From all the obituaries to Steve Jobs, one common aspect has stood out for me: the fact that he was successful because of, not in spite of, his lack of a conventional educational background in computer engineering.
At his much-cited commencement address at Stanford, Jobs noted that although he dropped out of his college course after just six months, this happily enabled him to drop in to a free class on calligraphy:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

The aesthetic principles that he picked up here would inform Jobs' design philosophy, starting with the typefaces that made the early Mac computers so groundbreaking, and extending to the visual engineering of the iPad. One software engineer reminisced that they would present Jobs with a new piece of software built upon some radical and complex core programming, only to be told to return to the drawing board when he spotted an ugly button or mis-aligned font. This focus on appearance may have been frustrating, but it encultured a unique tech company that was driven to make things that worked beautifully, as opposed to merely functioning.

Job was convinced that it was this commitment to design, borne of putting artistry first and programming second, that led to the success of the Macintosh. There are probably very few computer companies around today that would employ people principally on the basis of their creativity and only secondarily on their ability to program:

The Macintosh turned out so well, because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists.

It should not be surprising why comments like this caught my eye, given the ongoing campaign against the reorientation of the UK's university system along market-led, output-based lines. Our universities are increasingly pushed to deliver degrees for those vocational purposes that are immediately useful to the economy. The economy needs more engineers, so universities must produce more people who can design bridges. The economy needs to develop its software industry, so we must have more graduates capable of programming Java. Science has a practical impact on society, so we must increase funding for science and technology research, and slash it for the arts and humanities.

Yet in his Stanford commencement address, Jobs noted of his calligraphy course that "None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life." Those two words, "practical application," might be easily come from the mouths of the technocrats at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (which, not that you would know it from the name, runs our universities). Jobs became one of the most innovative businessmen of the computer era. Yet he did so precisely because he was not rooted in a model of education that sees a direct, casual link between a course and the graduate that results.

Adrian Poole, Chair of the English Faculty at Cambridge, has compiled a list of the current buzzwords in government papers about universities: "operational implications", "outcome indicators", "impact beneficiaries", "incremental significance" and "levels of robustness" are some of the more chilling ones. Steve Jobs' course in calligraphy turned out, ultimately, to embody all of these ideals: it had a practical application, was of more than incremental significance, had operational implications for the IT industry. The trouble is, nobody, least of all the spontaneous Jobs himself, could have foreseen precisely how it would have these effects.
What mattered was that this course existed in the first place, and that none of the educators at Reed College were bothered when Jobs decided to follow his impulses. They allowed him, to use a slogan that the DBIS might do well to adopt, to "think different." The specialism of the university is its pluralistic culture, the type of culture that allowed Steve Jobs to wander out of engineering 101 and into calligraphy for beginners without judgement as to whether this would be ultimately worthwhile for society or the economy.

Jobs reflected on his unconventional and multidisciplinary education that:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

The UK government intends our universities to drive economic growth by delivering courses and research pathways that, it predicts, will matter in the immediate moment. But it is precisely the haphazard, multidisciplinary, unpredictable nature of universities that makes the very best entrepreneurship possible. Here, then, is one prediction: stripping down universities to an applied, utilitarian system might well prevent the next Steve Jobs from encountering the coincidence of disciplines that will lead to the unknown, beautiful technologies to come.

Labels: Browne review, higher education, Steve Jobs, University Life

On the day that students hope to pass their A-Levels, let us remember that today also marks the failure of Higher Education in the UK, as the next cohort of A-Level students will be the first to pay for their university education under the new tuition fee regime. I have blogged many times about why the government's plans for universities are flawed, so I will largely hand over to Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books, who provides an acute dissection of the bloody mess that is the Higher Education White Paper. Each of the "subjects" below were the originally intentions behind the Browne review proposals. Each of them, though, has failed in its implementation. The quotes are Collini's.

Subject: Decreasing costs for taxpayer. Grade: Fail.

The original intention of the Browne Review was to find a way to square a circle: allow more students to attend university, whilst decreasing the cost to the taxpayer. We will come to the former issue in a moment. But with respect to the latter, it seems clear that the immediate costs to the taxpayer will actually increase. As Collini points out, it is strange that the supposedly independent Browne review managed to recommend slashing public spending on universities just before the coalition announced its own spending plans. But it is a disaster that, ultimately, the government's reforms will actually increase public spending:

We now know that when the decision was taken to replace the block grant with a loan system, the Treasury (presumably the real driving force behind the change) calculated that the initial expenditure on loans would more or less match current expenditure on the teaching grant if the average fee were no higher than £7500. But the Treasury had assumed that the Office for Fair Access (Offa), which oversees universities’ admissions policies, had the legal power to dictate how much a given university could charge, ensuring that fees would be kept down to the desired average level. But Offa has no such legal power, as its director was obliged to ‘remind’ the government. A great many universities were setting fees of £9000 (as anyone could have told the government they would). It slowly dawned on the government that not only was the scheme not going to reduce expenditure; it was actually going to be a lot more expensive than the present system. Whether one is broadly in favour of the new fee regime or not, there can be no denying that the policy-making process in the last eight months has been a shambles.

Subject: Increasing university funding. Grade: Fail.

The above would be just about acceptable if it were to mean that universities would be better resourced than they can be through the public purse. Although there are problems with the government's fixation on world university rankings - and especially the American model - in its interpretation of what UK universities can achieve after they are effectively privatised, nevertheless any increased income to universities can only be a good thing. Except this will not happen. The government has claimed that the new regime will see university income increase by 10% by 2015. This seems unlike, as Collini points out:

Willetts has proudly maintained that this policy does not represent a cut to universities, but a boost to their income of around 10 per cent by 2015. It’s just that from now on, he says, the money will be ‘channelled’ through students. But by 2015 the Treasury won’t have recouped a penny of the money it will have given out in loans since 2012, so that this 10 per cent rise must therefore be an increase in government expenditure on higher education above the cost of maintaining the present block grant (even though a loan is an asset not a cost in accountancy terms). After 2015, some students will start to pay some of their loans back, at varying rates, when they start to earn more than £21,000. On the most optimistic figures, it will take 30 years for the Treasury to recoup 70 per cent, at most, of what it provides in loans each year (other economic analysts think the government will never recover more than 50-55 per cent of the amount loaned). And the official figures are based on the Treasury’s assumption that the average fee would be £7500, which even the government must now realise will not be the case. Whatever else is said in favour of this policy, it cannot be maintained that it represents a saving in public expenditure in the short or medium term, even though in the longer term it does amount to a significant shift from public to private funding.

Subject: Increasing access for students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds. Grade: Fail.


As a consequence of the increase in the up-front cost to the treasury, the government had to row back on its plans to allow universities to accept unlimited numbers of fee-paying students. Rather than lifting the cap on the total number of students able to go to any one university, the government has actually had to maintain it, only allowing some flexibility at the "margins." At one margin, universities which set significantly lower fees will be allowed to take more students. At the other, universities will be able to take any number of students with top A-Level grades, so-called "gold dust" consumers. Collini states the consequences of this rigged-market approach very well:

In keeping with its wholly phantasmal conception of competition, the White Paper declares confidently that the new system ‘should allow greater competition for places on the more selective courses and create the opportunity for more students to go to their first-choice institution if that university wishes to take them’. But the two parts of this assertion must be in contradiction: if there really will be more competition for the most sought-after places, then by definition opportunities for applicants to get their first-choice places will be reduced, not increased. The actual effect of the changes will be to make the distribution of resources for institutions match more closely the distribution of A-level scores. Just on fee income alone, students at institutions with an AAB offer or better will be better resourced, by quite a long way, than students at institutions with lower entry requirements. This is a naked example of the use of state power to entrench hierarchy in the name of ‘market principles’. By effectively ruling that a large number of universities must charge considerably less than the level it has legally permitted institutions to charge, the government is constructing a system that is bound to reinforce existing social inequalities.

Subject: Allowing universities autonomy. Grade: Fail


Universities have long cherished their autonomy from government policy, being the one public space where research and discourse can be conducted free from the requirement that they give immediate returns on investment. Collini speculates that this is why the government has been so keen to bring universities to heel, as it dislikes the idea of the funding public institutions which do not necessarily have a direct or quantifiable impact on the economic wellbeing of the nation (as if economic wellbeing is the same thing as being of social value). This autonomy looks set to be removed, as government will be able to set recruitment priorities and access requirements, despite the fact that it is primarily students who will be paying for higher education in the long term.

This plan is designed to produce a rigged market in which the ‘top providers’ will do well and there will be the usual race to the bottom at the lower end. The government has introduced de facto price controls, laying bare the hypocrisy in its proud affirmations that universities are ‘autonomous’, that admissions are ‘a matter between the student and the university’, that the government cannot dictate what fees universities set and so on. And it has done this after universities have already set their fee levels for 2012. Universities believed the system would operate by one set of rules, but now they have been told the rules have changed, and that some of them will be punished for decisions they were forced to make by the government’s own rushed timetable.

Subject: Exam Preparation. Grade: Fail


It is worth noting that most of the government's failure in the test of university reform derives from its lack of careful revision. Revision, that is, of the Browne Review.

The usual way for government reviews to work their way into government policy and then into legislation is this: the initial review will outline the general scope of what needs to be improved and the government will announce a consultation period based on its findings; Parliament and other interested parties (such as universities and students) will have an opportunity to make their comments heard, which will then result in a White Paper being set before Parliament, for further discussion; Parliament and the House of Lords will then draft and redraft legislation, putting the White Paper into practice.

However, the government decided to ignore this usual revision timetable. The government announced that it "accepted" the recommendations of the Browne Review, then legislated for its recommendations to be put into practice, telling universities to set their fees under the new proposal; only six months later did it publish the White Paper which contained the fine discussion of the legislation long since announced. Except it turned out that the White Paper did not just formalise a process that had already started. Instead, it quite radically changed its direction. As the government realised that universities were setting more or less maximum fees in an attempt to recoup their cut in central funding, the White Paper added all sorts of qualifications and provisos, such as effectively reinstating a cap on student numbers - something the new marketplace in tuition fees was originally going to see lifted. This led to universities setting fees and putting in proposals to maintain access, without knowing how the final scheme would work.

The government - led by "two-brains Willetts" - seems a bit like a student who has sat up all night cramming for one exam, only to realise the next morning that the exam in front of them is not the one they were expecting to sit. The government intended its reforms to facilitate a free market in higher education, which, they dogmatically assumed, would automatically entail increased quality and value in teaching as students were enabled as "consumers." But in the final test, they have set a policy which is anything but a free market, which restricts student numbers and sets the burden of payment not primarily on students (though they will be impacted in the long run) but on the public purse. The government has failed, ultimately, to realise that some things - such as education - simply are not marketplaces, but need to be publicly funded.

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

The outgoing head of Universities UK, Steve Smith, has suggested that universities will try to "buy" top-performing students in an effort to increase recruitment. Such students will be "gold dust" as universities will be allowed to accept them in unlimited numbers.

When it implemented the Browne review recommendations, the government envisaged that the market in tuition fees would enable universities to expand and to accept as many students as they could attract (in contrast to the current situation, where each university is allocated a fixed number of government-funded student places). However, the government naively underestimated the number of universities that would choose to charge the top £9000 tuition fee, in order to compensate for drastic cuts in central funding. This fees benchmark would be unsustainable for the treasury, which has to pay tuition fees up front, and so the government is likely to be forced to reduce student numbers below the current cap, leading to the worst of both worlds: a higher cost to the taxpayer, with fewer student places. The one caveat is that in order not to deter the brightest students, universities will be allowed to take as many top-grade AAB students as they like; such students would be what Smith refers to as "gold dust."

This would be fine for elite universities charging the full £9000, which currently accept and receive a high proportion of applications from such students. But Smith predicts that middle-ranked universities that would usually not expect AAB quality applicants will start to dangle generous bursaries or reduced tuition fees in order to fish students from this uncapped pool. The government has responded by celebrating the fact that "Universities need to meet tough new criteria for attracting the brightest students from lower income backgrounds, including offering fee waivers and bursaries. These additional scholarships will help universities to attract the brightest and the best students."

However, this is where the government's shambles of a policy on access to higher education is exposed. Consider the case of two students, both predicted top AAB grades at A-Level.

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

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about A.C. Grayling's brainchild, the New College of the Humanities. On the face of it, its £18 000 a year fees smack of elitism; the left-wing academic Terry Eagleton has described it as "odious." However, by assembling a glittering array of Professors and teaching staff such as Richard Dawkins and David Cannadine, the College seems to be seeking to be an elite institution, equivalent to Oxford and Cambridge, or the Ivy League, where comparable bodies of internationally-renowned academics already exist. And as their US counterparts already do, Oxford and Cambridge would quite happily charge £18 000 a year for this privilege were the government to allow them.

Grayling's New College is, then, simply a dystopian vision of where the coalition's privatisation of Higher Education will lead us in five or ten years time, when the cap on fees will, no doubt, be lifted altogether for our top-level institutions. The fault lies in the principle of privatisation that has been instigated by the government, not the consequences which Grayling is now seeking to put into practice.

Let's not be naive about this. Of course, the headline Professors of the New College of Humanities will likely pop over for morning coffee only once a year, gracing the prospectus but rarely to be seen inside a tutorial room. But then that's not wholly different to how the US system currently works, with star, tenured academics giving a few headline lectures and adjunct, doctoral or postdoctoral staff doing the bulk of the teaching week to week. And it's not unlike what will presumably happen in the UK system, with part time, temporarily contracted teaching staff responding on an ad hoc basis to student - sorry, consumer - numbers. Again, Grayling's new model institution is a precursor of what is to come.

And, on this basis, a part of me can't quite help admiring the fact that in the post-Browne climate where the arts and humanities are generally deemed to be of no economic worth, Grayling is sticking two fingers up to the economists by asserting the value, both financial and humanistic, of a liberal arts education. Combining studies in the conventional humanities with required courses in Science Literacy, Logic and Critical Thinking, and Applied Ethics, the New College of the Humanities might - just might - demonstrate that the arts and humanities have a role to play as the applied sciences of human life.

The economics of class in Charles Dickens, the lessons of the history of the Crusades in the era of Islamic terrorism, metaphor and simile in scientific communication. Maybe, just maybe, and in an ironic and paradoxical way, the New College of the Humanities offers us a vision not only of the decline of the public university in the twenty-first century, but also of the reassertion of the liberal arts education that underpinned the first mass expansion of universities in the nineteenth century.

Labels: Browne review, New College of the Humanities, tuition fees, University Life

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

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

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

This end of the academic term, students and teachers alike are faced with a cluster of deadlines. No matter how carefully one has planned, the writing or marking of assignments seems to lead to a last-minute rush before Christmas. Even so, I was still surprised to read a recent tongue-in-cheek article on Guardian Education, written by a university lecturer of all people, that offers some tips on how to pull the infamous "all nighter" to get those last essays done. I was, though, sadly unsurprised by the comments on the post, many of which seem machoistically to advocate the idea of doing things at the last minute.

As a marker, I do not automatically worry about an essay written late at night (and believe me students, it only takes a glance at File Properties to figure that one out). I appreciate that some people genuinely do work better under pressure. Some students dare to do such unproductive, degree-distracting pursuits as charity fundraising, drama, arts, sports coaching - all of which are more likely to get them jobs than a standard 2:1 degree alone. Contrary to popular belief, many students do intense degrees with a full-time burden of lectures and assessment. And some students - not least those I teach with the Open University - have to juggle part- or even full-time jobs to fund their education.


However, for every well-intentioned student who is forced to work into the early hours of the morning through no fault of their own, there are far more for whom, I suspect, this is not only a bad habit but a required rite of the university experience. I do worry about a university culture where the ability to do an essay at the last minute is a sign of bravado or "working the system," as was implied by many of the posts on the Guardian article, or as I detect in my work with mainstream university students (by contrast, I know full well quite how hard my Open University students work, even if they too are, by necessity, forced to work late into the night).

Doing an all-nighter may focus one's mind to look at internet resources and hash together notes with great efficiency (which may indeed be useful for the harassed office environment), but this does not necessarily lead to a student developing a thorough and cultivated knowledge of a subject (and those three years before students step through those office doors are the only time when this precious opportunity will be available).

In my experience those students who plan their work well ahead may not automatically get better grades than the all-nighters, but they do perform better than they personally might if they were not so enthusiastic and capable of planning their work around other commitments; conversely, I mark many all-nighter essays which I know full well do not represent a student's potential, even if I still award them a decent grade. Whilst all-nighter essays are usually coherent, focused and well-written, they often lack the attention to detail, careful proofing, and editing needed for the first class marks - marks which I am certain more of my students could, but don't, achieve.

I sense that students are increasingly swayed by an anti-"geek" attitude, such that those who work hard are frowned upon by those who can pull things out of the bag at the last minute to get equivalent marks. Indeed, I have first-hand experience of good students who find it genuinely difficult to cope with the campus atmosphere where it is only the end that matters, not how hard one works to get there. From the point of view of a diligent student, it can be intensely demotivating if they "only" receive the same mark as someone who can churn work out at the last minute (even if, in the long run, the former student will likely turn out to be better educated).

The idea of doing assignments just to "get enough marks" is precisely the sort of utilitarian principle that underpins Browne: the sole measure of the value of a degree is how much money you can earn at the end of it (or the mark you get on graduation).

As I wrote in my post on the implications of Browne for teaching and learning, when the student becomes a consumer of their education this fundamentally changes the idea of what that education is about, namely an end product rather than a means. As a teacher, I know that the best thing for my students is to motivate them sufficiently so that they actively want to do their subject, rather than suffering its interminable assignment demands just to get the degree at the end of it. But this may become increasingly difficult to achieve in an education marketplace. Browne suggested that student-consumers should be required to sign a contract, which include "commitments on attending a minimum number of classes or completing a minimum number of assessments per term." Why should students who are paying for their degrees have to do any work at all? After all, you don't buy a happy-meal in McDonalds, only to be told you have to cook it yourself. Thus I can see that the culture of all-nighter bravado which, let us admit, has always been there in university life, is going to get more prevalent, as students seek - or are even encouraged - to do as little as possible to get the reward, the degree result, they have effectively purchased.

Labels: all nighter, Browne review, essay marking, University Life

This is one of a series of posts in which I respond to the Browne review of higher education funding and student finance. Other posts look at the implications of the Browne review for postgraduates, and for the arts and humanities.

Entering into the new higher education marketplace, a logical assumption that students might make post-Browne is that if they are paying more, they should get more in return: more and better teachers, improved IT and library facilities, green and tranquil campus spaces to rival Harvard or Princeton. Had the Browne report been presented in an era before massive cuts to public spending, this might have been the case. A tuition fee market would force universities to compete for students, and to provide higher-quality, more attractive "products" as a result.

However, Browne was instigated before spending cuts became the sole focus of political debate. Launching the review in 2009, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson suggested its aim was to widen participation and simplify student support. By 2010, with the government's spending review imminent, Browne has become reconceptualised. No longer are tuition fees about improving higher education for all, but about making up a potential £4 billion cut in public funding. Exemplifying this change in attitude is Steve Smith, head of Universities UK. Like many VCs of research-intensive universities, Smith had been arguing for a free market in higher education long before the recession; after it, he found in Browne a handy scapegoat. He now argues that "Browne is not the cause of the reductions in state funding; it is an attempt to substitute other funding sources for lost government revenue."

My point in this political aside is not to be polemic (I have done polemic aplenty in my other blogs on Browne). Rather, it is to provide some context for Browne's ambitions for teaching and learning. Browne's headline vision is that:

HEIs actively compete for well informed, discerning students, on the basis of price and teaching quality, improving provision across the whole sector, within a framework that guarantees minimum standards.

In a scenario before spending cuts, improving quality would have been in the interests of universities, students, and government. In the present climate, however, tuition fee rises are necessary simply to keep universities from going backwards, since investment to improve quality will certainly not be available from government, which will distance itself from any complaints about teaching quality once resources reside with universities alone. The risk here is that universities that are already at the top of league tables will be able to sit back on their reputations, knowing that students will always want to come to the big names that are on the tips of employers' tongues: Durham, York, Exeter, UCL; they can thus use tuition fees to make up the shortfall in their income without correspondingly seeking to further improve the standard of their already good teaching. Universities lower down the pecking order, by contrast, which may begin by charging lower fees, will have to indebt themselves in order to invest in facilities and teaching that might potentially attract more students. It is not surprising that many commentators already foresee the closure of several poorer universities.

Aside from further polarising wealthy and poorer universities, what will be the consequences of tuition fee rises within the mainstream student experience? Browne says plenty about a regulatory framework - run by a new Higher Education Council - that will seek to guarantee teaching quality. However, he says little about how increased tuition fees should be spent to improve university education in practice.

One positive thing he does suggest, with which I agree, is that all university teachers should be trained and accredited to HEA standards. It is still shocking to think that it was not until the 1990s that any qualifications for university teaching even existed.

More vaguely, Browne adds that:

Institutions may want to include commitments to students on the minimum contact time with teachers that they will have and promise timely individual feedback on assignments. They may also choose to provide greater detail about class sizes or name the teachers who will be responsible for key courses. 

In the annual National Student Survey, students consistently rate assessment and feedback as the lowest of all the various measures of quality. In the 2010 survey, for example, only 65% were satisfied with the quality of assessment and feedback. However, feedback and assessment are highly intensive on staff time, especially when staff are pulled in different directions, between teaching and research. If marking a batch of class papers means missing the deadline for a major research grant application, then it is the class which is going to suffer. What is likely as a more general outcome of the Browne review is that UK higher education will split along US lines: postgraduate or postdoctoral staff will perform most of the teaching duties, whilst established faculty are employed in research-only positions. Well-known professors may be parachuted in to look good on prospectuses, but in practice teaching and research will be distinct streams. This may indeed improve the timeliness of feedback and assessment, and other direct measures of teaching success, but it will be at the expense of what differentiates holistic UK universities, with their strong tradition of research-led teaching, from their US counterparts.

Also worthy of note is the following caveat:

Students may decide to include commitments on attending a minimum number of classes or completing a minimum number of assessments per term. 

Whilst Browne's meaning here is somewhat ambiguous, I take this to imply that in return for being empowered to hold their universities to clearer standards and expectations, students should acknowledge their responsibility to engage with the requirements of their degree programmes. Whilst one would like to think that no student ought to need to promise to work, in practice some students do see their degrees as a way of subsidising extra-curricular life experiences. It would be hoped that students paying £7000 tuition fees would take increasing responsibility, and prioritise their academic work over their social life. However, things could turn the other way. Why should a teacher demand an essay from a student if that student, who is now a fully subscribed education consumer, does not want to submit it? Why should a student have to attend lectures, if he or she, having freely chosen to pay £7000, does not want to go? This caveat about "commitments" seems to be an attempt to force students to keep to their responsibilities to learn, even as they exploit their rights as consumers. However, even if students sign up to some sort of charter, what would be the ultimate consequences? Can one really see a university expelling a student who has failed one first year exam, and thus losing a potential £14 000 of future income? Under Browne, tuition fees will be paid directly to universities on behalf of students, rather than distributed from a national pool, whilst there will be no cap on the number of students universities are allowed to admit. This may mean that universities become unduly and detrimentally attached to a student's buying power, rather than their brain power, allowing students to resit courses for which they are unsuited when in the past they might have been dismissed from the university with their place taken by a more willing student.

Regardless of the effects of teaching and learning once students are at university, one of Browne's conclusions that I wholeheartedly endorse is the need for students to get more refined information about where their tuition fees are spent:

Most of the investment in higher education goes to institutions through a block grant and students have no sight of what it is buying. We want to put students at the heart of the system. Students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education. ...Students will be better informed about the range of options available to them.

As I wrote in my essay on Tuition Fees and Contact Hours, data about student spending is woefully inadequate. For example, an undergraduate in the arts will typically have half as many contact hours as an undergraduate in the sciences. However, the arts student has no way of knowing how much of their tuition fee is spent on the resources that they may make significantly more use of, such as physical libraries. This information has to be made available, to allow students to choose between different modes of study. Some students may prefer more contact time, but correspondingly more proscribed courses without, for example, dissertations; others may like independent working but need to know that the study, library and IT facilities will be made available for them to do this.

However, there is another scenario. At the leading, established university at which I teach English Literature, student contact time is limited but focused. Although students may only have four tutorials per module per year, for example, these take place in small groups of eight rather than in large seminar classes. In terms of its outcomes on student learning, an hour's intensive, small group tuition is almost certainly better than several hours of larger group teaching. Because no student can escape discussion in a group of eight, students build their confidence and oral skills, whilst also learning to criticise authority (that is, myself) and to assert their own views and ideas; they build strong relationships with me, which often conclude in me writing them an informed job reference. Our students seem to recognise this. Although well aware that the amount of contact time they receive is limited, satisfaction scores on the courses on which I teach have not markedly dipped from the era of £1000 tuition fees, up to £3000 fees today.

However, Browne proposes that students discriminate between universities on an up-front basis. In their prospectuses, universities should make clear "Weekly hours of teaching contact time." If this is not tempered by describing the type of contact time as well, one can see the hallowed "contact hour" becoming the sole indicator of return on tuition fee investment. Regardless of whether University X gives 20 hours of lectures a week, whilst University Y gives 5 hours of small group tuition, more will be seen as better. This will be exacerbated as parents become increasingly involved in supporting their children through higher education. Although a student experiences university in a subjective and flexible way - in the case of mine, they recognise that the comparatively little contact time they have still works for them, regardless of what other courses are doing - parents look at their children's education from more objective standpoints. If their son or daughter is receiving less face time with tutors than their peers, parents may start to pressure universities to put quantity of tutor contact over quality.

As with assessment and feedback, it is not hard to envision that research and teaching will be split so as to meet the demand for more contact time. Instead of prominent but busy researchers giving a few lectures over the course of a year, a single teaching-only staff member will run an entire block of lectures on a more regular basis. It may well be that on quantitative measures, this improves the student experience, but it also fundamentally changes the nature of universities in the UK, so that instead of integrating teaching and research such that each university teaches to its research strengths or according to the specialisms of its lecturers, universities deliver formalised curricula in staid and uninspiring formats.

Of course, as with all my blogs on Browne, I may be guilty of an innate, academic conservatism. Just because successful universities have in the past been constituted in certain ways does not mean these are the right or best ways for the twenty-first century; just because I feel as a teacher that the buzz of a small group tutorial is worth more than an entire week of lectures does not mean that my students feel the same; just because students will become consumers of their education does not mean that they will automatically expect to be given easy degrees without having to commit to meet work deadlines or attend tuition. However, without being naive about the scale of the funding problem, I do believe that conservatism is the least worst standpoint when it comes to the UK's higher education sector.

The UK government has traditionally funded higher education at around 1.3% of GDP, compared to an average across OECD countries of 1.5%; the US spends 3.0% of GDP on higher education. Despite this comparative underfunding, UK higher education punches far above its weight in international league tables. In science, the UK is second only to the US in terms of the number of citations, making it by some way the most efficient programme in the world. Limited tuition fees have funded more university places over the last decade, and a record number of students now attend university. According to the NSS, 80% of students were satisfied with their experience in higher education. UK higher education is a flawed system - 80% satisfaction still leaves one in five unsatisfied; thousands of students miss out on university each year because of a lack of places; science is currently suffering from a "brain drain" as academics move abroad - but in spite of these flaws, it still largely works.

Changes certainly need to be made to keep it running this way. In an era before the spending review, government might feasibly have argued that increased tuition fees were necessary to allow public money to be focused on increasingly expensive research, rather than paying for student tuition, whilst a free market would allow the cap on student numbers to be lifted, preventing the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of students missing out on the university degrees that are, so government claims, essential in a modern economy.

After the spending cuts, though, the picture looks very different. Tuition fees will simply allow UK higher education to stand still at best - and may potentially damage a system that works well if imperfectly, at worst. The risks are enormous: a huge debt burden on young people, exclusion from higher education based on social background rather than merit, the closure of poorer universities unable to invest to attract students or unable to justify high fees, the elimination of swathes of courses in the arts and humanities, the severance of the link between teaching and research, an excessive focus on contact hours rather than those methods of tuition that experienced teachers know to be best. If I have one concern that encapsulates everything I have said across my blogs on the Browne review, it is that this risk we are taking with a functioning higher education system is not merited based on the potential rewards in an uncertain future. Will more students be able, even willing to come to university, as Browne promises? Will his reforms really widen rather than narrow access? Will they allow universities to focus their funding on research rather than teaching even as the latter becomes their primary income stream?

Whilst funding cuts changed the nature and outlook of Browne's review from one of markedly improving to simply maintaining higher education, Browne still concludes his report with an optimistic vision:

Our vision is not one of shoring up the current system. Instead we have aspired to propose reforms that will enhance the strengths of the higher education system, while enabling the widest number of students to benefit from the pleasures and opportunities of learning.

My vision is more qualified. With higher education starting from an already high platform of international esteem in research, and of teaching quality for students, it is hard to see how increased tuition fees and the slashing of public funding for higher education will help to elevate UK universities even higher. At best universities will maintain their standards whilst a generation of students takes on £30 000 plus of debt; at worst, our successful, internationally renowned university system will suffer irreversible changes and losses that no amount of future investment can make up.

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

Further to my discussion of the fallout upon the arts from the explosive Browne review of university tuition fees in UK Higher Education, there is an interesting debate going on in the US Chronicle of Higher Education, sparked by English Professor Robert Watson, about whether the arts and humanities actually make money for universities (subscription only Chronicle article here; free reprint from UCLA here). This debate may well have lessons for the UK.

In the US, high student tuition fees have long been a feature of the education system. And, with the recession and budget cuts, funding streams are likewise being focused on business-friendly courses, and diverted from arts faculties. The view of the President of UCLA bears uncanny similarities to the tone of Browne's report, suggesting that the arts must be sacrificed for more applied subjects:

Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. We're doing very well there. Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care. So, we have this core problem: Who is going to pay the salary of the English department? We have to have it. Who's going to pay it in sociology, in the humanities? And that's where we're running into trouble.

As I pointed out in my response to Browne last week, there is plenty of evidence that arts and humanities graduates enter work and, armed with allegedly useless degrees, actually contribute a great deal to the economy. Thus if universities have a role in wider economic life, arts and humanities departments merit public investment, regardless of the local fiscal demands of staff within universities. However, what struck me in the US debate were the details about how much arts faculties actually contribute to universities' internal economies.

Responding to his President, Robert N. Watson, Professor of English at UCLA, did some sums for his university:

Based on the latest annual student-credit hours, fee levels, and total general-fund expenditures, the humanities [at UCLA] generate over $59 million in student fees, while spending only $53.5 million (unlike the physical sciences, which came up several million dollars short in that category). The entire teaching staff of Writing Programs, which is absolutely essential to UCLA's educational mission, has been sent firing notices, even though the spreadsheet shows that program generating $4.3 million dollars in fee revenue, at a cost of only $2.4 million.

This corresponds with evidence at the national level:

Of the 21 units at the University of Washington, the humanities and, to a lesser degree, the social sciences are the only ones that generate more tuition income than 100 percent of their total expenditure. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, recently cited a University of Illinois report showing that a large humanities department like English produces a substantial net profit, whereas units such as engineering and agriculture run at a loss. The widely respected Delaware Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity shows the same pattern.

Useful courses such as medicine are not propping up liberal arts courses that are quaint accessories in a market-driven university. Quite the opposite, in fact: with their comparatively low infrastructure overheads, arts courses actually make money for their universities, making more from tuition fee income than science and medicine courses can from business spin-offs or research grants.

Given that Browne's higher education funding shake-up will approximate the US system, we can expect a similar scenario to pertain in the UK. Thus the case of the US should provide us with a pertinent warning: to lose public funding for arts courses now, in favour of science-based degrees, as Browne recommends, will be to risk the closure of departments that in future could actually generate income for universities.

There are other similarities too. In the UK, higher education looks set to suffer around 75% cuts from its block funding grant from HEFCE. Because the sciences can secure more funding from research grants, much of the HEFCE money goes on supporting less research intensive courses, often within the arts and humanities. Thus it is these courses that will suffer most as vice-chancellors tighten their belts, especially if there is a lag between the HEFCE funding cut and the increased tuition fees that should make up the difference. Now replace HEFCE for "discretionary budget" in Watson's report, and the parallels between the US and UK are clear:

Yet because the discretionary budget in humanities goes almost entirely for teaching staff, across-the-board cuts hit our instruction especially hard. The dean of humanities' office at UCLA warned a few months ago that the proposed budget would require programs in this division — already the leanest in staff per faculty — to fire most of their lecturers and teaching assistants, making our curriculum unsustainable.

In quoting the above, I am aware that I seem to be walking headlong into a trap. If public funding of universities is to be slashed, and if tuition fees from popular subjects like English can actually make money for universities, surely this is the best possible argument for raising fees and enabling a higher education marketplace. If students really want to study English at £7000 a year, let them. The English professor can keep his job, supported by his students, whilst public research funding can be targeted at those subjects with the most obvious public benefits, namely science, technology, engineering and medicine.

However, the example of the US illustrates precisely my core point about the Browne review: that to see universities through the eyes of the businessman is to risk ignoring those more subterranean features that make arts and humanities degrees attractive to students, to employers, and to the wider economy. Once a degree programme in the arts and humanities is slashed and burned in funding cuts, it will be unlikely to rise from the ashes. Thus if we absolutely must to enter a higher education marketplace and indebt our young for the basic privilege of learning, we have to make sure that we maintain an open mind with regards to the types of courses we make available to them. As I said in my response to the Browne review, it is naive to assume that the arts perform no economic function in the UK. Likewise, the UCLA President appears to have automatically - and wrongly - assumed that arts faculties prop up the sciences, when the reverse is the case. If university and government leaders simply follow business hunches without looking at the evidence, they will cause UK universities to eliminate arts courses which could actually prove popular and moneymaking in a higher education marketplace, and which are already significant contributors to the wider economy.

Labels: Browne review, English Literature, Politics, University Life

This is one of a series of posts in which I respond to the Browne review of higher education funding and student finance. Other posts look at the implications of the Browne review for postgraduates, and at the possible impact on teaching and learning.

As one might expect of the former boss of an energy company that puts profit before the environment (namely BP), Browne appears to have looked at higher education with dollar signs in his eyes, seeing value in purely financial terms. The value of allowing young adults to immerse themselves for three years in a subject that they are passionate about; the value of the arts, humanities and social sciences in articulating human and moral behaviour; the value of practising the soft skills that underpin all knowledge (reading, digesting information, writing well) rather than specific, scientific knowledge in its own right - these are not values that can be easily quantified, tabulated, charted, counted, economised or budgeted. And so they are not the values which, according to Browne, public funding should pay to support.

As an indication of Browne's priorities, the word "business" occurs 22 times in the report; "science" occurs 6 times; "humanities" does not even appear. Page 27 of the Browne report makes damning reading for anyone concerned about the arts, humanities and social sciences:

There is a critical role for public investment even if students are investing more. There are clinical and priority courses such as medicine, science and engineering that are important to the well being of our society and to our economy. The costs of these courses are high and, if students were asked to meet all of the costs, there is a risk that they would choose to study cheaper courses instead. In our proposals, there will be scope for Government to withdraw public investment through HEFCE from many courses to contribute to wider reductions in public spending; there will remain a vital role for public investment to support priority courses and the wider benefts they create. 

The Faustian trade-off with increased tuition fees is that subjects like sciences typically have a higher infrastructure and teaching cost - more labs, more staff to supervise those labs - than the arts and humanities. In order to limit the price of courses like science and engineering, and hence not deter students from them, they will need some form of public subsidy. This will come by withdrawing funding from those subjects deemed to have no "wider benefits," namely the arts, humanities and social sciences.

I have dealt elsewhere on this blog with the demonstrably false assumption that subjects like these have no social or economic benefit. The creative industries employ 1.8 million in the UK, and if business is so in need of scientists, it is strange that twice as many graduates in science disciplines are unemployed compared to their arts counterparts. As the most recent Prospects survey, What Do Graduates Do?, noted, "Six months after graduation, art and design, media studies and performing arts graduates showed higher employment rates than the average for all first degree graduates (61.4%)."

For anyone who has a broad minded picture of what the UK economy is like, this is not surprising. As with UK universities as a whole, the arts is one area where the UK retains a world-leading status, in spite of underfunding compared to other developed countries. London, for example, is not only a hub for global finance, but for the international art market, publishing, media, advertising, and tourism. Nationally, the creative industries contribute £57 billion to the economy. The roots that underlie this activity are hidden and various - but one of the deepest is in academia. Without graduates who are trained to think creatively, to understand human psychology, to write, draw, paint, design, the creative industries will have to recruit elsewhere; without university teachers - human scientists - who are able to inspire, research and influence our understanding of human thought, politics and culture, we will lose that sense of direction and vision that gave us such social enterprises as the welfare state, or institutions like the BBC. What Browne sees as irrelevant courses, aimless undergraduates, and useless researchers cannot simply vanish, without the withering of one of the UK's most important economic outputs, and without the gradual decline of those millennia-old subjects through which we gain a greater understanding of what it means to be human, beyond quantifiable dollars and often with unforeseeable consequences.

However, to return to those numerical terms that former industrial chairmen can relate to, it is important to recognise that the arts and humanities clearly appeal to business in an indirect way. In my own subject, English, career destinations vary widely. Again, according to Prospects, 8.6% of English graduates go on to become managers; 7.4% enter marketing; 17% go to retail; 18.8% enter secretarial occupations. English students in these workplaces may not on a daily basis demonstrate their understanding of free indirect speech in Jane Austen, or the feminist values of The Color Purple. What they do use, however, are the soft skills that underpin many arts and humanities subjects: the ability to summarise a vast range of reading in concise and rhetorically confident essays (for which read, business reports); the confidence to argue a point in front a group of peers (for which read, making one's case in the board room); the ability to study independently, and to pursue their own research around a subject (for which read, low-maintenance employees).


Browne argues that a fifth of businesses report having a skills gap in their workforce. His report suggests that "there needs to be a closer fit between what is taught in higher education and the skills needed in the economy." However, the economy is not some static entity, but changes and shifts in unpredictable ways. Witness the current push to move away from banking and services, and back into manufacturing, or the advent of the green economy. Clearly, engineering or business graduates are capable of adapting to such changes. But for arts and humanities graduates, too, a degree is not just for three years, but for life. Those abilities inculcated through three years of close engagement with a particular subject are not fossilised in the brain so that the student who studies Austen or anthropology will only ever be able to have a career reading novels or living in the jungle; learning is, rather, an organic form which, once established at university, takes on its own life in the mind of the graduate, and which can be nurtured and adapted to new economic environments.


The other factor missing in this is students themselves. Last time I looked - as I did today in my tutorials - students are not cogs in a wider economic machine. They are individuals who bring to university a wide range of skills and abilities, who possess unique personalities, who pursue their subjects in ways that interest them. Some students, sadly, are not possessed of the brains to do maths or physics; they do not have the synaesthetic capacity to "see" the results of algebraic equations, as good mathematicians do, or the ability to write fluently in the language of computers. Some students, however, do possess a strangely refined empathy that marks them out from many of the general population, an ability that they choose to turn to the interpretation and understanding of human psychology in that vast database known as the novel; some students feel a peculiar sympathy with distant tribes in sub-Saharan Africa, and want to better understand their unique cultural behaviours. Are these students to be told that they must study engineering, not English, must be architects, rather than anthropologists, because their greater duty is to feed the beast known as the Gross Domestic Product?

Whilst tuition fees risk discriminating against students on the basis of their economic background, the equal but unacknowledged risk is of disenfranchising them on their basis of their brains, a kind of market determinism dominating the natural imperative that some people are better and more fulfilled studying and working in certain areas.

In spite of my rhetoric, which cannot help but become heated and defensive in the wake of a report like this, I am not anti-business. Neither am I suggesting that the arts and humanities ought to be of equal importance to the sciences. As someone whose research is in science and culture, I have been happy to lend my signature to  the Science is Vital campaign. I understand if some rebalancing of universities priorities is necessary in the wake of funding cuts and tuition fee rises, and as I wrote in my essay on The Value of an English PhD, the utilitarian socialist in me acknowledges that the arts and humanities often do a poor job of explaining their value, economic and otherwise, to the taxpaying public.

Nevertheless, the Browne report terrifies me for its utter disregard that these subjects might, behind all appearances, have a worth in our national life. The singular failure to mention the arts or humanities, those 22 appearances of the word "business" - this is the voice of the big businessman speaking, and being heard in government, at a time when the potential blindness of big business to human wellbeing - evidenced in banking crises or the environmental disaster in Browne's former company -  ought to be something that concerns us all. To close our eyes to the human disciplines, to pretend they do not even exist in a university, is to forget that the good human is defined by more than money in the pocket. The wealth of the mind is also something worth possessing, and we ought to be prepared as a society to reward students by providing them with three years education in those subjects that most enliven theirs.

Labels: Browne review, English Literature, humanities, Politics, University Life

The Browne Review has little to say about postgraduate funding. Although it was formally within the remit of the committe to consider funding for taught postgraduates (not for researchers), the section on postgraduates occupies a mere page of a 64 page document.

In the evidence that has been presented to us, we do see that participation in postgraduate education by higher socio-economic groups is higher than for others.

It is reasonable to suppose that access to postgraduate education is a function of the socio-economic make up of the undergraduate population – where the same trend exists – rather than anything else. Hence we should focus on improving access at the undergraduate level and that may over time help also to ensure that it is solely academic performance rather than social background that determines entry to postgraduate study.  

Labels: Browne review, postgraduates, University Life