The governmentโs laissez-faire approach has imperilled the whole system. Itโs time for a radical rethink
If you listened to ministers, youโd think that thereโs a crisis of โwokenessโ on campus. Every young person is apparently simultaneously an overvulnerable snowflake terrified of opinions and a yowling fighter in the culture wars. But although there might well be a problem with the diversity and range of ideas in the academy, choosing to focus on it amounts to pointing at a fire in a wastepaper bin while the buildings burn down. The real problems are the result of government abandoning all management of the university world.
There used to be a cap on individual universitiesโ student numbers. Each of them got a figure imposed from the centre, and each received an appropriate level of funding. So far, so good. Every institution had a certain number of places, and they worked out what A-level offers they could make, based on those numbers, combined with past experience of how students would fare compared to predicted grades. Those universities at the โtopโ asked for As, in the โmiddleโ Bs, and so on.
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