Marketisation has led to university mission convergence

The financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath – the drive for austerity – have led to a clear shift away from differentiation of mission in higher education in the United Kingdom, according to Vincent Carpentier, a political economist and historian of higher education and Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) co-investigator.

Speaking to University World News after giving a presentation on “Differentiation and the quest for a balanced higher education system” on 3 April at the CGHE’s 2019 Annual Conference at the UCL Institute of Education in London, he said: “In my opinion there has been a clear shift, with the decline of public funding of universities making it very difficult to have a fair vertical differentiation between universities, leaving every university with the same kind of mission.

“At the same time the fact of acceleration of marketisation and decline of public funding make it more difficult to have a level playing field. And what we are seeing with the end of controls over student numbers is a growing elite sector.”

He pointed out that the balance of differentiation of mission had shifted since the 1960s when Labour’s charismatic education secretary, Tony Crosland, pushed through the binary system of universities and polytechnics that was meant to create “alternative forms of higher education that could be different but equal in some ways from universities”.

However, the “idea of prestige” meant that some alternative institutions were always trying to develop and act like universities.

“If you look at the inequality still between segments of the sector, such as the Russell Group and non-Russell Group, pre 1992 institutions [when polytechnics were granted university status, with the power to award their own degrees] or post 1992, there are some big differences,” Carpentier says.

“Also, there are still big inequalities in the social composition of the student body in each type of institution – higher income population students are overrepresented in elite universities and the reverse is true.

“So there is a connection between resource differentiation, mission differentiation and social differentiation as well.”

Carpentier also believes the raising of the tuition fee cap from £3,000 to £9,000 (US$3,900 to US$11,800) in 2012, when nearly all universities chose to seek the highest possible fees, increased the drift away from differentiated missions towards convergence.

Trigger for aggressive marketisation

“I think 2008 was the turning point, though, in the sense that it triggered a much more aggressive marketisation of higher education,” Carpentier says. “It brought a different dimension and when in 2010 there was a huge reduction in the teaching grant from all subjects barring the STEM subjects [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], we got combined public funding reductions and increased private funding.”

He accepts that there is an irony in the convergence now, where former polytechnics that used to concentrate on professional degrees are now becoming more academic, and universities responding to demand for lifelong learning are becoming more focused on providing professional degree courses, including online ones.

“I have looked at the United States and France and there are similarities, for instance with the divide between the grandes ecoles and universities, but not necessarily linked to an academic-vocational divide, although some grandes ecoles are high-level vocational in the sense of training people for certain jobs, such as elite civil servants.”

In the US, he says, there is clearly a distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit private universities and some public universities are elite too, but then there is the problem of for-profit universities being criticised a lot in terms of quality and lots of for-profits disappearing – including some that claimed to be universities but had never been accredited as such, including Trump University.

“Clearly what you see is there is a kind of social stratification and differentiation tends to be stratified socially,” Carpentier said.

Reproducing social stratification

He says history shows there has always been high resource differentiation between different types of institutions that raises problems about the horizontal division of labour between institutions, but also for the recent period in the UK, where if everyone is supposed to be doing the same, there is a problem with vertical differentiation, which is about quality and prestige.

“If there is a huge resource differentiation, it is problematic for mission differentiation. The two together have an impact on social differentiation where differentiation tends to reproduce social stratification,” Carpentier says.

He concludes that there is a case for rebalancing the private-public funding system in the UK.

“The idea should be to have a well-funded system based on equal division of labour of missions that contributes to social mobility. That could be a higher education system that contributes to positive social change.”