambridge, and deviations from the Oxbridge model were often considered suspect. But times are changing. Sir John Daniel, vice-chancellor of the Open University, Britain’s pioneering distance-learning institution, points out that when he went to Oxford, he studied for three years, took examinations for one week, and that was it. Virtually no one dropped out. “Life isn’t like that anymore,” he says.
Today, students drop out, stop out, and attend part time, and administrators must orient their institutions to that new reality, says Mr. Daniel.
One key to promoting more flexibility in British higher education, experts say, would be the adoption of a uniform system for transferring academic credits, similar to that in the United States.
“Some critics say we don’t need a uniform system, because not many students transfer,” says Mr. Copland. “Well, if you make it difficult, students won’t transfer. Without the portability of credits, you’ll never achieve the full lifelong-learning agenda set by government.”
That agenda is being given strong support. Over the past year, the government has taken several steps to encourage universities to seek out and enroll non-traditional students. Among them:
* Providing, for the first time, limited student loans to low-income, part-time students. Starting next year, tuition will be waived for part-time students on welfare.
* Extending from 50 to 54 the age at which eligibility for student loans ends.
* Creating financial incentives for universities to recruit disadvantaged students.
* Investing more money in so-called sub-degree programs. Those are based at institutions known as “further-education colleges,” which award students a two-year “higher national diploma,” similar to a U.S. community-college degree.
* Increasing funds to encourage collaboration between further-education colleges and other higher-education institutions.
The government also has raised the enrollment cap for higher education by allocating about $120-million for 44,500 new student places, with part-time students being the primary beneficiaries. It also plans to increase significantly the number of new places available for part-time and “mature” students -- those older than 21 -- by the 2000-01 academic year.
As its flagship lifelong-learning program, the government established the University for Industry, a private/public, distance-learning institution that will open in the fall. The aim is to bring hundreds of thousands of adult learners into higher education through partnerships involving universities and businesses.
The lifelong-learning agenda signifies a new wave in Britain’s shift to a mass system of postsecondary education. In the early 1980s, the Conservative government began a serious push to make higher education less elitist by broadening participation and increasing enrollment. But funds for higher education did not grow at the same pace, and universities were forced to educate more students with less money.
The conversion of polytechnics to universities, in 1992, opened up and diversified the higher-education sector. That change, along with the official push to attract more students, led to a 71-per-cent increase in enrollment from 1989-90 to 1996-97. Today, 33 per cent of the college-age population is enrolled in higher education, up from 17 per cent a decade ago. Young, middle-class students were the primary beneficiaries of that enrollment drive.
Now the government is focusing on older, minority, and part-time students, who together account for a substantial and growing segment of the student population. About two-thirds of all students now enrolled in higher education are over 21, and one-third of all students attend on a part-time basis.
“We’re finally seeing a discourse on higher education that does not equate higher education with young, full-time students,” says Mr. Daniel, of the Open University. “It’s become less of a slogan and more of a reality. It’s taken a long time.”
But some government policies, according to critics, undermine efforts to reach the non-traditional market. Chief among them was the imposition of tuition for new students last fall. At one time, most students at British universities were required to pay fees, but the government began phasing them out after World War II. While part-time and foreign students paid tuition -- which varied depending on the course of study -- full-time undergraduates from Britain and other European Union countries did not. Now all students are charged, although tuition is waived or reduced for those who are financially disadvantaged.
The introduction of tuition was controversial, but institutions report that it has been accomplished without too much pain and suffering -- except for the negative impact on older students. After tuition was imposed, the number of mature students applying to British colleges and universities fell by 11 per cent in 1998 and by another 11 per cent this year.
For many older students, tuition was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Alan Tuckett, director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education. “It can be like stealing money from their families.”
Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Ms. Blackstone, the education-and-employment minister, argues that many other factors have contributed to the drop in the enrollment of mature students. For example, she says, the demographic group from which they are drawn has been shrinking. And when the economy is good, employed people generally don’t want to leave their jobs for further education.
Moreover, she points out, 55 per cent of mature students in Britain are enrolled on a part-time basis, and part-time students already were required to pay tuition. The amount varies depending on the program.
Mr. Daniel goes further, arguing that research has shown that the imposition of tuition actually helps attract more members of previously underrepresented social classes to higher education. “People in lower socioeconomic groups understand a transaction where you pay money,” he says. “In a curious way, they are better able to come to grips with it.” Free higher education, he says, was seen as “a middle-class entitlement.” The fees “move it into the more everyday commercial world, with which they are more familiar.”
Tuition aside, the government’s desire to maintain high academic standards while encouraging institutions to seek out non-traditional students looms large among the challenges facing higher education. Most observers agree that the new universities play an important role in attracting and educating older and minority students. Yet those institutions, for the most part, do not enjoy the same accord and prestige that Britain’s older universities do. In published rankings of 97 higher-education institutions, based on data from the government’s Higher Education Statistics Agency, almost all of the new universities came in below the old ones. The criteria included average scores on entry-level tests, the ratio of students to faculty members, and assessments of research and teaching.
Unlike the United States, says Mr. Daniel, Britain has not been prepared “to accept all different categories of higher education.” Institutions that provide learning opportunities for part-time adult students get less recognition that those at which research is a primary activity, he says.
Educators acknowledge that a system that, until quite recently, was designed primarily to give a very good education to a relatively small segment of the population will not be reshaped without difficulty.
“We still haven’t come to terms with the development of a mass -- or, as I would prefer, a democratic -- system of higher education,” wrote Peter Scott, vice-chancellor of Kingston University, in a recent newspaper column. “In our secret minds, higher education is special, for the best and the brightest, not for everyone. Accessibility and quality are inevitably at odds; more of one means less of the other.”
But the coming decade will force many in Britain to re-examine their assumptions about higher education -- and their prejudices, says Ms. Blackstone.
“If we were to look ahead 10 years, we’ll see a rather different pattern of postsecondary education from the one that existed in 1997,” she says. “The traditional 18-plus, full-time student will be a minority. I think the United Kingdom will become more like the United States as we expand and develop a mass system of post-school education and training. Many people will be undertaking courses mainly because it is relevant to their jobs and prospects.”
Despite her own disappointments with higher education, Ms. Channer, the student-turned-secretary, still hopes to become a part of that “new pattern” in postsecondary enrollment.
“My own experience was not a good one -- I needed financial and emotional support that I didn’t get,” she says. “But I do one day want to go back. I don’t think there’s any age limit on this.”
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