The process by which numbers breed numbers has at its heart a disturbing paradox. We are being forced by the scale of the educational enterprise to reduce things to numbers because numbers can, on the face of it, be added and equated. Two points plus two points makes four, wherever those points come from. Yet that same educational expansion means that things are actually less standard, and therefore probably less comparable, then ever before. The result of our current need to translate everything into a single numerical tariff is that standards become at once more heterogeneous and far more political.
Standards are also an economic issue.
These figures reflect the perception that a British degree is good value in the global market. If the perception changes, it is not simply that overseas students will disappear. In line with other countries, we will also find our own middle classes investing in overseas degrees and even secondary schooling. The growing importance of formal qualifications in a high skill economy has effected a transformation in British education in the last decades, creating self-perpetuating pressures on young people in this country as well as the rest of the developed world. The next century will, in all probability, carry this to an increasingly global level.