This new book is more evidence that analysis of higher education is getting better. Other signals include Michael Shattock’s Making Policy in British Higher Education, 1945-2011, which came out last year, and Everything for Sale: The Marketisation of UK Higher Education by Roger Brown and Helen Carasso, which was published earlier this year. As David Willetts noted in a recent speech, the LSE and the Institute of Education are preparing events to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Robbins report. Meanwhile, wonkhe goes from strength to strength. This is all good news because the study of higher education as a discipline in its own right has been patchy in the UK.

Andrew McGettigan writes well, explaining detailed points of law and finance clearly. The book builds on his influential 2012 report for the Intergenerational Foundation, False Accounting?, which ingeniously claimed the current higher education reforms would not save money. This time, he takes a broader view with sections on recent funding reforms, marketisation and privatisation. If the prose proves tough for general readers, that reflects the depth of analysis rather than other weaknesses.

The book is an interesting read because the author goes to unexpected places. Just when you think you know where he is heading, he veers off in a totally different direction. So, after laying the blame for higher education’s woes squarely at the door of politicians and Vice Chancellors, he concludes that most universities should have less independence from the state while a tiny minority should have more independence. That such a bifurcation would risk a new form of the old binary divide is no deterrent.

The author would not expect me to agree with his arguments and I don’t. This is partly because they lack historical roots. He claims: ‘Expansion of higher education began under Kenneth Baker’. This is unfair on earlier politicians and officials, local authorities and university administrators – not to mention Lionel Robbins. Later on, he says ‘the government is no longer committed’ to propping up failing institutions, but previous governments did not offer universities a guaranteed lifeline either.

There is an unfortunate tendency among writers on higher education to don rose-tinted spectacles when looking at the past and dark-tinted ones when looking at the present. McGettigan particularly condemns ‘the botched loan scheme [which] means that the Treasury has insisted on an overall cap on student numbers.’ But the need to impose a cap on the total number of students in order to limit the exposure of taxpayers is neither new nor unique to England. Politicians have grappled with the trade-off between student support and the number of funded student places for decades, as I attempt to show in a new article on the history of undergraduate support since 1962 for Contemporary British History. Australia faces the same issue, with some experts warning the country will need to reverse their recent policy of lifting student number controls because of burgeoning costs.

There are other problems too. As well as lacking historical awareness, the book has an odd take on current policymaking. McGettigan repeatedly asserts that the Coalition’s motives are concealed from view. The Government are proceeding ‘without presenting its plans or reasoning to the public.’ Opponents of the higher education reforms have been outmanoeuvred by politicians who call ‘snap votes’, ‘sneak passages’ into legislation and use ‘existing powers quietly’ (his italics).

This doesn’t stack up. The students who poured into central London in 2010 were not protesting at being kept in the dark about the Government’s intentions. The £9,000 tuition fee cap was announced in Parliament and later debated and voted on in both the Commons and the Lords. Other important elements of the student finance package, like the real interest rate, were in primary legislation that went through all the regular parliamentary stages. There has been a higher education white paper and an accompanying technical document as well as numerous public consultations on contentious issues, such as the regulation of alternative providers. Indeed, these documents provide much of the raw material for the book.

Because McGettigan believes policymakers’ motives are concealed, he proceeds to reveal them. But conjecture is portrayed as hard fact. So recent changes to institutions’ own number controls are ‘a deliberate step in a process designed to destabilise them [universities] prior to the entrance and expansion of the alternative providers.’ The potential benefits to students and to the sector as a whole of a more flexible and diverse higher education system are downplayed. Instead of explaining why policymakers would want to do all the things he ascribes to them, McGettigan assumes it’s axiomatic that the goal is ‘creating new outlets for value extraction.’

As part of this, he condemns the Government in fruity terms for meeting with higher education providers not funded by Hefce. (In his words, they are ‘privateers, private equity managers and other profit-making interests.’) But any administration seeking to improve the regulation of alternative providers has a duty to try and understand them as part of evidence-based policymaking. The meetings between BIS and alternative providers are referred to in the book but other meetings, such as those with the author, are not.

The most significant factual error is where McGettigan claims: ‘Dearing recommended a means-tested upfront fee of £1,000 a year’. There are two problems with this. First, the Dearing report of 1997 recommended a flat-rate, not means-tested, fee. Secondly, it said the fee should be backed by an income-contingent loan, not paid upfront. The slip is unfortunate as it suggests the Blair Government’s decision to implement a means-tested fee with no underlying loan was in line with Dearing, and therefore consensual. It wasn’t. As Stephen Dorrell, the shadow Secretary of State for Education and Employment, told the House of Commons at the time, it was ‘a policy that was specifically examined and specifically rejected by Sir Ron Dearing and his committee’. Within a few years, it had been reversed.

There are alternatives to the Government’s approach to higher education and Andrew suggests some. But they usually involve less responsive funding structures, higher barriers for new providers and more rigid student number controls. The Coalition could have set the size and shape of the higher education sector in aspic back in 2010 and slashed the unit of resource instead of shifting further towards loans, but it would have limited student choice, blunted incentives to improve the academic experience and hindered institutions trying to excel.

Overall, this book is polemical, lively and well-written. But while its research on issues like the legal status of different institutions is thorough, its contentions are flaky. The book’s objective, according to its Preface, is to be a primer on recent changes. I am not convinced it succeeds in this because it will be hard for disinterested readers to separate opinion from fact. Yet if you regard it instead as a lengthy political pamphlet, then you do not have to agree with it all to welcome it as a useful contribution to the debate.

You can buy The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education by Andrew McGettigan (Pluto Press, 2013) here.

Win a copy of the book by sending a poem no longer than 14 lines about the Coalition Government’s reforms to higher education to: competitions@wonkhe.com by Friday 14th June 2013. The best entries will be published on this site and the winner will receive a book. 

We thought the last Spending Review in 2010 was bad enough.  But this one – covering 2015-16 and then 2016-2018 is beginning to look a whole lot worse. Departments across Whitehall are now deep into negotiations with the Treasury. And it’s looked pretty bloody for some time. The Budget confirmed the worst – it showed that it was highly likely that BIS as a non ring-fenced department would be looking at a cut of approximately £1bn (possibly as high as £1.6b) in 2015-16 and more in the years that immediately follow. Science and research may just get a reprieve but that will only magnify the cuts elsewhere in BIS spending.

It already feels like we are fighting a rear-guard action and in HE, the biggest fears look to be for the Widening Participation budget. Alan Langlands warned at the recent HEFCE conference that we need to tell ministers that if they really want social mobility then they will need to pay for it with WP funding. Despite his belligerence it looks a difficult task to persuade a cash strapped Treasury that the extra costs of teaching the disadvantaged can’t be met from within their tuition fees.

The potential cuts to come are eye watering. As the FT showed in their data above, the total reductions between 2010 and 2018 are staggering. Local Government, Culture, Defence – even Health and Education are going to have to make really tough decisions and looking at each in turn it is also easy to see why they might look at universities and see them ‘awash with cash’…

It gets worse. Cutting WP won’t be enough to save the overall amounts required. Spending on skills and education elsewhere in BIS (and also in DFE where only schools are protected) budgets are being scrutinised. FE will likely take a big hit and given that government has worked out what it can save by shifting teaching grants to loans we can expect a shift of pretty much all level 3 19+ learning to loans managed by the Student Loan Company. If we think adult and part time demand is in crisis now, just wait until these changes start to take effect.

All in all we might describe this as a major human capital crisis – and so much for winning the global race. But perhaps as worrying in the short and longer term is a different aspect of this crisis that is gathering pace amongst academics, media and voters – the belief that investment in human capital, skills, FE and HE may not be worth it after all.

In ‘Does Education Matter?’ (2002), Alison Wolf questioned the assumptions linking human capital to economic growth. More recently Phil Brown, Hugh Lauder and David Ashton – three extremely well respected social scientists from SKOPE – an ESRC centre – published the ‘Global Auction’ questioning the real impact of the knowledge economy and the ‘broken promises of education, jobs and incomes’.

And the media is full of negative headlines too. The Daily Mail and Telegraph fall over themselves to tell stories of graduate unemployment and underemployment and the ‘folly’ of Tony Blair’s 50% target for higher education.

Broadly the argument goes like this… Western Governments’ faith in the coming knowledge economy and in neo-liberal economics – supply side reforms, labour market flexibility, employability all led to the one intervention that didn’t rattle economists or business leaders – investment in skills and human capital. A principle founded in the economics of the Thatcher and Reagan era, but extended significantly in the ideologies and meta narratives of globalisation and technological change under New Labour, Clinton’s Democrats and across the OECD and developing economies throughout the world.

Obviously the crash and subsequent recession has had a major impact on all this and we should be taking an informed longer-term view. It is increasingly accepted that simply focussing on supply side investment in skills and human capital may not be enough – we need ‘demand side’ interventions, smart industrial policy and serious thinking about human capital utilisation – and that goes for universities and colleges as much as for governments. Just chucking ever more human capital and research at a labour market or an economy that isn’t able or doesn’t know how to use it lets us all down. We must not assume that either Government or future applicants are quite as convinced in the knowledge economy and the value of human capital as they might have been in the past.

Yet the data shows that employment rates and earnings over a lifetime – of all people with degrees in the workforce – remains a significantly better option than having lower level or no qualifications. We know that a skilled workforce, especially in key sectors, will drive productivity locally and nationally and that universities and colleges are absolutely fundamental to any plan for short and long term growth. I am still convinced by both the data and the narrative although I can see they are increasingly contested in different quarters. It is no longer simple to assume that these arguments are straightforward or unambiguous.

If we are going to emerge from this current spending round and future spending reviews in the shape we’d all like, then we need to confront both the difficult spending numbers of 2015-16 and also the rather more difficult crisis in human capital that sits uneasily and rather threateningly, alongside it. If policymakers don’t believe in mass human capital anymore then that is a very serious problem for further and higher education in this Spending Review and for the 2015 election manifestos as they begin to emerge.

If voters and the popular media don’t believe it then it is an even more serious problem, because the political cover it brings makes painful cuts that much easier to make. The ring fence is political as much as it is economic and that’s one of the reasons why HE and FE don’t sit within it but schools and hospitals do. Up to now science has at least carried a convincing economic narrative but when politics trumps all and major cuts need to be made, even research cannot be guaranteed to come through intact.

We might have a bigger job on our hands than we thought.

After the last two years, it is something of a relief to read a policy report which does not offer some new twist on the English student loan scheme. In that and other regards, there is a retro feel to the Conservative party’s Free Enterprise Group recent report, Completing the Reform, Freeing the Universities written by John Glen, MP for Salisbury. Not least because in advocating financial independence and stability for universities by building up endowment funds, it echoes Labour’s 2003 HE white paper; The Future of Higher Education. Margaret Thatcher’s flame burns bright amongst members of the Free Enterprise Group, largely comprised of new intake Conservative MPs that includes current ministers, and others tipped for future party leadership. For that reason, it is important we scrutinise their policies and ideas.

Although there is no formal recognition of the paper’s 2003 predecessor, the language is in parts identical and Glen’s research, too, seems drawn from a decade ago. Although aware of the match-funding scheme on donations to universities, which ran between 2008 and 2011 inclusive, Glen does not cite the recent Review of Philanthropy in UK Higher Education commissioned by Hefce, nor recent trends in income from endowments and investments.

Glen sees the move to financial independence as the proper culmination of the project to liberalise the higher education sector. He estimates that with an additional £12billion of endowment funds, sufficient annual income would be generated to replace the remaining teaching grant and thereby to ‘restore’ institutional autonomy threatened by student numbers controls, fee caps and the bugbear of private schools – the Office for Fair Access.

Without a discussion of the loans financed by public borrowing that will largely back uncapped caps and students, it is hard to give a serious assessment of Glen’s vision since most financial pressure is coming from that direction in the next decade or so. Those advocating ‘independence’ still wish to have access to this scheme, not least because the trouble of collecting repayments is performed on behalf of institutions by HMRC and the Student Loan Company.

That said, it is possible to interrogate Glen’s calculations regarding the roughly £550m of teaching grants which will remain in 2015 (see Figure 12 in Hefce’s March report on the impact of the new funding regime). Based on an estimated 4 per cent return per annum on invested funds, this gives us the £12bn figure cited already.

Given that total endowments across the sector stand at roughly £10.3bn, and that Oxbridge holds £8.3bn of that, we can begin to see the flaws in Glen’s suggestion. Though he insists that such funds are not an elite preserve, he cites a 2003 Sutton Trust report: the gap has widened in the last ten years. And, in truth, although giving to HEI’s has increased from £513m to £693m since 2006-07, this relates mainly to donations which are spent, rather than sums accumulated in funds.

It is hard to see how that £12bn can be put together within a reasonable timeframe given those figures. Further, in 2011/12, the financial year for which we have the most recent data, endowment and investment income amounted to £285m across the sector (2010/11: £240m), roughly 1 per cent of total annual revenues. This represents a fall from the years before the financial crisis (£400m in 2006/07; £521m in 2007/08) illustrating one of the problems in relying on this source of income – the varying performance of financial assets. The latest Hefce report on English university finances projects another fall of 5.5 per cent in 2012/13 from £236m to £223m.

The Review of Philanthropy stressed, “Endowment fundraising – never easy at the best of times – will be more challenging with long-term interest rates at historically low levels.” (§176) Further, it emphasized that donors give to fund special projects and research, new specialist facilities and to protect historic buildings but are reluctant to part with money cover the core costs of HE. ‘As the Thomas Report insisted, voluntary giving “is not a substitute for other sources of higher education funding, particularly public funding.”’ (§103) Glen therefore seems to be advocating a position at odds with the most informed survey of this matter; a position which involves a lot of fundraising to replace what little remains of science, technology and engineering funding.

The persistent myth seen on both sides of the Atlantic is that public money can be replaced with private money (whether through fees, funds raised on capital markets, or donations) without any detriment to the overall system. What merit there is in Glen’s report is to underline just how much endowment money is needed even to cover £500m. Should he turn his attentions to undergraduate loans and the public subsidy underpinning them – now estimated and accounted for at 34 per cent of the value of loans issued (or somewhere between £3-4billion per year from 2014/15) – the true, eye-watering cost of the financial independence he seeks would become apparent.

What is a private university? The latest big UK HE news is that the not-for-profit Regent’s College has been given the right to use the title “university”, and will become “Regent’s University London”. The Guardian says that it “will become only the second private university in Britain”… which I’m not sure is the case. It is definitely a university. And it is definitely in Britain. But is it private? And does it count as the second one? Well, it depends what you mean by a private university. This post takes a look at what these terms mean, and gathers together details of the recent changes that have taken place primarily in English HE which have muddied waters both public and private.

What counts as a university?

There is a huge volume of writing on this subject – almost an entire field of academic endeavour – and some of it is excellent. But we’ll shortcut all that, because there is now one clear simple answer to this, at least in narrow legalistic terms, which is that an organisation is a university if it is permitted to call itself one under UK legislation. It is not a definition that has the sophistication of a Cardinal Newman (or a Robbins, or even a Dearing), but it is at least an admirably clear line, and there are definitive lists. To be allowed to use the title “university”, there are three criteria:

(1) You have to have degree-awarding powers (which come in three flavours: foundation degrees, taught degrees, and research degrees);

(2) You have to show that you ‘have regard to the principles of good governance as are relevant to your sector; and

(3) You have to have at least 1,000 FTE students, with at least 750 on degree courses.

The old route to calling yourself a university was by permission of the Privy Council, which took advice from the QAA. Now there’s the new route via Companies House, which takes advice from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). There are related rules about the title “university college”.

This is the new, modern, streamlined and almost-coherent system of naming. It is not all perfect. There are several pretty old ‘University Colleges’ that are not quite the same as the new style designation. There’s University Colleges that are constituent colleges of the Universities of Oxford and Durham, and of course London. UCL also prompts us to note several other HEIs that were formerly part of the University of London, at least some of which are now universities in their own right and award their own degrees, but don’t call themselves ‘university’, including KCL, Imperial College London, LSE and SOAS.

In England, organisations that have degree-awarding powers are known as ‘recognised bodies‘ (definitive list). All universities are recognised bodies, but not all recognised bodies are universities.  Then there’s ‘listed bodies‘ (definitive list), which are organisations that are recognised (sorry) as providing bona fide teaching towards degrees awarded by recognised bodies. Things are different in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, of course.

What counts as private?

One important feature of a university – at least, for many people – is that it be independent of the Government. So in a certain sense all universities should be, or aspire to be, private in the sense that they are not owned or controlled by the Government. Certainly David Willetts thinks that universities should consider themselves to be in the private sector. (So perhaps we can look forward to the Government no longer taking a view that pension arrangements and pay restraint in HE should be that of the public sector.) It is, of course, possible to have independent universities that are funded by the Government. It is what we had until very recently, and that’s what most people mean by public universities. What now counts as private?

A for-profit company obviously must count as private, leaving aside the confusions that can arise from publicly-traded companies, plcs, and Government-owned corporations.

But what about not-for-profit organisations?

The traditional definition of a ‘public’ university is one that is mostly funded by public means through government – whether local, regional, state, federal, national or trans-national level (see the United Nations University). Most universities were funded through the government, via various arrangements, most recently the funding councils. However, the new fees regime in England has been described as privatisation, and not entirely unreasonably. The overwhelming majority of university funding in England now comes not from the public, but directly from students in the form of tuition fees. (This will be even more the case once students on the old funding regime have left the system.)

What about eligibility for tuition fee loans, which are Government-backed? Well, students are eligible for tuition fee loans from Student Finance England if they are studying on any ‘designated course‘ (definitive list). All recognised bodies have designated courses – that is, all organisations with degree-awarding powers have courses that are eligible for SFE tuition fee loans. But there are many more designated courses beyond those, including e.g. Pearson HNC/HND programmes and other private outfits teaching qualifications validated by other recognised bodies. So that doesn’t work as a marker.

Having a Royal Charter is even more of a red herring. Most pre-92 universities have one, but some were established by specific Act of Parliament, and Oxford and Cambridge have those special murky formation stories that go with having been established before Royal Charters and Acts of Parliament even existed. Most of the post-1992 universities do not have Royal Charters: they are corporations established by statutory instrument pursuant to the Educational Reform Act 1988. But they are clearly ‘public’ universities if the term carries any weight. And some clearly ‘public’ universities are straight-up companies limited by guarantee, albeit not-for-profit (LSE is one). Having a Royal Charter isn’t a necessary criterion for being a public university It is not even a sufficient condition – the College of Law had a Royal Charter, but didn’t get public funding, and is now the University of Law (though the Royal Charter went with the spin-off Legal Education Foundation – see below).

Charitable status doesn’t work for these purposes either. One might argue that this may come to be seen a key dividing line, but it isn’t yet. Since some tidying up work a few years ago, almost all universities have formal charitable status (with registration numbers etc), although precisely how they came by that status can be a bit involved. But, for instance, the University of Buckingham is and always has been a charity, and most in the sector would describe it as a Buckingham private university, whether or not its students are eligible for SFE loans (they are).

So what is a public university?

You could try to say “historically public universities” or “universities that were public before the tuition fee changes in 2011/12″, but that rules out universities that fit the traditional mould but happen to have been created, merged or granted full university status more recently, which is probably not what you want. There are still funding streams that go only to public universities in England – not least the REF. And there are more obligations on public universities – including student number controls and OFFA etc. When the new arrangements came in, there were rumours of high-profile universities considering “going private”, and escaping from the tighter controls, though none have done so.

To summarise: To be a university, you need to have degree-awarding powers (be ‘recognised’), have the right governance, and at least 1,000 students. All universities, public or private, have ‘designated courses’ eligible for taxpayer-backed student loans. Traditional-style public universities have all sorts of legal structures, but are all charitable bodies. The six other universities so far (listed in the Appendices) are all ‘recognised’ (have degree-awarding powers), and range from charities to for-profit companies owned by private equity. Many people have observed that there is diversity among public universities: there is diversity among the private ones, too.

So what about Regent’s University London?

If I’ve counted right, Regent’s University London will be the third institution that (a) is entitled to call itself ‘university’, and (b) is not a traditionally-public university. The other two are the University of Buckingham, which is a charity, and the University of Law, which is unarguably a for-profit outfit since it was taken over by a private equity firm.

It is worth noting that when BPP – which is a for-profit company – gained its ‘university college’ title in 2011, most press coverage wasn’t very careful about the distinction between ‘university’ and ‘university college’ and called it the first new private university in the UK since the University of Buckingham - and some even left out the ‘since Buckingham’ caveat.

There is always going to be signifiant confusion about this issue, in the press and in policy making which is why I hope this post will prove useful in unravelling it all.

(A note on terms: I have decided to use the slightly-American ‘for-profit’ term, since the more British phrase ‘profit-making’ implies that profit is being made, rather than intended at least as an eventual goal. It seems wrong to describe an organisation that is losing money hand-over-fist as a ‘profit-making company’).

Find appendices to this post here.

An avalanche is coming. An avalanche of nonsense. This is not our language, which is fair – which is correct –  because this is not written for us. This is written for the kind of people who are impressed by such language. This is written for people who would not bat an eyelid that the formerly respectable IPPR are now publishing paid advertorials from Pearson.

One of the facets of this new discourse of “disruption” is the use of vaguely connected anecdotes to illustrate a point. Pearson run a college in the UK, who are imaginatively called Pearson College – leveraging their reputation for value for money textbooks into the mass higher education market. Except they don’t really do the mass bit, accepting a cohort of around 40 students, twenty of which had their fees paid for them at the last possible minute.

Norman Davies, the esteemed and often controversial historian, was interviewed recently in the FT, and explained historical change this way:

‘historical change is like an avalanche. The starting point is a snow-covered mountainside that looks solid. All changes take place under the surface and are rather invisible. But something is coming. What is impossible is to say when.’

You may wonder why I cite a Financial Times restaurant review  at this point of the article, without any obvious context. The IPPR/Pearson advertorial does similar, and omits the following paragraph which offers context.

It seems impossible that Giorgio is going to arrive with more food, but he does. There’s a green salad, followed by fish – handsome slices of sea bass and bream, and more of those chunky jumbo prawns. “The older you get, the more large meals become something of an ordeal,” Davies observes.

The education ‘revolution’ that Barber, Donnelly and Rizvi are such keen advocates of is a comfortably fed one. This is not a cry from the barricades – not a populist movement of grass roots activists. The hand-wringing citation of unemployment statistics and rising student fees comes not from the unemployed and poor, but from the new education industry that wants to find a way into the marketplace.

And this is the underlying impression one takes from this report. The citations are shoddy, the proofreading abysmal – it reads like a bad blog post. Or a good Ted talk. It’s a serving of handsome slices of invective which would leave anyone sick to the stomach. Falling graduate wages. The lack of good “quality measures” for universities. A neatly formatted table of annual academic publication rates – in 50 year slices from 1726 onwards – labelled “The Growth of Information over 300 years”. (but “citizens of the world now cry out for synthesis”!!)

Again and again we, as citizens of the world, are encouraged to rail and protest about the broken system that somehow seems to have educated world leaders, scientists, lawyers, engineers and senior staff at academic publishers with pretensions at “thought leadership”. A system which anyone would admit has problems; problems caused by the imposition of a wearying and inapplicable market.

Section 6 of the report, “The Competition is heating up”, retreads familiar grounds concerning the all-conquering world of the MOOC – that well known reheating of early 00s internet education hype flavoured with a rich source of venture capital. But this is situated within a wider spectrum of globalised private for-profit providers – the lot of whom (poor reputation! high drop-out rates! difficulty in gaining degree awarding powers!) is bewailed at some length.

As far as this report has any meat in it (horsemeat, maybe?) this section is it.

The reputations of some of the new for-profit providers have been
tarnished by high dropout rates (a US government report alleges an
average rate of 64 per cent in associate degree programmes) and
high spending on non-education related expenses such as marketing
and profit-sharing. Perhaps the government, through lax regulation
and student loan subsidies, has also contributed to the problem, but
either way it would be a mistake to think that the innovation itself will be
diminished by these abuses.

I’m particularly impressed with the way they decided to blame the government. If only the government had told them to stop lying to prospective students, spend less on flashy marketing and pay themselves less then everything would have been OK. Pearson here are calling for more red tape to constrain and direct the activity of HE institutions.

UK readers will be delighted to note:

In addition to US-founded MOOCs, the UK has responded with FutureLearn, an online university, which builds on the foundations of the Open University but has content from institutions around the UK.

Remember this. FutureLearn is an online university. An e-university, if you will. An e-university based in the UK. And incidently, did we mention that Pearson run a MOOC platform?

League tables are next in line. Pearson/IPPR complain that league tables are unfairly weighted against new entrants because they include things like research performance. Many would agree that perhaps too much weight is placed on research performance. But university reputations are complex things, and league tables are themselves a radical simplification of the complex criteria that we use when we decided which of two almost indistinguishable middle-ranking universities are the “best” for a particular purpose.

We can skip over the box-ticking enumeration of the neo-liberal university dream that is section two of the report, and move on to where the serious money is. Unbundling.

Research is at risk from… think tanks and government funded centres.

Degrees are at risk from… private colleges. Alternative credentials (yes! they reference my favourite “education is broken” start up DeGreed. Still no venture capital for them, sadly) And also the start-up culture wherein Peter Thiel gives smart teenagers $100,000 to do very little of any consequence. And sites like the (open university supported) Not Going to Uni.

The effects of universities on their surrounding areas are at risk from… government investment in local services. (another deviation from the small government playbook there)

Faculty are at risk from… celebrities. The connected internet age apparently means that people want to learn only from celebrities, without actually being able to communicate with them.

Students are at risk from…. actually it breaks down here, it’s just some more stuff about the connected world. Bob Dylan is cited as a college drop out, though few current undergraduates would cite a need to meet Woody Guthrie as a reason to drop out.

Administrators are at risk from… their own inefficiency. (Despite being described earlier in the advertorial as “top professionals in specialist fields [who] make up the engine that keeps the vast, complex organisation running smoothly.)

Curricula are at risk from… MOOCS! – which are themselves based on university curricula. (from prestigious universities, no less…)

Teaching and learning are at risk from… online teaching and learning. This section also contains a curious digression about the need for “practical” rather than “theoretical” learning – perhaps harking back to a desire to see the government pay for employee training.

Assessment is at risk from…computer games. No, really. There’s one of those asides about some 22 year old who became manager of the Azerbaijan football team FK Baku after 10 years of experience playing Football Manager. Which must be disquieting news for the team’s actual manager, Božidar Bandović. The student in question, Vugar Huseynzade, actually appears to be more of a business manager – though I invite any Baku fans who may read this to correct me. Oh, and Pearson already own a chain of assessment centres.

The experience of attending university is at risk from… clubs and forums.

Vice-chancellors who have read this far will likely be convulsing with laughter at this point. But never fear, as Sir Michael has a prescription for your future success.

You can be an elite, mass, niche, local or lifelong learning institution. All are at risk from the oncoming juggernaut of private sector instruction, so each must respond in different ways.

Elite institutions must share their prestige with (private) partner institutions. Mass institutions must move online, maybe with the capable support of private sector experts. Niche institutions will all be private institutions (College of Law, New College of the Humanities should it ever become an actual institution with degree awarding powers…) so don’t worry about them. Local institutions must add the vocational, employer-supporting finesse to elite content from around the world. And lifelong learning? Well that isn’t institutions at all, that’s young entrepreneurs “hacking” their education with the support of the private sector.

I’m not sure what the key thread is with these recommendations, but there does seem to be a common theme running through them.

So – having sold you the disease, Pearson now attempt to sell the cure. We must all work hard to support the brave and noble entrepreneurs as they seek to disrupt education, moving existing providers out of the way, adding or removing regulation to order.

It is essential to do this because it is essential that we prepare our young people for their lives as cogs in a machine that is already broken, as avatars of a discredited and poisonous ideology. Young people are not seekers after truth, they are consumers and their money must be allowed to flow as directly as possible to Pearson Education.

Unless there is a bigger avalanche coming.

A version of this post originally appeared at Followers of the Apocalypse 

This time last year on Wonkhe’s first birthday, I had a brief look back at the first year in operation. Another year has passed and so as we celebrate our second birthday, it feels right to have another review of the year gone by.

Readers

As I said last year, the positive feedback I get about the site wherever I go in higher education is overwhelming. Colleagues from across the sector and further afield respond very well to our take on things, and also the brand which over two years has certainly made a dent in to the collective consciousness of UK higher education.

As you might expect, the overwhelming proportion of visitors to the site are in the UK, but there is a slowly growing readership in the US, Canada, Australia and Ireland.

The site’s logs reveal just who is actually reading – and they report hits from virtually every higher education institution as well as notable bodies in policy making and politics. But there have to be winners, so here are the top 10 locations (that are readably identifiable) from which people read Wonkhe between the 1^st Feb 2012 and 1^st Feb 2013.

1. University of Glamorgan
2. Department for Business, Innovation & Skills
3. University of Manchester
4. Universities UK
5. University of Warwick
6. Oxford University
7. National Union of Students
8. University of Birmingham
9. Manchester Metropolitan University
10. Higher Education Funding Council for England

To the readers at BIS: your servers amusingly still report as being the now long-defunct Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. Someone email an IT guy.

Content

As with visitors, content must also have winners so here are the top 5 most viewed posts in the same time period.

1. Counter Revolution at the Gates – Poly Teak-Nicks 15^th November 2011
2. Employability – congratulations to the best and ‘worst’ performers – Andy Westwood 17^th July 2011
3. Strategies for student number control – Andrew Fisher 19^th March 2011
4. Five questions about students as partners – Rachel Wenstone 13^th September 2011
5. ‘Seriously deficient’: or Whither London Met? Or Where’s Willetts? – Andrew McGettigan August 31^st 2012

The success of Counter Revolution at the Gates, matching similar success last year for this April Fools Day post shows how satire quickly bursts outside of wonksville and is passed around thousands of times among people that would not ordinarily visit Wonkhe. So these posts tend to do very well in any ranking.

Andy Westwood’s post about employability was fascinating to track. Long after an initial surge on day of publication, it was being tweeted, emailed around, linked to and discussed in many different forums. It showed how important his analysis was, particularly as no one else had articulated anything similar. It went as close to ‘viral’ as a sombre analysis of employability stats could do, which makes this wonk very happy indeed.

A key difference between this year’s list and last is that posts authored by myself do not even feature. I think that this reflects a) how my circumstances have changed in the last 12 months and my decreasing ability to write in the public domain but also b) how there is now an expanding set of contributors, which I think gives the site greater richness and a diversity of opinion that only improves Wonkhe.

I should also mention that CIPR was good enough to recognise the site in their 2013 Education Journalism Awards by giving me the Runner Up prize in the Online category for Fear the future campus wars, which was jolly nice of them. (The post was in 2011, but the awards recognise work from the previous academic year).

Technology

The email list has grown substantially over the last twelve months with an increasing trend for people to want blogs emailed directly to their inbox. If you haven’t been getting these, you can sign up in the left hand column. I promise you will never be spammed.

For anyone interested, Internet Explorer is winning the browser race with Chrome not far behind.

There is a long list of improvements and fixes I’d like to make to the site and its associated channels which I will get to very slowly. 99% of the time I have to give to the project invariably needs to be used for writing and editorial work. But I am happy to keep it a ‘work in progress’ as things seems to be ticking over under the hood as well as one might hope.

The future

You will have seen our recent calls to help out. The response to this has been very positive indeed with lots of people coming forward with ideas for posts and offers to help out in the editorial team. I am still deciding about the best route forward, but in the mean time I am starting to assemble an editorial team that can keep Wonkhe fresh and exciting. If you’d like to be a part of that, please get in touch with me.

As ever, I need to remind people that Wonkhe is pronounced ‘wonky’ (not WonkHE like GuildHE). And you are liable to be corrected if I hear it said incorrectly.

I hope you enjoy the next twelve months of Wonkhe.

Mark Leach

Founder and Editor in Chief, 4^th February 2013.

UCAS have now published their data for applications to the 15 January deadline. By this stage, almost all school-leavers who are going to apply have applied, and a significant proportion of the overseas and older applicants have also applied. Because the data are taken with reference to an actual deadline this dataset, unlike the earlier UCAS data releases, provides a reasonably firm basis for taking stock of this years’ recruitment position.

In previous years we were given institutional-level data alongside this release, but this year we are not. UCAS’ explanation for this makes striking reading:

This change has been made following an assessment that publishing the application digest within a cycle could potentially change institutional or applicant behaviour …. In particular, our analysis showed that many institutions may have substantial shares of their applications in common with other individual institutions, increasing the potential for the applications digest to influence behaviour.

Yes, that’s right. They have stopped publishing the data because they could potentially be used by somebody and – even more shocking – because some applicants have applied to more than one institution. So although the numbers released this week give us the clearest indication yet of what is happening in the 2013 application cycle, it feels frustratingly incomplete.

The numbers

It is natural to look at this year’s numbers primarily in relation to the new fees regime, but there are two other important trends that need to be kept in mind. For many years, HE institutions have been looking ahead to a demographic dip in school-leavers. That dip is now well under way, and UCAS estimate that it has accounted for 20,000 ‘lost’ 18-year old applicants compared to the peak in the 2009 cycle (or 4,000 since 2012).

Secondly there is the economic context. Whilst the poor state of the British economy continues to make headlines, the employment rates, especially among older people is quite different and much more positive. In this context, UCAS’ figure 10 is a very interesting one.

Whilst the trend across all the age groups is slightly positive, you can see a big upwards trend in the older age groups especially in the 2010 and 2011 cycles. Now that the 2013 data are in, this looks increasingly like an effect of the economic downturn (when people can’t find jobs, full-time study seems more attractive as an option) which is now wearing off.

Whilst the rates among older applicants are much lower than for 18-year olds, there are obviously a lot more people aged 19-60 than there are aged 18. This temporary effect has counteracted the falling 18-year old numbers since 2009, but is no longer doing so to anything like the same extent. Since 2010 we have lost about 12,750 applicants aged 21 or older due to this effect (probably more by the end of the cycle: whilst almost all 18-year olds will have applied by now, we would expect significant numbers of additional applications after the January deadline from these older applicants).

So these two effects account for essentially all the difference between the peak of demand in the 2011 cycle, and now. Just as when the fee regime was last changed, it seems that demand has bounced right back to the trend after a single year of disruption: the difference is that last time, demand came back to a rising trend.

This is a pretty remarkable finding because English higher education is now incredibly expensive by international standards. But it could be true. UCAS’ analysis of the 2012 cycle also suggests fees made essentially no difference to applicants’ decision-making.

Reapplication rates

Because of the many applicants unplaced last year, and the shift from AAB+ to ABB+, we might have expected to see an increased reapplication rate, especially among school-leavers holding ABB. This turns out clearly not to have been the case:

The reapplication rate in 2013 for those unplaced in 2012 holding ‘AAA’ is 87 per cent, for ‘AAB’ 74 per cent, for ‘ABB’ and ‘BBB’ 71 per cent. These reapplication rates are similar to those in the 2012 cycle. There is no substantial divergence in the reapplication rates between 2012 and 2013 across unplaced applicants who were in different groups under the 2012-13 student number control arrangements for most courses at English institutions.

Source: UCAS

Perhaps it is not surprising that applicants haven’t yet understood and seized all the opportunities for regulatory arbitrage that exist in the current system. But neither have the institutions….yet.

UKIP are on the rise. Nigel Farage has become a permanent feature of political shows as recent polls have shown his party finding unprecedented levels of support. UKIP has been consistently ahead of the Lib Dems, building support amongst discontented Conservative voters over issues such as the EU and gay marriage. While the party does not have any MPs and will struggle with the first-past-the-post system (described rightly by Farage as “brutal to a party” like UKIP), it seems likely to feature far more prominently in 2015 than it did in 2010 and it is likely to do very well at next year’s European Parliament elections. So, what does UKIP, which describes itself as a “libertarian, non-racist party seeking Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union”, propose for higher education?

In the absence of a coherent or complete policy platform, deciphering what they believe about higher education is difficult. UKIP’s literature about higher education only include various statements from Farage, a selection of online videos and a few policy documents, both from the national party and local sections such as County Durham and Tunbridge Wells. UKIP were contacted during the researching of this article but did not respond.

Funding, shape and size

UKIP are in opposition to the current income-contingent loans system, describing the introduction of fees as “a retrogressive step”. Unlike the other main parties, UKIP does not propose tweaking the current model. It also does not favour a fully private market for higher education in which the state would no longer pay the costs upfront. Instead, UKIP has called for a “return to a student grant system”, with the state footing the full bill. It would be a generous system, for those allowed to attend, but hardly one that fits with UKIP’s declared libertarian approach. Instead, it is more familiar as the approach taken for most of the post-war period when the size and shape of the student population was markedly different.

Given that higher education is to be made free, and free provision inevitably means greater demand, how would UKIP control the cost of this provision? In essence, how many people do UKIP want to attend university? The party clearly want far less people to reach higher education than do currently. A 2007 policy statement said the party would “scrap the nonsensical target of making 50% of school leavers go to university”, a sentiment echoed in a November 2011 statement.

The party faithful’s support for such a view is indicated in a video of the divisive former Chief Inspector of Schools in England, Chris Woodhead, speaking at the party’s 2012 conference. “Why do we have to pretend that 50% of the population has to go to university to get a Mickey Mouse, dumbed-down…” he appealed to his audience, only for the rest of his sentence to be drowned out by ecstatic cheering. A percentage is not put on the number that UKIP wants to attend higher education, but it would presumably be far lower than it is at present.

Under UKIP then, the provision of higher education is not to be controlled by student demand but by the state, an interesting position for a supposedly libertarian political party. The rationale for this reduction in higher education provision is explained in a rather mystifying sentence by UKIP’s Tunbridge Wells section: “The simple fact is that many jobs do not require qualification to degree level, and that degrees from some educational establishments are recognised by the students themselves as worth considerably less academically than those from the older universities such as the Russell Group.”

The Robbins principle, which stated that “courses of higher education should be available to all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so”, is not favoured by UKIP. UKIP insists that university education “should only be available to those with a genuine thirst for knowledge and the acumen to handle it” and they have decided that the current system does not achieve that. It seems to be a view rooted in the belief that far too many people go to university in the UK, something that international comparisons refute. It is clear that given the opportunity, UKIP would oversee a large reduction in university participation.

Just as the demand for higher education would not to be left to students under UKIP, nor would the supply of higher education be left to universities. Again, there are signs of an approach that would have the state dictating which favoured institutions students should attend. One UKIP document favours “a nationwide review of higher education with the intention of distinguishing between those institutions that deserve the title of university and those that do not, and between those courses which merit degree status and those that do not.” Again, rather than a mixed market, the Government would have far greater control over who goes into further study, what subjects they could study and where they would be able to go.

Social mobility

In this area, UKIP’s policies are easily summarised: re-introduce grammar schools and abolish of the Office for Fair Access. The party has called for an end to “social engineering”, opposing contextual offers. Again, Chris Woodhead’s statement that “grammar schools are the most successful institution we have ever had in this country if we’re interested in social mobility” seems to be keenly endorsed by Farage. Reading their literature, one gets the sense that this is more to do with a convenient sense of nostalgia than an actual analysis of the impact of the grammar school policy on social mobility.

Immigration

Finally, UKIP unsurprisingly have very strong views on immigration that would affect higher education. The emphasis throughout UKIP literature is on reducing overall immigration and leaving the EU. Indeed, a November 2012 document recommended freezing “permanent immigration for 5 years”. Exclusion for overseas students from an immigration cap seems unlikely to form part of a UKIP policy platform. The UKIP County Durham paper even said “preference” should be given to UK school leavers. It would not bode well for the 430,000 overseas students in the UK in the academic year 2010-11, according to UKCISA, or the universities that depend on them.

Overall, the UKIP higher education policies have one common theme: nostalgia – or a faux nostalgia that conveniently fits their reactionary views. Their proposals would drastically limit students’ choices, both in terms of potential subjects and institutions. UKIP also seem casually derisory of the public benefits of both UK universities and the students that attend them.

Despite their professed libertarian nature, UKIP would seem to favour a far larger role for the state in the funding, provision and control of higher education. The preference for this expanded state control does not seem to derive from a confidence in state provision. Instead, it is about achieving one desired aim: taking higher education back several decades, reversing massification by drastically limiting the opportunities for so many and shrinking the UK’s world-class university sector to a handful of state-funded elite ivory towers.

The policy platform reminds me of quote from John Major, who was once caught on camera complaining that his party was “still harking back to a golden age that never was, and is now invented”. Throughout UKIP’s higher education policies, a common feature is a yearning for the past, be it grammar schools, fewer people at university, student grants or no more “social engineering”.

UKIP’s higher education policy may well evolve as the party comes under further scrutiny (it is also currently incomplete, e.g. there is no mention of research or innovation). But currently it is a backwards looking, surprisingly statist platform that would permanently wreck the UK’s higher education sector, do unfathomable damage to our economy and wind the clock back on decades of hard-won social progress.

There is little doubt that we have a problem or two in postgraduate policy. Fifty vice chancellors recently wrote to the Observer to say so. BIS ministers have been asking for imaginative suggestions and are clear that they are very open to considering any new or ingenious ideas. Well here’s one: don’t do anything (or at least don’t do anything rash).

That might sound bizarre given the apparent decline in postgraduate numbers this year and the prospect that in a couple of years, the first Browne ‘graduates’ may turn their noses up at years of further study and debt. In my view these are reasons why we need to think very carefully indeed before we reach for a Big Bang policy solution.

My starting point is that considered in isolation there are many valuable aspects of the current regime that make postgraduate funding a pretty good system. Like Hong Kong in 1997 it might be described as ‘one country – two systems’ with very different undergraduate and postgraduate funding regimes (and with further differentiation between postgraduate taught and postgraduate research but with few looking to PGR as a problem with benefits from the science ringfence and HEFCE QR funding).

There is also some immediate history to consider. The Government haven’t actually taken away any postgraduate funding – there are pressures here and there but if anything it may be slightly higher than pre 2010 and even slightly more given the additional cash for postgraduate taught degrees in Band C subjects. In other words the system is quite different to that introduced for undergraduates.

Unlike the undergraduate system, it captures a philosophy of government and individual investment (and also institutional and employer support) in a pretty good balance. For me there would have to be a very good reason to want to change that – and especially if we moved to a system that deliberately throws that whole settlement out of kilter. Like David Willetts and others, I am not persuaded that simply extending large loans to postgraduates is the answer because as we know this will inevitably create regulation on numbers, additional bureaucracy and financial pressures that will ultimately reduce numbers, choice and funding elsewhere in higher education.

Various loan models have been put forward including schemes from NUS and CentreForum’s Tim Leunig. But it must be a concern that the availability of even a generous loan facility might not actually stimulate the demand that we want to see. Just look at undergraduate demand today. There is a demand problem now and potentially a much bigger one to follow down the pipeline through to 2015/16, as current undergraduates work their way through the system. But many universities have suggested that postgraduate taught numbers have been in decline for several years. So these must be for different reasons.

We know that there is significant and growing international competition for postgraduate recruitment and that in pricing terms we may not be as competitive as others in Europe and in the OECD. So the messages sent by UKBA and by the government’s wider immigration reform are exacerbating the issue – but this isn’t all down to them as international recruitment has accounted for around 50% of overall postgraduate numbers for some years now.

The recession and difficult labour market is also a factor and just as for part time and mature applicants for undergraduate courses, it is clear that many people are not taking up study options because they are worried about something. I think it is for an opportunity cost, or a time preference reason that mean many are unprepared to risk even the income from insecure or poorly paid work whilst the economy is shaky. And given that the typical postgraduate is part time and over 25 then these decisions can not be easily dismissed.

Employers always find it hard to subsidise training in difficult economic conditions and the costs of postgraduate courses can be significant. It has also been observed that the public sector has traditionally been a large scale sponsor of MAs and MScs and that austerity has hit this source of subsidised demand too.

Better access to finance – whether through employers or through improved career development loans or more commercial arrangements for individuals will help but will never be a panacea.

Postgraduate courses have also increased in price during this time – maybe not by as much as undergraduate tuition fees, but certainly by inflation and across the sector by as much as 10% this year. We need to be very careful with such pricing changes and must certainly not assume that postgraduate courses should automatically be priced at similar levels to the new sticker prices at undergraduate level. Price increases of even small amounts will have an impact when money in people’s and employers’ pockets is tight, as well as an effect in increasingly competitive international markets too.

And I think it is in some institution’s interest to find ways of acting and indeed incentivising and subsidising demand – it is a talent and HR pipeline, point of institutional differentiation and reputation too? Particularly for research intensive universities. But look at what Sussex are doing – it makes a great deal of sense for institutions that can cross subsidise to do so, especially if it leads to more valuable and better-funded PhD research numbers including through doctoral training centres.

Government could make this easier to do. In regulatory terms they could treat UG and PG as one system – Access Agreement spending and NSP cash could all target postgraduate as well as undergraduate recruitment as long as various conditions are fulfilled. Institutions that are most worried should be making the case for such contributions – and given that large Russell Group universities are spending millions on bursaries and fee waivers, even small amounts could make a big difference.

HEFCE and BIS could also use funding that supports Strategically Important and Vulnerable subjects and specialist provision in a more joined up way across UG and PG. They could also respond to the growing calls for a new government-backed campaign to promote the value of higher education and the returns that make investing time and money worthwhile. And of course this should apply to both undergraduate and postgraduate study.

So let’s look at pricing and competition, at affordability in difficult economic conditions and at international competitiveness. Let’s consider an on-going campaign to promote the benefits of all types of HE including postgraduate study. Let’s continue our efforts to persuade the Home Office and others that making it more and more difficult for international students to come here is counterproductive and just plain daft. Let’s encourage universities to invest in postgraduate support too and enable them to do so via a more supportive regulatory system.

But let’s not jump to a solution that might too easily sacrifice a system that carefully balances contributions from individuals, the state and from employers and institutions. Instead let’s understand how and why each of these actors might better engage and articulate the benefits of our existing compact, and act now to improve their own contributions and efforts and to increase overall demand.

UCAS have now published their mid-December data on the 2013 cycle, and the press coverage has been mainly downbeat, perhaps because UCAS has not tried the faintly ludicrous ‘late surge’ spin that they put on the equivalent data last year.

We need to place caveats on these data. The UCAS deadline is 15 January for almost all courses. There is no particular benefit in applying long before that deadline and the typical year would see more applications received in January than in any preceding month.

Source: UCAS

It follows from this that you can see quite large swings in the data between December and January, and these don’t necessarily signify anything very much. In this context the 5.6% year-on-year fall in total applicants as at 17 December is not, to my mind, very big news. Certainly the year-on-year drop in applications my institution had in mid-December has been reversed over Christmas. We are now running ahead year-on-year but I don’t get excited: we may be behind again by the time January 15^th comes.

The other reason that we shouldn’t draw hasty conclusions from these data is that raw shortages of applicants were never the issue in the 2012 cycle. The UCAS end-of-cycle report showed that there were 653,600 applicants and 464,900 acceptances. Whilst a few of those 190,000-odd unplaced applicants may have been unable to meet the entrance criteria of any institution anywhere, most of them could have secured places if they wished to. There have always been significant numbers of applicants who choose not to engage with Clearing, or withdraw from the process at some stage, but in 2012 this behaviour was particularly pronounced.

It’s interesting, therefore, that re-appliers are actually down year-on-year even more than first-time applicants:

Total applicants for all courses (2009-2013) by domicile of applicant and by first time applicant (FTA) or re-applier (RA)