England’s Universities c.1169-2009 R.I.P.

Civitas, 4 August 2009

This week sees another set of venerable institutions, long enfeebled by years of over-indulgence at the public trough, singled out by Parliament, if not exactly for euthanasia, then for slow asphyxiation by ever tighter state-regulation.

In return for a measly subsistence from the state, they will now shortly be made to eke out their days jumping through whichever hoops their paymasters decide they should.

I speak, of course, of England’s universities, especially its most ancient and prestiguous ones.

A Commons Select Committee report published this week has recommended that their degree-awarding powers should be up for periodic ten year renewal by a beefed-up Quality Assurance Agency, despite initially having been granted in perpetuity.

Heaven help us!

The Select Committee claims (several of whose members know a thing or two about how to drink from the public trough) that only by all universities being held to a single common standard can public confidence be preserved in the value of degrees, given the massive expansion of the sector for many past decades now, especially since the Dearing Report of 1997.

The alternative, rejected by the Committee, is to allow it to become widely accepted, as they admit it is in the USA, that the value of degrees awarded by one university are not the same as those awardded by another.

Heaven forbid that anyone – let alone everyone – should believe a first from Oxford Brookes is not worth as much as a first from Oxford!

It seems not to have occurred to the Committee that, if their demand for a uniform standard is to be combined with a 50 per cent participation rate, then the only way anything approaching that resulting number of students will be able to graduate is by debasing the academic currency to the point where practically all Russell Group University graduates will need to receive firsts so that more than a mere handful at the new universities be allowed to scrape passes, let alone gain firsts.

Far better that the state cease to subsidise under-graduate teaching at all than that a single uniform standard be imposed in return for universities receiving it under conditions of a mass higher education system.

Under such conditions, more (students) cannot fail to mean much less (by way of quality).

In any case, why should the tax-payer support higher education financially, given it is not compulsory? That was one question the Select Committee did not bother to ask, or, if it did, provide an answer for.

It was the Robbins Committee on Higher Education which in 1963 first recommended that university places should be available to all willing and able to benefit from one. It was that recommendation which began the steady expansion of the university sector to the point that now threatens to drown it in a pool of mediocrity.

That expansion always ignored a major caveat which Robbins had entered. This was that university places should only be made available to those who had given prior indication of an ability to benefit from one. If not infallibly discernible at admission, it was the view of Robbins that any half decent university should be able to tell, by the end of the first year, whether any student on their books was par for the course.

State subsidy has given universities such incentive to turn a blind eye at that point to students of theirs clearly unable or unwilling to benefit from a continued place that, to avoid politically unacceptable high failure rates, the less good universities have constantly had to lower their standards at final honours. The inevitable result has been steady debasement of the currency at the lower end of the market.

Now, as evidence becomes ever more abundant of just how widely standards vary from institution to institution, the House of Commons Select Committee wishes to impose a uniform standard. This is bound to devalue the worth of a degree from good universities, even firsts.

If all have prizes, what is their worth? If all Russell Group universities in future shall have to award firsts or upper seconds to practically all their students so that more than a mere handful can graduate with honours at some newer universities, what will become of the value of a first from the better universities? It will surely no longer mean as much as it once did.

What we are seeing, as a result of the state subsidy of university teaching, is the beginning of the comprehensivation of the university sector.

Far better it seems to me for the state to withdraw from subsidising university education altogether, and allow the market to decide what university degrees are worth relative to each other.

In a very perceptive comment posted a year ago on the BBC News website, one anonymous employer offered the following insight into what degrees awarded by English universities have come to mean for people in his situation. He wrote:

‘I am an employer who usually recruits degree level staff. Assuming you are getting an education to get a good job, like it or not, at the end of the day it’s the opinion of people like me that counts. And this is the actual grading system in use:

1st – Candidate actually tried & is at least reasonably intelligent.
2:1 – Candidate turned up for many of their lectures and did a bit of work.
2:2 – Mostly didn’t even show up as too hammered from SU bar.
3rd – No one puts this on their CV, they simply say they passed. in our opinion they failed miserably and it is worse than them having nothing.

If Unis continue to try to be smart Alecs with the grading we’ll simply lose all faith in the system and soon a whole new industry will grow up around intelligence testing for recruitment.’ (Barry, Woking)

What boss Barry said about this matter is sadly all too true.

Employers, and increasingly everyone else, will cease to take notice of degree results, even of those that issue from a single national standard, so long as successive governments continue to have recourse to using universities as instruments by which to increase upwards social mobility, rather than as centres of higher learning.

Frankly, I would sooner see the university sector contract to a fraction of its current size, but to remain true to its original higher purpose than be made to lose its credibility on grounds of short-sighted political expediency.