More drivel from G-G:

http://www.sj-r.com/News/stories/25487.asp

I have yet to see any of these ‘experts’ show any interest in the real threats to education:

http://www.instantdegrees.com  

http://www.degrees-and-diplomas.com

http://www.universityofdublin.org

http://www.degreexpress.eu/?degree+adwords2

http://www.speedydegrees.com/sitemap.asp

http://www.degrees-for-sale.com

http://www.customdegrees.com

http://www.affordabledegrees.com

http://www.degreexpress.eu

My own informal review of online discussion forums shows that at this very minute:

Degree.net = 83 users online
Degreeboard.com = 30
Degreeinfo.com = 17
Degreediscussion.com = 5

Of course, there is a difference between quantity and quality, but it appears Degree.net is the current leader in volume, while the discredited Degreeinfo remains in severe decline.  Degreediscussion appears to be even more irrelevant now than when it started.  Degreeboard is the sleeper, with few posters but a lot of lurkers.

To what can we attribute the popularity of Degree.net?  There seems to be a lot of discussion of current distance learning programs, nearly all of it courteous, thoughtful and offered in the spirit of cooperation.  Conversely, the self-proclaimed "experts" and rude mindguards who have befouled the discussions at DI and DD, and AED before that, seem to be absent.  

It's good to see there is still some life in these boards somewhere.  Let's hope the cancer spreaders stay in their DI and DD rat holes and leave the normal people alone.

Without that asshole.

Let's hope for 2 million more.

Berkeley student involved in Halberstam crash sentenced

Quote:SAN FRANCISCO -- A 27-year-old [regionally accredited] UC Berkeley journalism student who was behind the wheel in the car crash that killed Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Halberstam was sentenced to five days in jail Thursday.

...A first-year student at the university's graduate School of Journalism, Jones ran a red light on April 23 while driving Halberstam to an interview with former New York Giants quarterback legend Y.A. Tittle. Jones made a left turn at a busy intersection in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, and Halberstam's side of the car was struck by an oncoming car. The writer, who lived in New York, died instantly from a punctured heart.

Jones, who pleaded no contest last fall to a charge of misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter, read a brief statement at the hearing, expressing his remorse and saying he would spend his life upholding Halberstam's ideals.

Another slaughter at a regionally accredited university.

Quote:A gunman killed six students in a [regionally accredited] Northern Illinois University lecture hall before shooting himself Thursday afternoon. Many more were wounded: Aside from the perpetrator, Northern Illinois reported 21 victims in all.

Quote:A source identified the gunman as a current graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Quote:"Neither Irish, nor a university. Some observations on the Irish International University controversy
by John Kersey

This week, the BBC has been broadcasting an investigative feature[1] on the Irish International University that has been revealing to say the least. The candour with which its honorary chancellor, Professor Jeff Wooller, now a tax exile in Monte Carlo, openly admitted that the university was "dodgy" was refreshing, if somewhat worrying.

The BBC is right to highlight the poor quality and misleading practices that are characteristic of some "educational" institutions. In the case of IIU, its claim of independent "accreditation" was shown to be by a body of its own creation, while its governing council, by the admission of its honorary chancellor, did not exist. Nor did the claimed campus in Ireland, which was in fact a mailbox.

There has been extensive negative publicity concerning IIU on the Internet for several years now, particularly emanating from Malaysia, where the university has been active. In the UK, IIU has operated through making arrangements with private residential colleges which have then offered courses that lead to IIU degrees. It is not an offence to offer overseas degrees in the UK provided it is made clear that they are not from a UK institution, and it is not suggested anywhere in the BBC's report that IIU has been acting illegally.

It is, however, a little surprising that in its claimed three months of investigative reporting, the BBC failed to dig up that Wooller has been in this sort of trouble before, back in 1995 or so. According to information supplied by the Institute of Chartered Accountants (of which he is a member), "Mr Wooller accepted a Consent Order on a complaint that in a Magistrates Court he pleaded guilty to two offences under Section 214(1) of the Education Reform Act 1988 for which he was reprimanded, fined £1,000 and ordered to pay costs of £250.[2]"

IIU and Ireland

IIU and its formerly associated institution the Irish University Business School have been around for ten years or so in one form or another. In Ireland, IIU has been registered as a company since 2000 under the name Institiud Idirnaiseuinta na h'Eireann den Aontas Eorpach Teoranta. This is in accordance with the Universities Act 1997, which regulates the use of the word "university" in company names. The reason for this regulation is that in common law, such as pertains in Ireland, the use of the word "university" is de facto assumed to carry with it the assumption of university status and the right to undertake university work, except where aspects of that work are specifically proscribed by law.

However, Irish legislation does not presently regulate the conferring of degrees by private institutions, and several private degree-awarding institutions, including Warnborough College Ireland, operate on the basis of Irish registration.

Neither did Ireland prevent the Institiud Idirnaiseuinta na h'Eireann from obtaining official registration of "Irish International University" as its business name from the Irish government authorities in 2000. As a result, when IIU claims that its use of the title university is sanctioned by the Irish government, it is quite correct. Documentation confirming this is readily available from the official online register of business names from the Companies Registration Office, which lists Irish International University as business name number 182631[3].

IIU is certainly no part of the Irish public education system, but the Irish government is misleading at best when it says that it has failed to sanction its use of the university title. Whatever problems IIU has caused, a large part of the responsibility for them must lie squarely at the feet of the Irish government for permitting it to exist in the first place. Only a retrospective and doubtless complex legislative decision on its part would now be able to effect a remedy to that situation.

A bogus university

In any case, it is one thing to be a university in law, and another to be one in terms of achievement. On the basis of the above information and much else that is known about this institution, IIU fails the latter test comprehensively.

Like some of its commercially-focussed American counterparts, IIU has no real academic life to it; it produces no scholarly output, undertakes no philanthropic activity, engenders no real benefit to society. Where it could, with effort and commitment, provide a determined alternative to the mainstream, it has been content to be merely a pallid and perhaps deceptive imitation of it, justifying the BBC's "bogus" description.

Doubtless, students do some work for their degrees at IIU; whatever the standard of that work, it is not suggested that IIU is an outright diploma mill or degree-selling operation. And given the lamentable standards of some of the less-celebrated public universities in the UK, it is unwise at best for the public sector to start crowing about how great British standards of university education are.

Why IIU? Why now?

But the shallow facade created by IIU is in many respects an easy target for the BBC, and it is important that we should look beyond the entertainment provided by its discomfiture towards the deeper reasons why it should be in the news now, and indeed given prime prominence by BBC London--the state broadcaster--when other major channels and newspapers did not even trouble to report the story. The whiff of government propaganda, as one might anticipate, is not far away, and its telltale sign is that the obscure institution in question is not being accused of having done anything illegal, but instead is being heaped with an equivalent level of moral opprobrium by the political class.

Anatomy of an agenda

Today on both sides of the Atlantic there has developed a particular lobby group comprised of low-grade universities that are either owned by the state or under the direct control of accreditation agencies that are in turn controlled by the state.
The pattern goes something like this. The weaker the profile of a university is, the harder it finds it to attract students. Oxford has no problems in that regard. The former Peckham Polytechnic, on the other hand, cannot pick and choose with such ease, and it is likely that a high proportion of its intake will be from overseas, which of course carries higher fees and potentially a less demanding constituency which is seeking the supposed prestige of a British degree and does not much care which institution it is from.

As the university declines in standing, so it becomes more and more dependent on the state to allocate it funding and to assign those students for whom it would not have been a first choice. Indeed, most of these students would not be at university at all were it not subsidised by the state, which continues to advocate mass university education not for academic or humanitarian reasons, but because it reduces crime and unemployment.

The chief--indeed the only--strength of the low-grade state institution becomes ultimately that it is part of the state machinery and that its degrees are "degrees of the state". It is these institutions that we hear pushing the line that "all state degrees are equal in standing" in the face of a disbelieving public. It is also these institutions whose graduates are frequently cited by employers as lacking basic skills and contributing to the"dumbing down" of university degrees.

It is these institutions who have most to gain from supporting both the state and its regulatory procedures that purport to assess quality. In the UK, it is extremely difficult to find out any useful information whatsoever from university regulatory bodies that will help you determine whether one university is actually better than another. The regulators may talk a great deal about quality and produce voluminous paperwork and statistical reports to justify their drain on the public purse. But actually, their purpose is directed inward, not outward. They are not there to tell the public which universities represent value for money and which are poor investments. They are there to protect and bolster the weaker institutions from market forces by defending and ring-fencing the state system itself.

Ironically, the BBC and the political class themselves are often persuaded to see themselves as defenders of "the university system", doubtless conceiving of that system in terms of the halcyon days of the 1970s when many of them were students. They ignore the fact that the excellence of those institutions which were then-active is today being actively impeded and dragged down to the lowest common denominator. The factors responsible are the substantial tail-end created by the post-1992 expansion of the university sector, and the consistent effort to get more and more students into higher education, whatever their aptitude for university life.

Inevitably the result is that standards fall and the best universities suffer because of the effort - financial, academic, propagandistic - now needed to prop up the worst.

The private sector as enemy

Why should such ring-fencing be needed? In particular, because there is increasing disquiet in those circles concerning competition from the private sector. The BBC's fuss about IIU is cover, in the same report, for higher education minister Bill Rammell to talk about new legislation that will introduce mandatory state-approved accreditation for private colleges, scheduled to come in by 2009. A condition of obtaining this accreditation is that these colleges can no longer offer courses that lead to degrees conferred by non-state-approved institutions to overseas students seeking visas. Naturally, IIU is among the sans culottes.

The private college sector remains the hidden success story of British tertiary education, and it is a sector "unlike the mainstream of higher education" that is dominated by British entrepreneurs who are largely black or Asian in ethnicity. Dozens of institutions--the BBC reported over 60 in East London alone--operate without state subsidy and generate considerable profits through the supply of education on the open, unregulated market. Their customers are most usually overseas students who come to Britain seeking a year or more of productive study and cultural experience, aware that the "British brand" is a powerful marketing tool when they return home. They may be studying in small, undistinguished-looking premises over shopfronts and in unfashionable parts of town, but in contrast to the state universities, they can gain access to private education for considerably less money and often with fewer academic barriers to entry.

The demand areas for such institutions remain those that are most directly vocational, particularly business and information technology. Degree qualifications (especially the MBA) are highly valued, and some colleges partner with British universities to offer their awards. The smaller colleges, however, generally find that the fees demanded by the British institutions to franchise their degree programmes are unsustainable, and also that the British curriculums on offer are better suited to grand campuses and taxpayer-funded facilities than to students who are looking for a direct route to the assessment of their ability and to a pared-down style of study. Often those students are being taught by tutors who are earning little more than the minimum wage, without any of the security of tenure that their cosseted public sector counterparts enjoy. This may be education on a shoestring, but it is education nonetheless, and it serves the needs of many who experience it.

Into this situation have come overseas institutions such as IIU, and a myriad other counterparts, mostly from the United States, which fill the gap by providing degree franchises at an affordable price, thus meeting market demand. Some of these institutions are decent enough, while others are dreadful. None is Harvard, but Harvard is not what this market is looking for. These institutions, by contrast, are breaking a state monopoly and creating price competition. That is why the likes of Bill Rammell have seen them as a problem.

The growth and increasing demand fuelling a vibrant private sector in tertiary education has sent up a warning signal to the low-grade state institutions. Since overseas students are such a big part of their operation and viability, the prospect of losing them to a private sector alternative fills them with fear and foreboding.

What really disquiets them, however, is the prospect that the choice between public and private is not just one that will affect the poorest overseas students--those who would probably not be able to afford state fees in the first place--but that it will come to embrace their target market of the more affluent. Heaven forbid, indeed, that their target market should decide that the private sector offers better value for money and a solution that meets its needs with equal effectiveness. In a developing country, where higher education is the preserve of the elite, even a sub-standard degree from IIU starts to look like a good deal.

The hidden machinery at work

What to do? Well, for the public sector and for government, the answer is simple. The success story of the private sector must be eliminated, and there are two ways in which this will be effected.

Firstly, new legislation will make it all but impossible for most of the private colleges to operate without slashing their profits as they seek new arrangements with British universities. That will effectively shift the odds back in favour of the public sector monopoly. Many of the private colleges will probably go out of business altogether, especially if they do not have the facilities available to meet the expectations of their British university partners.

Secondly, in the process of introducing the new legislation, it would be mightily useful to discredit private sector degree providers as much as possible so as to deter students from seeing them as a viable alternative. Why not find a particularly indifferent institution to be held up as an example? IIU certainly seems to tick all the boxes.

Thirdly, why stop at the private degree providers? Get rid of, or reduce, the private college market itself, and its customers will have no choice but to turn to the state.

While we're about all that, why not also use our convenient scapegoat to reinforce that oldest myth of all--that only the public sector can be trusted to deliver higher education, and if the private sector barbarians are let in the gates, there will be nothing left but tax exiles sunning themselves in Monaco - and dodgy degrees a-plenty.

The moral agenda reinforced by the personal

Of course, in all these cases, there must also be victims. Bring them forth--those who spent their life savings on courses that they now believe (or have been told by the state propaganda machine) are worthless. The correct approach of caveat emptor is rejected in favour of that of presuming that consumers are merely gullible victims and that choice in the free market is too demanding for their meagre intellects. And the question of "worthless" is moot when graduates of the vaunted state system find themselves asking whether you'd like fries with that.

And those who fear being caught up in the backwash of negative publicity--prominent businesspeople with remarkably little guile and who would hardly be where they were without a high degree of nous--now line up to declaim that they were no more than unwary dupes "hoodwinked" into involvement with the establishment concerned. Did someone say "show trial"?

Best of all, from the media's point of view, is where people with qualifications that are not necessarily bogus in themselves, but come from institutions which have hit the media spotlight for the wrong reasons, are "discovered" being employed in positions of responsibility. There's nothing quite like a witch-hunt and the spectacle of someone being prominently fired pour encourager les autres. It's all a modern morality tale--only with that particularly distorted and blinkered brand of morality that doctrinaire state socialists seem to specialise in these days.

Visa smokescreen

Another line of fire is provided by the issue of illegal immigration and some private colleges that are fronts or scams to assist students to obtain visas deceptively. Yet, with much fanfare only a few years ago, the government introduced a Register that was at the time claimed to be able to distinguish bona fide colleges from the makeweights. David Willetts, opposition spokesman on universities, raises a pertinent question when he asks "It begs the question of how they got on to the list in the first place and suggests the government's process for accrediting them is not up to scratch.[4]"

Yet, while this is true, the answer is not to ban the unregulated private sector outright, as some lobby groups are arguing, nor is it to introduce yet more accreditation schemes to replace the existing one that has failed so abjectly. The answer instead lies in much deeper and more politically difficult questions about the extent to which illegal immigrants are eligible for welfare benefits and are able to work in the UK without being detected and sent back to their countries of origin. Ultimately, the visa issue and the colleges issue are not as connected as the government would wish us to believe. Smokescreen on dodgy colleges is a great deal easier to produce, however, than a coherent policy on illegal immigration, an area where the government has shuffled its feet for the past ten years.

Treating the consumer as ignorant dupe helps the agenda along. Never mind that 30 seconds on Google tells you most of what you would want to know about any higher education institution in the world, private or not – and the rule is always rightly caveat emptor, even with the most prestigious of hallowed halls.

Never mind that people can and do make ill-informed and ill-judged decisions about how to spend their money every day without it being the business of the state to become their personal financial advisor.

Never mind that for every one complainant there may be several hundred satisfied customers.

As ever, whenever the state claims to act on the grounds of consumer protection, it does not take much investigation to find its real motivation in terms of the coercive reinforcement of a state monopoly.

The likes of IIU exist for good reason

It doesn't matter if IIU and a dozen institutions like it turn out to be the dunces of the private sector education world. There's a reason why they exist, and it's called market forces. The BBC investigation will not be the end of IIU, and it may even--as so often in similar cases--find that the negative attention perversely results in increased demand for its product as its profile is raised.
Even were IIU to close, there are many similar outfits out there ready and willing to take its place. And, truth be told, the best of them are meeting a standard equal or superior to their state counterparts. In a comment in The Times Online[5], someone signing off as "Jeff Wooller, Monte Carlo, Monaco", said that "I will continue to work with [IIU] to try to get full accreditation so that everyone will then be happy." With the state of higher education today, it would not be a great surprise if he were successful in that aim. The main criteria to achieve accreditation, after all, are the possession of money, physical facilities and a willingness to toe the political line of the lobbyists. Accreditation, at least in its US format which seems to be being rapidly imported to the UK, doesn't actually examine quality in terms of outputs at all.

Free the market – eliminate the problem

So the answer to Bill Rammell is as follows: if you want to see an end to the IIUs of this world, or at least their relegation to their proper place at the bottom of the educational food chain, there's an easy solution. Simply stop distorting the market through reinforcing a massive and aggressive public sector monopoly on higher education and providing it at extensively subsidised rates as if three years of study at the taxpayer's expense were some kind of automatic right for today's youth, regardless of their aptitude for university study. In short, stop providing a mass one-size-fits-all system and start thinking smart and thinking towards individualised education solutions.

If a free market is left to develop in higher education, the good and bad will be obvious for what they are, and the good will survive at the expense of the bad, which will fail and close. Fair competition is good for innovation and development, it's good for institutions and it's good for the public. Higher education needs to abandon the security of the ivory tower and realise that the free market is ultimately the best and most moral way to secure its future.

The private sector in higher education is currently squeezed into the small area that the state monopoly allows it to occupy--essentially a combination of niche providers and low-level outfits such as IIU. Take away the squeeze provided by the monopoly and the private sector will expand to take over the areas presently denied to it, including those where high quality is demanded.
Certainly, these changes will be a painful process. Those protected by the comforts of tenure at third-rate state establishments will likely find their positions evaporating. Courses which exist for no more reason than to meet the need created by the state's relentless drive to a system of mass higher education will become extinct. Universities will need not only to link up with employers in their communities but to respond directly to what they want them to provide, even when that means breaking the academic mould. Institutions will specialise instead of remaining generalist, and many niche institutions will spring up. Many young people who would otherwise go to university will instead go out to work and will want to study part-time or by distance learning, making the campus less and less relevant. And you can take it for granted that the education unions will be up in arms.

Yet this is a battle that needs to be fought and now is the time to fight it. Higher education is changing dramatically, largely because Internet-based distance education has enabled the private sector to enter and compete in a global marketplace where even the most determined ring-fencing and rhetoric cannot protect the public sector indefinitely. Year by year, the state powerbase becomes more tenuous and less easy to justify, as more and more students find that a sensible, well-informed choice within the private sector can work well for them. It is no longer a question of if, but of when the state finally cedes its power to the private sector.

It is time to bite the bullet, loosen the regulatory chains and let the market determine the results. But I fear Mr Rammell and his comrades lack the stomach for that fight.

References:
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/arti...ture.shtml
[2] Quoted at http://iam.subhumour.us/?p=1707
[3] See the searchable databases at www.cro.ie
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7177033.stm
[5] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_an...142514.ece

Some Thoughts in Favour of Private Universities

by Professor John Kersey

© 2004: Libertarian Alliance; Professor John Kersey.

John Kersey was educated at the Royal College of Music and subsequently earned his doctorate at Knightsbridge University, Denmark, where he is now Dean and Visiting Professor of Music. He is also Professor of Music at Adam Smith University, USA. He is an international award-winning concert pianist and music critic, and also works as a legal and academic consultant for universities in the areas of non-traditional and progressive education and distance learning.



Introduction

For many, higher education by definition conjures up images of substantial state-run institutions. The great universities dominate the educational landscape, their traditions and reputations defining not only educational standards but also the place of education within wider society. Where higher education takes place through residential study, it achieves the status of a rite of passage for the young, signifying not merely the opportunity to apply oneself to academic study under the tutelage of those who are experts in their fields, but the chance for personal growth amid like-minded peers. None of this is undesirable per se; quite the contrary. However, there is more to higher education than the present university establishment, and indeed some highly progressive work in education can in fact take place outside it.

The University and the Establishment

The expression “non-traditional” when applied to education suggests by its nature an anti-establishment outlook, and thus it has often proved in practice. What then, one might ask, is wrong with the university establishment, and what aspects might alternatives to it focus on? In the first place, by using the definition of an establishment, one moves to the heart of the matter; the universities are undeniably and explicitly politically-influenced, and bear the imprint of governmental education policies and strategies. Indeed, the state has arguably always seen education as its preserve to control and direct. One has merely to look superficially at the oldest and most influential of institutions to see that the universities both actively court political influence and that they seek to influence public debate in an explicitly political context. Conversely, where socialist or neo-socialist governments seek to bring objectives of social engineering into the operation of universities (as has frequently been debated concerning the issue of admissions to Oxbridge from the maintained sector) we see the clash of old and new elites and competing ideologies, and the question of potentially threatened academic standards is once more brought into play.

However, recent debate in the UK has suggested that there is certainly a case for the privatisation of higher education, at least in part, and that this concept even has the personal support of Tony Blair. In an article in the Daily Telegraph,1 Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, argues that, “The best universities in the world are the independent Ivy League institutions in America (Harvard, Stanford etc), and the most innovative are the independents in the Far East (there are now more than 1,000). Independence provides better management, higher investment and, contrary to myth, greater access for the poor.” The E. G. West Centre at the University of Newcastle2 was set up in 2002 in order to explore the area of educational privatisation and has produced extensive resources on all aspects of the issue.

Academic Arguments for Privatisation

Since 1992, the overall value of university graduates in the UK employment market has declined sharply with the democratisation of university entrance. The former polytechnics have taken on a conspicuous and valuable role in the university landscape, but for a large number of students, the dawning realisation that their degree qualifications are simply not valued in the workplace has come as a rude awakening in the light of the initial post-1992 euphoria. The growing trend towards US-style diplomaism in the UK, where degrees and similar qualifications are demanded even where they are not genuinely necessary, is a prevalent and worrying issue, reflecting the glut of over-qualified individuals in the employment market. Furthermore, students today are encouraged to see three or four years in residence at a university—any university—as their automatic right, even when their decision is more motivated by social than academic concerns, and as the only real option for them at age eighteen given the dearth of attractive job opportunities for school leavers.

Reactions against these trends in academia, which are not new by any means, take several forms. The most common of these seeks to find ways to free education from political influence so as to be able to promote a more selective admissions policy or a more adventurous curriculum. State control sets up active impediments towards experimentation in education when it allows its political and academic elites to promote an agenda of conservatism and general stasis. Furthermore, many of these elites are by their nature self-perpetuating and therefore resistant to radicalism. Usually, a certain degree of challenge to the norm is encouraged providing this challenge is limited in its scope and does not threaten the establishment itself. The suggestion that a thriving private sector in education might come into being outside state control, however, is guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of many who are aware that such a sector is likely to be more easily adaptable to market demand and thus a very considerable competitor for the mainstream.

How Independent Can Privatised Universities Be?

Most European countries have a tradition of private universities, but the extent of their control by the state varies considerably. In some Scandinavian countries and Belgium, for example, private universities are free to operate without constraint. In France, private universities can operate, but the curriculum for all degree awards is set out by law with penalties for deviation. In the UK, domestic private universities were abolished (ironically at the height of a Conservative government) in the 1988 Education Reform Act, with the exception of the University of Buckingham, which had been granted a Royal Charter in 1983 and was allowed to operate post-1988 under what amounts to exceptional measures. It remains possible for institutions with degree-granting authority from overseas to operate legally and offer their awards in the UK.

It is sometimes asked why private universities feel the need to grant degrees at all. The best answer to this is that to do so is seen as a fundamental hallmark of academic independence and of faith in its own standards and practices by the institution concerned. The post-1992 universities could easily have continued to confer the degrees of the Council for National Academic Awards as they had previously done as polytechnics; however, none did so and all opted to introduce their own awards instead.

Progressive Strategies Within a Privatised Sector

Both within and beyond Europe, the limited financial resources of small private institutions mean that many have historically chosen to operate via correspondence rather than face-to-face or residential tuition, and now the advent of the internet means that a small school can operate as effectively as a much bigger rival. The offering of programmes via correspondence or the internet does not mean that those programmes are necessarily lacking in rigour by comparison with residential degree courses; the widespread acceptance of distance education has been long-established within the UK market by the Open University, for example, and many major UK universities are now following the OU’s lead. Indeed, non-residential study is often a much more appropriate fit for most mid-career adults than more traditional alternatives. The ability to fit learning around the other demands of a busy life is a basic necessity for many, but there is still a good deal of unnecessary lack of flexibility within state universities as far as physical attendance at seminars, examinations and the like is concerned. In addition, the acceptance of the concept of accreditation of prior experiential learning, despite its enshrining by the QAA at all levels, is still insufficient in state postgraduate programmes, where arbitrary limits are placed on credit that can be counted and doctoral programmes by published work remain a closed shop for alumni and staff of the university only. Where these strictures are felt to be academically unreasonable, it is inevitable that some will seek alternatives that meet their needs.

The Effect of the 1988 Education Reform Act

Looking at the British private sector at the time of the ERA, we are confronted with a multiplicity of institutions which are distinct in nature and should not be lumped together. On the one hand there were some obviously fraudulent bodies that existed merely to sell meaningless pieces of paper. On the other, there were some institutions which were serious in intent but which were too small or too unusual to fit any model of UK governmental approval, including the Geneva Theological College (founded 1958), the Central School of Religion (1896) and the Anglo-American Institute of Drugless Therapy (1911), all schools with an American orientation offering correspondence instruction to a predominantly adult constituency. As chance would have it, the former two of these were able to continue operations as a result of overseas degree-granting authority. In retrospect the ERA can be seen both as a move against the legitimate private schools, who had “usurped” the privileges now reasserted by the state, and as a consumer protection measure. I am sure that I am not the only one, however, to consider that the latter is insufficient justification for the suppression of the entire sector. The Act, indeed, is a deeply anti-libertarian measure emanating from a regime that suffered from the dichotomy of being libertarian and progressive in its fiscal policy whilst remaining deeply elitist and ideologically entrenched when dealing with matters concerning the British establishment.

The question of why what is now the University of Buckingham should have been exempted from the general crackdown of the ERA is interesting indeed. It is clear that the personal influence of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was key to its being singled out—Lady Thatcher has served as Buckingham’s Chancellor (now Chancellor Emeritus) and along with other members of the political establishment such as Lords Hailsham, Harris and Beloff was instrumental in its foundation.3

The Natural Place of Education Outside State Control

Why, then, should the legitimate among these institutions have existed in the erstwhile British private sector in the first place? Invariably the answer lies not merely in circumstance alone, but at the very heart of education itself. The nature of the educational experience is that it is individualised and personal, not institutionalised and faceless. The oldest detailed model of education we have—that of classical antiquity—presents education as a one-on-one mentoring process reinforced by work in small groups. We should realise, consequently, and not hesitate to strongly emphasise the point, that to treat education as something that is naturally carried out in large state-run institutions is not merely inimical to its very essence but also deeply unnatural. Education cannot truly be subjected to blanket rules and regulations or to the greater good, however construed; it is as particular, as quixotic and not infrequently as strange as humanity itself. What could be more inevitable, then, but that those who have likewise come to this conclusion should seek to follow the model of the Greeks and establish their own small institutions where their own ideals could be realised?

What is perhaps striking is that the rebel spirit against state education finds a happy position in British education up to the age of 18. Perhaps because of the reliance of the British establishment upon the great public schools, independent school education thrives in the UK in all shapes and sizes, with no legislative demand that education even take place in what would be regarded by most as a school. It is rare for independent schools to set their own alternatives to public examinations, but not unknown—Winchester College being a prominent example. Those sitting the bespoke Winchester leaving examination have no difficulty in finding acceptance at the best universities, because of the reputation of the awarding body in question. The more esoteric independent schools, such as Summerhill, the best-known example of the free or democratic school movement in the UK, offer government awards at 16 and 18 but make candidature on the student’s part optional.

To Regulate… Or Not?

To extend such measures to the university sector causes some interesting questions to come into play. Firstly, can this putative sector be relied upon to self-regulate, or does it need some kind of legislative framework to prevent the worst excesses of poor quality provision? As a libertarian, my answer is that without question self-regulation will provide most of the necessary checks and balances, and indeed that self-regulation is necessary in order to protect the academic freedoms that will be outlined below. In practice the private sector in education falls into two categories. One category consists of legitimate organisations whose reputation—often in the process of being established, where they are new and relatively unknown—depends entirely on their ability to create trust and confidence in the public in the probity of their practices and their high standards. For this category, decline in standards or reputation means commercial death, and they are without the safety net that poor-quality state universities have in the form of government to prop them up. The other category consists of schools that sell academic qualifications or documents purporting to be such with no academic process involved. This category is a menace to all involved in legitimate education and a justifiable concern to consumers and others. However, controlling it can be aided by “bottom-line” legislation that outlaws the selling of academic qualifications outright. Another sensible measure is to encourage regulation by the relevant professional licensing bodies in appropriate areas, for example whereby medical degrees must receive approval from the GMC in order to allow their holders to proceed to licensure as physicians.

The issue of what actually happens in small private sector universities is an interesting one indeed. Historically, universities have determined their curriculums and standards for themselves. If experimentation and freedom of curriculum is to be encouraged, its interpretation must rest with the academic authorities of the institution in question, not with political masters. This opens the door to the teaching of much that is unorthodox and contrary to academic received wisdom, and in some cases to the weird and peculiar. However, what it also does is to empower individuals so that they, rather than the state, can determine their own educational needs and the most appropriate solutions to them. In short, it promotes free choice and properly subjects universities to the forces of the free market, where successful institutions will thrive and weaker institutions will decline or seek to serve niche markets.

Credibility in Unregulated Institutions

Where is credibility to be sought in the output of private universities? Ultimately, in the same place as any other university—in the work done for the awards and the people who stand behind them. If a private university is able to attract faculty and examiners of high calibre, and if its alumni take their place in leading roles within society as a result of their new qualifications, it will attract the respect that is its due and take its proper place in the educational landscape. It is possible to do this both where the envisioned mission is to be a campus-based university and where the aim is to function as an internet or correspondence-based university. The American writer on distance education John Bear has written, “I have been suggesting for years that in a rational world, any degree would be evaluated based only on the work done to earn it, and the credentials of the person or people who approve and stand behind it.”4

Towards a Model of Education Driven by the Market Rather than the State
Professor Robert Stevens, former Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, has argued (with his views quoted extensively in a Telegraph article5) for the creation of private universities, “Universities would be truly independent, living off the charges they receive. This approach would allow universities to choose their own future. If they wished to educate and pass on cultural values—the original goal of universities, which is an anathema to today’s political parties—they would be free to do that. If people did not want that kind of education, they would not borrow the money to fund their education. Similarly, if, as the Government suggests, employers are demanding specific skills, then those universities which teach specific skills would do exactly that and people would flock to them, perhaps partly funded by potential employers. People would be free to choose. The market would decide.” It can already be seen that those private institutions outside the UK that employ a specifically workplace-driven curriculum, granting full APEL credit where appropriate for workplace learning achievement, are among the most popular of institutions both with the student public and with employers.

Freedom to accept or reject academic dogma is the most fundamental of educational rights, and yet the phenomenon of state-controlled higher education makes this choice a major undertaking. It must be understood that academic freedom and the concept of an academic establishment, more yet a politically-linked academic establishment, are not happy bedfellows. There must be not merely the freedom to join the club, but the freedom to create an opposition or an alternative to that club. That freedom does not truly exist whilst higher education remains within the shackles of state control.

Notes

(1) Terence Kealey, ‘How we could have our own Ivy League’, The Telegraph, 13th October 2004, URL (consulted 29th November 2004): http://crossword.telegraph.co.uk/educati...op.%20Html.

(2) E. G. West Centre website, http://www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest.

(3) ‘History of the University’, University of Buckingham website, http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/facts/history.

(4) In a post at the www.degreeinfo.com forum. A cached, longer version of this quote can also be found via Google at http://www.google.com/advanced_search.

(5) Julie Henry, ‘Universities should be independent and set fees according to market, says top Oxford don’, The Telegraph, 28th March 2004, URL (consulted 29th November 2004): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jht...nuni28.xml.

Brian McNamee, the "trainer" for Roger Clemens being grilled at today's congressional hearing regarding the use of steroids and HGH, taught at regionally accredited St. John's University:

Quote:In interviews, McNamee has tried to paint himself as a victim. Last year, he told SI.com that Clemens and Pettitte paid him average "working wage and expenses," but that he had to juggle several other jobs to support his wife and three children, one of whom has diabetes.

"Now some of those jobs are disappearing," he told the Web site.

One of those jobs was teaching at St. John's, his alma mater. He blamed the L.A. Times story.

"His professorship at St. John's University has been suspended," according to SI.com.

St. John's said that was not true. Dominic Scianna, the university's spokesman, told ESPN The Magazine last year that McNamee had a "one-year, full-time appointment" to teach in the sport management program from September 2005 to June 2006. "There was no suspension, no reprimand, none of those things," Scianna said, adding that the contract was up "well before the L.A. Times story. This hadn't even come to light."

Or so it would appear. Unless Janko is registering himself as "Janko's Tiny Penis" at DegreeNet, it looks like pranksters there may have been putting words in Janko's mouth.? Or maybe not.

Quote: nosborne48:

"I am beginning to see something new, though. Degrees aren't always necessary and universities aren't always the best places to learn."