Tuition fees, privatisation and tertiary education - a round-up of recent news

Fee cap poses threat to universities

Britain's world-class universities will "wither away into under-resourced mediocrity" by 2012 if they are not privatised and deregulated, concludes a book from the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies.

The Economics of Higher Education argues universities must be free to charge market-based tuition fees in the region of £10,000 a year to pay competitive academic salaries and provide the best facilities.

Author David Palfreyman argues that the government's proposed £3,000 cap on fees is a step in the right direction but nowhere near the £18,600 that research shows is the annual cost of teaching each Oxford undergraduate.

More information is at this web page.

Private legal training making inroads in Britain

British universities like students who pay big fees. They are less happy to deliver the corresponding service, according to a recent article in The Economist.

That creates a gap, which private company BPP is making inroads into. BPP is Britain's largest provider of professional training and looks a bit like a private university: it teaches some 20,000 students in 32 centres, in subjects such as accounting and law.

But in many ways it is not like a university at all: "there's no sign of state planning; the staff are better paid, the buildings smarter, technology more high-tech, morale higher. Administration is leanly businesslike; there's no money spent on research, just a lot of high-quality teaching," The Economist writes.

From September, BPP will offer a postgraduate law degree, including the courses needed to become a solicitor. The degree won't technically be from BPP: the firm is renting that right from the University of Central Lancashire, which is 'validating' the course.

The Economist reports that these hybrid products, combining an academic and a professional qualification, are the fastest-growing section of BPP's business.

Launched in 1976, BPP specialised in training for the various accountancy qualifications until it listed on the Stock Exchange in 1986. Since then it has grown to take on exam and non-exam based training for other professions, and now has 2,000 staff and 40 locations worldwide.

BPP says it is Europe’s largest accountancy training company and largest insolvency training company, and the UK’s largest tax training company.

The BPP website is at http://www.bpp.com.

Chasing private cash can keep education healthy, writer finds

The story of markets in US higher education is told in a new book which finds that over the past 50 years government subsidies have shrunk, endowments grown and education has improved through competition.

• "How can you turn an English department into a revenue centre? How do you grade students if they are 'customers' you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university's research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line?" - Harvard University Press.

• "Kirp examines about a dozen schools and the ways they position themselves to attract the highest quality 'customers.' An illuminating view of both good and bad results in a market-driven educational system." - David Siegfried, American Library Association.

More information on Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education by David L. Kirp (Harvard University Press) is at this web page.