Professor Alan Ryan on UK Higher Education System Reform

Alan Ryan published a piece in the Times Higher Education (15 December) on the crisis in the public higher education system.

In it, Alan argues in favour of adopting Californias three-tier public higher education system in the UK because of its built-in encouragement of mobility. While it is true that the California Master Plan foundered on the issue of public funding, he argues that the system can work much better in Great Britain because British governments are not as vulnerable to taxpayer revolts as the State of California is.

For Alan, the real problem lies in the relationship between government and higher education institutions. The California model would put British academy under the direct control of the governmentan issue on which the British have yet to make their minds up about. The benefits would be clear: cheap, open-access foundation courses; ready migration between one sort of institution and another; and differential costs according to institutional type. However, there are also political costs which the current government may be unwilling to take on: more government control; less use of for-profit providers; and in general less influence by the private sector.

The full article can be read here.

Professor Alan Ryan is an associate member of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford.