Higher education into the 1990s
Introduction
The background
1. The fall in the birthrate since 1964 has already caused primary school rolls to decline sharply; over the next few years our secondary schools will face a similar decline; and our higher education institutions will begin to feel the effects in the early 1980s. This paper is about the development of Britain's higher education system in the face of that prospect. Its main focus is the period between 1981 and 1994. It considers the possible implications of demographic trends for the current pattern of higher education and how that pattern itself might change over the next 15 years. The various possibilities discussed are not a series of discrete policy options, since the eventual outcome may well lie in some combination of policies. Nor does the paper suggest answers or conclusions to the issues which it raises. Its purpose is more modest – to direct public attention to those issues and to encourage their debate by interested bodies and individuals. The Departments will welcome views and comments on all aspects of it.
2. Britain's higher education system has almost tripled in size since 1960. It now caters for about 520,000 full-time and sandwich students and about 230,000 part-time students, on a variety of courses and in a variety of institutions. The present planning assumption is that full-time and sandwich numbers will increase by 1981 to 560,000. (Although, in practice, the Departments make appropriate allowance for part-time provision in short- and medium-term forward operational planning, part-time numbers and Open University courses are normally excluded from higher education planning figures.) The 1981 planning figure itself represents a downward revision of earlier figures based on assumptions of more rapid growth in demand than has in fact materialised over the intervening years.
3. Past growth in full-time and sandwich higher education provision and the planning figures adopted for years ahead have reflected a pattern in which, traditionally, young home entrants have predominated; and it is in providing for this group in particular that successive Governments have adhered to the principle enunciated by the Robbins Committee in 1963 that higher education courses should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.
4. Appendix I gives a more detailed picture of the higher education system as it is now and of medium-term future developments already anticipated. Appendix II sets out forward projections of full-time and sandwich student numbers for the period up to 1994. It is important to emphasise that those projections assume that the higher education system will continue broadly along the same lines as at present: that is, that the Robbins principle will continue to apply and that the broad pattern of entry and of course duration will be what it is now.
5. Appendix II itself explains the detailed assumptions made about the various categories of student. The most crucial assumptions concern young home entrants. It is already certain that the 18 year-old age group (from
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