Policy exchange sees a future – in 2010 and 1992

And I don’t think it would be especially unfair to argue that none of those governments appear to have a clue about what to do with their higher education systems.

Wales and Scotland are at different stages of hoping something turns up by launching funding reviews, while England appears to have no discernable higher education policy at all apart from the world’s most over-engineered microcredentials funding scheme.

So in a stagnating sector in a stagnating country, maybe it’s the right that we need to turn to for the big ideas.

First up is Prosper UK – a centre to centre-right political movement at pains to point out that it is neither a registered political party nor a think tank, which of course means that it neither needs to worry about being popular nor worry about thinking.

It is, it says, here, a “movement” – intended to shape centre-right politics around growth, enterprise, business, housing, skills, and “politically homeless” voters – which will refuse “easy answers and empty promises”.

Backed by all the big pro-European Tory names – Ruth Davidson, Andy Street, David Gauke, David Lidington, Amber Rudd et al – its first big campaign is called “Fair Fees”.

The blurb pretty much scoops up all the moans about student loans and then, on the convenient basis that “it is not the job of this campaign to write the Treasury’s policy”, sets out five basic tests for reform instead:

• work like a loan that can realistically be repaid, not a tax in all but name
• reward work, so that middle earners are not left worse off the harder they try
• share the cost of higher education fairly between graduates and the country that benefits from them
• keep faith with the terms people signed up to, so the rules cannot be rewritten after the event
• give the next generation something better than a longer version of the same problem

Great! So if you too want the moon on a stick and don’t want to worry about how it might be paid for, sign the petition. It’ll get delivered to No.10 and everything!

Are there really swathes of aspirational graduates that are stupid enough to fall for this barely-disguised email address harvesting wheeze? If there are, it’s either an damning indictment of the HE system, or them, or both.

Now that’s what I call Iain

Maybe we need to look a little further right. Policy Exchange’s “Tarnished Towers: Fixing England’s Broken Higher Education System” is endorsed by all the other big names – Laura Trott from the Conservatives, Suella Braverman from Reform UK and Lord (Maurice) Glasman from Blue Labour – and kicks off with an alarming stat:

“Only 57% of graduates are in full-time work 15 months after graduation.

Readers are presumably expected to assume that the remaining 43 per cent are sat about on benefits – when in reality a further 36 per cent were in further study and/or work, volunteering, travelling, caring for others or retired.

The (main) author here is Iain Mansfield – special advisor to Jo Johnson, Gavin Williamson and Michelle Donelan – and the recommendations are very much a greatest hits collection of announcements his ministers made but somehow never followed through on.

Across the 3 CD box set we get three types of nostalgia – a technocratic nostalgia for a pre-2012/15 more managed system, a structural nostalgia for a pre-1992 smaller and more stratified university sector, and a set of newer play-to-the-audience culture-war interventions stapled to a diagnosis of institutional failure.

The problem is that it’s utterly incoherent as a result.

Oh Christmas tree

Student number controls are back, although rather than something sensible like government having an influence over what is studied and where, as a blunt mechanism for shrinking the sector. OfS gets stripped back a bit, quality is to be inspected cyclically, funding is to be steered more deliberately through teaching grant, and the loan system is to be made to look and feel more like a loan again. That is the pre-2012/15 bit – a half-memory of HEFCE in an era when we spent more on the system.

Then there is the pre-1992 bit. The report wants fewer people in higher education, higher academic entry thresholds, fewer foundation years, fewer franchised students, fewer vocationally ambiguous degrees, fewer providers doing things that look like universities but offend the sensibilities of people who remember when polytechnics knew their place.

The longer-term vision is not just to regulate the market better – it is to re-sort the sector into “global universities” and “regional universities”, with the former allowed autonomy, research prestige, higher fees and national recruitment, and the latter pointed firmly back towards local labour markets, lower fees, technical courses and tighter control.

That at least has the merit of being a theory. But it is not quite the same theory as the one driving the first half of the recommendations. One minute the problem is marketisation, with young people, providers and taxpayers all responding rationally to a badly designed funding system. The next minute the problem is widening participation, contextual admissions, the NSS, “student as consumer” thinking, international recruitment, the growth of administrators, grade inflation, antisemitism, cancel culture, franchising, master’s loans, postgraduate credentialism, and possibly UCAS collecting too much information about applicants. It is less a policy chain than a Christmas tree.

Some of the baubles are big. Banning UCAS from passing demographic data to universities would make it much harder to monitor admissions fairness, evaluate contextual admissions, understand who is being selected, or identify where discrimination may actually be occurring. The report treats the existence of the data as though its only plausible use is unfair discrimination in favour of disadvantaged groups.

The same is true of access and participation. The report says the current regime is bureaucratic and target-driven. But it then leaps to abolition and replacement with a version of meritocracy in which prior attainment becomes the main gateway, despite the fact that prior attainment is itself heavily socially patterned.

It partially notices the problem by proposing a “Double-Scholarship” for low-income students with AAA or better. It does little for the students whose potential was blunted earlier by school, place, poverty, disability, caring responsibilities or the absence of the kind of advice that makes selective higher education legible in the first place.

And then, stapled onto the side, is the new audience-service material. Here we get cancel culture, antisemitism, “social engineering”, an attack on the student-as-co-creator idea, caps on international undergraduates and a sense that universities have not merely made poor financial choices or tolerated weak courses, but have become culturally suspect institutions whose autonomy now has to be earned back. It’s not just that the funding model is broken. The sector’s moral claim to self-government is broken too.

The wrong sort of planning

It says higher education is not a market, but keeps reaching for market-shaped tests of value – earnings, loan repayment, graduate jobs and “return” – as the basis on which places should be rationed. The market is a disaster when students use it, a distortion when universities respond to it, and a source of wisdom when Policy Exchange wants to decide which courses deserve to survive.

It wants a lighter-touch regulator, but proposes a state apparatus that would control student numbers, fine providers for over-recruitment, cap degree classifications, run inspections, enforce international student limits, monitor subject health, police admissions data, supervise institutional mergers, close courses, sell campuses and decide which students are allowed to access finance. It’s HEFCE with a clipboard, Ofsted with a mortarboard, and the Treasury sitting in the viva.

It says OfS has been ineffective, bureaucratic and prone to failure, then hands OfS the job of delivering most of the revolution – like concluding that the fire brigade has repeatedly failed to put out fires, and then asking it to design the city’s new electrical system. Either OfS is too weak, too legalistic and too captured by process to run the system, or it is the body that can manage the largest act of controlled demolition in the history of English higher education. It is not clear it can be both.

It wants universities to restore academic authority, but then mistrusts academic judgement at almost every point where it matters. Admissions should be externally constrained, foundation years should largely go, classifications should be capped, degrees should be supplemented by a national exit exam, quality should be inspected, and the balance of provision should be centrally squeezed. The academic voice is apparently to be strengthened in governance, just not trusted to decide who to admit, what to teach, how to assess, or how many students a course can responsibly take.

And it says it wants to end credentialism, while inventing new credentials – a University Aptitude Test for entry, a national exit exam on the way out, transcript deciles, stronger signalling to employers, less reliance on degrees, but more official scores attached to them. The problem with the status race, we are told, is that everyone is running too fast in the wrong direction. The solution is to install more timing gates.

The deeper problem is not that Policy Exchange wants planning. Planning is what has been missing. A serious country would be shaping who studies what, where, and with what relationship to industrial strategy, housing, transport, adult learning, public service workforce need, employer behaviour and regional productivity. It offers instead the wrong sort of planning – not a future-facing account of the tertiary system England needs, but a politics of scarcity and sorting dressed up as economic realism.

That is why the lack of numbers matters so much. We are told to cut places by 30 per cent, increase teaching grant, freeze fees, abolish real interest, change historic loan indexation, expand apprenticeships, create a consolidation programme, manage teach-out, reshape institutional missions and steer students elsewhere.

But there is no serious fiscal account of the costs, savings, timing, transition risks, regional effects, institutional debt, staff liabilities, capital write-downs or student protection implications. “Shrink the sector and spend the savings elsewhere” sounds neat only until it meets an actual balance sheet.

As usual, the nostalgia does the work the economics ought to be doing. The report reaches back towards a smaller, more socially selected system in which nobody had to worry quite so much about what students were learning because enough graduates went on to run the professions, politics, law, finance, journalism, the civil service and the academy.

The graduate premium could be mistaken for educational value because class selection, institutional prestige and labour market closure were doing so much stealth work. It is a memory of a world in which exclusion made quality look cheaper than it was.

It’s also what makes the whole thing feel so thinly populist. It has all the gestures – fewer foreigners, restored standards, proper universities, technical colleges knowing their place, meritocracy rescued from social engineering, and a state that once again knows how to sort the deserving from the over-promoted.

But there is no equivalent ambition for the future – no convincing account of AI, demographic change, green transition, public service shortages, adult retraining, regional productivity or how to create the graduate jobs the economy needs. It’s less an answer to stagnation, more a set of former glories in a PDF.

There is, somewhere, by someone, a decent case to be made for mass higher education. Modern economies, public services and democracies need more people capable of abstract reasoning, evidence use, communication, ethical judgement, technical adaptation and collective problem-solving – not fewer.

The case is not that every existing course is perfect, or that every graduate gets a salary premium by magic, or that universities should be exempt from redesign. It is that a country facing technological change, ageing, climate adaptation, health and care demand, geopolitical instability and regional stagnation will need much more distributed capability, not a smaller caste of winners.

Mass higher education is not a luxury the country indulged during the Blair years. Properly designed, funded and connected to work, place and civic life, it is part of the infrastructure a serious country now requires. All we need now is some serious policy people to propose it.