UNDERGRADUATE SPATE
By DAVID THOMSON•
THE expansion of British universities which has taken place since the end of the war has been officially urged and popularly accepted on a whole sequence of questionable assumptions. The pressure has come from two main directions: from above, in the form of recommendations of Select Committees (most notably the Barlow Committee on Scientific Manpower of 1946) and financial encouragement by the University Grants Com- mittee ; and from below, in the form of student-demand and, popular support for greater educational opportunities at the highest level.
All British universities have responded to this double pressure in varying degrees. At first their response was spontaneous, for it was widely felt that there was a banked-up flow left over from the war years, when so many promising students had their education interrupted by national service. The system of Further Education and Training Grants, devised to meet just this demand and generously administered by the Ministries concerned, made the demand immediately effective. It could be argued that, if only to replace the generations of graduates which were not produced during the six years of war, the universities should stretch themselves to the utmost to absorb these belated undergraduates. They did so. But during all the war years the total student population at our universities never fell below 35,000 at any one time, and the normal pre-war figure was 50,000. As total numbers rose to roughly 52,000 in 1945, 65,000 in 1946, 78,000 in 1947, and over 83,000 in 1948, it is clear that there is already a handsome surplus over war-time deficits. The universities are now turning out graduates in much larger numbers than ever before, and this has been justified by estimates of the national need for highly-trained scientists and tech- nologists, and by the desirability of keeping a certain balance within the universities by a corresponding increase in the number of " arts " students. ..
The assumption here, which is all too seldom challenged, is that universities can determine the rate of, their growth in accordance with national needs without impairing their educational value and their essential academic qualities. In the past universities have grown—and over certain periods, such as the early twentieth century, have grown very fast—through the steady development of new sectors of human knowledge and the cultivation of new forms of learning. The growth of history as a distinct academic discipline, of. the natural sciences in all their ever-widening ramifications, of
* Tutor of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. the social sciences such as economics and sociology, have afforded the " plan " on which new faculties and departments have been built and new bodies of undergraduates brought within the frame- work of a university education. Never till now has the " plan " been provided merely in the form of a " target " of student-numbers to be attained within a certain limit of time.
Universities and colleges are organic growths and complex communities, each having at any one moment an optimum size. This size is determined by the interaction of several different factors—the skilled teaching-staff available, the living and teaching facilities, the sectors of knowledge to be explored and their suitability for undergraduate study, the supply of apt pupils, and the social needs of the national community within which the universities have their being. It becomes increasingly clear that too much emphasis, during the last four years, has been placed upon the last of these factors, to the serious neglect in many casts of all the others involved, and therefore to the detriment of the universities as places of learning and research. One indication of this is the fact that, of the z5,000 new graduates emerging from the universities last summer, only three in every five held Honours degrees.
Now, it may be at once protested that the Ordinary-degree man (or woman) is not to be despised ; that he is likely to have profited enormously from his university education, both as an individual and as a citizen ; and that it is so desirable that a larger proportion of our young men and women should have the benefit of a university education that the universities must be prepared to go on swelling their numbers, even if this should mean a preponderance of Ordinary over Honours graduates. It is here that the next series of unchal- lenged assumptions creeps in. Of course the Ordinary-degree graduate is usually an estimable person, and of course he will nearly always have profited from being at the university. Indeed, no university should be without a certain element of students who do not aspire to Honours. But it is all a matter of proportion. There is incalculable danger in the tendency, indicated by the Nuffield College Report on The Problems Facing British Universities, to think of universities as the last rung on an educational ladder the top of which as many as possible should strive to reach.
If it be assumed that the universities should attempt to meet all the needs of all members of the community whose education is to be carried beyond the age of eighteen, we need not one new University College at Stoke-on-Trent but fifty Stokes-on-Trent. It has never been the aim of British universities to feed all the pro- fessions. They have shared this task with countless other competent institutions—the Inns of Court, the Teaching Hospitals, the Chartered Accountants' Association, Theological and Teachers' Training Colleges, and the rest. Nor have they ever shouldered the task of training technicians—that is the task of technical insti- tutes and colleges of every kind. They have traditionally restricted themselves to academic research and to the teaching of those sectors of learning wherein general principles and the highest intellectual disciplines were involved. We are asking them to attempt the impossible if we expect them to be the crown of the public educa- tional system in the same sense in which the secondary schools are the middle of the system ; and we shall prevent them from perform- ing the vital cultural and social functions which they alone can perform if we ask them to undertake work which the other institu- tions of higher education and technical training can in fact perform much better.
Nearly every student, of course, unless he be an imbecile, might be expected to derive some benefit from three years at a university. But " fitness " for a university education is discussed as if it were an absolute criterion, instead of essentially a relative thing. An applicant is rejected for admission not as a rule because he is totally " unfit " to benefit, but because he is deemed to be less fit, in the sense of less likely to benefit so much, as another who can show evidence of that basic intellectual ability, intelligence, temperament and previous training which are required to get the maximum benefit. The fallacy becomes particularly dangerous when the slogan " fit for a place, fit for an award" is bandied about as it recently was in parliamentary debates. The demand that all university places should be "free " for all who are " fit " for them opens the door to still
heavier pressure on the universities to expand, and seduces into the quest for a degree still more who, both in their own interests and in the community's, would be better advised to seek higher educa- tion of a more specific and technical character than the universities can or should attempt to give.
So, too, the demand for more " General Courses;" combining study of several different " subjects" at once, shows by its tendency to prevail at some universities a misconception of the essence of university education. Higher education to the extent which it is possible to give it in "General Courses" can be given equally well in adult classes of the kind provided by Extra-Mural Boards and the Workers' Educational Association There seems no good reason why the universities should be saddled with this particularly burdensome task, and most of the young students asking for such courses would be likely to benefit more by combining study of them with simultaneous apprenticeship in a professional training or a technical skill.
It is difficult, indeed, to resist the conclusion that a considerable part of the present demand for multiplying the numbers of under- graduates springs less from a discriminating desire for certain qualities of education than from a general belief that a university degree will open the way to a better job, and a widespread miscon- ception that the university monopolises the whole of the top rung of the educational ladder. The production of a surfeit of graduates with Ordinary degrees on a contracting labour-market would be the most painful and undesirable way of dispelling the former of these beliefs. If this situation is to be avoided, it is for all the responsible authorities concerned, from the Ministry of Education, the Grants Conunittee and the universities themselves to the schools and the local authorities, to dispel the latter.
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