ABSTRACT
The new University of Essex was one among many. In the early 1960s most governments, especially in the developed world, decided to put very much larger amounts of money into higher education than ever before. The process went on until the oil crisis of the early Seventies reduced the money available; even before that, further growth had been discouraged by the student troubles of the late Sixties. In the Eighties the assumption gradually began to seem less well founded, seemed increasingly an inapplicable relic of the paternalistic, ‘cossetting’ thinking which had produced free libraries, university extra-mural departments, the Workers’ Educational Association and the Open University. The increased provision in the Sixties for higher education within traditional institutions was less unsettling, so more easily digestible by government, than the founding of the Open University. Students who continued to live at home were given less, but again could manage unless their parents demanded over-much for bed and board.
