Training | 2009.12.24
University funding: Shape of cuts to come
When Lord Mandelson quietly announced cuts of 6.6% in the higher education budget for 2010‑11 this week, he did two extremely important things simultaneously. The first was to throw more than 10 years of steady university expansion under Labour, one of the signature policies of the Blair-Brown era, into sudden reverse. The second was to point the way for a series of major cuts announcements over the coming weeks by every other department across Whitehall, with the exception of the favoured few – frontline NHS, schools and international development – which have had their budgets ringfenced by the prime minister and the chancellor. It is hard not to sense that we have seen the future, not just for universities but also for vast areas of the public services, from arts to transport.
Neither the scale nor the significance of the university cuts themselves should be underestimated. After an initial two-year spending freeze, Labour began spending serious new money in education, including in the universities, in 1999. Its aims were to repair the neglect of the previous 20 years, to put the knowledge economy at the heart of British growth, and to open up the educational opportunities of generations of British school-leavers, including in particular the most economically disadvantaged. The results have been a Labour success story. Spending has increased by 25% compared with 1997. The neglect of buildings and equipment which had marked the Conservative years was reversed. And, even though Labour has fallen far short of its target of 50% of school-leavers going to university, there are now more students than ever before in our history.
Lord Mandelson\'s announcement marks for this generation what Tony Crosland\'s "the party\'s over" marked for an earlier era of Labour government. Though the latest cuts of £135m in the higher education settlement, on top of the £180m already signalled in the chancellor\'s 2009 budget, are not as swingeing as some of the recent rumours have suggested, they will still go deep. The decision to protect research funding, maintaining a pledge which Gordon Brown gave in 2004, means the impact of the cuts will be concentrated on capital spending and on teaching. In plain English, it is teachers and students who will suffer most.
Capital spending has done well under Labour, as a visit to almost any university will show. Much of this spending, however, was needed to repair decades of neglect. Now that the tap is being turned off again, the threat of a return to the pre-1997 regime is grave, and will become more so as the likely long restraint of spending continues. The most immediate victims of Labour\'s stop-go policies, however, are young people. There will be fewer students in 2010 than in 2009 and they will each command fewer resources than their predecessors. Universities\' overdependence on foreign students\' fees means that UK undergraduates will bear the brunt. The Treasury, which has to pay undergraduate fees and loans upfront, has a powerful vested interest in keeping this number as low as possible.
Universities face a grim choice. They must either turn students away or look after their needs less well – perhaps both. That means larger classes and less tuition in a system already fraying at the edges. It may also, as Lord Mandelson suggests, mean shorter courses. Universities that want fees to rise after Lord Browne\'s review will now have another argument for such an increase. Universities with little research funding will be particularly squeezed. Courses and colleges are in danger. All these pressures mean participation will be narrowed, and that fairer access – another Labour success story – is put at further risk, while social mobility is suddenly a luxury for another day. The university cuts graphically illustrate the wider truth that waste savings only go so far. Real cuts hurt. These ones are real all right. And there are more to come.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]r-education-university-funding
