The Augar report pits arts against sciences – and both lose out

Cutting fees for arts and humanities degrees would damage Stem subjects too

After days of intensive discussion, the strengths and weaknesses of the Augar report on post-18 education policy and funding are apparent. It is a solid review, refreshingly non-ideological in tone, but undermined by a flawed vision and wishful thinking.

Some of its proposals – and its less attractive one-liners about low-value courses and too many graduates – are likely to seep into policy. But it lacks the momentum of a great reform. It gives but it takes away, handicapped by having to be fiscally neutral.

It’s hard to see the next prime minister picking up the whole package. Politically it does not secure youth votes at scale. Policy-wise it creates as many problems as it solves.

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Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods.