University Financing, 1979-86.

In the summer of 1986, universities found themselves in a serious situation, the seeds for which had been sown some quarter of a century earlier. Immediately after the Second World War moderate but steady growth had occurred in the university sector, numbers reaching a plateau at the end of the fifties. The general feeling around 1960, shared by both the major political parties, was that considerably more needed to be done in the tertiary education field if Britain was to maintain its position as one of the leading developed nations. It seemed, moreover, a natural consequence of the effects of the wartime Butler Education Act that universities should respond to the impetus that had developed in the schools since 1944. Both teachers and pupils had indeed come to expect that places in tertiary education should expand to match the numbers fit to fill them; moreover those places should be available in the subjects desired by the students themselves. The motive power for the enhanced demand that was then sense...