At last, someone who can play the government at their own economic game with Higher Education. Howard Hotson provides some facts and figures to expose what anyone working within British universities has known all along: we punch above our weight in research, in teaching, in efficiency, and in access; and the government’s reforms to improve the efficiency and reduce the public spend on UK academe will actually make matters worse.
The government is obsessed by the American neo-liberal model of privatisation, and continually turns to the world university league tables in an attempt to prove that the private, US model of higher education is more successful than our central, publically funded one. With thirteen US universities in the top twenty of the Times World Rankings, and with all bar one of these private institutions commanding tuition fees of around $20 000 per annum, UK policy is guided by the assumption that there must be an equation between the privatisation of higher education and the international standing of an institution.

But the fact that the UK already has four universities in the top twenty Times World Rankings shows the esteem in which UK universities are held in spite of everything. Partly, this is due to tradition. The Ivy League models itself on Oxford and Cambridge; but even whilst the trans-Atlantic sons of British universities have long since outstripped their parents in terms of the resources they wield, that ancestry leaves a reverse kind of inheritance. American alumni who study at Oxford and Cambridge provide geneous philanthropic support that continues to subsidise a highly inefficient teaching and collegiate system, conscious that they would have been expected to do the same had they attended their Ivy League relations. Consequently, Oxford and Cambridge, who of course supply the UK's top two places in the international leagues, has funding more on a par with American institutions, and maintains a "reputation" in the eyes of scholars worldwide, a key measure on the Times Higher Education league tables. But the Oxford and Cambridge effect alone does not account for how well UK higher education performs against its international counterparts. Another key factor is the sheer hard work and dedication of UK academics across the board, who commit to long and underpaid hours to scholarship and teaching. Far from the Cameronian caricature of the public servant lounging on the public purse, researchers and lecturers have been tied to the profession by vocation, not by money.

The figures Hotson helpfully marshals demonstrate quite clearly that the UK’s academy outperforms, pound for pound, person for person, its wealthier US counterpart:

Yet all those journalists and politicians who have leaped so nimbly from league tables to university policy have apparently overlooked the fact that the US is larger than the UK: its population of 311 million is five times the UK population of 62 million. Already, the American three-to-one lead in the World University Rankings looks far less impressive. In fact, over the past seven years, the UK has had more top 20 universities per head of population (one per 15.5 million) than the US (one per 23.9 million). And since the UK institutions in the top 20 are on average slightly larger (20,500 students) than the US ones (17,300 students), almost twice the proportion of the UK population has been studying at top 20 universities (1 in 756, compared with 1 in 1383). In economic terms, the two countries differ by an even larger margin: US GDP (at $14.658 trillion) is 6.5 times larger than UK GDP (at $2.247 trillion). For the past seven years, the UK has been maintaining fully twice as many top 20 universities as the US for each unit of financial resource.

Hotson goes on:

According to the OECD, the UK spends 1.3 per cent of GDP on tertiary education, precisely the EU average. The US, on the other hand, spends 3.1 per cent, far more than any other country in the world. So America not only has 6.5 times the UK’s financial resources, it also spends 2.4 times as much of those resources on tertiary education. That adds up to more than 15 times as much investment in higher education in the US than in the UK. And yet, according to these world rankings, that 15-fold investment nets barely a three-fold return in educational excellence. The UK has somehow managed to maintain top-ranked universities for only about a fifth of the US price.

The game of privatisation currently being played with higher education is scary, but it would be just about acceptable if those involved within it - teachers, researchers, students, society - thought that it would actually improve things. Hotson's argument makes a convincing economic case for saying that it will not. US universities may look smart and manicured, with their faux-Oxbridge halls and towers, but beneath the skin is a vast swathe of administrative bureaucracy, and trivial enticements for fee-paying students: athletics tracks rather than lecture halls, saunas in bedrooms rather than books in a library. Less John Henry Newman, and more the Great Gatsby.

The trouble is, David Willetts only has two brains: one of these thinks in terms of free market competition, the other in terms of efficiency, and both are ideologically repelled by the nineteenth-century idea that publically funded universities might actually perform efficiently, contribute to the national economy and social wellbeing, and sustain a diverse portfolio of research beyond the purely “impactful” – and that they might do this without draining the life savings of generations of young students.

Labels: Browne review, Ivy League, tuition fees, University Life

It is twelve months since the coalition came to power, but on this anniversary, I feel that this also marks my own political coming-of-age, from my more naive kind of adolescence.


My teenage years correspond with the election of New Labour in 1997, the first major political event that I understood would affect me directly. Before then, all the turbulence I had lived through as a younger person - Thatcherism, the collapse of the USSR, Black Wednesday - had been filtered through my family. My abiding memory of the coup against Boris Yeltsin, for example, is not of the event itself. It was of accompanying Granddad to buy a newspaper, something he never ordinarily did. I felt it was important, because he must have done; but I did not discuss the events in Russia in any informed way. I knew of the recession of the early 1990s not through statistics about inflation, but because my dad had bought our family's first computer one week, then was out of a job the next. By contrast, in 1997, I remember sitting on the school bus listening to the news reports on the radio, and knowing that something had happened that would alter my world directly; I also knew that come the next election, I would by then be old enough to vote.

Beginning the New Labour years as a teenager, though, I recognise now that this period corresponded with a kind of idealistic immaturity on my part, lasting until the coalition's election last year. Over the past decade, I shouted at the news on a daily basis, angered by New Labour's failings on the environment, on PFI, on taxation; I blustered at the affected charm of Tony Blair, and the machinations of spin; and, of course, I marched against tuition fees and the Iraq war. There had to be a different way, an alternative, a party that would govern by principles of fairness, not the populism of the focus group.

So when I came of voting age, I turned repeatedly to the Liberal Democrats, with the belief that they were a party founded upon ideals that I agreed with: utilitarian, progressive, secularist. The more academic I became through university, the more I felt their methods were not dissimilar to mine: thinking through the prism of evidence rather than ideology, conscious of history but not blinded by it. The evidence of the present says that our possession of nuclear weapons is no longer necessary, and I welcomed the Liberals' courage in wanting to do away with Trident, rather than maintaining it as the last vestiges of our Imperial prowess. The evidence showed rehabilitation was better than prison, and this is what the Liberal Democrats stood for, not some Tory right-wing fantasy that criminals are somehow genetically different to the rest of society and so should be locked away for a jolly long time. The Liberal Democrats seemed to aim for government by reason, not by retrospect.

Yet throughout this time, for all my loud antagonism to New Labour and preference for the Liberal Democrats, the constant whisper in the background was that no party offered a genuine alternative. I was told that there was no difference between the left and right wing. Every party governs from the centre. The Tories too would have done much the same on Iraq, on fees, on the privatisation of healthcare.

It now appears that the whispers spoke a truth that ran deeper than I then suspected. With the coalition government, it seems that not only are the sides of red and blue actually two shades of grey; the yellow of the liberal Democrats turns out to be politically monochrome as well. This has been the first, nasty lesson I have learnt. In our area last week, there were no elections for local government. Had there been, though, I would certainly not have ticked the Liberal Democrat box as I have in the past, in what I previously considered to be a thoughtful, genuinely alternative vote.

I have learnt more advanced lesson as well. The divisions between the three parties are ideologically and practically very slight. But I reflect now that precisely because of this, I should have read the New Labour years more patiently and moderately than I did, and thought more about some of the subtleties to be found in the ebb and flow of politics within a government's time in office. In a way typical of adolescents, I felt everything during those years of my political maturation must be cast in black and white. PFI in healthcare was a bad thing and should be stopped. Tuition fees were wrong.  School league tables were a farce. Green policies were trumpeted but never implemented. There are some aspects of the New Labour years which, even now, I still see in such absolute terms. With the Gulf War, I was told, I was either with the Blair-Bush axis, or against them. I was and remain against.

But I now recognise that even if the parties themselves had few wholesale ideological differences during the New Labour years, there were still patches and shades where different colours did come through. New Labour did develop the Sure Start programme to help social mobility from a young age, a programme the Conservatives are slowly eroding. PFI may have put the public health system in a devilish relationship with the private sector, but new hospitals did get built. Class sizes did go down, teacher numbers did go up, education did improve. Patients continued to die in hospital corridors, but patients also were increasingly likely to survive cancer and surgery, had to wait less time for a minor hip operation or knee replacement.

As historians will no doubt tell us in hefty books to come, the thirteen years of New Labour's rule were a political epoch. It is one which aptly mirrors my own growth: I began those years as a teenager, I emerged on the cusp of middle age. I realise now, then, that politics is for the long term, and that across that term ideals have to suffer, get bent or twisted. The media, operating on a daily cycle, are always exposing the hypocrisy and failures of the immediate moment; no daily news headline runs with the words, "On sudden reflection, over the last two years..." What matters most in politics, though, is not the disputable headlines of the day-to-day, but the definitive changes of the year-to-year.

This is the lesson I have learnt, then: political patience. Whether my patience will last over the next four years of the coalition so that I emerge ready to vote Liberal again at the next election we will have to wait and see. At this stage I somehow doubt it. Living and working in a university environment, my sector is crumbling into dust under the misguided hammer of the coalition's policies. I doubt that the edifice of higher education will have been sufficiently restored over the next four years, over the long term.

Labels: coalition, Politics

Reading William Deresiewicz's long discussion of the crisis in US graduate schools, I am left feeling that this is the dystopia coming soon to the UK, with its now quasi-privatised university sector. In the US system, PhD programmes are aimed at those wanting to become university lecturers and researchers; given that gaining a PhD can take nine years, rather than the three or so it takes in the UK, the US PhD is more focused on training for the university culture, rather than providing a higher class of transferable skills for industry as it can be in the UK.

With the advent of higher tution fees in the UK, we can anticipate that in future most of those who choose to stay on in postgraduate education will be sponsored by industry or will be focused on PhDs as a vocational training option for a specific career. For the rest, those who are either wealthy enough, or foolish enough, to want to continue in a PhD for academic reasons, things look pretty bleak on the basis of the US experience Deresiewicz writes about.

The problem with US graduate programmes is that there are simply not enough decent university-level jobs to go around for increasing numbers of PhD graduates. Deresiewicz describes the job situation as a "bloodbath"; as a professor, he reckons it successful if half of his students gain academic jobs - and that's his students from Yale, no less. And even those successful ones are not entering tenured, full time, permanent posts, but are acting as casual, transient labour. As the US higher education market expanded in the late 1990s, rather than taking on full-time academic faculty:

Departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students. From 1991 to 2003, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 18 percent. The number of part-timers increased by 87 percent—to almost half the entire faculty.

I have previously predicted that post-Browne that we can expect UK higher education to fracture teaching from research along the US model. A relatively small pool of faculty will focus on research, competing for whatever funds happen to be available in the public budget (with research satisfying the demands for public "impact"); some of these well-established academics will be recruited as brand names to gloss prospectuses, and may teach a couple of exotic modules. But the majority of university staff will be teaching-only, satisfying the more immediate demands of students - now consumers - of higher education. And the grunts bearing the load of basic module teaching will be the postdocs, teaching-only staff, and casual lecturers recruited in accordance with fluctuating demand. Unlike tenured academics, these are easily sacked when the income from student numbers falls.

This is why universities in the US continue to "sell" postgraduate programmes to naive ranks of graduates, even as the proportion of decent academic jobs that indicate the ultimate value of these programmes is falling:

You’d think departments would respond to the Somme-like conditions they’re sending out their newly minted PhDs to face by cutting down the size of their graduate programs. If demand drops, supply should drop to meet it. In fact, many departments are doing the opposite, the job market be damned. More important is maintaining the flow of labor to their domestic sweatshops, the pipeline of graduate students who staff discussion sections and teach introductory and service courses like freshman composition and first-year calculus. (Professors also need dissertations to direct, or how would they justify their own existence?)

It suits universities to continue to pitch the notion that a PhD will lead naturally and easily to an academic career. On their graduation day, as cohorts of postgraduates face joblessness, any alternative such as casual, teaching-only work is welcome, partly to bring in some sort of income and partly to sustain the fantasy that their shiny new PhD was, after all, worthwhile as preparation for an academic career.

Which leads onto another issue. Universities in the US justify the sweatshop conditions in which postgraduates and postdoctoral staff teach, with the word "training":

Teaching is part of the training, you hear a lot, especially when supposedly liberal academics explain why graduate-student unions are such a bad idea. They’re students, not workers! But grad students don’t teach because they have to learn how, even if the experience is indeed very valuable; they teach because departments need “bodies in the classroom,” as a professor I know once put it.

This is something that is already sadly familiar in the UK, which looks set to get worse. The UCU's campaign against fixed-term, hourly-paid postgraduate or postdoctoral staff continually butts up against the argument that they are not really staff at all; in fact, they should welcome the opportunity to teach for a pittance, with limited employment rights (such as contracts that can be reduced in line with student numbers without invoking redundancy), because they are being "trained" for a full time academic career that allegedly awaits at some putative point in the future. Such arguments do not only come from university managers. I have heard them being made from the same tenured academics who are supervising the PhDs of students suffering under poor working conditions. Far from protesting against the system, the words "Be thankful for what you can get" are the mantra circulating on university campuses from both PhDs and academics alike.

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