How English universities could learn from the American higher education system

It is a paradox that Britain has used two important United States school reforms: Magnet Schools (specialist schools in Britain) and Charter Schools (academies and City Technology Colleges in Britain) to great effect and has had much greater success with these two initiatives than has been the case in the United States. Today 90% of all English secondary schools are either specialist or academies and in the last 10 years alone, standards in our schools have increased by more than a third. By contrast, many American publicly funded secondary schools, especially in urban areas such as New York and Washington DC, are generally accepted to have low standards, with less than half of US students graduating from high schools in some urban school districts. However, it is generally accepted that American universities and colleges offer a high standard of higher education with wider choices and diversity and greater market discipline than those in Britain. Why is this so? For example, participation rates are much greater in the United States than in Britain. Only 44% of British school leavers matriculate in a degree granting university. By contrast, it is estimated that 53% of the US population have some form of higher post-secondary education, with 39% of the age group obtaining an Associate (two year) degree or higher. Overall, 27% of the population in the United States has a Bachelors degree (4 year) of which approximately 10% have a graduate degree as well. These numbers are net of drop outs. We do, of course, have many outstanding universities in the UK, especially the 20 members of the Russell Group, of which 15 rank in the top 100 universities in the world, but their numbers compared with the number of leading US universities are much smaller than the difference in total population would warrant - 300 million population in the USA versus 60 million in the UK. In total there are more than 7,000 accredited institutions of higher education in the United States compared with just 169 higher education degree awarding institutions in the UK, of which only 130 are universities, plus 376 further education colleges. Why is the American higher education system so successful despite the difficulties at school level in many urban areas, and could British universities benefit from using some of the US techniques? This paper analyses the differences in the two systems and makes recommendations on how British universities could benefit from adopting many of the American system's techniques.