Bring back Smith

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 566.

Economics argue for cutting universities loose from government and allowing them to raise money through fees, for which students could borrow, either pri­vately or from the government. Fees would rise a lot. The government says that the current £1,100 fees cover a quarter of the cost of educating students. UUK says the real cost is higher, and the difference appears in the deficits that around half of Britain's universities are running. Sir Rich­ard Sykes, the rector of Imperial College, recently calculated that Imperial loses £2,800 annually on every undergraduate, and proposed charging the full cost, around £10,500, to students whose fam­ilies could afford it.

In its last manifesto, Labour promised not to introduce top-up fees, but Tony Blair is now believed to favour them - per­suaded, it is said, by Lord Jenkins, a former Labour chancellor of the exchequer, now chancellor of Oxford University. But other cabinet members, such as Gordon Brown, the current chancellor, are reckoned to be hostile. They fear that fees, even if intro­duced with a state-backed loans system, would put off poorer people.

If ministers shy away from this sol­ution, there is talk that some top universi­ties may decide to cut themselves loose, and do without government subsidy. Adam Smith would approve. He taught at Glasgow University, where academics were paid directly by students, and he thought the teaching was better in such universities than in those subsidised by the church or the state. A teacher's dili­gence, he observed, "is likely to be propor­tioned to the motive which he has for ex­erting it". Britain's universities have been subjected to socialist centralism for too long. It would be good to bring a bit of Smith back into them.