Wider participation can result in higher drop-out rate

For those of you concerned about maintaining numeracy skills in higher education, here is today's quiz question. Which is the larger number: (a) 40% of 60%; or (b) 80% of 40%?

Those who answered (b) not only have legitimate aspirations for one of the new "Beckham" fellowships from the Royal Society, but also have an insight into the comparative strengths of the American and English higher education systems when it comes to widening participation.

Politicians, policy-makers and even the academic community itself instinctively look to practice in the US when it comes to contemplating the merits of a mass higher education system. It is, indeed, an admirable system, containing most of the finest universities in the world (and only a few of the worst) while extending educational opportunity as a citizenship right to all who can benefit from it.

But how far current American practice can be directly applied to contemporary English conditions needs closer examination, as the figures set out above indicate. The participation rate in US higher education is currently 60%, compared with just over 40% in England. That may be no surprise.

But the graduation rate in the US is only 40%, compared with nearly 80% in England. The net result is that it is England which graduates a higher proportion of the age cohort. At present, American policy-makers are just as interested in how we sustain such high graduation rates as we are interested in how they achieve such high participation rates.

If nothing else, this indicates how great care needs to be taken about how much we can learn from current American practice, even if one continues to make the (somewhat dubious) assumption that the American AB is equivalent to the British honours degree. The truth is that the American system is a very inefficient one, maintained by the much higher levels of absolute investment from both government (state and federal) and the students and/or parents themselves. Progression is markedly inferior to this country - only just over 20% of students taking two-year courses at the much-vaunted community colleges progress on to four-year institutions, for example.

As we contemplate a concerted drive towards widening participation here in the UK it is important that the American experience is played back into our discussions in a manner that is based on the reality, rather than the attractive myth, of American mass higher education.

Another set of figures will demonstrate the importance of this. In order to achieve the government's clear target of a 50% participation rate by 2010, the higher education system in England also will need to find an additional 300,000 to 400,000 full-time equivalent students.

Leaving aside the breakdown between actual full-time and part-time students, then if (a big if) they are to be taught by conventional means, this also implies an additional 15,000 to 17,000 full-time equivalent teaching staff. All of this assumes that the additional places will be fully funded, which must be the starting assumption unless we are prepared, for planning purposes, to assume a further round of declining unit of resource - and all that implies for endangering quality.

We have only eight years ahead of us during which this mammoth task will be undertaken. So we need to start thinking now about how the expansion is going to be managed.

What is the likely split going to be between, say, full-time and part-time students; or between students graduating with honours degrees and those with other higher education qualifications? And how are these students going to be distributed, both institutionally and geographically? Is each institution going to be asked to take its share of the incremental growth; or is it to be distributed on some other basis? And can the resources be secured over a period that encompasses both several spending reviews and, probably, two general elections?

So far the debate on widening participation has focused mainly on the demand side - how can we stimulate more student demand, especially from those who come from poorer backgrounds? But alongside this we need to contemplate the supply side - what kind of higher education courses are we going to offer, how are they going to be distributed, where and to whom?

This is not a trivial problem, which can be left, as the Americans would say, to where the cookie crumbles, as was the case with the late 1980s expansion in the UK. It would be a betrayal of precisely those students to whom we want to extend educational opportunity if they were to be attracted into an under-resourced and ill-planned sector demonstrating a crumbling edge of quality. This is where the US fears it is heading over the next decade. It is important that we learn from their example now and not when it is too late.

Sir Howard Newby is chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England.