How to Stop Meddlesome Mandy Messing Up the Life Chances of Middle-Class Children
Civitas, 11 August 2009
Twelve years of incessant meddling by the Government with education has failed to improve the chances of pupils at ‘bog-standard’ comprehensives gaining sufficiently good A level grades to satisfy the entry requirements of the country’s better universities. So, now Lord Mandelson has seemingly set his sights on these universities agreeing to lower their entry requirements for such pupils to enable them gain admittance to them.
The ostensible justification for what seems on the surface a blatant act of reverse discrimination in favour of children from a particular social class is that, because it is harder for pupils to achieve good grades at certain schools, a grade B obtained at one of them should count as much as an A grade from one where such grades are easier to come by. Thus, the argument goes, universities do not discriminate against applicants from more favoured backgrounds should they be passed over in favour of those with lower grades from less well achieving schools.
In sum, Lord Mandelson wants universities to regard 2 Bs and a C gained at a bog standard comprehensive as equivalent to, or better than, 3 A’s gained at a grammar or a public school, or even at just a very good comprehensive. Apparently, Leeds University and two London medical schools already employ this system and claim their academic standards have not been adversely affected as a result.
I wonder.
Writing in today’s Independent, Dominic Lawson claims that: ‘the most recent research from Oxford and Cambridge showed that the A-levels scores of graduates between 1976 and 2002 were exactly predictive of the final degree results, regardless of whether the undergraduates had previously been privately educated or not.’
If that finding has general validity, it suggests the kind of discounting Mandelson is proposing cannot but depress the quality of the intakes of universities that go in for it.
Accordingly, the overall calibre of universities is bound to suffer, if it is introduced generally, as seems likely if New Labour can cling onto power sufficiently long to enable Mandelson to get his way.
If I were a middle-class parent of school-age children (as I am), I would be profoundly worried (as I am) about Mandelson’s apparent desire to see all universities adopt this system of positive discrimination.
Thinking about how they (and I) might respond to the potential threat it poses to the educational prospects of their (and my) children led me to realise there is no longer any good reason why the field of possibilities should be restricted to UK universities. Already, for example, there are good medical schools abroad whose qualifications are recognised by the UK, and which offer as good a medical training as can be obtained here for no greater cost, and which, to attract foreign students, are willing to admit them with lower A level grades than are UK medical schools.
Many foreign universities offer comparable educational opportunities, sometimes without demanding British students receive tuition in a language other than English.
It seems to me that, should Mandelson succeed in getting his way in debasing the academic currency still further in the manner upon which he seem intent, there is bound to be an eventual flight abroad of young human capital in quest of a decent university education, just as, in the 1970s, non-human capital left the country to escape the confiscatory marginal tax rates introduced by Old Labour.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether UK universities could retain their powers of attraction in the lucrative overseas student market should they be forced to implement Mandelson’s plan.
Doubtless, if that market was threatened, the policy would lose its attractions for the likes of Mandelson. By then, however, he would have long since sacrificed the golden goose upon the altar of equality.
All that will remain of it will be a few feathers in the form of some rotting ivory towers serving to remind the inhabitants of this country of when its best universities were among those of its institutions of which they could justly be the most proud.