Independence for Oxford
Imagine that there was a kind of rare fish which was both very enjoyable to eat,and had a lifelong and very positive effect on the brain. If you ate it for about three years in your early 20s, your life would be likely to be much nicer and more interesting. Imagine the government takes control of the places where this fish could be eaten. It sets a price that is very cheap for the rich, but expensive for the poor.
And it insists on a uniform admission test of ichthyology, gastronomy and so on, regardless of the consumers' income. What do you think would happen? Pretty much what has happened with undergraduate education at Oxford. For the children of investment bankers and city lawyers the delicious and brain-nourishing fish of an Oxford education is absurdly cheap and easy to obtain. While for the bright but poor, or poorly-educated, it is expensive and unattainable.
The solution is as simple as it is politically incorrect. Oxford should charge market fees to the rich, in order to subsidise the poor. With a nod and a wink from the university and the government, it could start with one brave college - call it Plebnobs - deciding to go outside the straitjacket set by state price controls. Plebnobs college would announce that as from the next academic year, it would charge say £30,000 a year tuition fees, and would admit anyone with three A-grades in A-levels.
(Only those with single-word titles would count, ie physics, maths, English, French would be OK. Media studies, travel and tourism, or physical education wouldn't). Who would apply? All the offspring of rich families who currently find it hard to get into Oxford and currently languish in Bristol, Exeter, Durham, St Andrews and the like. The three As requirement would ensure that the extra intake wouldn't be noticeably worse than the average undergraduate.
But the fees they would pay would revolutionise Plebnobs's finances. The cost of teaching an Oxford undergraduate is probably not as high as the £12,000 a year estimated by the Oxcheps study. Even if it were, Plebnobs would make an £18,000 profit on each full-fee student admitted. If the real cost is actually about £8,000, then the surplus is a stonking £22,000 per student.
Either way, if Plebnobs admits, say, 50 very-rich-butslightly- thick students in the full-fee category, it has a war chest of around £1m a year to spend offering scholarships and bursaries to hard-up but brilliant students. Other colleges could follow suit. Proletoffs college, for example, might set a lower fee, but have rather tougher entrance requirements. Other colleges might charge much lower fees, and offer more modest bursaries.
But the result would be that colleges would be competing properly for money and talent - exactly what universities ought to be doing. In time, that should be the Oxford model, just as it is already Harvard's. Government price controls on higher education are in effect delivering a huge subsidy to the richest people in Britain, who are already well-represented at Oxford.
That is why The Economist wants Oxford, and Britain's other top universities, to go private and free themselves from the chains of state control. Government meddling with education in the name of social engineering has had disastrous consequences. Left to themselves, universities will seek out the brightest potential students, with big financial inducements if necessary. And they will charge the fees necessary to make that possible.
That is exactly what happens at top American universities, and Oxford would behave the same if it could. So what John Hood should be doing, as he licks his wounds, is contemplate something much more radical than his current botched reforms. That would be an idea that the government could hardly refuse if properly presented: let Oxford charge the rich more, in order to give real help to the poor.
26th May 2005