Private universities benefit older and poorer students
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Version 0 of 1. One take on the coalition’s approach to private higher education institutions, known as alternative providers, goes like this. Free-market Tories helped their private-sector friends by giving alternative providers official status, sometimes even letting them become full universities. Then, they allowed their students to claim generous student loans. The result, it is claimed, is waste, overspending and falling quality. Last week, the National Audit Office (NAO) reported that almost 6,000 EU students at alternative providers received support to which they may not have been entitled. So it seems to corroborate this critique. But the idea that there has been a free-for-all is a fairytale. The rules have become tighter, not weaker, and the NAO found alternative providers usefully help “students who may not previously have had the opportunity to enter education at this level, such as older students or those from lower socio-economic groups”. Ministers have reduced the number of students necessary for an institution to become a university, from 4,000 to 1,000. They have also clarified the pathway to university status by introducing a new “Companies-House route”. Yet the tests of quality remain and, indeed, a new financial sustainability test has been introduced alongside. The obstacle course to becoming a university is better lit than it was and entry has been opened up to smaller providers, but it is no easier to complete. Beneficiaries include a small number of alternative providers, such as BPP University and the University of Law, whose quality is not in dispute. Far more traditional higher education providers have also become universities – such as the Royal Agricultural University, the University of St Mark and St John, and Norwich University of the Arts. Their quality is not in doubt either. Since 2012, students at alternative providers have been able to borrow up to £6,000 a year for their tuition costs. That is roughly double the previous level. But other students may borrow 50% more – £9,000 each – and many universities claim that is not enough. So it is difficult to argue that legitimate alternative providers have been treated exceptionally generously. They have also been hit disproportionately hard by the Home Office, which bars their international students from having jobs on the side. One argument for restricting the loan support for students at alternative providers was that these institutions were free to recruit as many students as they liked. But that is no longer true. For 2014-15, most alternative providers have been told not to recruit any more students than they did two years ago. Meanwhile, traditional universities have been freed up to recruit more students than ever before. For a student to be entitled to loans and grants at an alternative provider, their course must be “designated”. Back in 2010, designation was a tick-box exercise. Institutions seeking designation were pretty certain to achieve it. Since then, the process has been massively tightened up. In the words of the NAO, there are “new and strengthened checks, and providers must meet criteria for quality, financial sustainability, management and governance, and course eligibility”. So the rules are tougher, not looser, than they were. Speak to any alternative provider about the challenges they face, and you will hear metaphors about steeplechases, marathons and moving finishing lines. As a result, there has been less private investment than many people originally expected. There are those who think all alternative providers of higher education should be barred. But blocking alternative provision would hinder innovation, limit access to higher education and be out of kilter with the rest of the world, as the liberal thinktank CentreForum recently argued. Others are so ideologically committed to the private sector that they want very low barriers to entry so that almost anyone can set themselves up as a higher education provider. But that would risk system-wide waste of the sort that doomed individual learning accounts a few years ago. There are suggestions that an incoming government might seek to bring the shutters down on alternative higher education providers. That seems unlikely. There are too many students, too much investment and too much goodwill already sunk into them to make that a sensible decision. It would also be out of tune with the history of higher education in Britain, which has seen successive waves of new providers shaking things up. Yet we do need a new legal framework to reflect the true diversity of the higher education sector and give more protection to students. In place of the level playing field for all higher education providers that ministers used to speak of, we have an untidy meadow. It is time to give it a mow. Nick Hillman is director of the Higher Education Policy Institute and was an adviser to David Willetts |