‘The turn of the screw’; marketization and higher education in England

Notes

1. This is the explicit agenda of the Browne Report (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2010) and Students at the Heart of the System (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2011).

2. The Haldane principle, named after Richard Burton Haldane, is the idea that decisions about what to spend research funds on should be made by researchers rather than politicians.

3. As set out by Kuznets (1953) and described by Piketty (2014) as a temporary phase that has come to an end. Inclusive economic growth has been newly endorsed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

4. Part of the reason that Robbins perceived there was unmet demand for higher education, of course, was to do with the gender imbalance in recruitment - especially at elite institutions -and low levels of participation of those from working class backgrounds. Changing attainment and aspirations required expansion of student numbers if higher education were not to become a zero-sum game in which upper class and middle class boys would be squeezed out. This is also part of the explanation for the grade inflation associated with the expansion of higher education.

5. See, especially, its pamphlet, Jewels in the Crown (Russell Group, 2012). A recent article in Times Higher Education sets out the competitive pressures on ‘research intensive universities’ (Ruckenstein et al., 2016).

6. More technically, the RAB charge (the Resource Accounting and Budgeting estimate of the amount of loans that will be unpaid) is set at about 45%.