Has a long-standing truce in the relationships of our mission groups broken down?
Back at the end of last week, The Times reported that Russell Group chief executive Libby Hackett had called for differential undergraduate fees in England, with higher fees for courses of greater public benefit, of higher cost. or (you guessed it) delivered at certain types of institution. A leader the following Monday described this as a "simplification of the system," because honestly what could be more complicated than everything being the same price?
There is evidence that courses cost more to deliver at certain providers than others, but we've never really gotten to the bottom of why this might be or whether the taxpayer should be subsidising these differences. It is likely that place has something to do with it (it is more expensive to do near enough everything in London), but London weighting is an idea we can only see in the rear-view mirror.
A variation on the line duly turned up in the Russell Group budget submission:
there is an opportunity to consider how public funding and fees can support a better alignment between resource, delivery cost and outcomes, including greater per-student investment in high-cost, high-value and strategically important subjects. We would welcome a broader review of the tertiary sector alongside consideration of student finance reform, including greater targeting of funding and careful consideration of the future size and shape of the sector.
In comes, studs-up, the University Alliance's Vanessa Wilson. Such a policy would risk an "existential threat to higher education in this country" and cut across government efforts to restore parity of esteem to technical routes, said the chief executive of an organisation describing itself as the " voice of professional and technical universities."
It feels like, what with AI and gestures expansively at the sheer state unmitigated state of pretty much everything, existential threats are ten-a-penny at this point, though we'd need primary legislation to ensure that this price rose with inflation. Even so, like most policies that The Times writes leaders about it all falls apart when we get to implementation. Wilson, again:
What would the consequences be for the devolved nations and their different fee systems? Who would decide which institutions have an elite enough “reputation” to attract greater funding and using which criteria? Who would foot the bill for this increase in fees; students, taxpayers, or both? These questions are not technical niceties to be worked out later but instrumental to the new system they propose.
The spectre of the "good university" is an insubstantial one - pretty much every university is good at something, and we do need pretty much all of it to have a functioning society and meet the demands of young people (even though said "young people" do seem to be putting their chips on the Russell Group in increasing numbers these days.) A government focused on devolution might have an interest in the kinds of providers embedded in deprived areas; a government focused on innovation-led growth might be keen on the big research performing organisations. A government focused on both would probably take something from each row.
It has been a while since mission groups deviated from the Universities UK position that diversity and plurality are good things and actually argued about which universities are "better": but as all academic arguments end with bickering about defining your terms we are unlikely to get a solution via these means. Most likely, Vivienne Stern will call them into Woburn House and words will be had over disciplinary tea and biscuits.
It is a sign of how little money is likely to be available, and how low a priority the sector is to Burnham's government (wherever it currently sits in Lucy Powell's in-tray) that the uneasy truce between the Russell Group and everyone else is once again in jeopardy. We can be certain that the cash or the political will isn't there for a wholesale re-writing of the undergraduate fee loan system, so it is possible to read this whole exchange as a skirmish ahead of the pending rethink of the OfS Strategic Priorities Grant. And that is a process that is going to have more to do with the Industrial Strategy Eight than the Russell Group 24.