ABSTRACT
The issue of access is the best starting point for any discussion of the future of higher education because it is a question that dominated, and steered, the post-war expansion of the system through the famous Robbins principle. The social base of the universities has been broadened, but not as much as many had hoped. Going to university has become a much more common experience for 18-year-olds in Britain; indeed it has become the almost automatic expectation of many middle-class professional families. The record of the polytechnics and colleges on the other side of the binary line was equally mixed. In the non-university sector the polytechnics jostle with the colleges of higher education, themselves sub-dividing into proto-liberal arts and proto-community colleges. The message is as much that the future for higher education is ambiguous as that it is bleak.
