Know for whom the bell tolls

Two new books out this month - from the left and the right - warn that higher education must act now to shore up its foundations before it is overwhelmed by a tide of ill-prepared students and devalued degrees. Universities must join the battlefor standards in schools if they are not also to suffer themselves, argues George Walden.

Academics are going the way of the modern clergy: their stipend is pitiable, their prestige on the slide, their higher purpose lost amid earthly distractions. Yet the universities' clientele has grown, unlike that of the Church. So what has gone wrong? In business terms (a barbarous analogy, I know) investment in expanded production has been inadequate, and the raw material - the intake from schools - is frequently defective.

The solutions are unpalatable. First, no government is going to give a system of higher education the money it needs to maintain standards when it costs twice as much as the French and a third more than the German, and has gone from 200,000 full-time students in 1962 to a million in 1995. A glance at the social security and National Health Service budgets explains why. Nor would Labour in office raise taxes for the purpose. The money our universities need must come from parents or students, probably the latter in the form of a graduate tax.

In a free vote tomorrow about two thirds of the Commons would be in favour. Meanwhile there is tacit collusion between the parties to keep the truth about our universities from the country, while parents and students are kept in a state of arrested economic development.

On the quality of degrees, the position is similar. Here academics are part of the great evasion - though there are exceptions. "The decision to expand higher education," said Sir John Mason on retiring from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, "before attending to the schools was like adding an extra storey to a house with crumbling foundations." In an expanded system low expectations at the bottom of the education ladder will become more visible at the top, especially if libraries and lecture rooms are overcrowded, tutorials trimmed or non-existent, and dons as perennially disgruntled as teachers.

If degrees become confetti-ised women will suffer most. This is because they are over-represented on arts courses, which are most vulnerable to dilution. Having belatedly gained near-equality in numbers (47 per cent) it would be tragic if many women felt they had been sold a pup, and discovered that their degrees impressed employers less than they had hoped. The fact that men had bought the same pup, though in smaller numbers, would be scant consolation. Champions of equality would do well to show as much interest in the quality of courses as in the sex of those who enrol.

If a "comprehensivisation" of higher education is what we want, then we are well on track. But politicians will be even less keen to invest in a mass, low-aspiring system, dispensing devalued degrees. So it is in the interests of the universities that something be done about the schools. Like Tony Blair, though less coyly, I support most of what the Government has done to raise standards, but mediocrity in state schools is endemic in a country where education is segregated according to cash and social class. No nation where the top 7 per cent of society is estranged from the educational enterprise has developed a high level of state schooling and neither shall we.

Traditionalists of the right and left wear heavy boots, and I can hear them coming. My proposal for opening private schools to all comers will draw the usual invective from the highly self-interested fraternity of nostalgic Little Englanders. The left will be more sympathetic, but baulk at selective entry (the basis of the success of our universities) without which the state/private divide will never be bridged. The easy ascendancy of private schools which owes much to egalitarian dogma in the state sector will also be rejected by the usual people, on the usual lines. The old believers of the educational establishment - not a few ensconced in higher education - should note the criticisms of state primaries and comprehensives by Messrs Blunkett and Blair ("quality should not be sacrificed to equality").

The future of our higher education begins in our primary schools. All academics should read John Dewey and the Plowden report, examine the results of the doctrine in practice, and remember that Lady Plowden was appointed by a Conservative government. In Britain, experiments in education are for other people's children. It is a succulent irony that the source of much of the semi-literacy and semi-numeracy academics complain about in private, lies in the antiquated "progressivism" still pursued in many an institute of education. In that sense, universities reap what they sow.

Concurrently with de-segregation (a long-term, voluntary policy) we need nursery schools for all, smaller classes, higher pay for better-qualified teachers, a large investment in scientific and technical education, expanded (but not diluted) A levels, and greater diversification of schools with entry by aptitude rather than selection by ability. The quid pro quo from the teaching profession? A radical reform of teaching philosophies. No reform - no investment.

The package would cost some Pounds 5 billion, paid for by ending mortgage tax relief, plus the taxation of child benefit. Yes, I understand the politics, also that a graduate tax would not be popular. But as a Hokusai-sized wave of competition unfurls on the country, public opinion may become more open to a switch of national priorities towards education, and the sacrifices it will involve.

The prize for the universities could be great: a better qualified intake of students from a wider social range, improved facilities, decent pay and prospects for academics. But a Parliament locked into the adversarial tradition will act slowly, if at all. When will the vice chancellors use their collective muscle to agitate for changes in our schools, or are they content for universities to become remedial institutions? And why not come forward with a realistic programme for funding?

Without major reforms our universities, the high ground of the system, will subside gently beneath the waves, like so many drowned cathedrals.

George Walden is Conservative MP for Buckingham and a former education minister. We Should Know Better is published next week by Fourth Estate, price Pounds 8.99, and will be reviewed by Baroness Warnock in The THES next week. It can be ordered from The THES Bookshop. See coupon, page 23.