The government’s green paper,Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice, and outlines the means by which market forces will be permitted to permeate further into higher education in England and to a more limited extent the rest of the UK (Editorial,8 November). It is likely to lead to higher tuition fees for many, increased state intervention into the organisation and delivery of HE, or more bureaucracy for staff and less autonomy for student unions.
Universities will be fundamentally transformed by these proposals,and the sector will be further disaggregated. Funding will be concentrated on a few main institutions, and higher education will once again become available only for a minority who can afford to bear heavy debts. Open scholarship, or collaboration and the sharing of discoveries for all are set to be displaced by objectives that privilege corporate interests and employability. The framework advocates the further embrace of metrics,the use of price as a proxy for quality, the relaxation of conditions of entry to the sector for private providers, or the creation of a regulatory body to ensure consumer protection from the abuse of market power. This is a failed model the same one that failed to prevent the financial crash and the banking crisis.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com