I did finish mine, but only by biting back rancour about absent tutors, sub-standard facilities, a whole course offered but never delivered.
I stayed, tempted by the offer of sexy courses such as film history and digital imaging. AS I trod the boards of the Barbican, capped and gowned, to collect my 2:1 (BA Hons – fine art with film history) from the University of East London last month, I experienced the sinking feeling that had dogged my previous three years as a student. Had I obtained a degree that was worth having?

UEL has just been named and shamed as being at the top of Britain’s drop- out league: a shocking 36 per cent of its students do not complete their degrees. At the beginning of the new millennium, nothing suggests that education has lost its significance as a way of transmitting wealth and social position from one generation to another. Ministerial task forces and Ofsted inspectors are unlikely to stop this. It was true of the vocational education of novices in a medieval religious house, it was also true of the preparation of would-be district commissioners within public schools, and it explains many of the troubles of “failing” schools in our modern urban slums.

Meanwhile, the British universities are going down the slot because they have ceased to have friends in high places.Heigh-ho it is some comfort to know that it will all be one with Nineveh and Tyre a thousand years from now.The writer was editor of the `Times Educational Supplement’ from 1969 to 1989, and is the author of `History of Education in London 1870-1990′ among other books. A thousand years of education have shown how closely education is linked to jobs and social status. More than one in 20 of the work force is employed in education.The Education Reform Act of 1988 completed the task of organising the system begun by the Victorians nationalising the school curriculum and prescribing it in detail by Parliamentary Order.But social factors still impose themselves on educational performance. It was only in the mid-1980s that the proportion of the age-group staying on at school beyond the minimum leaving age topped 50 per cent. Enrolment in higher education has rapidly moved up from around 15 per cent to more than 30 per cent. What pupils and parents want from school is still related to the prospects of employment – while teachers and educationists – and now politicians – have higher aspirations.Educational development, post-World War Two, has gathered pace in the past 15 years from a gallop to a break-neck stampede. Elementary schools for the mass of the population continued till the 1944 Act, by which time the leaving age had crept up from 10 or 11 to 14 years.Building on foundations like these, it is hardly surprising that it has proved difficult to create a unified system of education based on equality of opportunity The tension continues.

Again, the rationale was strictly in sociological terms, and it related to a world in which children were wage earners before they entered their teens. Eventually in 1870, Forster’s Act created School Boards to fill up the gaps left by the churches and non-denominational school- providers. Compulsory education followed a few years later.These schools provided the education thought suitable for working class children – a minimal introduction to the basics. Oxford’s famous riposte to Lord John Russell’s Royal Commission indicated what the reformers were up against. The Hebdomadal Board saw no need for any action because two centuries ago – in 1636 – the university revised the whole body of its statutes, and the academic system of study was admirably arranged at a time when not only the nature and faculties of the human mind were exactly what they are still, and must, of course, remain, but the principles also of sound and enlarged intellectual culture were far from being imperfectly understood.Educational reformers also had to do something about the mixed bunch of schools founded by the churches and by other philanthropists to provide elementary schooling for the children of the poor – the great mass of the population. But they were essentially institutions for the minority of pupils – never more than 15 per cent – with superior abilities or well-to-do parents.Earlier, there had been moves to reform the ancient universities, now joined by King’s College London, the first of the new 19th century foundations. As the middle class expanded and got richer, the range of secondary schools widened, and after 1902 the county councils added yet more.