Back to basics

The British austerity package makes the Greeks look downright lazy: An average of 19 percent cuts across all departments without even touching the National Health Service. But some of the biggest shocks are yet to come, when Parliament debates the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, known as the Browne Review, after its sponsor, Lord Browne.

The Browne Review is a detailed document, but its basic proposal is that students should be required to pay more in tuition fees and the government should give less money to universities through the “block grant,” a per capita lump sum payment meant to (mostly) cover the cost of teaching. This is a frequent source of struggle: The educational authorities always complain that the block grant is too small, and the government complains that the universities are too expensive. Browne’s solution is that students should be made to bear more of the costs themselves: British universities are presently forbidden from charging more than roughly 3,500 pounds ($5,560) in tuition fees for home students. On Browne’s proposal, that amount will swiftly rise, to perhaps around 9,000 pounds by 2012. The fees will be covered by government-backed loans to students, repayable after the student has started earning income and on a progressively calibrated scale.

The universities and the government both have a point: A world-class college experience is expensive. Just look at Princeton’s price tag. The most expensive British universities, under the Browne proposal, would cost no more than the out-of-state costs for an average American state university — which is a bargain if you’re a student at one of the elite Golden Triangle schools. It is fairly plain that British universities need more funding, whether directly from students, through a “graduate tax,” or in the form of a larger block grant. As an American, I see no problem with requiring students (more likely their parents) to contribute more directly to the cost of their own education, though the rise in fees seems uncharitably swift and steep. What bothers me in the Browne Review, however, is its single-minded approach to universities as engines of economic growth.

Universities do contribute to economic growth: Graduates of universities earn more money than those who do not hold bachelor’s degrees, and the research performed at universities sometimes leads to important new products. Everyone already knows that universities are an economic boon. But the report seems to barely acknowledge that universities do anything other than raise gross domestic product.

Universities are supposed to be primarily about teaching and research — in all fields. Whether in physics or philosophy, history or astronomy, universities do not primarily focus on profit-yielding results. This is what differentiates even the science departments from research and development at for-profit firms. Studying the opening seconds of the universe is no more profitable, in economic terms, than the study of Socrates — but they are both the business of the university. Universities do boost the income of their graduates, but they are also cultural treasures, a point that seems lost in Browne’s review. When he talks of higher education “transform[ing] lives,” he explicitly restricts this to higher wages and lower unemployment rates, all of which is very good, but it tends to ignore the primary function of the university as opposed to, say, a business or trade school.

The justification of a university has some bearing on the question of funding. Browne calculates that a university degree, under his proposal, will be worth about 400 percent of the purchase price. If the purpose of a university is just to raise GDP, then on this view even a public university might raise its fees to anywhere below the value of the degree, since this will still be a net positive contribution. (Though obviously economic efficiency will peg the value somewhat lower; in fact, the precise cost of a university education could be calculated based on the marginal benefit of class size and hours in lecture.) More simply, one could let the universities charge as much as they like — so long as the students are paying, on Browne’s logic, they are getting “value for money” (a pet phrase of his).

Much of the argument over the Browne proposals has so far turned on detailed questions of specific economic impact: Will poor students be worse or better off under the scheme; will universities have more or less money with which to pursue their goals. These are much too detailed to explore here. What should be pointed out, and what seems lost in the report, is that universities are not merely about improving incomes — they are primarily about teaching and research for its own sake. It is telling that the pursuit of truth should, indirectly, yield material riches, and this is all the more reason to place universities on a firm financial footing. But we ought not to lose sight of their basic purpose as we do so.

Brendan Carroll is a philosophy major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.