Higher education in the UK in 2020 is, by any measure, a mass system. It enrols 2.5 million students, one of only five systems with more than two million students in Europe (the others are France, Germany, Italy and Poland). This still comes as a surprise because of the deep-rooted prejudice that continental European higher education systems are sprawling, disorganised and wasteful, while the UK is selective, structured and efficient. In England half of all school leavers continue on to some form of higher education, and in Scotland the participation rate is approaching 60 per cent. In Martin Trow's classic taxonomy of elite, mass and universal stages in the development of higher education systems, the UK is on the brink of entering the third stage and becoming a universal system. The total budget is more than £40 billion, the majority provided directly or indirectly by the state. Expenditure on higher education is now a substantial element within the state budget, and also a significant item in terms of private spending. The largest universities, University College London (UCL) and Manchester, each have more than 40,000 students, the population of a medium-sized town. Several others have more than 30,000. Universities have become even more visible presences in urban landscapes, their expanding campuses now dominated whole precincts.

The scale, and timing, of this transformation has been discussed in Chapter 3. The past is very much ‘another country’ … And yet, that past lingers on. For a higher education system on the brink of becoming a universal system, UK higher education has retained many of the characteristics, and consequently much of the ‘feel’, of an elite system. High student completion and low wastage rates; the sustained attempt to maintain uniform academic ‘standards’ by the twin means of academic peer review and bureaucratic policing instruments; stubborn resistance to any formal stratification of institutions (combined, of course, with widespread acceptance of an informal pecking order), which reflects a core belief in the unity of academic work – teaching, research and scholarship; an equally strong belief that a university education constitutes a ‘rite of passage’, although no longer (so) confined to a social elite; a system dominated by a monoculture of comprehensive universities traditionally formed – these, and other attributes, are some of the hallmarks of elite higher education.