The latest revelations about endemic tuition fee fraud have drawn attention once again to a truth policymakers do not want to face: that our current model for higher education is completely unsustainable, and by this means or that the system is heading for collapse.
Unfortunately for Conservatives, this isn’t one we can simply blame on New Labour’s bid to radically expand tertiary education. While that is the ultimate wellspring of the sector’s woes, the particular roots of the latest scandal owes to the confluence of two Coalition policies: the huge hike in tuition fees in 2010, and the abolition of the cap on student numbers in 2015.
I outlined the basic problem at ConservativeHome: institutions are now incentivised to pull in as many students as possible, with no investment in the eventual fate of those students (or the money loaned to them), except via reputational risk, which is a horribly intangible thing to pit against the bottom line for a vice-chancellor’s affections.
The result has been a brew of remarkable toxicity. Cost pressures (the Russell Group insists they lose money on every domestic undergraduate) are seeing universities slashing jobs and courses centrally, while those with any sort of reputation lease that reputation to franchisees. These aim to process as many students as possible at the lowest possible cost, with any quality gap disguised by the clustering of fees at the maximum allowable level.
But while that would be bad enough, the effects of lifting the cap extend much farther than one might expect, and have warped and perverted even what ought to be straightforwardly benign parts of the system.
Consider clearing. Before the cap was lifted, the number of students a given institution could accept in a given year was more or less fixed. There was thus no incentive for a university to do anything other than try to get the best cohort they could; thus, especially at the upper end, students tended to be competing for places, not universities for students. As a result, clearing was, as one academic put it to me, ‘genuinely a case of helping out people who hadn’t managed their B in Maths, or whatever’.
Lifting the cap fundamentally changed this. Suddenly institutions – especially those which were not many people’s first choice, or had undersubscribed courses – had every incentive to lure in as many people as they could. According to university staff to whom I’ve spoken, many are now dragooned into shifts cold-calling distressed teenagers who missed their grades, many of whom would be much better off taking a year out to do resits or reassess their options, and giving them the hard sell.
They instead end up getting bounced (and not just by universities but parental expectation and indeed schools, which are assessed in part on the share of their pupils who proceed to further education) onto, on average, lower-value courses, at less prestigious institutions which they will not even have visited – and for which they will assume the exact same debt as someone going to their first choice.
Why are institutions so keen to get people through the door? Because abolishing their places cap undermined the stability of their funding. At first, the sector loved it because student numbers kept going up. But like any industry that bets the house on the line going up forever, it came in for a lot of pain when applications began falling; this was then compounded when inflation started eating the value of their income from student loans.
This in turn created yet another perverse incentive, this time even harder to spot because it is tied up with something that has obvious merit: the question of value for money.
It took a little while for school-leavers to unlearn the old reflex of applying to university by default, but with higher fees we have started to see them getting choosier about where they go. This is, in part, much to be welcomed; anybody signing up for a £28,600 mortgage (plus maintenance loans) secured against their lifetime earnings, with interest rates set at-will by the lender, and which can follow them through bankruptcy, should be very choosy indeed.
For that reason, well-meaning government intervention has focused on this area. The Office for Students, the sector’s regulator (again established under the Conservatives), measures universities in part on their student satisfaction and retention rates. It all sounds indisputably benign.
Except you know what is guaranteed to cause dissatisfaction? Failing.
The huge increases in fees and student numbers, combined with the proliferation of specious degree requirements from employers (evinced in our ‘overqualification’ rate) has fundamentally changed the character of the student intake. Far more undergraduates now think of themselves as consumers, and the product is not an education, but the qualification which serves as a de facto passport to any white-collar employment.
Every so often there is a seemingly-preposterous story of someone suing a university for not granting them the degree they clearly thought they’d paid for, but that is simply the absurd tail of a curve evident in almost any frontline account from teaching staff. Not only is cheating rife but, crucially, universities have little incentive to police it. This article, by a Canadian professor, sets out a very similar tale to the one I get from British academics:
In my experience, there is a fair bit of pressure on faculty not to lean on in-class written assignments. These are said to advantage students who think quickly, who perform well under pressure, who are more comfortable with pen and paper.
Unmentioned, but implied, is the other reason the university might not favour in-person examination as a response to cheating: because accurate assessment would lead to lower grades and, if a substantial number of pupils are wholly reliant on cheating, failure rates. In our upside-down order, that isn’t likely to reflect well on an institution, either to a regulator concerned about happy students or a prospective applicant making a hard-heading calculation about, as they see it, buying a degree.
Thus, even more than they already were due to overstretched budgets, standards slip. Exams are replaced with essays, essays with multiple-choice quizzes or, per one source, ‘presentations and posters’. One current student recently told me that the final-year dissertation was the first essay set on her university’s three-year politics course – and at just 5,000 words, it was not even twice the length of a module essay when I was an undergraduate. Modules were otherwise graded via multiple-choice quiz.
(To this we might also add that rigorous assessment might not produce politically-desirable outcomes – case in point, the recent call from the Higher Education Policy Institute for Oxford and Cambridge to ditch exams and oral examinations because the wrong people, i.e. men, are getting too many firsts.)
The best, and perhaps only, defence of the Coalition’s double-tap to the head of the old university sector is that some means was needed to pay for tertiary education on the scale New Labour had expanded it to. The tuition fee levels it inherited were nowhere near enough, and it would have been both politically and morally absurd to give universities an open line of government funding at a time of steep cuts to essential services.
But as so often in British politics, the option chosen merely postponed the problem at the cost of exacerbating it. Rather than face up to fundamental questions about what tertiary education is for and to what extent the taxpayer should fund it, ministers resorted to any other means they could lay their hands on for channelling cash to the sector. The result is a policy mix which achieves the remarkable goal of failing everyone at once.
Universities are leasing their good names to private contractors for a quick buck and relying on the import of ever-more international students (of whom we currently have 600,000, a population the size of Glasgow) into a housing crisis – and even after all that, the sector is in acute financial crisis.
Meanwhile, remaining staff are immiserated both by teaching larger and larger cohorts of students who don’t want to be there and by the changing tastes of those that do (to whit: collapsing humanities departments), while young people are forced to ‘opt in’ to a morally indefensible marginal tax rate to have any chance of getting jobs which many of them will be ‘over-’ (read: ‘irrelevantly-’) qualified for.
Now Bridget Phillipson is considering forcing financially-sound universities to merge with those that aren’t, freighting hale institutions with deadweights just to again avoid confronting the problem. Truly, the reckoning can’t come soon enough.
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