The STEM course cull

stephen clarke, 24 February 2012

Last December Civitas published the ‘STEM Subject Push’ which examined the take up of STEM subjects in British universities in the last decade. Yesterday the University and College Union (UCU) published ‘Choice Cuts: How choice has declined in higher education’. Where the Civitas publication documented the slow growth or even fall in British students choosing STEM subjects at university, the UCU finds that the number of STEM and other courses offered by British universities fell between 2006 and 2012. Is there any connection between these two phenomena?

The headline figures in the UCU’s report are as follows: there was a 27 per cent reduction in undergraduate courses between 2006 and 2012, a 14 per cent fall in principle subject courses (single subject courses) and a 14.8 per cent fall in principle STEM subject courses.

The UCU comes to the conclusion that the fall in course provision is the result of public spending cuts for university courses, the evidence for this claim comes from the fact that course provision has fallen to a lesser degree in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland where public funding for teaching has not been cut to the same degree as in England.

UCU’s conclusion is compelling. However the fall in STEM courses was marginally greater than that of arts and humanities and social science subjects despite the fact that public funding for STEM courses was retained, albeit at a reduced level, whereas it was cut for all other courses. This begs the question: are there any other factors explaining the fall in course provision?

One factor could be reduced demand. 44 per cent of principal subjects offered by British universities are STEM subjects whereas only 34 per cent of students take science subjects, and this includes students studying medicine, veterinary and architecture which are not usually classed as STEM subjects. This could suggest that there is an oversupply of STEM courses relative to demand.

Using data produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency one can dig deeper into this hypothesis. The UCU report identified a number of courses which had witnessed a significant reduction of provision: biology, physical and geographical sciences, computer science and sociology amongst them. The table below looks at the number of students enrolled on these subjects from 2004/05 to 2008/09. It is important to note that there was a change in data collection in 2007/08 that excluded writing-up and sabbatical students and which altered how some courses were delineated. The first change had a marginal effect upon reported student numbers, the second change effected the physical and geographical sciences.

The data in the table above largely calls into doubt the hypothesis that falling demand is the cause of falling provision. Nearly all courses examined saw an increase in demand or a steady level of demand in the years examined. The exception is computer sciences which saw a significant fall in student numbers. Importantly these figures are for the period before the period examined by UCU. If a fall in demand was responsible for a reduction in provision it is in these years that it should show up.

I don’t think that the demand hypothesis can be thrown out completely, the evidence concerning computer science could support it and during Civitas’ research for the ‘STEM Subject Push’ evidence emerged that some departments and courses were under threat from a lack of demand, remaining opening primarily because of demand from non-EU overseas students paying significantly higher fees. Nevertheless it is clear that the demand hypothesis cannot really explain the fall in course provision.

As a result the UCU’s conclusion demands even more examination. The Government’s plan to increase student fees was an attempt to place higher education funding on a more sustainable footing, however it should not be assumed that higher fees alone can fund Britain’s world class universities in the future.