Higher education - personal privilege or society's gain?

Vince Cable and I were at University at the same time. He came down from York to Cambridge while I went in the opposite direction from London to York. Both of us were the first from our families to go to University and both of us lived on a maintenance grant, based on our parents' incomes. (You might think that the similarities end there ...)

The grant in my second year was £330 per term. I put the cheque straight into my post office account, and drew £3 a week to live on, leaving me enough to pay for rent and travel home at the end of term (I couldn't afford to travel back to London more often unless I got a lift). There were no credit cards, and no-one gave loans to students - in fact, it was quite difficult to open any sort of bank account - so there were no other sources of funding. My parents could not afford to subsidise me.

Like everyone on a grant, I wasn't allowed to take paid work during term time - the reasoning was that we should be studying. One of my fellow students was a professional wrestler, performing under a stage name, and we all piled into the TV room on Saturday afternoons to cheer him on - until one Saturday when the commentator said that he was a student at York and disclosed his real name. That was the end of his grant.

Towards the end of my first year I was invited to take part in a group discussion for the Guardian. We were asked whether we thought we were privileged to be at University, receiving free education and grants from public taxation. I remember answering quite clumsily, and saying that I should not be made to feel grateful; the country needed my skills and was paying for me so I could contribute to the good of society.

Of course, at a personal level I was deeply grateful for the opportunity, and was thoroughly enjoying my time, but the point I was making then is still valid. As a nation we should not be judging higher education (or indeed, any level of education) in terms of the benefits it gives to individuals, but in terms if what it contributes to society's economic and social wellbeing.

So I'm delighted that Vince is taking a line that starts to distinguish between the personal gain and what society gains from putting young people through higher education.

In the 1960s only 10% of young people went to university. York was one of half a dozen new universities and I was there in the early days. There were only 300 students in my year, and 200 in the year above, and we felt like pioneers because of the new styles of teaching and experiments in community building. Despite dire warnings from traditionalists who were worried about the dilution of academia, some of those new univeristies, such as York and Warwick, are now amongst the top ranked in the country.

However, that 10% figure is rather misleading, since many professional training courses - for teaching, nursing, business administration - did not have degree status. These were quite rightly upgraded in the next decade or so. Polytechnics like Kingston were already offering HNDs in vocational subjects, and it was natural for these to be extended into degrees. So the expansion of higher education in the 70s and 80s did not really bring many more people into higher education, but instead recognised and upgraded the qualifications they were already doing. Employment was widely available for well-qualified people.

The push to get 50% into higher education did represent a new direction, since it was aiming to lift the educational achievements of a generation quite dramatically. But it came at a price, and I was never clear whether a proper analysis had ever been done of the net effects of increasing the number of graduates. Would it result in more jobs that genuinely required a degree? Would it increase wealth and make society more resilient? Or would it, perhaps, be one of the contributory factors in the credit crunch?

The price was, first, student loans instead of grants. This created a generation of young people who were being taught, by the state, that it was OK to take on debt. They were also encouraged to do paid work for long hours, udoubtedly affecting the quality of their studies.

Then tuition fees, again paid for through loans, pushed young adults into very substantial levels of debt, whatever their future earnings might be.

Whilst it may be unrealistic to call for the return of maintenance grants for most students, it is a huge relief to see the ending of tuition fees. A graduate tax is just about acceptable as a way of funding universities, although many would argue that graduates on average already pay more tax through higher earnings. I would personally prefer the Government to place the burden on society as a whole, through general taxation, since we all benefit from a highly-qualified workforce. But that can only happen if the number of graduates produced is geared to the demand.

As a footnote,it seems astonishing now that in the 60s, only 10% of the places at Oxford, Cambridge and medical schools were open to women. Vince got into Cambridge, I was put on the waiting list for PPE at Oxford. Actually, going to York turned out to be a real blessing and I have no regrets, but in those days the inequalities based on gender in universities were far greater than the inequalities based on class.