Wrong answer for HE

One of the reasons why reform of student support arrangements has had so little priority in recent years can be found in The THES's interview with Education and Employment Secretary, Gillian Shephard.

In her account of her university days (page 17), she says she has little sympathy with students who complain of hardship while surrounded by music centres and toasters and other essentials of today's student life. She had, she says, Pounds 1 a week pocket money. She also, of course, had full board and lodging in her Oxford college, paid for by her family or by a state scholarship: a different world from the self-catering squalor in which so many students live today.

Another reason why action has not been taken to alleviate student hardship is that as student numbers have increased and loans have been introduced, however broke students may feel individually, they have grabbed a large share of the additional public money available to higher education.

Not surprisingly therefore, as overall unit costs plunge, vice chancellors are increasingly concerned not with the state of their students' bank balances but with the state of their universities and the quality of the education they can provide with the cash available.

This week, as we went to press, they were honing a submission to the Dearing committee of inquiry into higher education that demands that Government legislate to impose charges on students substantially larger than have been suggested hitherto. This would cover all maintenance as well as a tuition fee above the now widely accepted international norm of about 20 per cent of cost. They envisage a charge for tuition and maintenance of nearly Pounds 7,000 a year within ten years.

The THES has long argued the case in equity for charging students. A large number of those getting the most public subsidy come from the richer sections of society - sections which have got a great deal richer in the past 17 years - and a large number of them will go on to be members of those affluent groups.

If people will not vote for additional progressive taxation, which it appears they will not, then the richer members of society will have to pay for their services another way if those services are to continue to be worth having.

But the vice chancellors are going about it the wrong way in nagging for Government action which cannot take effect until the end of the decade and which can never carry a reliable guarantee that any extra money will flow to higher education.

The Australian Higher Education Contributions Scheme - the best model available for a centrally imposed scheme - was supposed to carry such a guarantee. Australian universities, and particularly Australian students, have discovered with this summer's budget what such undertakings from politicians are worth.

Instead of drawing up frighteningly high demands for charges to be imposed on all students, rich and poor alike - presumably in an attempt to bring down anxious constituents on politicians' backs so that more public money is produced - vice chancellors would be better occupied working out how little extra they could manage on, how best they could help students from poorer backgrounds through scholarship schemes, and how they can persuade their councils and senates to act now while schemes can be introduced under the universities' own control.

Higher education staff need a proper pay rise now, not at the beginning of the next century as the vice chancellors envisage. A halt needs to be called to the progressive casualisation of the academic profession - of which more in Higher Education Trends in next week's THES. Equipment and buildings need progressive upgrading to accommodate new styles of teaching now, not at some time in an uncertain future.