The combined endowments of the three top US universities alone is more than Britain’s entire defence budget. Luckily the risk of American invasion is still one of graduate students seeking a cheaper option, with old-world charm and brand name. But the days of Oxbridge and the Russell Group holding ranks with the ‘new money’ Ivy League are numbered. Not just because more money funds more, and better, research. But because US universities also use that money to do a better job finding, investing in and nurturing potential – potential often still excluded in the UK. They show that excellence need not mean elitism, and that’s a lesson the British academe needs to learn if it is to continue to compete globally.
‘We will have no choice but to privatise’ is what Britain’s best research universities threaten whenever the government asks too many questions about social mobility. Push us too hard on access numbers, query our admissions process, and you’ll lose influence over access forever. But it would be wrong to imagine that the American model of private universities means sacrificing social mobility. The irony is, compared to their public UK equivalents, the top-ranked, mainly private, US universities do much better not only in terms of the quality of their teaching and research – but also in the social and ethnic mix of their students.
In the US, at the top universities, full tuition fees can be three times higher than the UK – think nearer £30,000 than £9,000 a year. Admissions rates, for undergraduates and PhDs, are about ten times as tough: sometimes only 4 per cent of applicants are admitted, compared to around 18 percent in Oxbridge. And yet amongst the private US Ivy League, it would be unthinkable that a third of the annual intake could come from just 100 elite schools, or that in one year only a single Black Caribbean undergraduate would be admitted.
Some in the elite British universities, like the truly posh, don’t like to talk about the money, still less ask for it from government or donors. But many advantages offered by top US universities come down to their wealth. The ability to attract and retain top academics and produce excellent research should be obvious. For some on the left, there’s still an inverse snobbery that dismisses these benefits – they would attack all other Coalition cuts before those that are destroying our best universities. But what they miss is the effect money has on access, and converting that access into social mobility.
First off, there is financial aid. The US universities offer support not only for the very poorest, but the whole swathe of ordinary families that are not actually rich. There’s a reason the Treasury was happy to allow Liberal Democrats their tuition fees concession of funding for free-school meals kids – sadly, so few will get there (when the Sutton Trust last looked at this, pupils who qualified for free school means made up less than 1 per cent of the Oxbridge intake).
At Harvard for example, no undergraduate pays more than a nominal contribution if their parents earn less than $65,000 (£42,000), and aid is available for families earning up to $150,000 (£97,000) sometimes, more. Other top universities are similarly generous. So by all means have a Secretary of State send a letter to all the 16 year olds who have done well in their GCSEs, and encourage them to apply to university. Far better though would be to have a letter sent direct from a university, along with a commitment that, if you get in, regardless of your family finances, you will be funded.
Secondly, it’s the structure and content of the degrees themselves. While Gove is putting his energies into reforming A-levels, English bachelor degrees remain largely unchanged since ancient times. Four-year US degrees cost more, but they enable universities to offer a range of course subjects, majors and minors. Rather than assume students will have fully developed all their skills and intellectual interests by age 17, this gives students the space to explore and in some cases catch up on skill gaps. Even if you’re sure you only ever want to be a humanities professor, a good level of maths and a foreign language come in handy. Similarly, the option to try classes in the arts is there for those that didn’t absorb them by social osmosis at public school. Add to this the greater emphasis on teaching – at Oxbridge, as historian Tony Judt put it, one doesn’t so much get taught as read books and talk about them – and you can see why those from less privileged families and schools will fare better with an Ivy League education.
The financial power the American universities wield is undoubtedly important, but there’s something else as well. The best US private universities see developing talent, ability and aspiration as part of their mission, integral to academic excellence. Some in the UK elite universities still see it as threatening excellence. Top private US universities don’t directly make money through their efforts on diversity (although their endeavours will help fundraising, and many successful former students do give back). They have no civil servants trying to remotely control the numbers admitted at each institution. In the US, the debate isn’t about how many state-school or minority students one should ‘let in’, but how many of the smartest young people they can get, nurture, mentor, and proudly claim for their own.
And they’re happy to claim them from anywhere. The Sutton Trust, which works increase social mobility in the UK, teamed up with the Fulbright program to help state school students apply for US universities, where they can get this level of investment, and rounded educational opportunity. The programme has already doubled in size due to demand. It’s fantastic for the students. But it would have been better if Britain’s best universities, which can still hold their own among the best in the world, had been able to raise the funds to offer similar scholarships and fought to keep the brightest in Britain.
Sophie Moullin was a No 10 policy adviser under Gordon Brown from 2008-10 and is now a Research Fellow at Columbia’s Population Research Center.
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