Small is beautiful - discuss

My consulting work takes me to many different universities and higher education institutions across the country – 31 in the five years so far – and the differences can be striking. My clients have included very large universities – tens of thousands of students; thousands of staff; more real estate than you can shake a stick at. And very small institutions – tens of students, or maybe a hundred or so at most; tens or low hundreds of staff; one building.

Different sizes, but both are dogs

You can feel the differences. The large institutions have a buzz, a busy-ness, a sense of possibility and the unknown. And they also can have a sense of anonymity. You’re an individual navigating a complex bureaucracy; you’re one face in hundreds in your lectures. The small institutions can feel more friendly: you can see that students and staff recognise each other; people know who you are. You don't get lost. Equally, you have no place to hide.


The reasons why universities choose to grow are clear. It brings possibilities. It makes fixed costs cheaper. It means you can find resource to solve most problems. Boards of Governors tend to promote growth: it looks like a proxy for success. As higher education expands, governments like universities which grow: they make it easier to reach participation targets.


It's also true that smaller institutions can have real problems. A small HEI has exactly the same governance and compliance duties as a large university, but with a fraction of the resource to solve the problem. In a large university, a bad year’s recruitment to a discipline can be lost in the noise of the bigger picture; for a small HEI it can mean imminent financial disaster. There’s no fat to keep going through a difficult winter.


So here’s a provocation. I wonder if, in the expansion of universities to accommodate higher rates of participation, we’ve lost something important about the scale of learning communities. We’ve lost the sense of the learner being an important part of that community, and the sense that the individual matters. What if we have a new rule, that no university could have more than 5000 students?


We’d obviously have more universities. Maybe every town would have its own university. Every large city would have several - one in each suburb.  This would address supply in cold-spots at a stroke. The current behemoths would have to split – maybe on disciplinary lines; maybe by adopting towns nearby and creating new, smaller campuses. It would be easier for students to get to a university; the possibilities for working and studying at the same time, without life being impossible, would be much greater.


And with a more consistent scale of institution, regulation could be more proportionate, with much more transferable approaches to good practice. If something works in one place, there’s a much greater chance it would work elsewhere.


When Robbins was published in the 1960s, 3000 students was a big university. What have we lost in the growth since then?


Could we have smaller universities? Should we? What do you think?