UK: Office for Students spearheads privatisation and policing of universities
By
Thomas Scripps
20 January 2018
The establishment of the Office for Students (OfS) marks a new stage in the assault on higher education in the UK, with grave implications for a speeding up of privatisation and the policing of political life on campus.
The legal basis for the OfS was laid down in the Higher Education and Research Act in January 2017, in the face of massive opposition. Fully 81 percent of professors and lecturers surveyed by YouGov believed the bill would have a negative impact. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, the passing of the Act represented “the introduction of measures designed to lower the requirements that educational institutions must satisfy in order to attain university status. The aim is to further open up the higher education ‘market’ to ‘alternative providers’—that is, private institutions.”
The OfS is mandated to grow the education “market” and has been given “New Degree Awarding Powers” to do so. These powers allow the OfS to grant degree-awarding status to institutions without requiring them to demonstrate a track record of successfully delivering higher education, as was previously the case.
As early as 2012, the BBC reported that the government had approved more than 400 degree and diploma courses at private universities, without checking the quality of courses offered or student completion rates. In the same year, the amount of money paid to private colleges through unregulated courses trebled to £100 million. The number of students on those courses doubled in the same period.
Between 2010 and 2015, the amount of publicly backed funding for private colleges skyrocketed from £30 million to £1 billion. A major…