Robbins Continued
By JOHN VAIZEY
NOT since the great reports of Victorian times has a commission published so much of the calculations which underlie its recommendations as the Robbins Committee has done. Some indeed of the statistical work was too late for inclusion in the Report itself. These calculations will exercise influence long after most of the recommenda- tions of the Report have been forgotten. (Was it only a year ago that it appeared?)
The three new documents published this week are concerned with undergraduate and post- graduate life and with international compari- sons. Internationally, it is shown that the old correlation between national income and number of students has been restored, with the exception of the USSR. The Western world spreads itself out in a curve from the US at the top with the United Kingdom standing very high among the Western nations both in terms of the number of students entering and completing higher education and in terms of the proportion of the national income devoted to education. This is not a new discovery, but it is useful to have it reasonably well documented. In comparison to the United States, we have a narrow secondary system. Of those who enter the secondary system a good number stand a chance of completing higher education—with the broadening of secondary education which is now taking place, the effect on the numbers seeking entry to higher education will be dramatic. Indeed, already the Robbins prediction of the numbers gaining minimum entrance requirements have been shown to be 8 per cent too low for the last two years. Consequently these new documents suggest that Robbins was cautious—possibly over-cautious- in assessing the rapidity of social change: Nowhere is this more evident than in the sur- veys of undergraduate opinion. The isolation of Oxford and Cambridge from the great mass of the secondary schools • has never been more startlingly demonstrated. They take one in twenty-five of boy sixth-formers in the maintained grammar schools and one in five of the sixth- formers of independent schools. The boys from the independent schools are shown to have taken '0' and 'A' levels earlier, to have spent longer in the sixth form and to have specialised More nar- rowly than the other sixth-formers in the country. To some extent Oxford and Cambridge char- acteristics are shared by London—the University to which half the applications for admission had been made in 1961—but the connection between the maintained grammar schools and the civic universities is as close as is the connection between the great independent schools and Oxford and Cambridge.
On student life the evidence is abundant. A high proportion of students wish they were at another university than the one they were at; a fairly high proportion are dissatisfied with their teaching. This applies less to Oxford and Cam- bridge than to other universities. Although Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates have fewer per- iods of formal study than undergraduates else- where, they spend a greater part of their time preparing for tutorials and receiving them. This is a direction in which the other undergraduates would wish to move, yet the great lack at Oxford and Cambridge is of seminars, the inter- mediate stage between tutorial and lecture, which the undergraduates would obviously benefit from.
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