bigideas

Government funding for ELQs — essentially, second degrees — is being redistributed. These cuts are likely to make “lifelong learning” even more difficult for most of us than it is already, but there’s no simple answer to how funding ought to be distributed.

An “ELQ” is a higher education qualification at the same as or a lower level than one you already posess. So if you did your first degree in History and want to retrain as a mechanical engineer, or if you already have a masters in Fine Art but would like to do one in Art History, those are ELQs. If you have a degree in mechanical engineering and want to do a masters in Fine Art, that’s not an ELQ because it’s a higher-level qualification than any you already have. Good luck getting admitted to the course though.

According to the same web page, “the grant will be re-directed to support more people of all ages going to study Higher Education in England for the first time”. I guess the idea is that obtaining a first degree is a more powerful force for social good than obtaining a second at the same level, especially if your background means you might struggle with the costs of so doing. Hence, the money is more equitably spent getting more first-time graduates through the system.

Richard Lambert of the CBI gave a typically eloquent speech decrying this idea:

There may indeed be evidence that the cost of funding ELQ students has been to deprive significant numbers of qualified first time students of a university place.

It’s just that I haven’t seen it.

On this point I suspect he’s right; not every 18-year-old wants to go to university, no matter how much the government wants them to want to. The idea that every adult should have a batchelor’s degree is nonsense. Of course every adult should have the opportunity of obtaining a batchelor’s degree, but that was the case even when I was an undergraduate, back in the dark days of Thatcherism.

Lambert is working with his own narrative, an unsurprising one for a spokeman for the CBI: he thinks the purpose of education is to provide industry with skilled workers. That the government has bought into this narrative is evidenced even by the name of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, which used to be the Department for Education.

There’s another idea about education, which is that it’s inherently valuable. This idea isn’t exclusive to humanities departments. We think it enriches human life to study things. The more the average person knows, appreciates and understands stuff that’s hard to know, appreciate or understand, the richer we’ll be as a culture.

It strikes me that in mainstream political talk about education, though, Lambert’s narrative dominates. The most valid form of lifelong learning is assumed to be vocational, and education purely for personal enrichment is considered flippant. Here’s Lambert again:

I am also offended by the hints you sometimes hear that ELQ students are nothing more than a bunch of middle class freeloaders. That’s the “Why should we pay to teach the Ambassador’s wife to learn French” question.

Quite apart from the fact that it would be a jolly good thing if the ambassador’s wife could speak French, this attitude simply demeans those students who are struggling to move ahead in the workplace.

He likes the idea of the Ambassador’s wife learning French because it’s relevant to her job — it’s the applicability of the “skill” she’s learning that validates it in his eyes. He doesn’t rule out the possibility of her being a “middle class freeloader” should she decide to study, say, sociology instead.

On this view, the entire state-funded education system is really a training subsidy for businesses or (as Lambert openly suggests) an incentive to stop them outsourcing or relocating elsewhere. Yet this is a new, controversial view that needs to be debated rather than taken as read.

Should taxpayers’ money be spent on “improving” our culture? That’s a wider question that takes in arts, sport and “heritage” funding as well as education. There’s also the question of what counts as improving and what doesn’t. Maybe that’s the debate that’s needed here, although any conclusions will come too late for ELQs.