With 'A' levels, confirmation and clearing, and a nice new batch of league tables, Higher Education is enjoying it's normal high profile in August. I'm struck, again, however by the way that the press, and perhaps ourselves, are still dividing the world up into 'old' and 'new', especially noting where a university used to be a polytechnic.
I accepted a job at a polytechnic a little over 15 years ago, but on the day I arrived there it had become a University. 15 years is a long time - why is is necessary when writing about Oxford Brookes, for example, that our local paper still feels the need the add the tag, "the former Oxford Polytechnic" to its description of us. When will this stop? I don't think that Bath University is now referred to as "the former Bristol College of Science and Technology", or Leeds as "the former Yorkshire College".
There are still some structural differences between the pre- and post- 1992 sectors: diferent legislation, charters vs articles of governance, pension schemes etc. but are these real? Is is just the league table quality judgements that seperate tiers of universities? What do we think: is there something about 1992 that still rankles with the press? Is there something about the polytechnic status (it can't be the word - Surrey isn't billed as the "former Battersea Polytechnic")?
Soon we will have young people applying who were born after 1992, maybe the fact that a university has been a university for the whole of their life will be enough to consign this dividing line to history.
Mike Ratcliffe
Oxford Brookes University (formerly Oxford College of Technology)
17 August 2007
Free university tuition in Scotland
I am filled with admiration for the SNP's decision to scrap the tuition fee for all EU students in Scotland... except for the English who will still have to pay.
It's not the free tuition that I admire - the debate about funding is largely over and most people now accept that pay as you go HE is the only sensible way forward. (The fact that only the Lib Dems and the SNP seriously advocate anything else speaks volumes!)
What I really admire is the SNP's political strategy. Clearly resigned to the fact that an overwhelming proportion of Scots would vote against independence in a referendum, they have decided to irritate the English into starting divorce proceedings. Free university tuition and free prescriptions, paid for out of the grant from Westminster, are just the opening salvos in a long war of attrition. The question is, who will blink first?
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