If Higher Ed did have a golden age then when was it?

I was greatly interested to read Sir David Behan’s comments following the publication of his recent review of the Office for Students (you can read a separate blog about that here) in which he commented on the current state of higher education in the UK and then stated:

This has led to the observation that the ‘golden age’ of higher education is over.

Since then he has also been quoted in The Times on this topic:

The head of the universities watchdog has said the “golden age of higher education” is probably over, warning that the scale of the funding crisis facing the sector is “significant”.

In his first interview since being appointed last month, Sir David Behan, interim chairman of the Office for Students (OfS), said all options should be on the table to secure the financial sustainability of institutions, amid fears that some face bankruptcy.

He is referring to opinions that others have shared with him as part of his review although the source is not entirely clear. Whatever the origins though, my guess is that anyone speaking to a random sample of current university staff would struggle to find anyone to agree with the proposition that they have been working in a ‘golden age’ in UKHE. Indeed, I suspect that many would respond that the recent experience has been a very long way from gilt-edged indeed.

So what is all this golden age talk then?

Fees, Fees, Fees

In terms of the relatively recent history of higher education in England, the landmark change to higher education funding which was delivered by the introduction of £9,000 fees (up from £3,000) in 2012 is often viewed as ushering in a very positive financial phase for the sector. Not only were fees much higher (and almost every university immediately charged the maximum allowable) but previous caps on student recruitment were removed too. Not quite ‘fill your boots’ but certainly a more benign financial environment than before.

 In hindsight though it is perhaps less clear cut. Not only was it not inflation-linked, which has meant that the real value of the fee has declined to under £6,000 today (despite the small boost to £9,250 in 2017), but it was also substituting for many other funding sources, including capital allocations, and allowed government to play with and reduce direct funding for certain subjects but also research. We ended up then, within a relatively short period of time, in a situation whereby HEIs were having to look for other sources of funding, principally international student fees, and engaging in lots of internal cross-subsidy activity to enable research activity to continue. And, if you were a student, the perspective on the increase in your fee loan and the loss of student maintenance would be very different too. 

So, perhaps a period with a bit of initial boom but then a fairly rapid deflation of the golden balloon, further exacerbated by the impact of the Covid pandemic and rising prices in the latter third of this era.

Other Golden Age Views 

The always insightful Alex Usher of HESA is quoted in University World News commenting on the golden age in the Global South, driven by China’s HE drive where  funding had grown at about 15% per annum before falling back to 2%. This sudden shrinkage was significant:

“That made a huge difference in the world higher education economy.”

The next year, due to a collapse in oil prices, a bunch of other big spending countries started pulling back on spending – Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Indonesia among them. “All of a sudden you see that the Global South, which had been catching up, has stalled,” said Usher.

“I think people will look back on those years, 2006 to 2013, as a golden age across much of the Global South. The problem is, it seems to be over.”

So, a slightly different golden age there.

In the USA, there is perhaps a more general acceptance that there was, for a period, something resembling a goldie looking era of higher education growth. For example there is this book, focusing on just one US state, which is very clear about the period in question. In Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945-1970  we are told that:

In the years following World War II, academic leaders in Massachusetts participated in a national debate about the social role of higher education in the era that lay ahead. They also experienced the beginnings of a period of expansion for universities that would continue, more or less uninterrupted, for twenty-five years. 

The National Child Development Study, a major piece of research following the lives of over 17,000 people born in the UK in a single week in 1958, has been following this cohort closely for well over 60 years now. The BBC, in a report some years ago, commented on the educational experiences of this group and concluded that it was very far from a golden age for most. A small percentage of them benefited from higher education (more men than women) and a similarly small proportion accessed apprenticeships. The vast majority simply went into work. Not at all golden.

Golden Age Rankings and Disruption

But wherever there is a higher education categorisation of some kind you can be reasonably confident that someone will try to produce a league table. And sure enough those creative types over at THE managed to create a ranking based on the year of a university’s founding and a view that it happened in a slightly shorter post-war period:

The universities in the Times Higher Education “Golden Age” ranking were established between ’45 and ’67. The ranking takes its name from what was a Golden Age in global higher education, characterised by rapid university expansion and increasing investment in research. 

Because of the age of these universities (older than 50 years old but under 80), they fall outside the parameters of our overall Young University Rankings that looks at institutions under 50 years of age. They make up a unique group of higher education institutions that have embedded academic practices but haven’t been around for hundreds of years. 

The slightly arbitrary choice of 1967 as the end of this particular golden age does indicate that it might be the case that this was just a cunning device to rank a bunch of universities which didn’t appear prominently in other THE league tables. 

A KPMG report from 2020 entitled The Future of Higher Education in a Disruptive World pitched the golden age as lasting from the end of the second world war right through to the pandemic:

So, the combination of human capital theory, equality of opportunity, the emergence of an export industry and the need for research combined to create a Golden Age of expansion and esteem. 

However, that age is most definitely over according to this report and KPMG argue that therefore:

Traditional universities are approaching a crossroads: Do they transform into new kinds of entities? Optimize existing operations to enhance efficiencies and capabilities? Do nothing in the hope that if no rescue appears, they will have time to decide what to do later? Or do nothing in the belief that they are invulnerable?

Ultimately, today’s university leaders must face critical questions requiring timely and strategic responses that will likely define their future in a hyper-competitive new world.

All pretty challenging and very little golden about any of that then.

Academia Nostalgia

Whilst there are arguments to be made that there have been periods of growth and additional funding for higher education, often following years or decades of constraint and austerity, golden age thinking is not just about money. Although money is a really big part of it.

Among many staff who have worked in higher education for a long time or who worked in the sector a long time ago, there is often a strong sense of golden age nostalgia. This is a yearning for a different time and working environment which was just remembered as being a great deal more conducive all round. 

In practice this may rose-tinted recollections of a time of elite HE, with full student deference to staff, lots of time to do research and have fun at conferences, going to the bar at lunchtimes, an endless summer vacation, no IT system implementations to worry about and no real concerns about funding either. 

It is the university world of Brideshead, of Changing Places, of Gaudy Night. It really is closer to fiction than the current realities of mass higher education. And that really is the point. There is no such thing as a golden age of higher education. Indeed, there never really was a golden age, Not recently, not in the middle past, not in the last few centuries. Golden age mythologising is a fool’s errand and utterly unhelpful. Nostalgia truly is the most pointless of yearnings.

Higher education has continued to evolve over the decades and every era has been different – there is no going back from where we are to an earlier time, where there was somehow plenty of money, optimal regulation, governments which cherished the sector etc. It’s a fantasy. For short periods, in a smaller and very different system, there may have been fewer challenges than at present. But there never was a golden age.