EducationMart

Stefan Collini on the Browne Review, in the LRB:

The single most radical recommendation in the report, by quite a long way, is the almost complete withdrawal of the present annual block grant that government makes to universities to underwrite their teaching, currently around £3.9 billion. This is more than simply a ‘cut’, even a draconian one: it signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state from financial responsibility for it...

The report includes various ‘access’ regulations intended to mitigate the more extreme effects of this reallocation of students by family wealth, but differential fees are, of course, absolutely central to its conception of the way the market mechanism will operate, and it is a necessary truth about markets that they tend to replicate and even intensify the existing distribution of economic power. ‘Free competition’ between rich and poor consumers means Harrods for the former and Aldi for the latter: that’s what the punters have ‘chosen’.