Higher Education: EUC Report

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth]

My Lords, the report, The Modernisation of Higher Education in Europe, is an important and timely document. It alerts us to developments within the European Union and suggests that we need to keep a close watch on them if we are fully to exploit the opportunities that have arisen for co-ordination and collaboration.

The report also serves to remind us that, unless we take care, we are in danger of losing some of the advantages that our universities enjoy in the competition to attract overseas students. The report is relatively brief, and it might be helpful to give it a fuller context by recalling some of the recent history of our university system. I suggest that some things have gone amiss in the course of the modernisation of higher education in the UK.

The British university sector has grown remarkably in the past 20 or 30 years. The UK probably has a higher proportion of the relevant age group in higher education than any other European country. The participation rate for the year 2010-11, as calculated by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, was 47%. When I embarked on my own undergraduate studies some 45 years ago, only a small proportion of the age group attended universities, and the participation rate was probably no more than 12%. There was a favourable ratio of staff to students. We were treated in a manner that was casual but intimate, and if we showed aptitude or enthusiasm attention was lavished on us.

The academics were, in the main, as hardworking as they are today. However, they were free from the unsettling demands of research assessment exercises and national surveys of student satisfaction. They also benefited from the security of their jobs. Nowadays, academics within research-orientated universities who fail to perform sufficiently in their research and in its publication are liable to have their careers terminated, either by the non-renewal of a temporary contract or by early retirement. In the past, if their research faltered they had a ready alibi, which was to undertake administrative duties. The consequence was that there were few professional administrators in universities. The administration was also highly efficient, and a maximum output was achieved from a minimal input.

Nowadays, professional administrators, who used to play a minor role, are more numerous than the academic staff. The balance began to alter in the 1980s, when large numbers of academic staff were retired or dismissed as a consequence of budgetary cuts. Additional administrators were needed to oversee these cuts and dismissals, and the dismissals led to a dearth of academic staff available for administrative duties. At that time, the prospects of early advancement in the academic profession all but vanished and there were severe restrictions on academic salaries. Academic employment became unattractive to British nationals, and the numbers of British students pursuing master’s degrees and PhD qualifications in some subjects declined almost to zero.

Today, there continues to be a dearth of native trainee academics. Very little financial support is provided to native postgraduate students and, given the current burden of undergraduate fees, few people can afford to prolong their studies. Today, British universities recruit the majority of their young academic staff from other countries, and this is likely to be the case for the foreseeable future.

This circumstance, which has barely been recognised by politicians or the public at large, has had some adverse consequences. It has led to an increasing impermanence of academic staff. The turnover in some of the academic departments in which I have served has reached as high as 30% in one year. The impermanence of the staff is one of the factors that have contributed to a loss of ownership on the part of the academics of the processes of student recruitment, teaching and examining. The administrative staff have been exercising increasing control in these areas, with consequences that have often been deleterious. The academic staff, who are a weakened force, have been unable to resist incursions on to their rightful domain.

The increasing commercialisation and customer orientation of the enterprises of higher education have meant that student satisfaction has become a guiding principle. This has had adverse consequences both in teaching and examining. There has been a remarkable inflation of the grades in the assessment of the exams. When I was pursuing my undergraduate studies, the preponderant honours award for the final exams was a Lower Second. Nowadays, the majority of students are awarded at least an Upper Second. The failure to achieve the higher classes of honours degree can prejudice a person’s employment prospects.

A reputation for stringency can also prejudice a department’s ability to recruit the students it needs, which can have grave financial consequences. In one of the universities of which I have had experience, the management has issued an injunction that at least 70% of the students should be awarded First or Upper Second degrees. The failures of some departments to achieve this target have led to visitations from the quality-control administration, which has been pursuing an agenda that is directly opposed to the purpose that it is ostensibly intended to serve. The system of honour classifications is under attack. In some quarters, it has been declared that it is no longer fit for purpose. The purpose has surely changed over time.

The formative or didactic purpose of exams, which is the role they play in reaffirming knowledge, has given way to their summative purpose, which is their role in generating qualifications. Part of the impetus behind the desire to abolish honours classification is the fact that most of us dislike being subject to judgment. The honours system implies failure as well as success. Those who propose that the honours classification should be superseded have argued in favour of transcripts designed to give an assessment of the overall worth of individual students. It has been argued that those transcripts should reflect multiple criteria and give credit for a variety of social and extra-curricular activities as well as for academic performance.

I baulk at such a presumptuous intention to make such broad judgments on a person’s worth. Nevertheless, in a system based on the accumulation of credit, the majority of students will graduate from universities brimful with credit, and there will be few ostensible failures. Such a system would surely certainly enhance customer satisfaction.

Surveys of student satisfaction nowadays accompany every taught course. In some cases, the objective of customer satisfaction is placing a major constraint on what can be taught to undergraduates. The courses that tend to be the least popular are those that are technically demanding and those that have a major mathematical content. Such courses are often essential to the mastery of an academic discipline. The responses to them within surveys of satisfaction tend to be dichotomised. If they are demanding and well taught, such courses are liable to receive plaudits from the most able students, but they will usually be accompanied by bitter complaints from those whose have struggled.

The averaged indices of satisfaction of courses that are demanding are liable to be low, which will lead inevitably to pressures to curtail or suspend them. When such pressures come directly from the university administrators, academics are nowadays rarely able to resist them. The consequences for the quality of undergraduate education can be dire.

I have paid rather little attention to the detailed recommendations of the report. I am pleased that others have discussed them more fully. Instead, I have described what the processes of modernisation have implied for the British system. They have created some significant problems.

The report has alerted us to one significant problem, which is that the natural advantage that Britain has enjoyed in attracting overseas students may not endure. It points to the fact that nowadays many European universities teach their courses in English, which has become the modern global lingua franca as well as the pre-eminent language of academic discourse. To benefit from being taught in English, students no longer need to come to the UK. The extraordinary treatment of overseas students by the UK Border Agency now poses a strong deterrent to them.

At a time when many European universities are purging themselves of the last remnants of medievalism, British universities are becoming increasingly subject to the pathologies of the modern age. The prognosis is not good for them, and they should be fearful of being rapidly overhauled and outdistanced by their competitors in Europe and elsewhere.