Modified patterns of higher education
Model D
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accommodation, and it may not be possible to rent sufficient accommodation for up to another 40,000 students within two or three years at the bening of the 1980s. Temporary staff appointments would also present problems. But it might be possible to achieve a good deal by short-term secondments from industry and the professions, by making more use of part-time teaching staff and by encouraging postgraduate research students to take on a larger teaching role than they have now.
19. A more drastic approach would be to adopt a deliberate policy of not adding either to accommodation or to staff numbers beyond those necessary to provide for, say, 560,000 students at current accommodation and staffing standards. On this basis, accommodating an extra 40,000 students in each year of peak numbers (assuming the "central projection") would require a 7% squeeze in accommodation standards and unit teaching costs. A 7% deterioration in staffing standards would not overall produce a student: staff ratio higher than the 10:1 proposed for 1981 in the 1972 White Paper, but it could create serious difficulties for many individual departments and institutions. So far as buildings are concerned, much might in theory be achieved by more economical management of existing departmental accommodation (for example, by improved space utilisation and by filling up classes so far as possible to optimal size), but it might not prove feasible to match local requirements and resources with the degree of precision which this might imply. Other possible temporary expedients could include extending the teaching day, longer terms, introducing surnmer terms, a changeover to 4-term years and "Box and Cox" arrangements, though none of these would necessarily achieve any very significant unit cost savings.
20. In so far as approaches such as these could not be carried through entirely by relying on technological developments or more economic management of existing resources, they could result in some reduction (albeit temporary) in the quality of higher education provided in British institutions. Even if this could be avoided, reducing unit costs would not be a recipe for admitting 40,000 additional students at no extra cost: total student support costs (and probably some non-teaching costs too) would rise pari passu with student numbers; adapting buildings for more intensive use would involve some capital costs; and some new staff appointments would be necessary to reflect charging subject preferences and patterns of staff retirements and wastage.
21. Models A, B and C all presuppose a higher education system in the 1990s which is broadly on the same lines as the present system. This section turns attention to possible new developments which might modify the future pattern of higher education to a lesser or greater extent. One set of possibilities involves reducing the projected peak in student numbers; another might have the effect of averting the subsequent decline. The possibilities are discussed below primarily in terms of changing patterns of provision or of entry. But it is important to bear in mind that changes of this kind would inevitably require consequential changes in a range of secondary Government and institutional policies. Thus, for example, the present structure of student awards reflects current patterns of provision and entry: if those patterns were to change significantly, the awards structure too would need revising. Again, the present policies of many validating bodies reflect the fact that, for most students, the pursuit of a higher education course is a continuous process: if discontinuous study became more prevalent, validating bodies would need to be more flexible, particularly in such matters as the transferability of part-course credits.
22. It might be possible to cater for all students seeking entry to higher education in the 1980s without needing to allocate resources to the full extent
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