Michael Fry: Set universities free to charge their own rates

Education should aim to produce inequality in the sense of bringing out whatever latent talent each individual possesses, whether in mathematical rigour, artistic creativity, athletic prowess, mechanical dexterity or any other particular human quality.

Educational institutions will never match the infinite range of the students' capacities. But they can be set up so as to do their best, and at least to promote diversity rather than uniformity.

But the coalition at Westminster has now set itself against these principles. When Vince Cable this week announced its plans to get higher education through seven lean years, or indeed more, of cuts in public spending, he also doomed the system at the end to be drabber and more mediocre.

I would have liked to write that, in its prior announcements, the government of Scotland had offered a different prospect to the Scottish universities. Alas, I cannot.

This is not to say cuts could have been averted. A university is by nature an expensive sort of place, requiring buildings, equipment and other facilities manned by an older generation of trained minds passing on their wisdom to a younger generation.

A lot of people outside the set-up will always be hard to persuade that either generation is doing much in the way of real work. It is inevitably a qualitative rather than quantitative business, so always vulnerable to cheese paring calculation.

Now the cuts are coming with a vengeance, questions of equality clearly arise. In what ways are these imminent burdens to be shared?

It is hard to see how, for example, Scots lawyers can be adequately trained in less than four years, or linguists can acquire all the skills they need, including a period of study in a foreign country.

On the other hand a course in media studies or in hospitality will still seem to me too long even if cut to two years. There are universities which offer degrees in all these subjects: are some of their students to spend half the time that others spend to get the same (on paper) first degree?

But a deeper question will arise over the general role of universities, whether it should be more or less egalitarian, serving either a small elite or else a broad mass.

When I went to university I was one of only 10 per cent of my age-group that did so. Today the figure is more than half.

Obviously, things have got a whole lot more equal. Just as obviously, they cannot stay that way.

The solution proposed by Cable is to ask the beneficiaries of higher education to pay for it once they are earning enough in their subsequent careers.Most can expect to make more over their working lives than non-graduates, who have already contributed through their taxes to the acquisition of others' superior earning ability.

And Cable did not care to add that as a matter of fact, though not of selective principle, most graduates are of middle-class origin, despite all efforts made by previous governments to encourage working-class schoolchildren to apply to universities, or indeed to twist the universities' arms into accepting them. This is true even of Scotland's supposedly more egalitarian system.

It all looks like a rather desperate attempt by Cable to rescue equality in a system where it may well be doomed - not just because of the recession, but also because the system would cast off equality if it could.

One reason lies in the fact that English universities charge their students around 3,000 a year each for tuition (Scottish universities charge theirs nothing, so long as these are Scots). There can be few cases where this sum, even where charged, begins to cover the real cost.

What is more, it is levied at a uniform rate. Yet whether we like the fact or not, and for a variety of reasons, some universities offer more than others.

The top English universities are among the best half-dozen in the world (the best Scottish one comes in at around number 20). But they are not allowed to charge more than the worst English universities.

It will be surely be welcome if some of the deficit on the cost of tuition starts to come back, however far in arrears, through Cable's graduate tax. But it would do much more to solve the problems of the top universities in particular if they could charge their students what their tuition actually costs.

Other universities are less keen because they fear the top universities would, with their higher income, raise their status further.

Scottish universities, good or less good, follow the argument with interest but know the government of Scotland will not change the system here anyway, even if that means our best universities have no hope of keeping up with the best English ones.

As ever, Scottish resistance to reform is a burden on the nation.

In England, Cable no doubt turns a deaf ear to the pleas of the top universities because he assumes they are self-serving.

On any wider view they could damage British society by making its educational system more unequal. The top universities would be only for the offspring of the rich able to afford the fees. Even the cleverest working-class kids might have to make do with less than the best.

But I believe this apparently egalitarian argument in fact only tends to make the system of higher education worse for everybody.

Just think which western country has the most egalitarian system of all: it is the United States, despite the fact that there you seldom get anything unless you pay for it.The United States also has the best system of higher education in the world.

Why? Because the pace is set by the best universities, mostly members of the Ivy League. They are nearly all private institutions, existing off the fees of their students and off private endowments.

But a good number, because of the extraordinary energy with which they set about raising money, are able to offer free places to poor but clever kids.

Poor but clever kids are precisely the ones most likely to suffer from Britain's stringency. Which country will then have the most equality in its higher education?