Demography and Social Class: The Fluctuating Demand for Higher Education in Britain

Abstract

In 1963 when the Robbins Report (HMSO, 1963a) was published, Britain could reasonably claim to have the best ordered statistical base for the construction of policy towards higher education of any advanced industrial nation. The Report not only laid the foundations of this statistical base but provided detailed projections of the rate of demand stretching up to 1980-81 with provisional estimates up to 1985-86. Successive governments, however, have not built very successfully on the base provided. The prime purpose of government projections or forecasts has been to provide a baseline for financial allocations from central government to the university and public sectors of higher education. Only rarely has the purpose been to pose questions of policy about the development of higher education. As Table I illustrates, governments' plans, projections or forecasts of student numbers have proved to be over-optimistic and quite unreliable. Indeed firm planning figures have now been abandoned beyond 1981-82, and as that year approaches the implausibility of past forecasts or projections has become increasingly obvious. It was only in March 1979 that the goverment's Department of Education and Science (DES) was able to produce forecasts which seem likely to approximate to the actual numbers of fulltime students in higher education in 1981-82, and then the three options were described as 'assumptions' rather than projections or forecasts (DES, 1979a). As 1981-82 approaches it is worth examining why the actual numbers of fulltime students in higher education are so much lower than expected. In 1963 a considerable body of opinion felt that the Robbins projections were too high but in fact throughout the 1960s they were exceeded. By 1970 the rate by which Robbins had been overtaken must have been a factor in persuading the DES to produce aW projection which was not only 40% higher than Robbins for 1981-82 but looks likely to be about 60% higher than the actual figure. Part of the reason for governments' forecasting failures lies in the uncertainty that has beset demographic forecasts generally in Britain, as Fig. 1 illustrates. It has been argued that almost any time over the past 50 years an assumption of 850,000 future births a year for the UK would have been as good or better than any of the projections made (Armitage, 1974). Not all the blame, however, can be laid at the door of the Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys (OPCS). The fact remains that the 1972 White Paper, Education: a Framework for Expansion, (DES, 1972), was published eight years after the birth rate had begun to fall, when the down-turn was already being felt within the school system and when the students relevant to the furthest