The Remedial High School with the Research Centre Out Back

There is an adage about the manufacturing of bicycles: they can be cheap, they can be strong, or they can be light, but one bike can only ever be two out of three. You can get a strong and light bike, but it won't be cheap; you can get a cheap and light bike, but it won't be strong; and you can get a cheap and strong bike, but it won't be light.

This adage is capable of any number of analogous formations on any number of subjects. One permutation I think can shed considerable light on current debates about the availability and price of higher education.

University education can be cheap, rigorous, or widely-available; but it can ever only achieve two out of three.

If education is cheap and rigorous, it will not be widely available. This is the older model of higher education, which still prevails in some parts of Europe. On this theory, the cultivation of the most talented youth in society in the arts and sciences is a public good and worthy of public support. Therefore, it comes with a considerable amount of state funding and involves a minimal amount of accrued student debt. On the other side, however, it will only ever be available to a few. Entrance standards have to be high, and, unless you come from a patrician family, you would only ever have a shot at getting in if you were exceptionally talented.

If education is cheap and widely-available, it will not be rigorous. If the funding model of a institution, public or private, for-profit or not, big or small, is dependent for the very existence of the institution, on a steady year-by-year stream of reliable tuition fees, that will necessarily affect academic standards. What store would fail out its customers?

If education is widely-available and rigorous, it will not be cheap. This describe the current American regime of higher education at its best. Many colleges and universities have ridiculously luxurious student-faculty ratios of 15-1 or better. At many institutions, a decently motivated student really can have it all - one-on-one attention from faculty, comfortable surroundings, with resort-like amenities, a whole cadre of para-academic centres and administrators to help with everything from study abroad, to writing, to study habits, to conflict resolution. The need to bolster enrollments means that most students with a drive to attend college (and, in some cases, appropriate assistance at the high school level) can get in somewhere at a four-year institution. The amount of debt they will emerge with is exactly what one might expect from such a situation as this. A crippling usurious burden, almost heavy enough to outweigh whatever social or financial advantages a Bachelor of Arts or Science might expect.

The problem with most analyses of the student debt crisis and the intellectual decline of the American undergraduate is that they assume there is some way to have all three: a rigorous, cheap education available to all. It's not going to happen, and indeed, it cannot happen. There is a tacit assumption of the left and centre-left that somehow additional state support can fill in the gaps, and make universal university education affordable while maintaining standards. If you want to see what widely-available and free education looks like, look no further than the American K-12 system - pockets of excellence surrounded by a vast expanse of filled with at best mediocre schools.

It is no accident that state support for the public university system in America declined precisely at the time that access began to be widened. There was a fundamental shift in the status of higher education in America, a shift that will only reach its conclusion (if ever) when college becomes the new high school, a cheap, universally available, and perhaps one day mandatory, educational experience, which leaves no discernible trace on the minds of many of those who undergo it.

If you really want state-supported universities, then we need to go back to tracking, and tracking from an early age -  a system of Gymnasia or grammar schools, where students, deemed through assessment at a young age to be of academic promise, are educated in a truly preparatory fashion for University. The education of these children (who will generally be lower or middle class, since the uppers will still send their children to private schools) could be considered a public good, worth the greater expense to the treasury, which nonetheless would still be trifling considering the small number of students.

Somehow, that's an idea I don't expect will catch on . . .

And if not, we are either stuck with ballooning tuition or else the further degradation of our academic institutions into monstrous research-centres-cum-remedial-high-schools.