Time-wasters laze in lecture halls

UNIVERSITIES are in crisis and decline throughout Europe. Once the brightest beacons of learning in the civilised world, they are increasingly overcrowded, mediocre, pointless institutions, serving neither society nor students.

In Germany, once home to the world’s finest places of higher education, universities have become an arm of the welfare state, providing undemanding refuge for youngsters until they reach their late 20s or even early 30s.

In France, outside the top schools which educate the governing elite, matters are not much better; most Italian universities are dire, despite their historic achievements. And there’s the rub: too many of Europe’s finest universities are living on past reputations as they settle into genteel decline.

The best British universities still stand tall above the European crowd, but even they are slipping inexorably behind their better-financed, more adventurous American peers, hence Tony Blair’s desire to allow them to charge students a small amount in top-up fees. As result of this modest ambition to give his country’s universities a future in the 21st century, the British Prime Minister has put his job on the line. He is being opposed not just by the usual Labour party troglodytes but by its supposedly sensible centre, as well as by opportunistic Tories and populist Liberal Democrats.

Yet the factor common to all the European university systems in decline is that the higher education they provide is financed almost entirely by the state and free to those being educated. As a result, the universities are perennially underfunded, even by big-spending governments; and students pour into them with little thought of what courses they should do or even if they should be at university in the first place (and why not? -- media studies at Oxford Brookes University is a far more pleasant way of spending your early twenties than learning a useful trade or getting a job).

"Free" universities worked - and were affordable - when only 5% or so of the highest flyers went to them. Now that governments are willing 50% of school leavers to go to university it is no longer affordable by the state alone.

If universities charged reasonable fees, students would think harder about what to study and be more demanding about what was on offer. Fewer German or Italian students would be inclined any more to linger lazily round lecture halls and beer bars for up to a decade, as they do at present.

Much of the dross that is currently masquerading as academic courses would fall by the wayside because it was no longer free for indifferent consumption by those who could not think of anything better to do. The only downside to student fees is that they might deter bright students from poor backgrounds. But not if - as the Blair government proposes - the state picks up the tab initially and the student only pays back the cost when he or she is in a job and has the earning capacity to do so. Use your degree to become a highly-paid City slicker and the payback period will be quite short; use it to become a social worker on a sink estate and the payback will be gradual (indeed, you might earn so little that you never pay back the full cost).

Either way, what the British government is proposing need not deter anybody from going to university, nor determine the type of jobs they take after it. If more generous grants and cheap loans were available to poorer students to help with their cost of living while studying then Britain would be on the road to a properly funded university system which was also open to all the talents, regardless of background.

Yet resistance to fees for higher education remains strong across Europe. Chancellor Gerhard Schroder has at last recognised the general mediocrity of Germany’s once-great universities and is proposing a new set of elite universities; but he is not proposing that fees should be charged for them, which rather undermines his ability to finance them.

Few other European governments have shown the stomach for any reform. In France, the only universities that are seriously trying to adapt to compete with the best are some of the Grandes Ecoles, the elite universities that educate a tiny fraction of the student body. In what passes for radical innovation by French standards, several of the best, including Hautes Etudes Commerciales and Sciences Po, now offer US-style Masters of Business Administration to try to prevent France’s brightest students from heading across the Atlantic.

But mainstream French universities remain in long-term decline. Because most colleges are banned from selecting pupils on the basis of ability, they suffer from huge drop-out rates and up to 90% annual exam failure rates.

The price of this failure to reform is there for all to see, though most would rather avert their gaze. Europe’s universities once gained 75% of Nobel prizes, America’s 25%. Now the figures are reversed, indicating that Europe’s academic decline has been even more precipitous than its economic decline. The dwindling band of European-born and educated professors who are awarded top academic honours usually now work for US universities. Oxford, once the greatest university in the world, has not a single Nobel laureate in any of its faculties these days.

In the United States, where fees are ubiquitous (but so are bursaries) there are 2,000 private colleges as well as 1,500 supported by state funds. As a result, America spends 2.3% of its gross domestic product on higher education compared with Britain’s 1.1%. The gap is explained entirely by America’s charging of fees and ability to attract private funding.

The head of Britain’s "Russell Group", a collection of some of the country’s most prestigious universities who fancy themselves as a nascent Ivy League, has pointed out that in the past 20 years spending per student has fallen by 50% - because the state has expanded student numbers rapidly but failed to meet the cost - so spending per student is now only half of what it is in America. That shows the ground even the best British universities need to make up if they are to compete with America’s finest.

The Blair reforms, even in their original version, are inadequate to the task and his ministers have since watered them down in a vain attempt to make them palatable to Labour backbenchers. But they are at least a start, pointing British university finance in the right fee-based direction, on which much can be built; they could also be a template for other, more wary European governments to follow.

If Mr Blair loses it will mean the British political system is inadequate to the task of an essential reform - and the chance of reform elsewhere in Europe will be zero.