[purecapitalism] COLLEGE REVIEW

The Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance was launched on the 9th November 2009. It fulfils a commitment made during the Commons stages of the Higher Education Act 2004 to review the operation of variable tuition fees after these had been in force for three years. The Review was established on a cross-party basis, following consultation on appointments and its terms of reference. The review was chaired by Lord Browne of Madingley. The other members of the Review Group are Sir Michael Barber, Diana Coyle, Professor David Eastwood, Julia King, Peter Sands, and Rajay Naik.

Basil Venitis asserts that the best colleges in the world today are the private colleges in America. The gulf between them and the state-funded colleges in equally rich countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Japan, or South Korea, where there are few private colleges of note, is so huge that the lesson cannot be avoided, colleges need independence to flourish. It is interesting that the intermediate group of colleges are those in Britain and Australia where colleges, though funded and over-regulated by the state, nonetheless retain significant autonomy.

Even Fourth Reich(EU) agrees, and the Commission reports that American colleges are better than Europe's, because European colleges generally have less to offer and lower financial resources than their equivalents in other developed countries, particularly USA. American colleges have far more substantial means than those of European colleges and better eggheads. The gap between the US and EU expenditure stems primarily from the low level of private funding of higher education in Fourth Reich.

I and my colleague the Rt Hon Member for Havant want to thank Lord Browne and his Review Panel. The Government endorses the main thrust of the report. But we are open to suggestions from inside and outside the House over the next few weeks before making specific recommendations to Parliament, with a view to implementing the changes for students entering higher education in Autumn 2012. More detail will be contained in next week's Spending Review on the funding implications. But as a strategic direction the Government believes the report is on the right lines.

Browne acknowledges that the current funding and finance systems for higher education are unsustainable and need urgent reform. The issue is how. And that question has to be framed in terms of how the higher education sector contributes to the deficit reduction programme.

There is also, I think, consensus around the idea that there should be no upfront tuition fees for students. That would seriously deter students from low and middle income families. This Government is strongly opposed to upfront tuition fees. Indeed it shares Lord Browne's conclusion that we should extend exemption from upfront tuition fees to part-time students, currently 40% of the student population, who have been unfairly discriminated against hitherto.

The question, then, is how much the graduate contributions for tuition should be. We are considering a level of £7,000. Many universities and colleges may well decide to charge less than that, since there is clearly scope for greater efficiency and innovation in the way universities operate. Two year ordinary degrees are one approach. Exceptionally, Lord Browne suggests there should be circumstances under which universities can price their courses above this point. But, he suggests, this would be conditional on demonstrating that funds would be invested in securing a good social mix with fair access for students with less privileged backgrounds, and in raising the quality of teaching and learning. We will consider this carefully.

We believe it is essential that if the graduate contribution is to rise it should be linked to graduates' ability to pay. On average, graduates earn comfortably more than £100,000 over their lifetimes compared with non graduates. But not all graduates benefit in this way. Some choose socially useful but modestly paid or unpaid work which may include time spent bringing up a family. At present the graduate contribution acts like a poll tax, and is not fair.

Lord Browne has come up with persuasive proposals to deal with this issue. He suggests a £21,000 graduate income threshold before any payment is made, as against £15,000 at present, and to be linked to average earnings. And he suggests that a real rate of interest should be paid but only over that threshold. The effect is striking: 20% of graduates could pay less than they do now. The top third of graduate earners would pay more than twice as much as the lowest third. That is fair and progressive: the Government broadly endorses this approach and will examine the details of implementation. The principle of needs blind admission to universities must remain central.

The cost of university education to individuals and the state reflects living costs as well as tuition costs. The Browne Report makes some constructive suggestions. We shall come forward with detailed proposals which will make it attractive for students from families of modest means to go to university and will be fair and affordable including exempting the poorest students from graduate contributions for some (or all) of their studies.

Lord Browne considered alternatives, including a graduate tax. There are some key features in the current proposal for progressive graduate contributions which incorporate the best features of a graduate tax. It would be collected through the pay packet at a rate of 9p in the pound above the £21,000 threshold; combined with a real interest rate as Browne recommends, it would be progressive and related to ability to pay.

But Browne identifies serious problems with a pure graduate tax. The proposal is unworkable. It does not produce sufficient revenue to finance higher education until 30 years from now; weakens university independence; and is unfair to British graduates as opposed to graduates living overseas.

I do believe, moreover, that we need to look beyond the graduate population. 55% of young people do not go to University. We must not perpetuate the idea encouraged by the pursuit of a misguided 50% participation target, that the only valued option for an 18 year old is a three year academic course at a University. An Apprenticeship can be just as valuable as a degree, if not more.

There is a challenge to all of us to promote a long term sustainable future for higher education. But in this current economic climate that policy is simply no longer feasible. That is why I intend on behalf of the coalition to put specific proposals to the House to implement radical and progressive reforms to HE based on the Browne report.

College rankings play an increasingly prominent role in shaping the decision-making of students, families, institutional priorities, and government support. There is widespread skepticism and debate about the methodological insufficiencies of rankings. Nevertheless, the huge growth in college enrollments highlights the need for decision models that allow students and employers to compare programs and evaluate their offerings. Contentious rankings are only useful if the models they use don't just measure things that are easy to measure, but the things that need to be measured. Ranking is a euphemism for benchmarking, an exercise that attempts to rate institutions against an objective standard.

Rankings are audited by the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG), which was founded in 2004 by the UNESCO European Centre for Higher Education (UNESCO-CEPES) in Bucharest and the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington, DC. It is upon this initiative that IREG's second meeting (Berlin, 18 to 20 May, 2006) has been convened to consider a set of principles of quality and good practice in HEI rankings - the Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions.

It is expected that this initiative has set a framework for the elaboration and dissemination of rankings - whether they are national, regional, or global in scope - that ultimately will lead to a system of continuous improvement and refinement of the methodologies used to conduct these rankings. Given the heterogeneity of methodologies of rankings, these principles for good ranking practice will be useful for the improvement and evaluation of ranking.

VENITIST RANKING OF COLLEGES

Oxford University

Harvard University

London School of Economics

Rockefeller University

California Institute of Technology

Stanford University

Princeton University

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge University

Yale University

Columbia University

University of Chicago

Johns Hopkins University

University of Pennsylvania

University of California at Berkeley

Cornell University

Brown University

Dartmouth College

Hillsdale College

Williams College

Amherst College

College of William & Mary

University of Virginia

Northwestern University

Carnegie Mellon University

Case Western Reserve University

New York University

Duke University

University of Michigan

UCLA

Purdue University

Vanderbilt University

University of Southern California

University of Minnesota

London Business School

Imperial College

International University of Monaco

International Institute for Management Development

INSEAD

National University of Singapore

Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule Zuerich

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

University of Mannheim

Emory University

University of Notre Dame

Rice University

University of Hong Kong

Georgetown University

Swarthmore College

Claremont McKenna College

Wellesley College

Wesleyan University

Whitman College

Pomona College

Carleton College

Harvey Mudd College

Vassar College

McGill University

Centre College

University of Edinburgh

University of Maryland

Middlebury College

Boston College

Colgate University

Colby College

Kenyon College

University of Wisconsin-Madison

University of Texas at Austin

University of Toronto

University of Washington

University of Georgia

Penn State University

Tufts University

Smith College

Ohio University

Indiana University

University of Indianapolis

University of Athens