Book Review: “A University Education” by David Willetts
David Willetts was the Universities Minister in the coalition government which pushed through the rise of tuition fees to £9k/year. This book is his reflection on HE policy.
Personal Introduction: The Seven-Term Suspension
I was starting as a PhD student in Cambridge in the aftermath of Willetts’ visit to speak on ‘The Idea of a University’. His talk was disrupted - to the point of being abandoned - by student protesters. One of the students read a poem of protest about fees, and was suspended for seven terms (about two-and-a-half years) by the University, grossly exceeding the recommendation of one term by the University’s counsel. It was an object lesson in power for me, and continues to concern me despite a later lightening of the suspension.
I highly doubt that Willetts had anything to do with the University’s disciplinary action (ironically, he is one of the few Conservatives who has spoken loudly about the raw deal young people have been getting since 2008), but it is interesting to reflect on why such a stern punishment was doled out.
I open with this story because I want to explain that I started this book expecting to disagree with a lot of it. I expected my views to be challenged by a market-driven vision of HE, and a narrowly-economic view of how education can transform a life. I expected to read a book which tacitly endorsed Oxbridge as the model institution. I expected to see a hard-nosed case for useful knowledge and national productivity as the justifications for Universities.
Instead, I was presented with a scholarly and frank reflection of where Universities sit in the wider life of the UK and a coherent case for using market forces to advance the various missions of the modern University. I didn’t agree with all of it, but I respect Willett’s analysis and I have a deeper understanding of the structures I am embedded in for having read A University Education.
History
I found the opening historical chapters very stimulating. Willetts talks critically about the Oxbridge duopoly, and how its chokehold on Higher Education is one of the key explanations for the shape of English HE, making useful contrasts with HE in Scotland, Europe, and the US (most particularly Clark Kerr’s work in California).
He makes an interesting feature of the influence of Germany on Britain in the early twentieth century. The ‘Humboldt’ model seems like the closest precursor of an institution which combines research and teaching activities. The loss of this culture under the authoritarianism of the Nazi party contains real human tragedy, but also important and long-lasting policy consequences. The stronger separation of teaching and research in modern German HE persists today, even as Britain has migrated to a more Humboldtian model since adopting innovations such as the PhD as a response to restricted access to German research training from 1914.
British policy history is also well-discussed. Willetts goes deeper than most of the accounts I’ve encountered. For example the Robbins expansion of HE is not venerated, but explored with political sensitivity. There are several interesting observations about how the sequence of policy developments in related-but-autonomous areas can dramatically influence their execution.
Tuition Fees
The Robbins report resonates strongly with one of the necessary features of a book written by the man who hiked tuition fees to £9k: defending a massive expansion of HE. The comparison with international models of HE was interesting to encounter, as was the ‘what it was really like’ account of the budget pressures of Austerity and the tone of conversations with Vince Cable of the Liberal Democrats.
Readers will bring their own suspicions to these accounts, but Willetts makes fair points about the improved access to HE and a proud case about the improved scope for serving the traditional Conservative virtue of supporting personal ambition. It is more possible than ever for a poor child to make something of themselves by going to University, and this seems like an objectively good thing.
The specific flavour of these arguments was one of the most interesting parts of the book for me. Willetts describes how the policy discourse of ‘early years determinism’ massively influences the HE funding game within government (Tables). Broadly, the standing assumption is that money is best spent on earlier education – a pebble upstream can divert the flow of the whole river. Willetts disagrees, though acknowledges Heckman’s work in economics, and makes a case for HE as an efficient policy spend. Willetts knows that people can fare badly in schools and fantastically in Universities, and sees funding reform as something which enables this kind of story.
Table: student:staff and pupil:teacher ratios. Note that the spacing of years is not even, and that the Coalition government spanned 2010-2015.
Table: billions spent by government on UK adult education pre-primary education. Note that the Coalition government spanned 2010-2015.
Funding discussions return us, I suppose, to the disruption of his talk at Cambridge. Willetts changed a lot about HE, and I imagine he will have been disappointed not to have had a full conversation with engaged students about some of the strengths and weaknesses of those changes. At the same time, his case for students having consumer power is somewhat punctured by the seven-term suspension of one of the protestors.
It is to Willetts’ credit that he openly discusses one of the Coalition’s objective HE failures: the inclusion of student numbers within national immigration targets. The economic case for not doing this is bigger than I had realised, and the scope for post-study visas to open up markets like China to British firms is an argument which I can imagine would set a few heads nodding in a Cameron cabinet. Despite the hard data on the net cost of the Erasmus programme to Britain, the citizenship case for personal growth through international study sits very comfortably with a robust economic one: companies need people who have a solid understanding of other languages and cultures, and so does our society. There are a couple of fun stats, too: how the revenue Universities generate from international students compares to post-£9k government funding; and the number of ‘Erasmus babies’ born as a result of people meeting through the programme (over a million).
Research
Willetts sees how graduates contribute to society, but also how research fits into the policy picture. The policy history is thoughtful, starting with the ‘Haldane’ separation of funding decisions from direct political interference, but tempering this with the vision for wider funding administered by Whitehall departments. The science (later, UKRI) budget was supposed to be part of a picture which involved activities like the Department for Education funding substantive research into the issues of the day. While Defence and Health still fund large research programmes, most government departments don’t.
In that light, Willetts’ criticism of Research Excellence is absolutely fascinating. Yes, he says, the UK does very well in producing Excellent research. But a research system geared to produce only Excellent research might be poorly optimised overall. There are pieces of unglamorous research which are rather useful, and our system encourages researchers to avoid them. A economist might be drawn to bigger US data sets, ignoring smaller British ones. A physicist might be drawn to fundamental research which gets published in Nature, ignoring applied work which could one day provide the basis for a new company. So the decision to allocate REF funding for only 3* and 4* papers is an interesting decision taken under the Coalition. The motivation was funding constraint, but it seems to be a decision which has cast a very long shadow.
The incentives discussion comes to a head with a research-teaching discussion which exercises me – a ‘teaching only’ academic – greatly. Willetts uses Adam Smith to stimulate a line of reasoning which rests on a specific site of competition in Universities: the competition to recruit students, rather than the competition to teach them well once they’re within a University. The ‘boarding school’ model of HE introduces a barrier to changing institutions, and the composition of University League tables converts research success into teaching prestige. I found his solutions a bit weak here (e.g. making credit transfer easier), but the analysis in market competition terms was thoughtful. His appeal to medicine as a contrasting case was interesting: the high application (and rejection) rate for the numbers-capped subject means that the medicine degree market is much less prestige-driven. Comparison with the US model was also useful: the competition for students happens within Universities when students apply to the general institution rather than the specialised subject.
The University and the Country
There are parts of the book which could have been written by anyone with a good knowledge of HE or the dynamics of free markets, but the unique perspective which Willetts brings is the discussion of how HE fits into the UK.
There is a deep interrogation of the ways that Universities have influenced the school system, and much of this is very critical. From the Oxbridge Scholarship Exam to the development of A Levels, Willetts traces how the existence of Universities has turned much of the purpose of schools into an academic preparation for University. The radical narrowing of the post-16 school curriculum is part of that, as is the poor provision of post-18 technical education. There is a short-but-interesting reflection on whether (the then-Education Secretary) Gove’s experience of Scottish school, which has a curriculum broader than England’s post-16, made him more critical of this model as he changed the A Level system.
The extraordinary specialisation of degrees is something both enabled by the A-Level specialisation and reinforcing of it. Willetts sees the merits of a broader University education – it is the thesis of his last chapter – but also notes that whenever you ask academics what they think about A Levels, they profess shock at how little pupils learn about their subject. This stands in some tension with the observation that A Levels are an international outlier for the depth of their curriculum. I wonder if this is a message Chemistry could stand to hear a little louder.
One of the unusual features of Willetts’ contribution is his respect for the disciplines. While he thinks degrees should be broader, he sees important and legitimate differences between subjects. Indeed, he values those differences. For example, Maths is a specific and interesting point of discussion in the school-HE relationship. Of all subjects, Maths is the one with the strongest link to economic indicators such as income level. That so few pupils study Maths after GCSE is extraordinarily rare internationally, and something which teaching in HE might be able to remedy.
The links between University and ‘the real world’ are also a theme of the book. There is a thoughtful reflection of how technical training is often dragged in impractical directions by the Excellence model of research. A business department set up to serve local entrepreneurship might be staffed by people promoted on the basis of research excellence, but someone publishing 4* papers on how grain prices in the USA during the 1840s affected food regulation might be imperfectly placed to teach people how to start an IT company.
While institutions drift in response to policy incentives like Research Excellence, Willetts is aware of the peculiar serendipity of research: apparently-useless ideas can be extravagantly useful in ways which are hard to predict. At the same time, better sources of funding for applied research is something he admires about Jo Johnstone’s term as Universities Minister. Ideas like the KEF are routinely mocked by academics on Twitter, but are intended as a response to the Research Excellence weakness of undervaluing research which can make a difference to the world we inhabit.
Nestled in this discussion is a really vivid hope for modern British HE: that Universities can be a lively and central part of what Britain is. Some of this is economic, but much (most?) of it is cultural. Willetts notes how Universities are one of the few institutions which have the name of a place in their names (“The University of X”), and how this should make them completely central to any meaningful plans made by government of any stripe. Indeed, so ingrained is the idea of place within the British University that Willetts spends a considerable number of pages talking about how hard it was to encourage British Universities to enter the booming international HE market. Surely this local stubbornness should be an enormous asset in policy agendas such as Levelling Up?
Beyond the book, it has been interesting to see how the post-Brexit turn of the right wing has been to see Universities as sites of cultural struggle rather than economic opportunity. I wonder if the economic independence of Universities afforded by Willetts’ fee innovations is something which we will see as having been politically protective when inflation erodes the fee income. Willetts’ writing is at its very best when he marries the political agenda with the economic one, but the national story of the last few years can be seen as divorcing them.
Conclusion
David Willetts wielded significant power over an important part of British society, and I judge that he made considered decisions under difficult financial circumstances. Whatever your view on the scale and scope of Austerity budgeting, the £9k tuition fee has changed Universities in ways which have been so profound that it’s very hard to judge what the counter-factual is. I suspect Universities were well served by a minister who saw such human and economic value in a University education. Of course they were: one of them suspended a student for seven terms for reciting a poem at him.
Perhaps the greatest omission of the book is therefore a deeper discussion of University governance, because it starts to get at the question of who Universities are. Are Universities a scholastic community of staff and students? Then a seven-term suspension is outrageous. Are they an ecclesiastical community of masters? Then the recital of such a poem is simply a threat to the Dons’ hospitality budgets. Those two institutions are going to provide two very different University Educations.
Maybe the greatest praise I can give this book, then, is that it has clarified my thinking – including my disagreements – with the policy decisions of its author. I’m glad I read it.