There was a period (which older academics fondly remember) when the government put a lot of taxpayers' money into universities - but left academics free to run their own affairs.

It was much the same in the National Health Service at frist - the government paid (with taxpayers' money) but left the doctors and nurses to run things as they thought best.

But this was a fool's paradise - whether one thinks it was good thing or bad thing for these people to be given lots of money with a "use this money as you think best" tag, it was never going to last.

If the government is paying the bills then, eventually, it will send in "managers" (and so on) and will tell you want to do.

Changing the political party in office will not really get rid of the "target culture" and so on - only getting rid of the principle that the government pays the bills will do that.

You're the expert, and I agree that in terms of value-for-taxpayers'-money the last ten years have been a disaster, but to be fair to Nulab, they did introduce top-up fees, which in theory ought to weed out the slackers and so on.

Clearly, the gains you'd expect from the top-up fees have been outweighed by the drive for 50% student admissions, but at least it was "one step forward, two steps back" and not just "three steps back", which is what they've done to everything else.

One of the universal tendencies of organizations is that of becoming more concerned with internal agenda than the supposed external purpose the organization was founded to perform.

The huge, state run educational entities that are common in most developed countries are, unfortunately, a perfect example of the malady.

Despite the good intentions of most of the participants in and out of the system, the outmoded structures and trendy but ineffective educational theories that permeate the various levels of the structure, not only routinely fail to bring any of the benefite claimed by their proponents, but actually worsen the ongoing failures.

The unfortunate reality is that the education of actual students comes in a distant third in importance behind the internal turf battles over prestige and influence within the academic community that perceives education as its private reserve, and the endless political maneuvering required to gain added power and funding from the system's political masters.

As a result, we have an educational system awash in all the latest PC jargon and multi-culti sensitivities, but bereft of any true ability to carry out its alleged purpose of actually educating society's youth so they can function well in a modern, high-tech, liberal democratic culture.

My youngest boy is currently suffering through his 3rd year at a pretty pricey private high school, chosen because it has at least some reputation for academic rigor and behavioral coherence. Each day, his answer to any inquiry about how his day went is some variation of "OK, but boring. You know, it's school."

Admittedly, taking after his mother, he is very bright, and very electronically connected, so boredom in a factory school setting is not unexpected, but everything I see and read about our schools tells me that his reaction is very, very common.

It is abundantly clear that, for the well being of our youth, the current education megalith must be dismantled, and control of the educational process removed from the hands of academic theoriticians and influence peddling pols, and returned to the parents and classroom teachers for whom students are not mere numbers in an annual report, but living, breathing human beings.

The Chinese talk about the "lost generation" whose education was rendered impossible by the turmoil of the cultural revolution. We're already into at least the second generation for whom education is, by and large, a waste of their time in a system which does more to prevent an adequate education than facilitate it.

I agree with veryretired and would go further. It's time the entire ideological edifice of factory schooling were dismantled. The idea of "Schooling" as like a job for children, with a fixed week in an institution, has to go.

The mistake is not so much "defining success" perhaps as defining success in terms of numbers and quotas. Some of the history of how this happened was described in the Adam Curtis documentary The Trap. Governmental confusion about the purpose of universities is nailed by O'Keeffe and Marsland in their 2003 paper Independence or Stagnation? The Imperatives of University Reform (pdf): (Link)

The government seems to think universities improve the gross domestic product. The outcome of this view is the conviction that the more people who go to university, the richer the nation will become . This notion is so fundamental to the government’s recent White Paper in universities that it is treated as if it were an indisputable reality. This is in spite of the fact that it is based on no evidence whatsoever.

The LPUK policy is along the same lines that veryretired mentions. Schools to be independent of the LEAs including admissions and a dismantling of obstructions to new school formation. The Tories have taken the voucher idea and continue to impose centrist control, so I have little hope for it. When it fails, the voucher will be blamed when in truth it will have been the State that screwed up.

Indeed.

Trackback ping: http://nicklevi86.blogspot.com/2009/05/observations-on-higher-education.html(Link)

On education:

Sadly the Conservative party leadership (Cameron, Gove and so on) will not accept such things as making fees tax deductable (which would save money as people would be able to take there children out of the goverment schools), nor is the leadership really interested in reforming state education.

For example, say a localk council wanted to allow new government schools to select on ABILITY.

The Conservative party leadership (just the same as the Labour party leadership) would not allow a local council to set up such new Grammar Schools.

In the face of this to talk about "academies" and so on is just waffle.