Paul Temple. 
Ronald Barnett, Peter Scott and I have just finished editing a volume of essays in honour of our colleague Professor Emeritus Gareth Williams, one of the foremost contemporary economists of higher education. Much of Gareth’s work has involved the study of markets and market-type mechanisms in higher education.
While he has no objections in principle to market-based methods in higher education as ways of improving efficiency and equity, in a recent essay he sets out their limitations:

• Markets will not provide long-term funding for programmes with uncertain returns;
• the inevitable knowledge asymmetry between higher education providers and users reduces their effectiveness (in other words, the providers know far more about the system than the students do);
• higher education has benefits that go beyond those gained by the people who take part in it;
• stratification (the creation of elites), rather than the differentiation that might be expected in a normal market, is a typical feature; along with other difficulties.

(more…)

Paul Temple
The University Grants Committee (UGC) was created in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when the penny began to drop in Britain that universities were fundamental to what wasn’t then called the knowledge economy. For most of the twentieth century, the UGC and its successor bodies sought to guide the development of a high-achieving university system by funding institutional development and, at various times, using its funding role to orchestrate system planning. As UK higher education is now generally regarded as a world leader, you could argue that the UGC and its successors did a pretty good job.
Their role began to change from the 1980s onwards, when market mechanisms came to be seen as answers to public sector resource allocation questions. A quasi-market methodology was developed by the (more…)