A degree of regulation: Building a more financially sustainable and resilient higher education sector

Degree classifications need reform but standardising a fixed maximum proportion to be 1st, 2:1, 2:2, etc. makes little sense: it means that a strong cohort of students would, in effect, be marked more harshly than a weaker one, even if they studied hard and met all the requirements of their assessment. It also sets the members of each cohort in competition with each other. Personally, I am not entirely clear why we need to put students into these rigid and dated grade classes at all. It could be pass/fail, like a driving test. Or, we could have a system where people can try again having received a classification and see if they can improve on their performance. Why not?

At first glance this appears to be a sensible report exposing the worse excess’s of the commercially motivated HE sector.

But is it really just a smoke screen from the HE sector itself, seeking to appear to look at bit tough but is in fact just doing only a very limited ‘mea culpa’ about the extremes of the gross behaviour and exploitation of our young adults ?

Because I can’t see anywhere in this document (I admit to not yet reading every word, so I might be wrong) a proposal to reduce the overall %HE participation level. Nor an admittance that the growth of the sector is on the backs of students with lower prior academic attainment, for whom it is proven beyond doubt, that very few are getting any benefit career pay wise , and so are destined to just have a debt for life and high marginal tax to contend with (and leave a huge loan write off for the taxpayer)

I’ve liked Tom Richmond’s work for a while and there are some interesting things here. However, I’m less than credulous of the last proposal, on degree classifications.

The reasons for “unexplained” grade inflation are complex. For each Frank Furedi there is a Liz Morrish, or someone who might assert that students are better prepared (or success is more important to them), teaching staff are better trained and so on. “In the absence of any supporting evidence of an underlying rise in teaching standards or learning outcomes” – HE instructors are certainly better credentialed if not qualified than previously. A “rise in learning outcomes”… no idea what that means if not the phantom that is “learning gain”.

The big picture is that in a marketised and competitive sector, degree outcomes will climb no matter what the mechanism. If “this strongly suggests some providers have used their higher degree classifications as a means of marketing themselves to potential applicants at home and abroad”, I’d like to see those marketing materials.

The proposal is simply (and a little ironically) to remove a standards-based system for a distribution-based system. Essentially, this is the bell curve model, and I am not sure how well this maps on to the classification system. It would certainly achieve the swapping out of one clunking machinery for another. No longer would there be a need for detailed marking criteria, as we would not be able to justify saying “a 2:1 student will be able to X” under conditions where the top 50% will receive the top classifications regardless. It might make life in exam boards easier if institutions do the obvious thing in response to working out “how the allocations of degree classifications are distributed among students and faculties”, and give each exam board the injunction to use the same bell curve.

At the same time, we introduce competition among students. We also retain the illusion that a first at one university is the same as at a quite different university.

The really innovative thing to do would be to remove the classification system, retain course marks, and compel students and employers to have meaningful conversations about what these marks mean.

The report provides a few indicative qualitative examples out of the hundreds of providers over the last 23 years. Is it enough to prompt more recommendations? The recommendations would require new legislation and may be legally contested by the universities. The current government has no intent for such reforms, having already been advised and published their white paper, so that is that. Managerially-incompetent providers will experience the consequences as the reforms already announced limiting revenues take effect at the same time as cost pressures rise. There will be a sequence of mergers where incompetent boards are replaced, beginning with the University of Kent, which will be a model worked out for later mergers to proceed rapidly. The new wave of inflation is going to speed up mergers. As supported by the DfE, the OfS will be able to demand changes as a condition of each merger, which is where a limited number of the recommendations may occur, but will have to be applied consistently along with what else the OfS wants, as judged by their metrics.

The report provides the Dearing Report as the policy background by which to judge progress in the higher education sector. Dearing was the origin of the justification for a rise in tuition fees and not the origin of the growth in student numbers, it was the 2003 White Paper ‘The future of higher education ‘, which proposed justifying the rise in tuition fees by expanding numbers through widening access or participation. The rationale for which was education being a route out of poverty and closing the wage gaps with other nations. The expansion has failed on these terms and the nation is left with paying for student fees subsidised through government debt, now accounted for as an asset against which to borrow. I do not see these recommendations as salvaging many of the lower-tariff universities, brought into existence by the too late Wilson reforms of the 1960s and 1970s for technical education against deindustrialization and became the post-1992 universities: it took 30 or so years to wind them up and 30 or so years to wind them down.

The removal of the student number cap is where the pressure began to form on many HEIs. Then as PGTi numbers also came under pressure from government hostility to mobility / migration (even though student migration is palpably different to the migration the government is mostly concerned about) those HEIs with extensive cost bases adopted far more aggressive behaviours in the UGh market. All of this we know, as does the report. The measures seem mostly sensible, but I would still want a fundamental sector-wide engagement on the notion of the cap, and also of what government sees the roles of HEIs (eg it might incentivise or not, particular types of educational practice).