The ruin of Britain's universities British universities have too little money to do their job properly

The procrastination would impress the idlest of students. During last year's general election campaign, the govern­ment discovered that changes it had made to the way universities and their students are financed had peeved many voters. So in October 2001 it announced a review of the system. Because whether and how stu­dents pay for tuition is inextricable from how universities themselves are funded and organised, the review came to encom­pass a general, ten-year strategy for higher education as a whole. After repeated de­lays, its outcome was due this month. Then Estelle Morris, the education secre­tary, resigned, and the announcement was delayed again.

In mitigation, this extended essay crisis has been provoked by a particularly tough assignment. The malaise that afflicts Brit­ain's universities has been brought about by decades of haphazard, myopic and self­interested policymaking, and the mishan­dling by successive governments of the transition from an elite to a mass system of higher education.

As in many other western countries, the number of students entering higher education in Britain has grown enormous­ly in the past 40 years. Whereas around one in 20 school-leavers went on to univer­sity in 1960, more than one in three do so now. There was an especially big boom in the number of young people going on to higher education in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which has since levelled off: Tony Blair wants to revive it, and has set a target for 50% of 18-to-30-year-olds to ex­perience higher education by 2010.

Many countries have struggled to man­age such educational explosions, but in Britain it has been handled especially badly. Kingsley Amis, a novelist and aca­demic, famously grumped in 1960 that "More will mean worse." To an extent, that was inevitable: different standards of en­try and teaching are bound to obtain when, as is now the case, higher education is provided in around 170 universities and higher education colleges, plus a variety of other facilities, rather than in a handful of elite institutions. But British governments have helped prove Mr Amis right by refus­ing to ask people to pay, either directly, through fees, or indirectly, through taxes, for all the extra students.

Expenditure per student has declined steadily, with a more rapid fall during the early 1990s. Since 1989, funding per student has fallen by 37% in real terms, while student numbers have increased by 90 %. The income per student at Harvard and Yale is now, respectively, 4.5 and 3.2 times as much as Oxford's.

This squeeze has had predictable re­sults. The ratio of students to teachers has doubled from around 9-1 ten years ago to 18-1 now. Dons' pay has declined not only in relation to the private sector, but also to other public-sector jobs: a new lecturer at one of Britain's old universities now earns about the same as a new policeman. Some universities are looking to poorer coun­tries - South Korea, China, Eastern Eu­rope - to fill junior posts.

Buildings, facilities and equipment have deteriorated. The higher education sector as a whole is in the red. Despite the dollop of cash for science that last year's government spending review provided, Universities UK (UUK), which represents higher education heads, reckons that in ad­dition to the around £8 billion ($13 billion) of public money it receives annually, the sector needs an extra £9.94 billion over the next three years to put things right - a fan­tasy, says the government.

Money is not the only problem. Within the broad economy of higher education, many different types of students study an enormous variety of subjects in a wide range of institutions. Unfortunately, the tendency of policy has been to erase or deny the differences between them.

This tendency was most starkly mani­fest in the decision by the last Conserva­tive government, in 1992, to scrap the dis­tinction between universities and what were previously known as polytechnics. Martin Trow, of the University of Califor­nia, Berkeley, a long-term-student of Brit­ish and American higher education, says that this was a move "exactly in the wrong direction": whereas what was needed was a clear articulation of the different charac­teristics and callings of different institu­tions, the reform obliged many of them to compete for the same resources and be judged (in some cases unfairly) by the same criteria.