If the stakes - the potential decimation of the UK's world-leading Higher Education system - were not so high, it would be tempting to feel a sense of schadenfreude at the way in which universities are setting their next generation of tuition fees. Every day brings news of the latest university to announce where it will set its tuition fees, and as virtually every university has set fees at or near the maximum £9000 mark, it is hard not to imagine the government squirming a little more uncomfortably in the hole they have dug for themselves.

If the majority of universities charge at or near the maximum, the high cost to the treasury, which bears the up-front burden of tuition costs until loans are repaid, will make the government's plans impossible to execute in their original form. When the traditional, research-intensive universities like Oxford and Cambridge, or Durham and Exeter, announced £9000 fees, few would have expected anything less; high fees here do not disturb the government - if anything, they prove that our top universities are prepared to pitch themselves as the premium product in the Higher Education marketplace. But now the likes of Aston and Leeds Metropolitan are pursuing similar figures, the writing seems to be on the wall for the whole sector. And the edifice gradually being built does not conform to the government's free market architecture for Higher Education: universities seem less like branches of Tesco, where discerning Higher Education consumers pick and choose from a range of degrees to their taste and wallets, some premium and others better value, and more like a single large store of Harrods, where there is still lots to choose from, so long as it costs the earth.

Should fees at or near to £9000 prove to be the norm rather than the exception, this will prove how muddled and counter-productive the government's Higher Education strategy has been, with everyone losing out in this new system. The public finances will have to contribute more up-front into Higher Education than would have been the case with more direct public subsidy; in a saturated graduate jobs market where salaries are suppressed, loans will not be repaid rapidly; students will be deterred from attending university, to the detriment both of social mobility and the economy that is allegedly calling out for graduates; and universities will still face a funding shortfall due to the government's savage cuts to HEFCE grants, which even the highest fees only partially offset. The ideology of free-market Toryism has been exposed here: some institutions only work through public funding, and the monopoly of public finance is not necessarily a bad thing, if the alternative is a fixed-price monopoly facing the "consumer," in this case, the student.

When every university charges the same as each other, this is not a market, but a ransom to younger students. If a student wants to go to university, he or she cannot shop around for the "best value" degree, because there will be no such thing. When more than the anticipated number of universities charge above the ideal £7500 average, the government will be forced to cut the number of student places nationally: this will make a mockery of the claim (one which originates with New Labour) that tuition fees will open up Higher Education, churning out the increased numbers of graduates necessary to match our competitor economies. And when those fees apply across the board at a university rather than differentially to subjects of different economic value, this will not encourage more students to go into engineering or accountancy, but just to do those subjects they happen to be good at and to hell with the job prospects (not that those under the age of 25 have many in any case).

Browne's free market vision of a flexible intertwining of business and Higher Education, such that business would tell universities what skills they wanted in any given moment, with students queuing up to pursue only those degrees most in need at a particular time and thus of lowest cost, has failed. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how the situation can be recovered. Tied to its ideological cuts agenda, the government is unlikely to find any additional, central money for universities to allow them to lower or vary their fees. The last regulatory thermostat which the government retains, having turned Higher Education into a free market, is the number of students it permits nationally to enter universities each year.

Sadly, this has implications for the arts and humanities in particular, which were already hamstrung by the withdrawal of central teaching funding. If the Higher Education marketplace had, somehow, actually worked, then even despite the reduction in teaching funding arts and humanities courses at some red brick universities could actually have benefited. For example, at my own institution we have around 30 students for every place we can offer. Freed from government stipulations on student numbers, we could have expanded our English Department - with degrees that are cheaper to deliver than those in the sciences - tenfold (admittedly, we would probably have narrowed our socio-economic student profile by the same amount). However, if the government has to operate the last control it has, student numbers, in order to check the burgeoning loan bill then it is all but guaranteed that it will suddenly forget its free market beliefs and order that priority for places has to be given in science, technology, engineering and medicine subjects. In the Harrods of Higher Education, you will be able to have any degree you want, so long as it is STEM, and so long as it is exclusively expensive.

Labels: Browne review, higher education, tuition fees, University Life

Watching the news of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami unfolding early on Friday morning, the spectacle seemed to develop into an exquisitely cruel plot, as if nature herself was some sort of orchestrator in a theatre of destruction: the first act being the shaking of the earth, the second the wave of water, the third the fire, the fourth the frozen weather – and now, days later, the final, human authored act has begun, in the form of a nuclear meltdown.

But even as this dramatic metaphor began to take root, the feeling that this was somehow a creatively designed destruction reawakened in me a peculiar memory from my childhood that led me to frame it in terms that were, on the face of it, wholly inappropriate. The sense of nature’s play reminded me of my own child's play, my computer games, when I used to spend hours absorbed in Sim City. In this game, one would craft a utopian metropolis along rational lines, zoning organised blocks of residences and industry, initiating complex urban transport schemes, laying down a web of electrical and water infrastructure. Gradually, out of a flat, brown map, skyscrapers and chemical plants, factories and high speed railways modelled into an urban ideal – a world that, like the popular image of Japan itself, was precise, engineered, technologised.

Yet as the game went on, such utopianism came to seem too easy, and a little bit dull. The constrained architecture of town planning gave way to the freedom of destruction. Alongside the palette of planning tools lay another palette to undo all that careful work: earthquakes, fires, floods, nuclear meltdown and, bizarrely, a Godzilla-esque monster could be unleashed in sequence. That delicate network of roads and districts would shake, then turn red with fire, then blue with water. In those early days of computing, the sequential animated disasters would push my processor to its limit, and eventually the game itself would crash in a final eschatology that pulled one sharply out of the game world, and back into a mundane reality.

Watching those news reports, then, I could not help but feel that peculiar sense of omnipotent sadism that I had once before encountered through a technological lens. This time, the menu bars of Sim City had been replaced by multiple ticker tape overlays, as the BBC news carried live feeds from local channels, which in turn carried amateur video footage. The lower, local news feed gave word of a tsunami, whilst the higher-level and delayed BBC feed was still just scrolling across details of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake; like my old computer, the screen could not keep up with events. From this point, information flashed past at an exhilarating rate, with a sequence of disasters just like those I used to combine as a kid. And even if I was not in control of this real, human-world chaos, I understood the thrill of unleashing apocalypse in perverse ways – water causing fires, boats floating down streets, in one string of tweets on the internet, whether comic or serious or just mistranslated, warnings of a possible mutant caused by the nuclear meltdown.

Nature, it seems, like my cruel childhood self, has a twisted humour. Yet hers was also a bewildering narrative, perhaps explaining why I alighted on a seemingly inapt memory in order to try to structure the events. Looking on at a distance through the television media, it was so hard to connect the local and the global, the small and the large: to connect those tiny cars scurrying along highways away from the tsunami, with the human lives they must have contained; to connect that initial cresting wave rolling across the calm blue of the Pacific (so that one almost expected to see a miniature surfer at its head) with that sludgy brown mass that bullied cars, houses, ships across fields; to connect the decay of atoms in a reactor to the vast evacuation radius that has become the target for nuclear meltdown. It is, of course, making such connections that would be performed by a deity – or by belief in one. And it is not surprising that such apocalyptic events form the ash out of which religions arise.

Yet this is not how it can work for an irreligious person like myself. Instead, like a true humanist, I turned to a secular narrative from our digitised modernity. In his book on The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode saw in religious stories of apocalypse some of the qualities that make us want to write and read literary narratives: authored works impose the order of plot on the chaos of the world, and provide the random with some form of explanation, making sense of the ending. This is why, although it seemed so inappropriate in the moment, I naturally turned to my memory of my computer game, where I got to play town mayor, city planner and, in destruction, God. Recollecting that sense of control and logic that I once authored through the game allowed me to establish some order behind the chaotic entropy being suffered by one of the most engineered, technologised nations on Earth.

Labels: 1910 Paris Floods, Game Studies, Japanese earthquake, Sim City, tsunami, video games

In teaching students in a subject like English Literature at university level, one of the hardest challenges is to encourage them not to fixate on marks. At A-Level, students get given a fairly tick-the-boxes marks schema; if they do certain things right, they will get awarded a certain number of marks. This is why marks of 90% at A-Level English are not uncommon, whereas they would be once-in-a-lifetime beasts at university.
Understandably, such students arrive at university with uncertain expectations, and often struggle to know what is required of them to produce a good university-standard essay. They will almost certainly be aware of our marks schemes, but as I commented before on this blog, it is sometimes inevitable that the marker resorts to intuition rather than exact standards:

Marking criteria in a subject such as English are notoriously problematic. Whilst the rubric has obviously to be carefully considered, how is one to judge the difference between "well focused work" (65% to 69%) and "relevant work" (60% to 64%)? The mark schemes can only be taken up to a point, from where intuition takes over, the sense of a First as opposed to Two-One class work; this indefinable difference leaves high Two-One students seeing through a notorious glass barrier between a 69% and 70%.

Especially at the high Two-One end, students new to university think that there must be a certain additional number of boxes they can tick to get those extra percentage points to tip them over the 70%. And even beyond this level, I have heard students want to know the qualitative difference between a 72% and a 74% on two consecutive essays.

In this environment, giving effective and workable feedback to students is sometimes difficult. Students are used to thinking about marks in a rationalistic, even computational, way: input x and get a grade of y. At university, we want them to work on the principle of the writer, to be able independently to reflect on the quality of their own work and thought, and to be able to work according to an academic standard whilst retaining a sense of individuality in their responses to literary texts. Thus I can never say to students that if they do a particular something next time, this will guarantee a specific grade of improvement, though it may help towards it. Nor can I say that the difference between a 72% and a 74% is definable according to certain criteria; different essays may vary by two percentage points for a host of unspecifiable reasons.

To my mind, what should matter most to a university student is not their quantitative mark, but my qualitative assessment of how they could improve. One of the benefits of the traditional university at which I do some of my teaching is that we still also have one-on-one consultations with our students, to explain the finer points of their essays (though I have little doubt that in the brave new Higher Education world of market efficiency, these will soon be scrapped).

In these sessions, my marking strategy is always to conceal the actual mark from the student until towards the end, after I’ve had a chance to discuss their work in a general sense. Some get agitated, and if they start to tip over into anxious (or even floods of tears: not unknown) I do end up telling them their mark to settle them down. I’ve generally found this approach works well, allowing me to focus on areas that could be developed, without inviting the potential apathy that the essay was still a decent grade. Some students are perfectly satisfied with a 2:1, and I fear that the moment they are told they can get this, they would be less interested in the things I can tell them to do to aspire - with a bit more effort and directedness - to a First.

However, in my latest round of essay returns one student confronted me outright on this policy, having seen right through it. "What I really hate about your marking sessions," he said (tongue slightly in cheek) "is that you always tell me lots of things I could have done differently, but then end up saying it was actually all right." This is, in essence, absolutely true. But the comment has caused me to reflect on my own practice. My principle has been to avoid marks fixation by stating the grade only at the end. But maybe, once my strategy becomes transparent to students, this has the opposite effect: they know that I will get to their mark eventually, so they simply wait patiently but disconnectedly until I finally get around to what they have come along to hear.

I would be interested to hear what other teachers do, if they have similar one-to-one feedback sessions. Do you announce the mark at the beginning? Or do you wait until the end of a session to get most out of it? Which elicits the best response from students in the immediate setting of the teaching session, and which do you think will elicit the best response over the longer-term in encouraging development?

Labels: essay marking, University Life

Sometimes, for all that the government tries to spin and control the release of news to the media, two stories coincide to reveal its underlying direction.

Today, Stephen Hester, chief executive of state-owned bank RBS, receives a pay settlement worth around £7.7 million, assuming he meets share price targets (which he will, assuming the stock market continues naturally to trend upwards, something entirely beyond his control).

Today, a review recommends that police pay be cut, whilst the Association of Chief Police Officers warns of up to 28 000 job losses. The latter is likely to be scaremongering. But, the maths speaks for itself.

Front-line police starting salaries are £22 000. Stephen Hester earns £7.7 million. That makes Stephen Hester worth the work of 350 police officers. Can we, the taxpayer, can they, the government, really believe that one banker is worth that number of people working to preserve social order?

Labels: Politics