What the Carnegie citizens’ jury concluded about Scotland’s higher education system

Is there a question? Yes, I’d like to know what the panel think about my statement.

The moments grate because that purpose usually turns out to be the one that was settled when and where the mic hogger was a student. You don’t get many saying “the training of clergy in theology and canon law”, for example.

And often, what the nostalgia really does is reveal a speaker’s preference for a system that was smaller, posher, whiter and probably not big enough to sustain the speaker’s employment anyway.

Martin Trow predicted all of this back in 1973, of course – arguing that the transition from elite to mass would produce a connected cluster of disputes over what it is for impacting admissions, curriculum, governance, standards, institutional diversity, staff roles, finance and public expectations.

His warning was that without differentiation we’d end up with chronic conflict, overload, confused standards, inappropriate curricula, and pressure on research university functions. Whatever else governing bodies have been doing in the past 53 years, it’s not been heeding his warnings.

I also get properly tired of those who seem to suggest that the taxpayer should fund mass HE without ascribing taxpayers any agency over what that money gets spent on. I’m not suggesting that ministers should set curricula – but with all the pressures on public funds, it’s not weird to think that it would be jolly good for HE to be doing things they’d like it to.

So it’s been properly refreshing to while away a UK rail network cluster of delays with the first thematic paper from Carnegie Education Fund’s citizens’ jury on the future of higher education funding in Scotland – a 19-person deliberative process run by Ipsos across six sessions in late 2025, designed to test what an informed public makes of the system once they’ve heard the evidence, and grappled with the trade-offs.

The headline finding is that views narrowed through deliberation. Jurors started in the place most members of the public probably do – with a wide and slightly contradictory mix of purposes: social mobility, personal development, NHS workforce, broadening minds, transition to adulthood, an “uplifted society” of confident citizens.

By the end, a near-unanimous 17–2 had backed a principle directing public funding toward vocational and technical courses, with “academic degrees that are less directly careers-based” deprioritised until skills shortages were addressed.

So the public, when properly informed, wants the poly back. Or at least, this 19 of them do.

Once upon a time there was a tavern

For most of the 20th century, the phrase “engine of mobility” meant something specific – higher education as a route out of predetermined economic and class roles. Escape, expansion, a future not entirely dictated by where you started.

By the time the jury reached its conclusion, the same phrase had been rewired to mean something almost opposite – slotting graduates into the specific labour market gaps the economy currently has. Mobility through compliance with workforce planning, rather than mobility despite or around it.

The “Why purpose and value?” section flags up front that recent polling shows the public’s view of HE narrowing toward instrumental outcomes. The jury was, in effect, set up to test what happens when you give people more time, more evidence and more deliberation. Does the picture broaden? Does the civic case for HE come back into view? The picture narrowed further.

That’s worth pondering on. Citizens’ juries are routinely cited as a way of accessing what the public really thinks once the noise of polling and political framing is stripped out. This jury produced a sharper version of the policy direction already in motion across the UK – low-value provision, vocational pivot, suspicion of “obscure” courses. The mini-public delivered that direction back to policymakers wrapped in the legitimacy of informed consent.

Whether we read that as a vindication of where Scottish ministers would like to head, or a warning about how easily deliberative processes can reproduce their own framing depends on what you think of the evidence the jurors were given.

The paper names “academics and sector representatives” as expert witnesses but doesn’t tell us who, or what they said. That might matter – if the bulk of the input was financial-pressure-and-graduate-outcomes evidence, you’d expect financial-pressure-and-graduate-outcomes conclusions.

I also feel the urge to flag who wasn’t in the room. It was a deliberative process about how higher education should be funded, conducted by a “mini-public”, and current or recent students don’t appear as a constituency within it. Students are present throughout the paper as objects of policy – as “young people progressing directly from school”, as “fully developed adults” returning to upskill – but never as deliberators about their own education. The jury’s silent assumption that the typical student is an 18-year-old school leaver looks like it did a lot of work in shaping where the deliberation ended up.

Where we used to raise a glass or two

The most interesting passage in the paper is the bit where it admits jurors couldn’t square what they voted for with what they continued to believe. They valued personal development, soft skills, thinking time, the role of HE in helping young people work out who they are. But they voted 17–2 for a principle that treats those things as luxuries that the public purse can no longer afford.

The compromise wording – “Decisions about which academic degrees are deprioritised should be made carefully” – is the sound of a group endorsing cuts and politely asking that the cuts be applied with care. It commits nobody to anything – and the jury seems to have known that, which is why they needed it.

The unresolved tension isn’t a quirk of this particular 19 people. It’s the same tension higher education across the UK has been dragging around for decades. What is unusual is seeing it laid out so plainly, in a process explicitly designed to produce a settled view.

There’s also a more subtle contradiction the paper allows to hang. Jurors believed there were both unfilled skills shortages and an “oversaturation” of graduates. If both are true, the issue isn’t volume – it’s mismatch, employer demand, or labour market structure.

The recommendation that follows is volume-based – less of one thing, more of another. The architecture of the labour market that produces shortages alongside underemployment is treated as a fixed backdrop rather than something HE policy might have anything to say about, or influence.

Remember how we laughed away the hours

Which brings us back to the man with the microphone.

Trow’s argument was that mass higher education couldn’t be a single thing doing a single job. Expansion would produce conflicting expectations – elite intellectual formation for some, vocational preparation for others, civic and regional development, research, mass access, professional reskilling. The system would have to differentiate visibly to absorb those expectations. Different institutions doing different things, with different funding logics, different staff roles, different governance.

What we have instead, more or less everywhere in the UK, is the multi-purpose university trying to do all of it at once. Everyone’s a research university. Everyone’s an engine of regional growth. Everyone’s a skills provider. Everyone’s running an access mission. The differentiation that does exist is mostly informal, prestige-driven, and largely invisible to the public.

If you set up a citizens’ jury in that context and ask “what is higher education for”, you’ve already loaded the question. There is no “higher education” in the singular – there’s a sector of broadly similar-looking institutions all claiming to do everything. Asked to choose between purposes under resource constraint, jurors did what anyone would do – they picked the most legible one. Skills, work, and filling NHS gaps. The bits of the offer that show up in a press release as a number.

The interesting question this paper raises – and never asks – is whether the unresolved tension at the heart of the jury’s principle is actually a signal that the architecture is wrong, rather than the public’s preferences being narrow. If the system visibly did several things in several places, with different funding settlements attached, the jurors might not have felt forced to pick.

Think of all the great things we would do?

I’ve banged on about this before on the site – our SUs study tour to Portugal when our taxi driver proudly declared that his son had got into top science and engineering school Tecnico, which we only realised was a faculty of the University of Lisbon when we met its Vice Rector.

We ruefully reflected in the restaurant that the branding police and our taste for centralisation wouldn’t allow that kind of differentiation to be visible – and ironically, with its insistence that students on higher technical degrees do some credits in the humanities, its students were getting more rounded degrees than they would in their hidden facilities back home.

This isn’t an argument for a return to and reverse of 1992. You can still do differentiation at faculty level – a research-intensive science faculty funded one way, a regionally-anchored vocational faculty another, a humanities and arts faculty a third, with each visibly accountable for a different bit of the public bargain. It would have the advantage of preserving the academic ecology of a single institution but the disadvantage of being mostly invisible to anyone outside the building.

A jury asked “should this provider be publicly funded to do skills, and that one to do research and intellectual formation, and a third to do civic and regional uplift?” would, on the evidence of this paper, probably say yes to all three. A jury asked “should higher education prioritise skills or thinking time?” will, on the evidence here, say skills, while wishing they hadn’t had to choose.

That’s the lesson I take from the paper. The jury didn’t reject personal development, civic purpose or broad academic study. They concluded those things weren’t a realistic priority for public funding in a system that asks the public to fund a single, blurry thing. Sharpen the offer, and the conversation changes. Refuse to differentiate, and you keep getting deliberative outputs that nobody – not even the people who voted for them – can quite believe in.

What the paper shows is what happens when you ask 19 people to do the differentiating work the sector has spent fifty years refusing to do – building endless branches of Debenhams while department stores have all but gone. The jury did its best. It produced a near-unanimous principle it couldn’t fully accept. And the architecture problem Trow flagged in 1973 is still sitting there, waiting for the man with the microphone to notice.