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When universities depend on taxpayers, their independence and standards suffer

(Continued from Saturday, January 31)

In effect, universities in these countries have become government-owned degree mills. Their aim is to get the greatest number of young people in and out for the least money and trouble. Really determined students may fight their way through to gain a professor's attention, win a research scholarship and start doing some real work, probably in postgraduate study. The others will arrive in the labour market, qualification in hand, feeling that their mostly middle-class parents have something to show for their taxes.

It is not all gloom and doom. Most countries have islands of excellence" German postgraduate engineering faculties, for example, or the French grandes ecoles, fiercely competitive and independent. Finland and Holland have largely managed to keep quality up and bureaucracy down. But for the most part, universities in the larger countries of continental Europe are a dreadful warning of the consequences of nationalisation.

No wonder, then, that British and European academics cast envious and wondering eyes at the American university system. It manages both quantity and quality: more than 60% of American high school graduates at least start some form of tertiary education.

And it keeps standards high, too. The European Commission recently published a painstaking ranking of the world's best universities, compiled by researchers in Shanghai. Of the top 50, all but 15 were American. From Europe only Oxford and Cambridge made it into the top 10; from other EU countries, no university ranks higher than 40.

The American system is not flawless. The diversity which makes the system so dynamic also leaves it vulnerable to abuse. In the humanities, intellectual fashion seems bizarrely distant from the real world. Many bad ideas - notably political correctness - started life as American campus fads. And budget pressures squeeze the system when times are tough. This year, the axe has fallen hard on California's public universities.

Degrees of difference

Yet for all that, the numbers going into American higher education continue to rise, and the average tuition fee in an American university is around 4,500 sterling pounds some 1,000 sterling pounds less than the proposed maximum to be charged in England. Fees in the California State system, even after two steep recent rises compelled by leaner budgets, are less than 3,000 sterling pounds, and a third of the income from them goes into grants for students who cannot afford even that.

Why does America succeed where Europe fails? The most important factor is diversity. American higher education is not just more varied, but has less of the crippling snobbery and resentment that accompanies variety in, say, Britain. At the bottom of the pyramid are community colleges, offering inexpensive, flexible, job-focused courses for millions of Americans each year. They are pretty basic, and Britons sniff at them. But the difference in mentality, says Martin Trow, an observer of both the British and American education systems is that in America "something is seen as better than nothing".

Crucially, too, the different bits of the system fit together. As Mr. Throw points out, a student can start in a California community college, earn some credits, move on to state university and finish up taking a degree at Berkeley. Such a path would be inconceivable in most countries in Europe. In France, for example the division between the State-funded, mass-market universities and the grandes ecoles is vast and jealously guarded. Britain's further-education colleges are the poorest relations of an already impoverished family.

American universities are also fiercely competitive: for talented staff and students, for donations, for results (though competition on fees at the top end, where tuition can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year, is yet to come). Fund-raising efforts at the best-organised universities start even before students have graduated. Star professors attract star salaries.

That contrasts with the two extremes across the Atlantic. In Britain, performance is so minutely measured by the State that it stultifies the efforts of the brilliant, without really rooting out the incompetent and lazy. State supervision, coupled with penury, gives universities the smell of a failing nationalised industry, rather than of world-class outfits devoted to the risky business of thinking original thoughts.

In much of continental Europe, the problem is that senior university staff are not scrutinised enough. The intention, to keep academic freedom sacrosanct, is admirable, but the cocoon has become a prison.

German academics are all but forbidden by law from getting involved in business. The best motivators for academic excellence are money, recognition and team spirit. But the German system penalises success in the name of equality: a university that does too well in the eyes of the federal bureaucracy will have its funding cut. So great is the risk of entrenched mediocrity that the Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, has urged the creation of-horrors - ten new elite universities.

A crucial part of competition is flexibility in setting fee income. Most European countries charge little or nothing. But fees have two beneficial effects. The first is that the university is beholden to nobody in its planning. Engineering and medicine are expensive to teach, so they cost more. Law is in high demand, so it is rationed by price at places like Harbard. But these are the university's own decisions. If it wants to teach something expensive, it can raise the money from fees, or from outside donors, or subsidise it from its endowment. It is not left, as Britain's academic managers are, wondering if it can squeeze money from the English department to keep the chemistry labs open.

Fees also mean that students are much more motivated. Underpriced goods and services are usually wasted, and university education is no exception. In a new book, Robert Stevens, an academic who has run colleges in both America and Britain, writes of "an alcoholic yobbish culture" among students, for whom university is principally "a rite of passage", like national service in the army, rather than an education.

When Austria introduced a modest tuition fee of 363 sterling pounds per term in 2001, the number of students enrolled dropped by a fifth. Many, it seemed, were signing up simply for benefits such as health insurance.

But fees will also make students more powerful customers. Teaching at American universities is much better presented than in most European ones. Visiting American students are often startled to attend lectures with no visual aids, out-of-date hand-outs and droning, inaudible speakers. Such complacency will not long survive when customers have a choice.

The last big issue is selection. In most of continental Europe, this is a taboo. Access is either entirely open to anyone who has passed the school-leaving exam, or, at most, is rationed according to the marks gained. Universities, in effect, have to take the students the government sends them.

That sounds food, but works badly. The advantage of university-based admissions is that academics end up choosing the people they really want to teach. Students are more likely to focus on the course they want to study, and to try to meet the university's specific requirements.

Dream on, spires

American universities, with their mighty reserves of talent and money, look well placed to compete with the world's new academic powerhouses in India and China (which has year alone produced 2m graduates). How can sleepy Europe and timid Britain even hope to keep up?

The best hopes are in the piecemeal changes that are already happening. Students, for example, are voting with their feet. Britain's Open University, which offers part-time courses by post and e-mail, says that young people of university age are its fastest-growing bunch of students, up nearly 5% this year. That suggests that the disadvantages of a dumbed-down full time undergraduate course, with the attendant debts and time spent not earning, are beginning to bite.

Employers too are signalling that there are too many graduates with indifferent qualifications. With luck, the British government's ill-starred 50% target may turn from its original force-feeding of the university to a harmless exhortation that people should do something educational at some point after they leave school.

The days of social engineering may also be drawing to a close. The British government's proposed "access regulator", an official body originally designed to force the top universities to take fewer students from fee-paying schools and more from poor backgrounds, seems unlikely now to penalise anyone. Just as well, Harvard and Stanford are both shopping for talent at Britain's top private schools, where pupils have been deterred from studying in Britain by official contempt for their class.

New institutions have sprung up, too. In Germany, the city-state of Bremen has set up an independent private university in conjunction with Rice University of Texas. "We wanted to be able to select students, to charge tuition fees, to have excellent and competent professors, to reach in small groups and in decent working conditions," says Fritz Schaumann, its director.

Five years after its foundation, the International University of Bremen has 500 students, who contributed just over 3.5m sterling pounds in fees. It raises a further 20m sterling pounds a year from endowment income and donations. Other German universities at first regarded the newcomer with great suspicion. Now they are co-operating for example in joint research programmes. Eventually says Mr. Schaumann, they will have to adopt a similar model.

Old institutions are also behaving in new ways. Britain's London School of Economics (LSE) for example has largely escaped from the state's clutches. It now gains most of its income by selling courses to students from outside the EU whom it can charge market fees.

With that money, it can afford to hire world-class staff. "This is the only way we can compete with American academic salaries," says Sir Howard Davies, the LSE's director.

For Britain's best universities, the big question now is whether to wait for more denationalisation, or to move towards freedom on their own initiative. From Europe's universities, the question is whether they can stop talking about reform and actually introduce some. Meanwhile, America's universities, hugely wealthier, happier and brainer, march remorselessly on.

(Courtesy - 'The Economist' January 24th)

(Concluded)

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