Im not surprised. Why do you think students have barcodes now on their IDs?

Oh, I remember Maggie, but I don't blame it all on her. Just part of it. For me most of the mess was almost an unavoidable consequence of a general decline in the British standard of living. Maggie's garage sales and the Blair/Brown housing ponzi scheme were all just delaying the inevitable: a lower standard of living for Britain which has been gathering momentum for half a century or longer. Just my two cents...

I'll add the memo was met with the ridicule it deserved.

Not a great deal to disagree about there. Although the phrase "Blair/Brown ponzi scheme" is a bit harsh. Wasn't that the City/Wall Street?

It's not harsh enough. But an excellent post nevertheless.

Actually in the UK, it was mainly down the increasing demand for higher education access by the working class. The system simply couldn't pay for everyone. This has also been the main reason we now have 'top up fees' in the UK. We are moving increasingly closer to the US model for funding HE.

One thing Maggie did to increase university access was to abolish the polytechnic system and almost over night they got re-branded as universities. So in some respects, the Thatcher government did more to provide working class access to HE than any other administration, including those of Attlee, Wilson or Blair.

Not at all. What she did (as you point out) was to redefine polys as universities, thus "at a stroke" increasing access to universities, while starting the rot which has turned the majority of UK universities into polytechnics.

Poor choice of terms. I meant increasing university access.

That's just a matter of personal conjecture usually informed by that age-old complaint that 'things were better in the good old days'. What we can measure is the increasing participation rates, whether that in itself dilutes 'the quality' of pre 1992 universities is again open to speculative debate, but not to credible research.

Well when I were a lad, we got a real degree at a real university, not one of them poncey polythingamy whatsits. And when I were a lad and we took our ex ams they weren't ex ams unless someone fainted and got carried out on a stretcher yelling "I'm an orange and I got my pips squeezed!"

Oh the Academic snobbery. I went to Polytechnic and am damn proud to have done so.

Don't get me wrong AX. I firmly believe that the old polys (like present day Colleges at least in Ontario) did/do a superb job of equipping a large section of the cohort with very valuable practical skills and knowledge of direct relevance to their chosen careers. Most people get better training than they would at a university.

Absolutely. They simply changed the name of the institutions to remove the stigma of two-tiered system, and that of 'training' versus 'education'. A lot of people in the UK can't live without formalized stratification so pine for the days when 'universities' were afforded higher prestige. You still hear the comment, "that was a former poly you know." You got the same thing with the emergence of the redbricks and the glass plates. We love our snobbery in the UK.

Possibly. But there's more to universities than teaching undergrad students, as well you know. Graduate eduction and basic/applied research to name a couple. At least in Canada (Ontario) a distinction is made between research intensive universities on the one hand and "primarily undergraduate universities" and Colleges on the other.

And before I get accused of academic snobbery again, I repeat that IMO a larger fraction of students receive a really useful education/training in the second category than in the first.