What price a university education?

By William Leith
 

For more than 30 years, Buckingham was the UK’s only private university. Does its history offer lessons on the way forward for higher education?
 
There are two types of university in Britain, explains Professor Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. There are private ones, such as Buckingham and the newly opened New College of the Humanities in London, and there are those that are funded and controlled by the state. Kealey does not approve of the latter type.
 
If you’re a university, says Kealey, you should want to be private. Being private, you can charge whatever fees you want, teach whatever subjects you want, to whomever you want. If Britain had more private universities, says Kealey, we would be able to compete with the best in the world. As it is, we’re slipping.

 
Why? Well, says Kealey, “the best universities in the world are the Ivy League. The next best are the English-speaking ones that are independent but not totally.” These, says Kealey, are “in the thrall of social engineering”. And then come the universities of continental Europe. These institutions, he says, are nationalised, like Britain’s railway system used to be. So there’s no incentive for them to excel. They’re sinking in the mire of a planned economy, like 1970s commuters waiting on grotty platforms for trains that always arrive late.
 
Not like Buckingham, which, since its opening 35 years ago, has stood alone as a bastion of freedom. As a tiny institution – it started with 46 students – it hasn’t done too badly. (In this year’s Good University Guide it was ranked 21st). It now has 1,700 students. They pay fees of nearly £12,000 a year, whereas equivalent fees to go to, say, Cambridge or York are about £9,000. But at Buckingham, there are four terms in an academic year, rather than three. So you can get a degree in two years, not three. So a Buckingham degree, at the moment, costs a bit more than £23,000, instead of £27,000. “Last year,” says Kealey, alluding to the increase in tuition fees for state-funded universities, “we went, overnight, from being the most expensive university in the country to the cheapest”.
 
Kealey, 60, is something of a polymath. He’s a staunch libertarian; according to The Guardian, “he may just be the most reactionary man in Britain”. He has been at Buckingham since 2001. Before that he was a medical research scientist at Cambridge, trying to find a cure for skin diseases such as psoriasis. He has written two well-received books – one, Sex, Science and Profits (2008), is the story of how humans evolved into a race of capitalists. He firmly believes that whenever humans invent things, they do so because they’re driven by hunger or the profit motive, not because someone has given them a grant. According to Kealey, grants make you lazy, and hustling makes you sharp. He thinks universities should be hustlers.
 

 
Buckingham is a not-for profit institution but it has complete control over its own destiny. “Once the government gives you money, they want control,” says Kealey. “It gives individual politicians a sense of importance and a role. What the academics [at state-funded universities] say is, ‘Actually, who cares about loss of political control? It’s so much easier just to sit here and get money every year.’ All politicians want to control universities. They argue that, without the state, universities wouldn’t take poor people. It’s not true.”
 
This is the strongest argument against the concept of private universities – that they’d be just like private schools. Some would be able to charge big fees. Others might not. The New College of the Humanities, which also believes the US-style model is the way ahead, attracted just 60 students for its first term, paying £18,000 a head.

“Imagine Manchester United was controlled by a ministry of sport,” says Kealey. “Imagine the club was told how much to pay the players, and which members of the public should be allowed into the matches, and which days they should play, and who they should play. Do you think Manchester United would be as good as it is now?” No, but then the creation of football’s Premier League is, for some, another good example of a system where an elite few thrive at the expense of lots of others.
 

The idea of a private university had been around for a while. In 1967, you might have read a letter in The Times from a Dr JW Paulley, who said: “Is it not time to examine the possibility of creating at least one new university in this country on the pattern of those great private foundations in the USA, without whose stimulus and freedom of action the many excellent state universities in that country would be very much poorer?” A small knot of dedicated libertarians pushed the idea along, notably Professor Harry Ferns and Ralph Harris of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think-tank, and Max Beloff, an Oxford don who would become Buckingham’s first principal. In 1968 Ferns set out “four principal reasons why an independent university should be established now” and wrote independence was necessary for “the advancement of knowledge and the inculcation of habits of mental and moral discipline”. The University College at Buckingham was opened by – who else? – Margaret Thatcher, then leader of the Conservative party, in 1976. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. Buckingham didn’t achieve university status until 1983. Kealey says there was a lot of resistance to the idea from the civil service.
 

 
The university expanded steadily throughout the 1980s – with international students a key factor in its growth. But the expansion of the state sector in the mid-90s, as polytechnics were granted university status, caused student numbers at Buckingham to stall and then fall by 30 per cent between 1996 and 2000, according to a paper published by the Institute of Economic Affairs on the university’s 25th anniversary in 2001. Investment in areas such as information technology helped reverse the trend and expansion to recommence.
 
We walk across the road to a fish restaurant for lunch. The campus is tiny, pretty, well-kept. But not how you might imagine of the place that was Britain’s only private university for more than three decades. It does not have the air of being a place of wealth and privilege, like a public school or an Oxbridge college. It’s made up of some old cottages, a former dairy, a building that was once the barracks of the Royal Bucks Hussars, a converted mill and several modern residential blocks. It’s sweet – a bit like Buckingham itself. In the evenings there are coaches arranged for the students to take the half-hour journey to Milton Keynes, where there are more pubs and nightclubs. Right now, the campus is empty because summer term, which runs from July to September, has just ended.

We sit down in the restaurant, where we are the only customers. Kealey explains the history of universities. How the first university was set up in Bologna in 1088, or thereabouts, when Italy was booming, and needed lawyers to resolve commercial disputes, and how universities then sprung up all over Europe – Toulouse, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, teaching vocational courses to aspiring clerics, lawyers, classicists, and doctors. The main thing, he keeps pointing out, is that, for most of their history, universities were private. They served the market.

After about 1860, young men from the middle classes wanted to go to university not to answer a commercial need, but because it was fashionable. In his book The Idea of a University (1858), Cardinal Newman captured this spirit eloquently. Newman loved the special atmosphere that existed in the quadrangles of Oxford and the courtyards of Cambridge. He believed that, if you had lots of time to study the Classics, and lots of time to talk about them with other scholars, you’d develop a unique mental polish – would become the sort of chap who, he wrote, “is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably.”
 
For Newman, Oxbridge scholars weren’t just in the business of improving their own minds – they improved the whole of society too. Reading and chatting about Pliny and Catullus – that, for Newman, produced a special sauce that would end up flavouring the world outside the quadrangle. Who would set the world to rights? University men, that’s who.
 
AC Grayling, master of the controversial New College of the Humanities, has talked of the “Aristotelian” idea of higher education as a way of ennobling your leisure time. He sounds a bit like Cardinal Newman. His opponents would probably say he should be ennobling the leisure time of everybody – not just those who can pay £18,000 a year.
 

 
After the first world war, sterling suffered terrible inflation and universities lost most of their endowments. They also lost thousands of potential students in the trenches. They turned to the government for help. And, in the form of the University Grants Committee, set up in 1919, the government helped. Or, of course, if you listen to Kealey, hindered.
 
And look what happened. In 1939, 50,000 people, or 2 per cent of the population, went to 21 universities. Now, there are more than 2m students and more than 100 universities, with 45 per cent of the population going to university. The debate around universities now is about they can justify their funding.
 
The arrival of other providers into the private sector – including Pearson, the education group that also owns the FT – is also changing the landscape. What would happen if more universities adopted the Buckingham way? If, say, a group of 20 broke away from state funding, and state control, and became private institutions? They would raise their fees. “An awful lot of public schools charge £30,000 a year,” says Kealey. Private universities would, he continues, become competitive in the global market for clever academics.

But do we want to enhance the prestige of the Manchester Uniteds of the academic world, possibly to the detriment of the lower divisions? For many, the idea is abhorrent. Their position is robustly represented by Terry Eagleton, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, who says: “British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, are not best served by a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded.” He fears the result would be “to relegate an already impoverished state university system to second class status”.
 
And what, I wonder, would become of Buckingham if there were more private universities? Would it lose its unique selling point? On the other hand, it has been hustling for 35 years. Kealey says: “Because we’re in the market we focus on the student experience. But as other universities recognise they’re also in the market, they, too, will focus on the student experience. That’s a challenge we’ll have to face when it happens.”
 
And in the end, of course, the market will decide.
 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012.