Introduction

This book has taken the long view – deliberately. It has focused on Braudel's longue durée, with a backward gaze to 1960 and detours into wider social and economic change. The issues of the moment, namely the longer-term impact of COVID-19 and the stuttering progress of England's market experiment in higher education – histoire événementielle, in Braudel's terms – were discussed in Chapter 8. But it is still too early to reach settled conclusions about either. In any case, the emphasis on the long view is fundamental to the argument in this book, that the crisis now facing higher education, in England, the wider UK and many other advanced countries, is only one of a number of intersecting crises in contemporary society, culture and the economy. It cannot be examined, let alone resolved, on its own.

This final chapter discusses four main themes, focusing on the ways in which this crisis might be resolved:

• • further expansion and a decisive shift towards a universal system of tertiary education;

• • fair access to reduce current inequity in terms of participation, progression through higher education, achievement levels and graduate success;

• • a better balance between ‘steering’ and regulation, within a broader framework of democratic accountability and the abandonment of surveillance metrics at the system level, combined with the root-and-branch reform of institutional governance and management; and, perhaps most important,

• • the reassertion of the public character of the university and its crucial, and critical, role in maintaining an open society.

Expansion

First on the ‘What is to be done?’ list of reforms must be a large-scale expansion of higher education, a step-change beyond a mass to a universal system. But old, and bad, habits die hard. In 2020 in the UK, ministers in the recently re-elected Conservative government publicly stated their belief that the 50 per cent participation target associated with the former Labour prime minister Tony Blair should be abandoned, overlooking the awkward fact that it has already been achieved. Just like the ‘more means worse’ opponents of the Robbins expansion more than half a century ago, they appeared to believe that too many 18-year-olds were going into higher education. Higher education should be reserved for the intellectually able (who possessed the social and cultural capital, whether acquired or inherited, to benefit from it), while most school leavers should go instead into technical education or apprenticeships.