Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, I decided that if I declared all my interests, it would take the full five minutes. Let us just say that I have had a lifetime in universities, academies, academic institutions and publishers of some variety.

I shall speak only on the higher education provisions which I think are the more difficult part of this legislation. The premise behind them is that competition will help to improve quality, and I entirely agree that zero competition would be—we have evidence from other countries of this—a very unfortunate thing. In the UK, we compete for students. Universities compete for staff; they compete for research funding; they compete for reputation. Academics compete to get their work published and they live on very short contracts in a large number of cases. In short, lack of competition is not our problem. We really need to show why more competition would be helpful, or why the 1980s recipe of a competitive market plus a regulator is the right way to go.

The Bill raises many hackles with the suggestions that new providers can come in on a very quick and easy basis—very contrary to our traditions—with no need for a track record. The reality is that possibly some new providers will be good and some will be disastrous. There is nothing about being a new entrant that makes you a good higher education institution. You might be just the discount operation of a well-established overseas university—in fact, that is likely to be where many new providers will come from. But you might be something much worse. You might, for example, have very limited offerings in mind. I think, for example, of the McDonald’s university. There is no requirement for any particular focus. It deals with two subjects—the marketing and the serving of hamburgers.

So the title of university is something that needs protection with a register and, in that respect, the Bill is right. But one needs to have a view of what is not a university in order to do that seriously, and I wonder how much or how little would count. What makes an institution a higher education provider as opposed to somebody offering a course that might contribute to some degree somewhere?

We need to be able to judge value for money, and to do so we need metrics. There is the teaching excellence framework—and there the principal weaknesses lie. Teaching metrics are, in my view, much less good than research metrics; research metrics are not perfect, but teaching metrics are much worse. If you want some evidence about this, there was a nice book published in the United States called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, a couple of sociologists. Bill Gates wrote:

“Before reading this book, I took it for granted that colleges were doing a very good job”.

No more—because he discovered that they were not doing a good job. For example, there was very little improvement in those things that we most value, such as critical thinking, the ability to write well and other good intellectual virtues. They also discovered a remarkable absence of work by students, which was not a very popular finding.

Surely, you may say, we are measuring all this. I fear we often are not. The metrics are gamed, or at any rate gameable—so they are selectively gamed. For example, there are the notorious so-called student satisfaction metrics. Well, what would you do to satisfy students? I shall not sketch the answer. There are also the distortions of the meaning of “half time” or “full time”; the units are not well defined, and we do not know how much work people are doing when different institutions are taking very different views of what a full or not full-time student does. These are insidious matters. We have created incentives for teachers to do a great deal of research, which creates a bargain, on which these authors comment, whereby those who need to get a lot of research out cut the following deal with their students: “I won’t mark you too hard and you will get a pretty degree and, equally, I will get time for my research”. That is a bargain that we need to be sophisticated about. The new bargain is an unfortunate one, and I think undercuts universities.

It is rather an old-fashioned number, but the $64,000 question is whether the teaching excellence framework could have some good metrics. I can think of some good metrics, but they are unfortunately very boring and pedestrian and not the sorts of things that people like. Here are some good ones: online tests of numeracy and writing capacity, and online tests of first and second language—in short, that sort of thing—rather than asking how many hours students work when we do not know what we count as full time. Then we could ask how many pages of written work they turned in the last term, and how many of them received commentary and feedback. Those are the sorts of things that students and their families mind about not being there, and I think that we need to use robust and honest metrics if we are going to do anything like what the Bill proposes. I am not sure that any of the metrics out there in the international or national ways of measuring these are robust or honest.