AFTER forty-two years in university teaching, I am frequently asked whether today’s student standard is better or worse than it was when I first took up the job in 1960. My answer can only be based on my own experience, which is not necessarily typical.

Thirty-seven years of that experience is in the constituent Colleges of the University of London, and five at Yale, which, from the undergraduate point of view, is probably the best of the great American Ivy League universities.

My answer to the question whether it is better or worse is “both”. Which matters more is not a question of quantitative measurement; it is a question of value judgement, on which my view varies from day to day.

In terms of sheer intellectual ability, the undergraduates I taught at King’s College London last year are on average a good deal better than those I taught in the 1960s.
They have a higher average level of intelligence, they use it with greater confidence, they argue more ably to the question asked, and they more often say things in their final examinations which examiners remember because they are interesting and illuminating. In terms of undergraduate quality, more has not meant worse. Since this is a tribute to our school system which is rarely paid, it should be acknowledged.

Where things are worse is that financial stringency is not allowing these able candidates to do justice to their ability in anything more than flashes: they do not have the time to do the work needed to keep it up across the length of a syllabus.

England – not Britain – is almost unique in its reliance on a concentrated three-year degree. This has many advantages, not least that it allows people to begin the pension contributions earlier in their lives than they can in America, France or Germany. Yet the three-year degree, by necessity, must depend on the preservation of the full-time student.
In America, where people work their way through college, they achieve a similar standard, but only because they take four years to do what we attempt in three.

Our three-year degree depends, of necessity, on the concept of the full-time student.
This is why it is a disaster that the changes in student funding since 1990 have left the full-time student a thing of the past. This is not just a matter of tuition fees – they are only the arsenic on the cake.

The problem is that the total package of student support is, by the NUS’s calculations, which I think just about accurate, £13.60 a week below the level of Income Support. That is not a full-time student.

Students get round this in one or both of two ways. Either they work for money during term, typically for some 12 hours a week, but in extreme cases as many as 28 hours a week, or they rely on support from parents, typically at a level of some £2,000 a year over and above free board and lodging during vacations.
Clearly, the less they can rely on from their parents, the more they have to earn, and the less academic work they are free to do.

The quality of student degrees is coming to measure parental bank balance more accurately than the student’s ability. This is neither just nor useful to the country. As Will Hutton argues, we are now moving from meritocracy, back towards a hereditary plutocracy. This neither carries consent nor prefers the best people.

It is very clear, looking at students’ records, that a rising proportion of those who show first-class talent somewhere in their course are unable to do the work needed to translate this into a first-class degree. The most miserable of all are those who cannot rely on support from parents from whom they are estranged.

Without access to Housing Benefit, the sort of temporary work available to students simply will not get them accommodation through the vacation. Some potentially brilliant people in this situation are constrained to withdraw altogether.

I would advise others in their situation not to come to university at 18, but to work until they have saved some £5,000, and then come up as mature students. This is the most crying injustice in student finance. At the same time as the amount of work students are able to do is reduced, the broadening of the syllabus increases the range of things we expect them to know about.

In 1960, no one was expected to know about women’s history, or about the history of non-European peoples. While I welcome these changes warmly, I would like to see my pupils able to take advantage of them.

That would mean being able, as undergraduates of my generation were, to do some serious academic reading in vacations, but I fear the idea of that is now lost beyond recovery.
The biggest drop in standards is in literacy. This is a worldwide phenomenon, and each country blames it entirely on the defects of its own educational system.
We should stop punishing ourselves, and recognise a worldwide cultural change when we see one.

Five hundred years ago, printing changed us from people of the image into people of the book. Television has now put this change into reverse. We will not stop it, but we mitigate its consequences a little.
Inevitably, the financial changes bias university intake towards middle-class students with good paying parents.

If governments blame universities for this, they are failing to recognise the effects of their own actions. Also, graduates with five figure debts gravitate towards professions like law and accountancy. If the Government cannot recruit any teachers, it has only itself to blame.
n The fifth Earl Russell, the son of philosopher Bertrand Russell, retired this year as Professor of History at University College London. He is a Liberal Democrat peer with interests in education and asylum.