One of the most notable features of the past week has been the higher education sector’s outrage at the Prime Minister using the phrases “crack down” and “rip-off” to talk about university courses the Government believes do not offer value for money to taxpayers or students. They should take the advice given by one of my older and wiser relatives who counsels “don’t cry until you’re hurt”, because this announcement looks a classic case of political sloganeering rather than direct action.
There is plenty more of this to come as election season looms and every piece of self-righteous university outrage will play out against a backdrop where 30% of the public are “broadly uninterested” in universities and 11% do not view them in a “positive light”. Levels of confidence may not have fallen as low as in the US, where Gallup polls suggest they are in near terminal decline, but it is not always easy to find supporters. For those suggesting it’s not fair that higher education is besmirched for political gain it is worth repeating a dictum from a lecturer in negotiation skills – fairness is a concept of and for children.
Just wait for the howls of protest if/when a further surge in dependent relative visas emerges after the Autumn 2023 intake and a Government in full-campaigning mode (or jostling for post-election leadership challenges) responds. The sector will, again, be easily positioned as self-seeking and irresponsible in the context of election messages about controlling borders and reducing immigration. There seems little reason to believe that the Labour party will throw itself in the way of such arguments.
Bleeding hearts1 but…
Vice-Chancellors are not above their own tough talk with, just this week, the incoming UEA Vice-Chancellor David Maguire quoted as talking about “Darwinian dimension” and “survival of the fittest” in the context of cutbacks at the university. The vice-chancellor of Oxford, Louise Richardson, talked of a “mendacious media” and “tawdry politicians” when salaries of vice-chancellors were challenged. It is relatively rare to find VC’s using anything but code and anodyne responses when speaking publicly but those who have worked closely with them know that in private many are more than willing to make strident comments about colleagues, academics, and any organization that disagrees with them.
Hypocrisy is rarely a good look so it is probably time for the sector to decide whether it is going to engage assertively and openly in the cut and thrust of public discourse, suffer in silence or actually do something positive. If it’s the former, there is a need to get their messaging more focused and populist if they are to have any chance of succeeding. Mendacious and tawdry are probably not quite right for discussions at the school gate, on the campaign doorstep or down the pub.
Crying Wolf2 but…
The truth is that the Government’s has had limited success in seeing any of its higher education ideas through and the sector has won at least one major victory in the past few years. In 2017, ApplyBoard’s ubiquitous Jo Johnson, when UK Minister for Universities and Science, gave a speech to UUK focusing on “accountability and value for money”, “grade inflation”, “vice chancellor pay” and “accelerated degrees”. Perhaps his abiding popularity with the sector is that everyone is still talking about the first three (with at least one measure arguably much worse) and by 2021 the Complete University Guide could only list eleven universities offering the fourth.
Another good example, this time involving the Office for Students who will be charged with the “crack down”, comes from Gavin Williamson’s time as Secretary of State for Education. In 2019 he wrote to the OfS asking what steps they could take to ensure “..international students receive the employability skills they need and are supported into employment, whether in their home country or the UK.” The further thread in the letter was that it was “…critical to ensure the OfS makes public transparent data on the outcomes achieved by international students…such as it does for domestic students.”
This was so ineffective that by early 2022 and even in the face of criticism from the sector HESA, who were charged with getting relevant outcomes data, had decided to stop telephoning students outside the EU to discover international student employment or any other status. The Head of Data, Foresight and Analysis at the OfS indicated that the OfS was content because “the current cost of this is not proportionate to our current uses of the data” and confirmed that the target response rate had been cut to 20%, compared to 25% previously. The aforementioned Jo Johnson was reported as being “amazed” and quoted as saying “Vice-chancellors should provide resources, this is an £18 billion [US$24.5 billion] to £20 billion [US$27 billion] annual revenue business we are talking about.” The VCs did not respond.
As we are reminded by Aesop’s Fables it is just possible that the wolf will eventually eat the sheep but higher education should be careful about becoming a Cassandra that never have its prophecies believed.
The Truth Doesn’t Hurt…
B. C. Forbes is credited with completing the phrase, “…unless it ought to.” To an extent the higher education sector seems to have got caught in a doom loop where it sees a problem (even if only in public perception), ignores it or tries to talk it down, then gets caught on the back-foot and is pained when savvy politicians raise it in robust terms. It is worth considering whether public opinion (for which one might read taxpayer) is ever so totally wrong, or elected representatives so dim, that the sector can totally ignore them or claim there is no foundation for concern.
There is some acceptance of poor quality courses by the sector, as in the UUK President’s recent statement that there are a “…very small proportion of instances where quality needs to be improved.” It is, perhaps, more telling that the UUK Chief Executive’s statement the following day did not even allow that minor acceptance and preferred to shield the sector behind the OfS as its regulator. A different approach might be – what is the sector doing to ensure students are not mislead about potential outcomes, how are they calling out any examples of quality shortfalls, or, just maybe, standing firm and offering evidence that no examples exist?
If the sector is persuaded that the OfS is the answer to its problems it would do well to listen more closely to what that body has to say. Just eighteen months ago the OfS published a consultation on minimum acceptable outcomes for students and CEO Nicola Dandridge said, “They are..designed to target those poor quality courses and outcomes which are letting students down and don’t reflect students’ ambition and effort.”
It seems a straightforward expression of the view that such courses exist and so the current Government position should come as no surprise. Given the Williamson example above, politicians may be equally concerned about the ability of the OfS to affect change and have chosen to ratchet up the pressure on a populist issue. The sector is responding as if it has just been caught of guard by a surprise uppercut when the blow was telegraphed a long time ago.
NOTES
- Anticipating possible outrage at the use of this term I note that I am aware of its history. I use it here as a common turn of phrase and have no political agenda.
- In the original Aesop’s fable only the sheep were eaten by the wolf. It is only in later English-language version that the shepherd boy is also consumed.
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay