Selling university places

It’s being alleged that the government is thinking of allowing universities to give extra places to richer students who can pay higher fees - the idea being that this would allow poorer students to win more places on the capped fees.
I reckon there are four arguments against this:
1. More means worse. Lecture halls will be more crowded and students will get less facetime with their tutors. There’s also an atmospheric externality. If universities have even more rich students, the poorer ones will feel even more out of place. Many Oxbridge students have for years found the atmosphere unpleasant and alienating. This’ll only make things worse.
2. Social meanings. Goods, said Michael Walzer, should be distributed according to the social meaning. And this puts a block upon what money can buy. For example, healthcare should go to the sick not the rich, jobs to those best able to do them rather than the well-connected. And so on. It’s a reasonable interpretation of this principle that education should go to those best able to use it, rather than to the wealthy. As R.H. Tawney said: “To serve educational needs, without regard to the vulgar irrelevancies of class and income is part of a teacher’s honour.” If you’re going to sell university places to the rich, why not sell places in, say, the West Ham team to their wealthy supporters?*
3. Education is (partly) a positional good. Part of the value of my Oxford degree consists in the fact that other people don’t have one. Giving university places to people who would otherwise be excluded reduces this positional value.
4. Signal dilution. An even larger part of the value of an Oxford education is its signalling effect; it signals to prospective employers that one is smart enough to get a place at Oxford. But if places are allocated on the basis of money, this signal is diluted. To the extent that employers cannot distinguish between those who got in on merit and those who got in on money, this disadvantages the meritorious job applicant.
Herein, though, lies a problem. These arguments are, in effect, a defence of inequality. I’m asking for the privileges of an elite to be maintained. It just happens that the elite is one selected by brains rather than wealth.
But what, morally speaking is the difference? What’s the difference between the Oxford applicant who has won the genetic lottery for intellect and one who has rich parents. Both have advantages that are, in Rawls’ phrase, arbitrary from a moral point of view.
The answer, I think, lies in Walzer’s idea of complex equality. To distribute everything according to one criteria - so that the rich, or powerful, or clever, or pious get all the goods - is, he said, tyrannical. Distributing goods according to limited meanings is a way of limiting such tyranny, because it allows some inequalities to act as counterweights to others. Allocating university places on the grounds of ability is inegalitarian when viewed in isolation, but it might - to the extent that ability and income are uncorrelated - be a counterweight to the inequality created by the fact that so many goods are allocated according to income.
Viewed in this light, the coalitions proposals are, in a sense, totalitarian; they imply that one thing - money - should decide how the total of all goods should be distributed.
* Lesser men than I would make the obvious point here.

Comments

[Bruce]

Quite amusing though to see rich Oxbridge (under)graduates desparately talking up their plebby roots for fear that people might think that Daddy's money bought them their place.

[chris]

Twas ever thus, though Bruce - that happened even in my day, back in the 80s.

[CharlieMcMenamin]

I'll tend you one though: a paid for Etonian education can give you absolutely brilliant skills at doing U-turns
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13343824

[Mark Wadsworth]

I disagree. I went to a fee paying private school, but by dint of the facts that a) I did very well in the entrance exam and b) my Dad didn't earn much, I got a free place, as did (about) a tenth of boys who went there.

Therefore, it's safe to assume that the other wealthier parents of not-quite-so-clever boys were overpaying slightly in order to subsidise my education (and I'm no judge, but I always felt I got a very good education).

But were they overpaying? Surely, they paid market value and that is that. And the presence of two or three poor-but-clever-and-ambitious boys in each class ensured that standards overall were driven up.

Whether this is because it made the thicker boys try harder to keep up (good) or on the purely cynical basis that having more boys achieve 11 O levels at A or B grade (this was thirty years ago) made their school look better in the rankings is a separate topic.

Turning to today, is it so terrible that ten per cent of rich-but-thick-kids overpay vastly for their Uni education in order to subsidise free or cheap places for a third of the other students?

Methinks not. It's like land value tax - if rich people want to pay a lot into the communal pot for occupying the nicer sites, then the poor people will still benefit from the communal pot.

[lola]

...they imply that one thing - money - should decide how the total of all goods should be distributed. Nope. It's 'price' that decides [best] how goods and services are distributed. This is a true for education as any other service. Furthermore people don't value stuff that is 'free'. You can see this in the anti-education attitude in so money students and parents in the UK.

[Keith]

There was a time when you could buy yourself an officers commission in the Army. Mr. Gladstone however put an end to it; the Russians failed to follow his example and that was the end of the Tsar in the end re: defeat in the first world war.

I know that those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it; but it seems we are doomed to relive every error evan if we do remember history.

[Chris]

I don't get you people. Nobody was proposing that you would get a place if you could pay for it. Let's go through how the current system works. Say that the finance dept. and the main tutors decide that there is capacity for 100 students on a certain 3-year course at Oxford. They then work out that it would cost £50000 per student or £5M in total.

Now Home and EU students are going to pay £9000 a year, let's say there is no inflation so it's 27K overall. The government decides it is going to contribute £2M to fund that course at Oxford. So if they decide to accept 50 UK/EEA students, they are still short of £1650K. That means that they can take on 50 overseas students who each pay £11K per year. If they wanted to have 75 UK/EEA students, then they could only have 25 overseas students who would need to pay £13K per year.

Obviously Oxford has extra fees for its college system, and they need to decide in advance how many students they want and how much they are going to charge the overseas people. This is done based on experience from the previous year. Now, whether there are 25 or 50 places for overseas students, there are still going to be maybe 200 applicants. How do you think they choose the lucky ones to get a place?

So what's wrong with allowing British students to compete in the overseas student pool? The university cares not where the money comes from. And to be honest, the intellectual standard of the overseas students are going to be much higher than the average British student anyway. Not only because of dumbing down etc, but also because they come from all over the world, and would probably be applying to places like Harvard as well anyway. (Which means that the admissions tutors usually need to offer maybe 1.5 times as many places as they actually have.)

Do you want to know what is unfair? A British student whose parents have worked abroad for 3 years and sold their UK home will already have to apply in the overseas student pool anyway. They won't be eligible for loans, grants or bursaries. Students from the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man MUST pay the overseas fees, but the island governments usually cover the difference. Whereas anyone with an EU/Swiss/Norwegian/Icelandic passport will get the Home student rate (the one that's currently £3345, to rise to £9000) regardless of if they have ever set foot in Europe.

[Chris]

Just to add, if a British student was to pay the overseas fees and manage to get a place through the overseas pool, they would probably be good enough to get through the Home student pool. They would still have to do the admissions tests and the interview for Oxbrige.

Where this (ex-)proposal may not have worked is for e.g. Media Studies at London Metropolitan U. The degree is barely worth anything anyway, and the so-called university is more of a money-making enterprise than a centre of academic research and excellence. I suppose demand for these types of courses is not that high from overseas, except for bogus students or rich kids who are slightly thick. And to be honest here, who cares if a British student pays through the roof to get a Mickey Mouse? They are not going to earn the money back if they even manage to get a job that requires that sort of degree.

[Keith]

The trouble with commercialisation is that in the end no degree will have value as money will be the only criteria of admission and award. Its the Saif Gadaffi situation multiplied many times over. Got a few quid? Here have a Phd mate; now you can call yourself "Doctor". The removal of state funding is part of that slippery slope we should have seen coming years ago. How long before the removal of public funds leads to the gradual reduction of places for the poorer students? The rich student or his parents are "profit centres" so the incentives will be for more and more profitable customers.

[FX]

The only thing gov did was to add light to the unofficial Buy-place-at-university policy; in the past and present, wealthy guys openly donate 100k and upward to oxbridge to get their kids places, regardless of grades. It is naive to believe the current process just depends on merit of brains.

[H]

@keith - the system of buying commissions produced Wellington's army, one of the best ever raised by this country; Napoleon's conscript army, led by officers selected on merit, was ultimately defeated.

The Russians had not been militarily defeated by the time of the Russian revolution - indeed, their greatest successes in the First World War were achieved under Brusilov shortly before the revolution. It would be a far fairer judgment to say that collapse of faith in the Czar coupled with economic collapse led to defeat, rather than the other way round.

PS I am not in favour of sellng commissions in the armed forces. But as Chris so often points out, apparently perverse arrangements can sometimes lead to reasonable outcomes and vice versa. Perhaps people who bought commissions were better motivated to succeed than the average dunderhead.

[BenSix]

Re: "positional goods". Is it fair to say that considering how many people breeze through university employers overemphasise the worth of a degree?

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Why stop with University places or Army commissions if trading positional goods is such an unqualified Good Thing?

I think putting the position of Monarch out to regular open tender is a tradition well worth re-invigourating

[Ken Houghton]

All right, someone has to be the lesser man, and this old(er than our host) Palace fan will say it:

"[W]hy not sell places in, say, the West Ham team to their wealthy supporters?"

I don't see a problem with that. It keeps a couple of young people in the feeder leagues a bit longer, and decreases bench time for the other reserves and/or increases playing time for the starters, but neither of those is necessarily a poor result.

Yes, I'm assuming it's still the manager's decision who gets onto the pitch, and that, say, Gaza or Roy Keane isn't buying West Ham. But it strikes me as being little different from when Palace came to Baltimore a couple of years ago and offered people a chance--for about US$300 in fees, iirc--to try out for the team. Best case scenario, you find someone who is capable of playing. Worst case: you make enough money to cover your costs and get some positive publicity.

(The difference being that you're more likely to find someone with football skills in the Palace Process, while you find someone who Loves West Ham with the Dillow Proposal. This also might be good; less likely to transfer.)

Assuming also, of coure, that a condition of being on the team is that one has to practice with the rest, it might even be A Good Thing for U.K. finance.

[Tom]

A good academic education, particularly a private education, is almost a necessary condition for Oxbridge. The current makeup is far from an 'intellectual elite'.Thanks for the Walzer reference, your blog is a great springboard from which to find interesting social theorists

-a student