It’s not even social engineering – just counterproductive interfering
Civitas, 16 March 2007
According to The Times interpretation, splashed across their front page today, ‘middle-class pupils face losing out on university places if their parents have degrees and professional jobs,’ after the University and College Admissions Service [UCAS] announced land-mark changes to the university admissions system. Prospective students will now be asked to declare both whether their parents went to university and what type of job they are in. The Times’ assertion that this move could potentially lead to middle-class pupils being discriminated against is tied to UCAS’ confirmation that the underlying motive is to ‘support the continuing efforts of universities and colleges to widen participation.’
The Times comments that critics of UCAS’ new admissions criteria have argued that it ‘smacked of social engineering.’ But for two important reasons, if social engineering is the aim, this is an extremely clumsy attempt. The first reason is illustrated by Pat Langham, president of the Girls’ Schools Association, a body which represents independent girls’ schools in the UK. She argues that discriminating against applicants on the basis of their parents’ backgrounds as a way of mitigating the advantages of privilege could seriously backfire: ‘I was the first person in my family to go to university. My father was a policeman and my mother a dinner lady. But I’m a headmistress with a degree; were I to have children applying for university under these rules, would they be discriminated against because I have worked hard?’
Pat Langham’s second point, that the new rules might lead applicants into deception by saying, for example, that their father is a ‘builder’ rather than a ‘property developer’ ties to the second major flaw in this type of social engineering: a premise of academic snobbery. The New Labour government, which is keenly supporting UCAS’s new admissions rules, has been on a blinkered mission to up university entries. It doesn’t matter what people study, or whether it will be of any use to them in the labour market, as long as they become a graduate. The thinking behind this is theoretically equality of opportunity, and anti-elitism. In fact, it seems to be quite the reverse. The government’s message, now pervasive in schools, is loud and clear: those who don’t go to university are inferior. Accompanying this message comes a negligence of helping young people into vocational work, the dumbing down of the curricula and classes based around cramming for exams so that everyone can be ‘academic’. The result is that young people’s opportunities are often stunted rather than extended: leaving school and going into non-academic work is seen as failure, as well as being very poorly facilitated by the school system; and many teens now go on to do a degree which leaves them unemployable and in debt. The pinnacle of this attitude seems to be academic snobbery rather than greater democracy.
If UCAS and the government really wanted to socially engineer, then the most effective way to do so would be through good state schools. At the moment, the number of private schools students in the Russell Group universities [the nearest thing we have to the Ivy League] is hugely disproportionate to the number of privately pupils in the general pupil population. Why? Because, these universities find that independently educated pupils come to them better educated. And no, this isn’t solely down to home-background advantages. As we know from the government’s proposals to alter ‘ghettoising’ schools admissions, there are many state schools in middle-class catchment areas attended wholly or predominantly by privileged middle-class children. In other words, a lot is down to better schooling in the private sector.
Mark,
You say:
“Chris has made the point that “People who go to university have, on average, much better outcomes in the labour market, which improve as careers progress.”. This is a fallacy.”
You are provably wrong, as the research of the likes of Elias and Purcell, or the series of papers by Dearden et al demonstrate.
I would be very interested indeed if you could show any evidence of any kind that the average graduate is better off not going to university. I can think of one specialised case, but nobody sensible would use that particular to generalise to the entire graduate population.
You say:
“Increasing the number of graduates, like increasing the money supply justs leads to a larger number of graduates chasing after the same number of “graduate jobs”.”
Mark, this betrays a very simple logical error. You make the assumption that the level of graduate jobs in the economy has not changed. It has, certainly since the start of university expansion under John Major. That is why graduate outcomes have remained broadly similar since the last recession – again, provably the case, and easily checked by recourse to HESA data and through the research of Elias and Purcell.
However, you have got one thing right – vocational education is essential to the UK.
Chris has made the point that “People who go to university have, on average, much better outcomes in the labour market, which improve as careers progress.”. This is a fallacy. Increasing the number of graduates, like increasing the money supply justs leads to a larger number of graduates chasing after the same number of “graduate jobs”. Inevitably, where an employer would have previously accepted a third class degree, the increasing number of third class degrees means that only second class degrees, right up until the current situation where you now require a decent Masters to be able to get a job that used to require a first. The ludicrous thing is that it means that people on their first job are now spending more time in education and in theory are more qualified, but I see no first hand evidence that these people are actually any *better* at doing the job than I was 14 or so years ago. I am priviledged to work with a whole load of people who have not been through University, but whose technical and personal expertise rival those of many graduates. Vocational education is essential to our country, and the government’s obsession with universities is harming our country’s productivity.
There’s so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to start.
The Times badly missed the point, being too keen to generate controversy to really think about the plan. You’ve followed them, by not actually thinking properly about why this might be happening.
This isn’t about social engineering. It never was. That’s just been made up by some education journalists with no background in education who don’t understand the system and had a deadline to meet. It’s actually at core about statistics.
Let’s set aside the fallacy you’ve set up about the graduate labour market, which has clearly been made without access to any of the data. People who go to university have, on average, much better outcomes in the labour market, which improve as careers progress. A fair system should offer everyone the chance to benefit from this huge leg up on the career ladder.
However, the evidence strongly suggests that efforts to widen participation have not succeeded and that universities have largely opened their doors to increasing numbers of middle-class people who would not have got in under the old system. But, we can’t be sure because the data doesn’t exist. Actually, there is a surprising amount of it available – I know, I have a lot of it. But we only think there might be a problem, we don’t know.
That’s what this exercise is for.
There may be social engineering later, but you’re carrying on as if the entire admissions exercise will boil down to one of tens of bits of information.
If tutors want to socially engineer, they can already do it. They don’t need this to do it. This whole post is, in essence, a huge straw man.