Month: July 2023

Universities Shouldn’t Cry Until They’re Hurt

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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

How could ChatGPT disrupt global student recruitment?

This article was jointly co-authored with Louise Nicol, founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD, and first appeared in University World News on 15 July 2023.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, but common sense tells you it is going to have a marked and lasting impact on education. Whether universities and schools demand students shun it, embrace it or ignore it, it is playing out in real time. Few seem to be looking at the international recruitment opportunities and who will be winners and losers.

ChatGPT makes the straitjacket of aggregator selection categories look as dated and restrictive as the days before streaming TV, mobile phones and the internet. It will revolutionise student search and selection for university choices because it is lightning quick and can be almost infinitely personalised. Above all, it removes the annoying propensity of current platforms to feature and favour universities that pay for the privilege of being on the top page.

For smart universities, the changes will allow them to focus on their unique selling points with high quality customer information about price, excellence and graduate employability. The onus will be on institutions to genuinely respond to student expectations rather than using rankings as a surrogate for quality. No need to pay middle men in the form of agents and aggregators because the students can do the searching for themselves.

It’s personal

A student sitting anywhere in the world is already able to search globally for courses offering the subjects they want, in cities or on campuses, at the grades they can offer and the price they want.
Forbes and others have already focused on the way that ChatGPT changes ‘the art of personalisation’ and higher education needs to catch up … fast. It’s a step closer to the possibility of consumers having perfect, contemporaneous knowledge about their opportunities.

Just an hour spent researching universities using ChatGPT demonstrates the possibilities and the threat to the established order of generic search. As an experiment the initial setting was as a student from India wanting to study Computer Science, particularly cyber security in London.

Fleshing out the details was an IELTs score of 6, a B grade for undergraduate Computer Science and a tuition budget of £7,000 (US$7,670). For a career, the dream role was working for Amazon Web Services.

At nearly the speed of light

Within seconds ChatGPT churned out its response and it is clear: course search is not a problem. Most universities have learnt the lesson that their website needs to have the most up-to-date course information and AI gobbles this data up. You could choose to refine the parameters further or loosen them, but you are not confined to clunky, broad categories.

The list was personal. It didn’t have at the top 90 or more universities that had paid the aggregator to be ‘featured’ on the website. There were no pathways posing as universities. No counsellor had intervened to highlight and promote an institution which was paying more in commission than the one that met my criteria.

Companies claiming to use AI have often been operating at a much less granular level. Some even have teams of checkers working away to keep data up to date, but they are always going to be behind the curve. ChatGPT delivers genuinely unique results in an instant without having to sign on to a company that is really intent on selling you consultancy, loans or visa advice.

ChatGPT is also good at establishing the levels of English required for various courses. Most universities put their English Language requirements for direct entry prominently on their websites. It’s another tick in the box for ChatGPT and institutions which have put in the effort to build good and searchable pages on course requirements.

On the topic of budget ChatGPT was pretty good and better than most aggregators and course search platforms. All universities recommended were within the budgeted amount. So, a big tick there.

Glitches to fix

There is an identifiable problem for pathway programmes in that they are rarely as integrated with university websites as they need to be. Without a seamless process and shared information they are likely to lose students who search solely for direct entry and, perhaps counter intuitively, the partners of higher ranked institutions who demand higher direct entry levels for English language are most vulnerable. There is the added dimension of the ways in which International Year One courses figure into this environment.

Entry grades were much more problematic, but this is also not that straightforward for aggregators and course-search platforms. They may give an indication of the ease or difficulty of gaining admission to a certain university, but it is far from an exact science, and we know that institutions may flex in any given year, depending on their pipeline of applicants. ChatGPT has a way to go when it comes to finding grade requirements for individual institutions, but it is reasonable to think that nimble universities will see this as an opportunity rather than a barrier.

Career opportunities and employability were, unfortunately, a big fail. It is symptomatic of the general malaise in higher education that institutions are poor at making and highlighting direct links between themselves, their international graduates and employers. The widespread failure of the sector to collect even the most basic employability data is likely to present an open goal for those who take steps to fill the gap.

As prospective students become far more outcomes-focused, universities should measure and evidence the return on investment from their degree programmes and provide accurate data as to where their graduates embark on their early careers. No institution, aggregator, and or platform publishes international graduate outcomes data by country as a tool for students to use when making their university choice. ChatGPT and its successors will expose those who fail to offer information and reward those who invest in collecting the data.

Move fast and fix things

Universities are going to have to get their course recruitment criteria in order to take advantage of AI recruitment, but the outcome will be that sales holy grail – a qualified lead. It’s not just about having the right and most persuasive information on the website, but also a major rethinking of the application process. Universities should streamline the opportunity for direct applications from ChatGPT and work out ways that students can forward their examination transcripts and English test scores directly.

Building a direct connection with the potential student is the dream of every institution and it cuts out private providers who are costing millions in commission payments and sometimes double dipping to take money from the student’s pocket as well. More challenging is that they should decide whether an AI-generated personal statement is part of the zeitgeist or a reason for rejection. Arguably, accepting that students will use the technology and adapting to that reality could mean more time to focus on fraudulent documentation.

International student recruitment should remain a people-focused business and AI offers the opportunity for universities to create links with potential students. The winners will find the right balance between allowing technology to ease the process and being available when the personal touch is needed. It’s a future that offers the best in self-service for potential students while allowing universities to express their personality and benefits.

Travelling halfway around the world for one’s education is a daunting prospect and students, and their families or funders, will always want the reassurance of someone on the ground to guide their child to a university that cares about them as an individual. Building in-country resources, agencies and locations that support the relationship will remain important but supplemented by genuine university participation. It’s a win for the student and the sector.

Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD. Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay