Month: May 2018

US University Pathways – Build It And They Will Come?

In 2014 Karen Khemka, a partner with the Parthenon Group, said “The U.S. third-party/outsourced pathway market is less than half the size of the Australian market despite having a higher education system that is 10 times the size.We anticipate that growth will be constrained only by the pace at which private providers can develop the market.” (Inside Higher Education, Bridge or Back Door? 30 April, 2014).  With reports recently indicating that two leading providers in the US, Study Group and INTO, are for sale it’s a good moment to see what has happened.

Khemka’s statement came towards the tail end of a period when more than a billion dollars was invested in private pathway providers with the potential for pathway development in the US a strong incentive.  But the next billion-dollar question facing potential investors may be whether US pathways were really a field of dreams where you could, to borrow loosely from the film, ‘build it and they will come’.  Or has attention to the supply side of the equation ignored the challenges of changing patterns of demand around the world?

To size the growth in capacity in the US I took the NAFSA publication Landscape of Third-Party Pathway Partnerships in the United States (NAFSA, 2017) as a starting point. The publication identified eight providers who were partnering with 45 institutions on 1 April 2016. The criteria was that these partnerships had to be ‘contractual agreements between universities and third-party entities to provide English language courses along with academic credit.’

I revisited each of the third-party entities listed to determine what relationships they have added. It is reasonable to say that the wording of some media statements and the content of web-sites is, either by accident or design, unclear about the exact nature of the relationship or offering. However, Table 1 summarises my understanding of new partnerships that meet the original criteria and notes the dates they were announced.

Table 1 – New US Pathways of Eight Providers Announced 2016 to 2018

* Source: Landscape of Third-Party Pathway Partnerships in the United States (NAFSA, 2017)
**I can find no public announcement of the Shorelight partnership with Utah but it is reflected on the web-site of each organisation

Table 2 shows arrangements listed on the providers’ websites but which I have omitted. I am happy to accept any authoritative corrections in my understanding of the nature of the partnerships or courses provided and to add any partners I have missed.  I have not gone beyond the original group of providers although a number of additional providers, such as EC Higher Education, have also developed pathway courses in recent years.

Table 2 – Partnerships listed on provider websites but not meeting criteria

The eight providers have added 21 new partnerships to the 45 shown in the original study – a growth of 47%. This suggests that the private providers have set about growing their businesses in the US with a good deal of vigour and some degree of success. At the time of Khemka’s quote in 2014 Shorelight was a new player but they have moved on to secure the most partnerships just four years later.

That growth in pathway capacity comes at a time when the global balance between supply and demand is in a state of flux and the future is somewhat less certain. The expanding availability of degrees taught in English and the ambitious targets of both traditional recruiting countries and emerging destinations has radically changed the competitive environment. While much of the world is adding rocket fuel to its recruiting engines the US looks to have loaded its unleaded petrol engine with diesel.

In the US a decline in non-degree new enrolments in 2015/16 was followed a year later by both graduate and undergraduate new enrolments declining. And non-degree enrolments continued to fall in 2016/17 which may be a leading edge indicator of further decline. The IEE Fall 2017 International Student Enrollment Hot Topics Survey says ‘Responding institutions report a 6.9 percent decline of international students enrolling for the first time at a U.S. institution, continuing the declines first seen in Fall 2016.’ (IEE, November 2017)

Table 3 – US New International Student Enrollment, 2006/07-2016/17
Source: Institute of International Education (2017). Open Doors Report on International Education Exchange. Retrieved from http://www.iee.org/opendoors

Like many sectors higher education is being obliged to rethink the fundamentals of supply and demand as demographics, competition and disruptive technologies undermine the old certainties.  It is a challenging moment to be launching new initiatives and building capacity based on past performance.

NOTES AND CORRECTIONS

This post was updated on 24 September 2017 to include Lynn University as a Study Group partner announced in May 2017.  Other related statistics have been updated.  At the time of announcement it was billed as ‘is set to open in January’ – presumably 2018.  As of the date of this correction the partner is billed on the Study Group site as ‘Launching Soon’.

UNIVERSITY PATHWAYS – INTO THE VALLEY

The potential sale of INTO University Partnerships has created a lot of interest with a particular focus on the Joint Venture (JV) model it pioneered and how they are performing.    A sharp-eyed and smart ex-colleague pointed me to Companies House, the United Kingdom’s registrar of companies, which offers access to annual reports for every JV as well as the wholly owned entities INTO Manchester and INTO London World Education Centre.  They make for interesting reading.

No doubt the wonks, analysts and number crunchers will comb these reports over the coming months as part of their due diligence and financial interrogation. As The Skids minor-hit of 1979, Into The Valley said – its ‘time for the audit, the gathering trial.’ But for this blog I am going to focus on enrolments because that is the area where most pathway providers claim they bring expertise, investment, global reach and commercial nous which add up to student recruitment that universities cannot match.

The individual filings appear to be consistent in reporting the average number of students in each Centre during the year. Table one shows these for ten entities operating in the 2013/14 Financial Year and still operating in 2016/17. This excludes the now closed St George’s University JV and the INTO Newcastle University London JV established in 2015.

Table 1: Yearly Average Enrolments at INTO Centres

*Manchester and London are not joint ventures.  Their parent company is INTO University Partnerships
Source: Annual Reports 2013/14 to 2016/17

The average enrolments in 2013/14 across all Centres was 4284 while in 2016/17 it was 4016 – a decline of -6.3%. The peak year for enrolment was 2014/15 when an average of 4293 enrolments are shown. As a comparator HESA reports that the UK HE sector’s first year international enrolments declined from 179,250 in 2013/14 to 172,275 in 2016/17 – a fall of 3.9%.

There will be many drivers for enrolment performance and as my previous blogs have indicated there have been winners and losers amongst universities over the past few years. Many in-house international offices have secured outstanding results and some universities have received strong support from the performance of their pathway partners. The picture for INTO looks mixed with only the Queen’s and Stirling JVs showing an increase in average numbers enrolled.

What also interested me was that I once heard a pathway leader explaining to a worried Vice-Chancellor that the period from start up to profitability for a pathway was ‘deepening and widening’. Both Gloucestershire and Stirling JVs were in start-up mode in this period having been incorporated in 2013. But their fortunes seem to have taken different directions with the latter forging ahead as the former has fallen back. It would be no surprise if pathways at more lowly-ranked universities were finding it harder to make progress under increasingly competitive conditions.

We can also see that even some of the pathways at well-known top 30 universities, Newcastle and East Anglia, have had a pretty torrid time in terms of enrolments. Newcastle enrolments fell by 24.3% from their peak in 2014/15 and East Anglia by 17.5% in the same period. City, a relatively well-known university with strong international intakes and a London advantage, saw numbers fall by 25.5%.  This suggests that even well-established partnerships with big name partners are not a guarantee of successful enrolment.

The university partners are, of course, still securing students who progress from these pathways but this scale of decline is unlikely to be made up for by improved progression rates or increased fee levels. My recent blogs have demonstrated that both Newcastle and UEA have seen their overall international student fee income declining over recent years. And while INTO University Partnerships’ share of the JV profits is not the only stream of income to its business it is reasonable to assume that the company would prefer operating profits to losses.

For INTO, and the pathway sector more generally, in both the UK and the US the challenges are not going away any time soon. These include the growth of favoured locations such as Canada, Australia and Europe, the emergence of new destinations and particularly those in Asia, and the ever-present spectre of improving on-line delivery and in-country tuition improving English-language levels.

Tennyson’s poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, provides an apt metaphor. He wrote that as the cavalry charged ‘into the valley of Death’ there were ‘cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them’. There were survivors but of the original 600 Light Dragoons, Lancers and Hussars in the charge fewer than 200 were able to re-assemble with their horses.

Over a billion dollars has been invested in private pathway providers since 2010 as the prospects for growth in the US and UK seemed bright. If there is a next round of deals for those providers – Study Group have also been for sale recently –  it seems likely that the price must reflect the market challenges. If not we may recall that, as French Marshal Pierre Bosquet reportedly said of the Charge, “C’est de la folie” — “It is madness.”

Live Music – Thrills, Spills and Unexpected Moments

With thanks to Paul Greatrix, Registrar at the University of Nottingham and a contemporary at UEA, for his blog on wonkhe.com , for a reminder of many nights at the magical Nick Rayns’ LCR at the University of East Anglia. For the uninitiated Nick was the extraordinary booker and maestro who picked talent and persuaded acts to the far-flung Norwich university campus.

Sadly departed but never forgotten Nick’s genius was a lifeline for thousands who enjoyed bands that, under normal circumstances, would have thought Norfolk’s capital was an outpost too far. Even after the A11 became a dual-carriageway it probably still is for everyone but Jools Holland who, apparently, likes to travel by bus and whose aunt lives in Norwich.

There are many who knew Nick better than I and are better-placed to pay tribute. The best I can think of to thank him is to write of three gigs he put on which provided memories to last a lifetime. There are lessons about community, channelling anger, and finding out unexpected things about people but mostly it’s about the glory of being at a live concert.

Elvis Costello is, in my view, one of the great songwriters of his generation and I have seen him once. It was at the LCR (which stood for Lower Common Room – very university) on 25 May 2005. I know the date because I was missing watching the Champions League Final, between Liverpool and AC Milan, to watch the gig. As I am a Manchester United fan it was little contest to trade seeing the arch enemy in a final for a concert featuring what was reputedly one of the finest bands in the world.

On that night, and the story is famous enough to be reported on Wikipedia, Elvis and the band were warming up while watching the first half (which is more warming up than Liverpool did as they went into half-time 3-0 down). But Liverpool scored three times in six minutes of the second half to make the score 3-3 at the end of normal time. Elvis and the band were transfixed by the game and were an hour late on stage.

What Wikipedia doesn’t tell us is that the LCR had become increasingly fractious. The town has a strong relationship with its own team and recognises partisan loyalty. But in the absence of an explanation for the band’s absence people realised what was happening backstage. The tension began to rise and the cursing about lack of professionalism increased.

When Elvis came on stage the match had gone to extra time. I think it is fair to say that the band was not at its best. They had either peaked early in their preparation, imbibed to thoroughly before appearing or remained nervous about the outcome of the game. Maybe all three but as I recall they were poor and out of sorts.

As a guitar nerd I had been impressed to see about 16 guitars on a rack before the gig but became increasingly irritated as Elvis switched from one the other and fiddled with tuning. The sound was harsh and the band was about as tight as well worn slipper. It is reasonable to add that Elvis is not a shrinking violet and in the face of the crowd’s dissatisfaction he gave as good as he got. Things were thrown, words were said – it was ugly and had every chance of getting uglier.

Then came one of those moments that make attending live gigs remind us how benevolent and uplifting the human spirit can be. A roadie scampered onto stage, crouched directly under Elvis and put his thumbs up. Liverpool had won the penalty shoot-out and were champions of Europe.
My memory of what happened next is that Elvis stopped the gig. He’s not the sort of guy that apologises but he reached out in the way that great communicators can. He knew that we knew what had happened and said something like – ‘we’ve never done this before but we are going to try it.’
The band broke into a version of the Liverpool FC hymn ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. The crowd, with extraordinary generosity and showing their shared love of the beautiful game, joined in. Even as a die-hard United supporter I joined in – there are moments when participating is the point, and the price, of being in the moment. Whatever the fire regulations of the time, lighters were lit and the audience swayed in a reasonable replica of the Kop on a Saturday afternoon. Just a wonderful moment of community and shared emotion.

Next on my list is Primal Scream in November 2006. I didn’t really know very much about the band and what I had heard made me think of the lead singer as a Mick Jagger wannabee who had delusions of grandeur. But the gig turned me around and that’s a good reason to be grateful because they can be interesting and spiky and challenging.

This time, in my research, I find that the Eastern Daily Press of 27 November has reinforced my recollection of the gig and its pivotal moment. The band had begun reasonably well but I didn’t find myself particularly moved by the standard overbearing rock noise that I was hearing. But then it all kicked off.

One of the crowd had been pretty vocal and hectoring of Bobby and ended up throwing the best part of a pint of beer over him. The singer exited the stage and his band continued playing for a minute or so but gradually shut down as it became clear he wasn’t reappearing anytime soon. I think the crowd was mixed – the beer thrower had been hustled out and we thought that an ex-Jesus and Mary Chain drummer from the mean city of Glasgow should be made of sterner stuff.

What happened next was that Bobby came back like a man on a mission. It was as if the affrontery of being forced to retreat had made him into the Terminator. And he was back with a vengeance. It became one of those rock, roll, acid-house, punk nights that live long in the memory. The sheer visceral thrill of being in a hall when the band and the audience become a single organism is one of the best reasons that live music is worth supporting.

There are a number of other LCR nights that spring to mind – I have reasonable story about Robert Plant – but the last for this blog shows that we might not know other people quite as well as we think. It was around 2001 and Joe Strummer was arriving with the Mescaleros. I am a totally unreconstructed fan of The Clash and had only seen them perform once so the chance to see Joe’s second coming was unmissable.

Standing at the back of the hall before the band came on I bumped into David Richardson, now Vice-Chancellor of the University and at the time a highly regarded academic in the School of Biological Sciences. I was, frankly, gob-smacked to learn that he had taken an extended leave of absence (the equivalent of dropping out) of university to follow The Clash on tour in earlier days. My hope is that all Vice-Chancellor’s have had those moments and allow them to influence their decisions about the lives of young people.

As the lights went down and the band came on stage we were both drawn, like fireflies to a flame, to the front of the hall. Joe came on stage and decided to make his way into the audience. There was a strange but wholly affirmative moment when dozens of adults were in the presence of someone who had touched their teenage lives with a positivity and a message that still burned bright.

Hands reached out to touch the writer, singer and polemicist who had told us it was a good thing to have a ‘bullshit detector’ and not to care or hear about ‘what the rich are doing’. As Julien Temple’s film reminds us, he encouraged us to accept that the future is unwritten and that our destiny is in our hands. I pogoed with the best that night and remain sad that Joe died so early. But I am grateful to have been there to show my regard and respect.

My other abiding memory of the night is the wonderful glee on the faces of the young musicians who made up the Mescaleros and were living the dream on stage with an icon. Music is live, it is about people and it is important. A good reminder to me that next Thursday I must go to the local Open Mic and applaud anyone who has the nerve to stand up and perform. I might even take my guitar…

LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT…BUT IT’S NOT WHAT DRIVES ME TO DISTRACTION

Seven months into the San Diego adventure and I am beginning to get comfortable with driving on the other side of the road. I refuse to be drawn into the right is wrong or left is right spiral – the jokes are very old and I simply look on the mental gymnastics involved as being like rubbing your head and patting your tummy at the same time. Obviously not something I would recommend while driving – unless it is a Bangkok or Beijing rush hour where the word ‘rush’ is a joke at the expense of the motorist.

I have driven for a long time and spent over thirty years in the UK doing thousands of miles and accumulating an undistinguished, and long expired, six points for two minor speeding offences. Both were on a Sunday before 9am with nothing on the road except me and the forces of the law. And 36mph on a 30mph dual-carriageway stretch was hardly either drag-racing or a challenge to the world land-speed record.

The officers involved were leather clad, motorcycle cops and used radar guns. Their stance, machismo and dark glasses suggested that it was a noon shoot out with a desperado in some lawless town rather than an overcast weekend morning with a slightly harassed middle-aged man in a provincial English town. But nobody is, or should be, above the law, so I paid my dues and took my three points (which is, at least, more than Arsenal have done in most matches this season).

My right hand/left hand sensibility has only let me down twice in San Diego and both times were in the first two weeks. Once as I was turning out of the drive onto the road and the second before 6am in the morning en-route to the airport. On both occasions the voice from the passenger seat said, “We drive on the right in my country, Englishman.” The tone of disbelief, scorn and reprimand was a reminder that, even after nearly 242 years, the time of coercion under the yoke of monarchical tyranny still rankles with some citizens.

What really paralyses me with fear is the rule here that allows you to turn right at a red light if there is no traffic coming along the road. It goes so far against the teaching of decades in the UK that I tentatively edge forward, pause, edge, pause, edge, until the honk of the queuing traffic behind forces me into action. I swing the wheel hastily and screech the tires while offering an apologetic wave to nobody in particular.

After turning I feel all the sensations that accompany an English person who is walking through ‘Nothing to Declare’ at customs and wondering if they accidentally packed three kilos of cocaine and a dead goat in their suitcase. I should confirm that I owe that description to an internet meme – it is so accurate as to be equally perfect for the feeling of having driven through a red light. I doubt I will ever get over my anxiety on this one.

What is even more troubling is that when the red light goes green the pedestrian crossing to the right goes green to signal that pedestrians can walk. It is totally counter-intuitive because just as you get the green light to go the pedestrians have the right of way on the road you want to take. And given the number of walking/texting Darwin award contestants you are never sure if they are about to walk or telling Aunt Lucy what they want for dinner.

Again, I edge forward, stop, try to catch the eye of the texting/dawdling pedestrian. Edge forward a little more, wave my hand at them to elicit a response, but all to no avail. And then the inevitable tooting and honking from behind as my indecision arouses the worst instincts in fellow drivers. It’s all pretty trying.

And for any Englishman of a certain age the four-way stop is an invention wholly intended to challenge our sense of fairness, civility, and goodwill to all people. This is a country where cities are largely built on a grid-system so there are lots of what people in the old country call ‘crossroads’. But there also seems to be a prohibition on traffic lights so each of the four roads has a single white line with the word ‘Stop’ on it – and people are meant to take their turn.

But it’s like the mind-games faced in a busy barbers’ shop without a booking system – was the guy with the AC-DC t-shirt here before you? And will he beat you up if you take his turn? Did the old geezer with the whippet sneak in without you seeing? Is it fair to go in front of someone who looks like they only have enough hair for a ‘pensioner’s special price’? And is the bloke with the youngster reserving space for both of them? Is that reasonable and will they want to go concurrently or consecutively?

Heaven help you if you feel that someone has taken your place in the queue because there is only so much loud tutting you can do before people wonder if you have dentures that are slipping. I have always thought that barber’s should adopt a ticket system akin to those at the delicatessen counters of busy supermarkets. Even better might be the opportunity to buy your cheese and ham at the same place as you have a hair cut – could be a world-beater for the ASDA/Sainsbury merger if my old work-mate and Sainsbury CEO Mike Coupe really wants to ‘be in the money’.

All that having been said, my engagement with every four-way stop is a little like a gentleman’s excuse me at a grand ball where I have misplaced my dance card. Imagine that my turn to go is the lady I want to dance with.  I sit with a look of longing at her beauty but few expectations about it being my turn as others assert their option to have a quick rumba, waltz or, more appropriately, American Smooth.

First is the big, bearded guy (and it IS always a man) with his cap on backwards who drives a truck the size of Texas and takes his turn, whether it’s his turn or not, at the intersection. Then comes the young buck with music blaring out of the open windows, who is on the phone and has the sense of right that only the young, rich or with military-grade hardware in the boot (or trunk to US readers) are entitled too. After that is the grey-haired, short-sighted older person who has decided that stopping is a recipe for disaster because of the state of the car’s brakes and the possibility it may never start up again.

Surely, it’s my turn next? But then there are Mom and Pop and a people-carrier full of young sprogs on their way to the Zoo and by the time they are through it’s a battle for supremacy between the Uber/Lyft (I believe they all work for both companies) driver in a hurry and the harassed US Postal Service van on an Amazon-inspired mission to deliver 56 packages over a 100-mile radius in the next half-hour.

I wave them all through and smile that peculiar English smile that reflects decades of inhibition, fortitude and, most especially, guilt for things that happened years before we were born. It’s definitely my turn next because there are no more cars. But then I face the other certainty of a drive in the sunshine in San Diego – people on foot.

A dog-walker with seven assorted dogs – some of highest pedigree, some rescue mutts of dubious extraction – all very hairy and quite literally barking mad. Then a jogger whose best 5km time is long-gone and who manages to slow down to cross the road secure in the knowledge that no California driver will assail their pedestrian rights. And, of course, a cute group of school-children with peaked caps and rucksacks who only pause for several minutes mid-crossing to apply more sun-cream and have a drink to rehydrate.

Just as the two and four legged have passed and my foot is coming off the brake I face the final, and relatively new road-challenge. Whizzing through the four-way, with the sense of entitlement known throughout the world come the cyclists on the dayglo coloured, rent by the hour bikes and close behind the motorised Bird scooters. It is like the chase scene in Mad Max Beyond Pleasure Dome but a lot slower and with no death, destruction or mutants and the certainty that no fossil fuel was harmed in making the wheels go round.

When all is said and done it’s an adventure but with music in the car, air-conditioning and time on my hands I can think of worse ways to spend time. And I quite like being polite and cautious on the road after years of hustling around the country for work and time-tight school pick-ups. As Charlie Tebbutt used to say as he drove us to new business pitches during my time running the PR division of Charles Walls, “Better to be fifteen minutes late in this world than fifty years early in the next.”