Alexander Bowen: In Britain our Higher Education could do with some ‘rationing’ – or be made to

Alexander Bowen is a trainee economist based in Belgium, specialising in public policy assessment, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

I have for some time, pretty rigorously, refused to watch Question Time.

Its format of a squirmy Labour MP doing what they no doubt think is an exceptional own, that is to say screeching “you were in government!!!” at one of the two remaining Tory MPs, whilst a non-entity MP and some obnoxious post-modern poet talk about needing to all get along coupled with some Reformer grinning like the Cheshire Cat in the background, makes for remarkably dull television.

Last Thursday was however an exception to my rule and largely a result of one clip.

In it, Oli Dugmore, left-ish populist-ish New Statesman writer, the person that is intended to serve as our post-modern poet, delivered a brilliant-ish takedown of the higher education system.

It was going so well – ‘The government likes RPI apart from when it takes my money’ is a genuine banger – until the very end when, rant over tuition fees over, Fiona Bruce meekly pipes up to ask, “How else are we going to pay for it?”. Dugmore’s “Uh… well”, followed by ‘the state – uhm’, ruined it all by exposing a simple reality – nobody is willing to talk about what an alternative to tuition fees actually means.

As someone who has, at one point or another, been enrolled in four different higher education systems, I’ll present these options and their trade-offs, and in the spirit of Question Time’s audience engagement schtick, you can decide what you like best.

Among European countries today, and they really are the useful comparator here rather than fantasies of 1950s Higher Ed, there are essentially three models for what higher education looks like – the Nordic, the Germanic, & the Mediterranean. Denmark, Switzerland, and France typifying each model best.

Every system, and I mean every system, has some rationing element. A good provided for free can never go unrationed, demand will always outstrip supply, and any conception of a ‘public good’ rather starts to break down when the return on education investment, both private and public, collapses.

Let’s start then with the Mediterranean and French model – the system I was enrolled in for the longest time. The Mediterranean option is defined by its open access – you pass your A-Level equivalent and, with a few limitations for medicine or dentistry, you can enrol in any subject at any public university for just about free, which unfortunately everyone does.

Courses are genuinely gigantic, teaching quality is poor at best, students don’t like their studies, academic excellence is shall-we-say-lacking, and degrees take far-longer than anyone believes is reasonable.

France in particular, and Italy to an extent, fix these issues by creating entirely parallel systems of education. Italy combines its public mass enrolment system with, similarly to Spain, an entirely parallel system of private education. Say what you want about Oxford or Cambridge gatekeeping elite careers in the UK but they are universities that are more-or-less equally accessible to all – Italy’s private universities that hold the same kind of dominance (Bocconi, LUISS, Università Cattolica) through their private-status mean that parental wallets serve as gatekeepers to the gatekeepers.

The French system, which whilst fairer financially, has much the same issue. Anyone who thinks UK HE is stratified between the Russell Group and the rest, ought to spend some time in France where in addition to the mass-enrolment public university system an entirely parallel system of grandes-ecoles exists.

The French, despite public perception of their pretensions towards some quasi egalitarian communism, have turbocharged the elitism to such an extent that you can, with near perfect certainty, precisely predict someone’s results. Imagine having for instance Imperial College London admitting the top 1 per cent of engineering applicants, then Imperial College York admitting the next 1 per cent, with LSE doing the same for economics, and so on. Imagine too that parents, eager for the status this confers, then sending their children for two years of additional education solely to obtain access to these universities. That is more-or-less the world that exists in French higher education.

The 5 per cent of students that go to these universities extract 35 per cent of educational resources, are responsible for every single high ranking politician, and the vast majority of CEOs. Break it down to just the very top of these grandes-ecoles and the system is even less equitable – one university with 400 undergraduates supplies 25 per cent of the stock market’s CEOs, another with a little over fifteen-hundred supplies 20 per cent of Parliament.

The mainline education system that everyone else uses? Squeezed out.

Then there’s the Germanic model where much like the Mediterranean everyone is admitted and nobody pays but, to avoid the kind of extreme bloat the Mediterraneans see, universities embrace a policy that amounts to forcing out enough students until demand meets their resourcing. Even Switzerland who, despite being just about the most prosperous country on earth, also cannot afford to just throw money after Dugmore’s ‘the state – uhm’.

My own university formalised it the most – embracing what it calls ‘assessment year’ – a process whereby post-High School students take a broad standardised curriculum covering everything from mathematics to philosophy to business administration with about two-thirds of students being kicked out or pre-empting it by dropping out. Fail your top choice university? Then spend another six-months to a year at your second choice, fail your second choice then try again or quit entirely. Thankfully the Swiss offset the time this can take with credits for internships, military service, and consulting projects but it remains a system where free and open-access is rationed by failure and wasted-time.

Then there’s the Nordic system typified by Denmark – the preferred model on really so many issues – where beyond the surface level takes of ‘free money for students’ their model of rationing leads to outcomes that any British person would find beyond bizarre.

There if you graduate high school then with less than a 6, a grade roughly equivalent to getting 3Cs at A-Level, you aren’t even allowed to use their UCAS equivalent. Score below a 6 and an entirely separate secondary clearing style process emerges requiring sitting another test and going through several interviews. Score above 6 and you get entered into the GPA-market with each subject having a different minimum grade required with that grade being determined by a simple rule – how many places does the government want to offer and how many people want to study it.

It’s a system that leads to some mildly hilarious outcomes, the kind you simply don’t see anywhere else, where the smartest students are in the psychology department (requiring a higher GPA than medicine or mathematics) or political science (with a GPA higher than dentistry or economics). The fewer people the government believes they need studying the subject – the higher the GPA needed. It’s a system that works by limiting choice – for non-exceptional students at least – and maximising public good. After all, educating two or three-hundred political scientists might be a public good, but four thousand? Unlikely.

What we have then is this.

The Danes rationing choice, the French rationing equality, and the Swiss rationing time.

In the UK we refuse to ration all three – meaning we must instead ration graduate’s wages. I have relatively little preference for what we ought to ration, but if Dugmore is to achieve his dreams of free education, he is going to, at some point, have to accept that we must at least ration one.

Plus ça change.