Evolution of the college dropout

Mark Lawsonon the quandary facing students entering British Universities now geared towards market principles.

Tony Blair faces an educational question for which a quick glance at his children's algebra exercise books won't help him. Q: Suppose that around 300,000 English school-leavers enter higher education every year and that around 56,000 fail to complete their courses. Express this figure as a percentage and explain: a) why it has happened and b) the consequences for a politician who declared education to be one of his three most important causes.

There are, coincidentally, three most likely causes of this graduatedropout rate, none of them very palatable to the education-driven Prime Minister. The first is the replacement of student grants with student loans. On a visit I made recently to University College London – a decade and a half after graduating – my old tutor explained that the new financial arrangements had caused a distinct evolution in the psychology of students.

Graduates now ended their education not with the traditional chiding letters from banks about their overdrafts, but owing around £10,000 ($16,000). They had come to think of themselves as customers. This meant that they were more critical and demanding about the courses, but that they were also less likely to see the university as an all-day bar with a handy library nearby. They were no longer drinking the local authority's or their parents' money, but their own.

Today's students are the opposite of 1960s dropouts: they are quitting to get a job.

These changes in behaviour might be welcome, but teaching-on-tick has less beneficial consequences. A rounded education is harder to achieve because so many students have jobs in the time once filled by clubs and societies. Another risk, as in any system based on loans, is that some will prove unable to pay. The worrying number of college dropouts may be accounted for by this.

The second explanation – especially tempting after a week of anti-capitalist riots in London and Seattle – is that the 56,000 who fail to graduate are rebels, and that, despite the widespread assumption of political apathy among the young, a stand is being taken against the middle-class neurosis about the absolute importance of education.

The spirit of the 1960s – the era in which our image of the college dropout was created – lives on.

The third solution is that the last two British governments – which tried to introduce the market to higher education, through student loans – have themselves become victims of another market principle. They seriously over-estimated demand. In turning colleges and polytechnics into universities – in encouraging the view that any course (The Anthropology of Elvis, The Divinity of Diana) was a useful end in itself – politicians have created a generation of students who were demotivated before they arrived. And these half-hearted students reach academe at a time when, financially, it is harder than ever to stay the course. They are the precise opposite of the 1960s dropouts: they are leaving to get a job.

So select a, b, or c. The difficulty for Blair and his Education Secretary, David Blunkett, is that this is a multiple-choice exercise in which they dare not tick any of the answers. Acceptance of the financial explanation would demand a rethink of the market approach to student grants, which is one of this Government's products acquisitions from the political right.

But somewhere in my own rhetorical triptych on education – student poverty, student radicalism, student overload – lies the explanation for these dropouts. My guess is that it is a combination of the first and third.

"Politicians greatly increased the number of university places while reducing the funds to sustain students there. You don't need a maths degree to see that this equation doesn't work. While college dropouts of the 1960s were protesting against The System in a generalised and apocalyptic way, those of the 1990s are making a practical and unavoidable stand against a very specific application of the market.

Abridged from The Guardian Weekly

11.b Explain the following concepts from the text.

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