Blaming universities for our nation's woes

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In black below is the text of a comment piece in the Times Higher Education by Jamie Martin, advisor to Michael Gove, on Higher Education in the UK entitled “Must Do Better”. In red are my thoughts on his arguments.

In an increasingly testing global race, Britain’s competitive advantage must be built on education.

What is this ‘increasingly testing global race’? Why should education be seen as part of an international competition rather than a benefit to all humankind?

Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings show that we have three of the world’s top 10 universities to augment our fast-improving schools. Sustaining a competitive edge, however, requires constant improvement and innovation. We must ask hard questions about our universities’ failures on academic rigour and widening participation, and recognise the need for reform.

Well, this seems a rather confused message. On the one hand, we are doing very well, but on the other hand we urgently need to reform.

Too many higher education courses are of poor quality. When in government, as special adviser to Michael Gove, I was shown an analysis indicating that around half of student loans will never be repaid. Paul Kirby, former head of the Number 10 Policy Unit, has argued that universities and government are engaging in sub-prime lending, encouraging students to borrow about £40,000 for a degree that will not return that investment. We lend money to all degree students on equal terms, but employers don’t perceive all university courses as equal. Taxpayers, the majority of whom have not been to university, pick up the tab when this cruel lie is exposed.

So let’s get this right. The government introduced a massive hike in tuition fees (£1,000 per annum in 1998, £3,000 p.a. in 2004, £9,000 p.a. in 2010). The idea was that people would pay for these with loans which they would pay off when they were earning above a threshold. It didn’t work because many people didn’t get high-paying jobs and now it is estimated that 45% of loans won’t be repaid.

Whose fault is this? The universities! You might think the inability of people to pay back loans is a consequence of lack of jobs due to recession, but, no, the students would all be employable if only they had been taught different things!  

With the number of firsts doubling in a decade, we need an honest debate about grade inflation and the culture of low lecture attendance and light workloads it supports. Even after the introduction of tuition fees, the Higher Education Policy Institute found that contact time averaged 14 hours a week and degrees that were “more like a part-time than a full-time job”. Unsurprisingly, many courses have tiny or even negative earnings premiums and around half of recent graduates are in non-graduate jobs five years after leaving.

An honest debate would be good. One that took into account the conclusions of this report by ONS which states: “Since the 2008/09 recession, unemployment rates have risen for all groups but the sharpest rise was experienced by non-graduates aged 21 to 30.”  This report does indeed note the 47% of recent graduates in non-graduate jobs, but points out two factors that could contribute to the trend: the increased number of graduates and decreased demand for graduate skills. There is no evidence that employers are preferring non-graduates to graduates for skilled jobs: rather there is a mismatch between the number of graduates and the number of skilled jobs.

This is partly because the system lacks diversity. Too many providers are weak imitations of the ancient universities. We have nothing to rival the brilliant polytechnics I saw in Finland, while the development of massive online open courses has been limited. The exciting New College of the Humanities, a private institution with world-class faculty, is not eligible for student loans. More universities should focus on a distinctive offer, such as cheaper shorter degrees or high-quality vocational courses.

What an intriguing wish-list: Finnish polytechnics, MOOCs, and the New College of the Humanities, which charges an eye-watering £17,640 for full-time undergraduates in 2014-15.  The latter might be seen as ‘exciting’ if you are interested in the privatisation of the higher education sector, but for those of us interested in educating the UK population, it seems more of an irrelevance – likely to become a finishing school for the children of oligarchs, rather than a serious contender for educating our populace.

If the failures on quality frustrate the mind, those on widening participation perturb the heart. Each year, the c.75,000 families on benefits send fewer students to Oxbridge than the c.100 families whose children attend Westminster School. Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission found that the most selective universities have actually become more socially exclusive over the past decade.

Flawed admissions processes reinforce this inequality. Evidence from the US shows that standardised test scores (the SAT), which are a strong predictor of university grades, have a relatively low correlation with socio-economic status. The high intelligence that makes you a great university student is not the sole preserve of the social elite. The AS modules favoured by university admissions officers have diluted A-level standards and are a poorer indicator of innate ability than standardised tests. Universities still prioritise performance in personal statements, Ucas forms and interviews, which correlate with helicopter parents, not with high IQ.

Criticise their record on widening access, and universities will blame the failures of the school system. Well, who walked on by while it was failing? Who failed to speak out enough about the grade inflation that especially hurt poorer pupils with no access to teachers who went beyond weakened exams? Until Mark Smith, vice-chancellor of Lancaster University, stepped forward, Gove’s decision to give universities control of A-level standards met with a muted response.

Ah, this is interesting. After a fulmination against social inequality in university admissions (well, at last a point I can agree on), Jamie Martin notes that there is an argument that blames this on failures in the school system. After all, if “The high intelligence that makes you a great university student is not the sole preserve of the social elite”, why aren’t intelligent children from working class backgrounds coming out of school with good A-levels? Why are parents abandoning the state school system? Martin seems to accept this is valid, but then goes on to argue that lower-SES students don’t get into university because everyone has good A-levels (grade inflation) – and that’s all the fault of universities for not ‘speaking out’. Is he really saying that if we had more discriminating A-levels, then the lower SES pupils would outperform private school pupils?

The first step in a prioritisation of education is to move universities into an enlarged Department for Education after the general election. The Secretary of State should immediately commission a genuinely independent review to determine which degrees are a sound investment or of strategic importance. Only these would be eligible for three-year student loans. Some shorter loans might encourage more efficient courses. Those who will brand this “philistinism” could not be more wrong: it is the traditional academic subjects that are valued by employers (philosophy at the University of Oxford is a better investment than many business courses). I am not arguing for fewer people to go to university. We need more students from poorer backgrounds taking the best degrees.

So, more reorganisation. And somehow, reducing the number of courses for which you can get a student loan is going to increase the number of students from poorer backgrounds who go to university. Just how this magic is to be achieved remains unstated.

Government should publish easy-to-use data showing Treasury forecasts on courses’ expected loan repayments, as well as quality factors such as dropout rates and contact time. It should be made much easier to start a new university or to remodel existing ones.

So here we come to the real agenda. Privatisation of higher education.

Politicians and the Privy Council should lose all control of higher education. Student choice should be the main determinant of which courses and institutions thrive.

Erm, but two paragraphs back we were told that student loans would only be available for those courses which were ‘a sound investment or of strategic importance’.

Universities should adopt standardised entrance tests. And just as private schools must demonstrate that they are worthy of their charitable status, universities whose students receive loans should have to show what action they are taking to improve state schools. The new King’s College London Maths School, and programmes such as the Access Project charity, are models to follow.

So it’s now the responsibility of universities, rather than the DfE to improve state schools?

The past decade has seen a renaissance in the state school system, because when tough questions were asked and political control reduced, brilliant teachers and heads stepped forward. It is now the turn of universities to make Britain the world’s leading education nation.

If there really has been a renaissance, the social gradient should fix itself, because parents will abandon expensive private education, and children will leave state schools with a raft of good qualifications, regardless of social background. If only….

With his ‘must do better’ arguments, Martin adopts a well-known strategy for those who wish to privatise public services: first of all starve them of funds, then heap on criticism to portray the sector as failing so that it appears that the only solution is to be taken over by a free market.  The NHS has been the focus of such a campaign, and it seems that now the attention is shifting to higher education. But here Martin has got a bit of a problem. As indicated in his second sentence, we are actually doing surprisingly well, with our publicly-funded universities competing favourably with the wealthy private universities in the USA.

PS. For my further thoughts on tuition fees in UK universities, see here.