SOCIETY TODAY
Education
New independence
Rhodes Boyson
In our drab egalitarian times it is always a delight to hail any signs of increased (or remaining) initiative or independence. Freedom is total and any advance helps freedom everywhere and any decline is one more step towards the destruction of our society.
The University College of Buckingham will actually open with students in February 1976. This is the Independent University which has been on the drawing board for a number of Years. The first university to be privately financed in our country for fifty years, it will Open with some eighty students taking law, economics, or law' economics and politics. The College will be entirely financed by fees and by private donors. The fees will be £1,800 a Year and students will need about £500 a year More to maintain themselves. It is presumed that local education authorities (according to the means test) will cover the latter and that the local education authorities will pay in up to £300 a year in fees — the same as they would have to pay for students to the state universities. Thus students and parents would have to cover some £1,500-£1,600 a year. It is hoped, however, that a loans system would both bridge the gap and act as a pioneer for a system which Should then be adopted in the state system. The College will offer a two-year and not a three-year course but there will be the same number of teaching weeks. Instead of the long vacations on the three-year degree course Which are now largely used in casual labour, the College will only give twelve weeks vacation in a year. This should mean that these vacations are fully used in home study. It is Probably time that we realised that university students no longer go back to their farms and villages to help take in the harvest as was once the purpose of the long summer vacations. The effect of a two-year intensive course will Mean that the costs are reduced and that the College will particularly appeal to the mature student who wants to increase his qualificalions and broaden his outlook with the least interference to his career. Local education authorities will save money by supporting students at the College and the cost to the Parent or student of a two-year Buckingham Licence would be some £3,000, a bargain in an age of inflation.
The two-year Buckingham Licence has been recognised as a BA (Honours) equivalent by major British universities, by the Law Society, the Bar Council and by various professional bodies. The external examiners will ensure that it Is equivalent to the standards of the state university degrees. The College "takes its stand on academic excellence." Its courses are not so narrow (Micro) as some university degrees or so wide (Macro) that they have little relevance to future etnPloyment. The aim is to help to produce graduates for the professional and business Worlds, especially able to take up appointments In the EEC. For the award of all Buckingham Licences reading facility in two foreign
-.on■ languages is required. In February 1977 a School of English Literature and a School of History will also open. The College will also concentrate on one-to-one tutorials, to my mind the basis of good university study. The very site of Buckingham, twenty-five miles from Oxford, could prove a great advantage for visiting lecturers.
The two-year courses start in February and not October. This will not inconvenience the foreign student or the mature student but it still seems to me to waste one of the great advantages of the two-year course: that within two years of taking `A' levels in June, the student could be at work in the career of his choice after taking his Licence. I think there should be both a February and September intake.
Nevertheless for the student who has the months to spare, the College has developed an imaginative use of his time from 'A' level results at the end of August to Buckingham entry in the following February. Language courses are being arranged at Lille, Nancy and Saarbruck.
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There will be a fully self-supporting foreign contingent at Buckingham College. Since they will pay the same economic fees, unlike those in state higher education, sixth-form students will not be a drain on the rates and taxpayer and from February 1976 they will bring in £40,000 a year to the balance of payments. Students will come from the US, Europe and the old and new Commonwealths and close links have already been forged with four well-known American universities and colleges whose students can spend part of their course at Buckingham. The first intake in February 1976 will include a retired helicopter pilot, a Hindu priest who is a prospective candidate for the Trinidad parliamentary elections, a catering manager and an insurance broker. A fair spread of what I hope will be an expanding, renowned and viable institution. One bright and new light in a world where so many lights are going out! Let us be thankful for small mercies.
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