Follow the demand or preserve the breadth? Universities face an A-level dilemma
This blog was kindly authored by Professor Alan Smithers, Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham
A-levels have served universities well over the years. At first, they were school qualifications and their main benefit to universities was identifying those who merited scholarships or bursaries to help with living costs before there were automatic grants. But gradually the universities ceded their exams to A-levels, and the relationship has become so close as to be symbiotic. As the university system expanded, the percentage of top grades rose from 10 per cent in 1965 to three times that in 2010. A-level entries also boomed from three to eight hundred thousand. There has always been a ready supply of respectably qualified applicants. But recently, with the reduced numbers from overseas, there is now an over-supply of places.
I am sure that university admissions tutors are well versed in what is happening to A-level entries and grades in their own subjects, but given that a university’s survival is dependent on applications, it is well worth taking a close look at what is happening across the piece. It is striking how students’ preferences are changing.
Maths has become much more popular, while English has fallen sharply. Twenty-five years ago, English had 87 thousand entrants to Maths’ 56 thousand, but last year while, Maths had grown to 112 thousand, English had fallen to just 58 thousand. French and German have also dropped spectacularly – declining by two-thirds and four-fifths since 1995 respectively. Spanish has bucked the trend, but has only reached an intake of eleven thousand.
In contrast, Psychology entries have quadrupled to 80 thousand, and Sociology has doubled to 40 thousand, although they have, particularly Sociology, waned somewhat recently. The Sciences have recovered well from the determined attempt on the creation of GCSEs to replace the separate subjects in Key Stage 4 with Combined Science. Physics entries, for example, fell from about 50 thousand in 1986 to 30 thousand in 2004, as the ladder was pulled away from under it. They survived thanks to the unlikely combination of independent schools, who fought the switch and won, and Gordon Brown, who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, made them part of his 2004 Science Investment Strategy. The ground was laid for recovery and by 2025 A-level entries were back above 40 thousand.
Another challenge A-levels pose for universities is that different groups consistently differ in their results. Do universities seek to balance their intakes by adjusting entrance requirements or do they admit on merit and have uneven intakes?
The best example in the A-level results that are available through the Joint Council for Qualifications is the sex difference, though the reasoning will apply to ethnicity, social background, disability and neurodiversity. Girls outperform boys at every passing grade except A*. Boys are ahead here because they are much more likely to take and do well in high top-grade awarding quantitative subjects, such as Maths, the Physical Sciences and Economics.
Admitting on merit would lead imbalances in recruitment, with girls taking most of the places in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, while boys would cluster in the quantitative. This would apply not only to the subjects themselves, but to the professional courses that have particular subject requirements, such as Medicine and Engineering.
Adjusting entry requirements to balance the sexes has a long history. Girls did much better in the 11+, so boys had a lower pass threshold. It used to be the practice in Medicine, and perhaps still is, to limit the number of places available to girls. While invariably more presented with better qualifications, it was recognised that the purpose of the expensive training was to secure the future of the health service. When it was found that women were less likely to stay active in the profession, there was some rebalancing of the intake.
The dilemma is whether to give underperformers a leg up and be unfair to those who would be denied places or commit to pursuing excellence and accepting the imbalances. The decision is complicated by the requirements of the Office for Students, which has the power to take away university status.
The shifts in entries pose an even greater dilemma for universities. Do they focus on the bottom line and close departments where recruitment is evidently going to be difficult, such as English Literature, Modern Languages and the Arts in general, or do they contrive to keep them open to maintain intellectual breadth.
At first sight, it appears to be a no-brainer, without balancing the books, there will soon be no university – unless it has the necessary financial strength to survive through its assets and the generosity of donors. But people do not just go to university for a qualification; there is also the quality of the experience.
The logic of the bottom line is that a university will end up as a collection of silos of professional courses, like Medicine, Computing, Law and Business, each of which may in time decide that the rest of the university is an embarrassment and take off to set up independently.
The alternative is to maintain the breadth and keep a supportive environment in which students feel comfortable in pursuing their learning and staff in advancing the frontiers of their subjects. A mix of subjects with their own ‘truths’ provides a necessary check on reality, which is absorbed as the students and staff go about the campus. Left to their own devices subjects can go off in directions that are of little use and can be downright misleading.
Those are the two main issues I can see arising from the recent A-level results: What is to be done in response to the shifts in subject choices, and how are the consistently different levels of achievement between the various groups to be accommodated?
Failure to balance the books will lead to merger or bankruptcy; failure to provide a fulfilling university experience will lead to falling applications as the word gets round. Unless a university has strong and imaginative leadership to pilot a way through it, it will be either a rapid death or a slow death. It is Hobson’s choice!
Comments
Dennis Sherwood says:
Let me note that using A level grades (and GCSE grades too) as a discriminant has been flawed for many years.
An admissions policy such as “AAA, accept; AAB, reject” assumes that each grade is reliable. But according to Ofqual’s research, carried out around 2014/15, this is not the case. On average, about 1 grade in every 4 is wrong, with wide variability by subject: Maths (all varieties), 96% right, 4% wrong; Psychology, 78%/22%; History 56%/44%.
I know of no information verifying that matters are any better now.
https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2019/01/15/1-school-exam-grade-in-4-is-wrong-does-this-matter/
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Amanda McCrory says:
I found the discussion of merit particularly thought-provoking, although I was uncomfortable with the framing of the choice as being between giving ‘underperformers a leg up’ and ‘pursuing excellence’. Lower attainment is not necessarily synonymous with underperformance, just as higher attainment cannot straightforwardly be equated with greater merit or potential. Grades provide important evidence of achievement, but achievement is produced within different educational contexts and opportunities. Contextual admissions therefore need not be understood as suspending merit in the interests of fairness, or as offering some candidates a ‘leg up’. They may instead represent an attempt to make a better-informed judgement about what achievement tells us about capability and potential. Perhaps the more fundamental question is therefore: when educational opportunities are scarce, what should count as merit, and what makes our judgement of it fair?
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Jonathan Alltimes says:
What is the student experience? The argument promises a better student experience if greater variety in degree subjects is maintained versus adherence to bottom line.
The history of degree subject choice at university was caused by changes in the economy, notably industrialization and the sciences in the 1800s to which the new Red Brick universities responded and later the new Plate Glass universities of the 1900s. The variety in the provision of degree subjects has always responded to the bottom line, the increasing complication was the intervention of the State in controlling the provision since the post-war period with unsustainable changes. The interventions did not matter much at first, but as higher education provision began to rise rapidly in scale since the 1980s, each change had a larger consequence on university finances, employment, and careers. Has the transition from collegiate governance to bureaucratic governance made choices about provision more difficult to negotiate? The colleges could choose with their endowments and investments to sustain out of fashion subjects and begin new subjects, but once the colleges lost their autonomy and decisions became more centralised by departments and a separate management, new rationales and choices would emerge controlled by outside interests like the State.
The student experience is a watchword of the OfS for testing loyalty to the interests of the State. When the colleges existed, academics from a variety of subjects would make choices together, students would then experience vicariously through their subject-specific academics the multi-disciplinary approach of the college. That experience has mostly gone. How else could students experience a multidisciplinary approach other than through broadening the degree subject? In the old days, you could just visit other lecture courses. Specialization in the economy is causing changes in the State and the universities, the question is, how to incorporate the changes within a degree? My answer is the question must be resolved earlier in the schools, so that a multidisciplinary approach is balanced with specialization. The universities should keep to the bottom line and specialize, while being wary of accepting short-term commitments from governments. The vogue for offering a plethora of degree subjects is a post-war fad for a liberal arts approach as a bulwark against authoritarianism because it was thought that narrower minds as a consequence of education and employment in industrialization were easier to control.
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Gavin Moodie says:
I agree that this conflates admission on merit with performance on A levels, ignoring that there are many other conceptions of merit and demonstrations of academic merit. And of course academic performance is influenced by many non academic factors.
It also by omission suggests that the only trade off is between subjects with and with enough students to recover their expenditure.
But there are many other possible trade offs, for example between teaching and research. Universities could maintain subjects with low enrolments by investing less in research by increasing teaching loads, either higher teaching in the less popular subjects, or more modest increases in teaching loads in all subjects.
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Dr John Milliken says:
A very thought-provoking piece. The dilemma between following demand and preserving intellectual breadth may, however, be more complex than it first appears because demand itself is not entirely independent of university decisions.
Modern Languages illustrates the problem particularly well. If universities close language departments because recruitment is falling, fewer graduates may enter teaching, schools may find it harder to sustain language provision, fewer pupils subsequently take languages at GCSE and A-level, and university demand falls still further. What appears to be a straightforward response to market demand can therefore become a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction.
There is also a danger in allowing individual subject viability to become the principal measure of institutional value. A university is more than a collection of courses, and certainly more than a collection of financially successful professional programmes. Its wider intellectual value lies partly in the interaction between disciplines, perspectives and traditions of knowledge.
This raises a further question. Rather than treating closure or continuation in its historic form as the only alternatives, could universities develop more imaginative models for maintaining strategically and intellectually important disciplines? Shared provision, cross-institutional collaboration, visiting academics and greater engagement with the considerable reservoir of retired and emeritus academic expertise might all help preserve capacity without reproducing the full fixed-cost structures of the past.
The challenge, therefore, may not simply be whether universities should follow demand or preserve breadth, but whether they have the leadership and organisational imagination to redesign the way breadth is sustained.
Demand should certainly inform the university, but it should not define it. If universities merely follow current demand, they may gradually lose their capacity to shape the intellectual, professional and cultural environment from which future demand itself emerges.
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Rod Bristow says:
It is a stimulating piece – thank you Alan. I’m sorry that you see it as Hobson’s choice for some. There is huge need for learning that delivers progress for people in work – and life. A university can and should work out how to meet this very big societal and individual need. Don’t think of it as marketisation, but as delivering a public good. It is more needed than it has ever been and Universities matter more than they ever have.
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