Author: dkernohan

I suppose it started when I was reading about the UK government’s plans to withdraw from the European Human Rights Convention. It’s a stupid idea for a number of reasons, but that wasn’t why I noticed it.

All the language used in interviews was about the right to deport terrorists, and how the EHRC was standing in the way. But the European Court of Human Rights has only ruled on around ten (pdf, p16) such decisions. Withdrawing seemed rather disproportionate.

Similarly, the media outrage around a family being “built” a “mansion” by the state to house their eleven children. And the calls for benefit caps to protect against the welfare spending effects of approximately 190 large families.

And all of the measures, including forced labour, aimed at addressing the so called “benefit culure” extending over multiple generations that recent research has found it unable to identify any examples of in one of the UK’s most deprived areas.

And then I started thinking back further, about the bizarre unisnotforme.com site run by a mum who appointed her daughter as an apprentice in her PR company rather than see her take a degree. (all the other employees are, of course, graduates).

It didn’t take much digging around to find that this was a front for a campaign to make ‘A’-levels more closely align to the needs of employers (and also here)

And I’d wager that renegotiation of our adherence to international human rights law (longer working hours, less employee rights), cuts to the value of benefits (making low waged work the only option) and “free” employees” (obviously!) are designed to benefit private employers as well.

Private enterprise is clearly expected to solve all of the worlds problem, armed only with large amounts of taxpayers money and gargantuan levels of media hype. I mean, just because it hasn’t worked in the UK for railways, heavy industry, unemployment..

But what about all this “education is broken” MOOC nonsense? Have we proven that entrepreneurs are better at supporting young people in achieving their dreams?

You might remember Peter “floating cities in the sea” Theil gave 20 people 100k to spend a year doing start-ups rather than go to universities, in 2011. Two years on it appears that journalists can only track down one who is earning any kind of income. Those who have dug deeper have either found very little activity (quora link, needs a sign in) or try to say it is too soon to measure. It is not too soon to measure. These are 20 of the brightest and best, chosen personally by Peter Theil. He predicted, and expected, great things:

“Pundits and hand-wringers love to claim that universities are the only path to a successful life. In truth, an inquisitive mind, rigorously applied to a deep-rooted problem can change the world as readily as the plushest academic lab”

I wonder when he was last in a university lab?

Katy Jordan at the Open University (UK) has put together all of the MOOC student statistics she could find (isn’t it odd that they are not generally made public…) and demonstrated that you can confidently expect more than 80% of people who sign up for a course will not complete it. Some try to justify this by pointing at the thousands that still “graduate” – but these are almost always graduates already, generally rich, western and very well educated. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how many MOOCs (at a generous 20% success rate) we need to meet the higher education demands of developing countries.

The wonderful David Wiley backed start-up “Degreed” (the “Education is broken, somebody should do something” people) is still looking for evidence of people using “jailbroken” learning to further their careers. If they can’t do better than the wishful thinking and stock photography they currently have, the jig may be up…

Even when for-profits are given the so-simple-the public-sector-can-do-it task of running schools and universities, there is little benefit and often great detriment. Both in the UK (and again) and the US, academies and charter schools are not delivering any appreciable gain in student attainment. US for-profit universities are under constant investigation for dubious recruitment practices.

Despite a tsunami (TM) of hype, the new wave of education start-ups has actually delivered surprisingly little of mainstream benefit. They can point to mass access to learning opportunities, but that has been around since the birth of the web, and has been largely led by traditional institutions.

Yet the bandwagon keeps rolling. What are the hidden benefits that allow commercial education leeway to fail so many? Why are the public education sector constantly criticised whilst the corporates and the start-ups can do no wrong?

Is it benefits for the employment market, cross-media ownership, a talent for writing a good press release or something else?

One of my main personal projects for 2013 on this blog is to try to unpick the power behind the reasons for this continued attack on public education, from primary schools to universities, in the UK and beyond.

[see also: “Hacking at Education” by Audrey Watters]

I love rights. They’re a great measure of how much western civilisation thinks of you.

If you’re a low-paid worker, an immigrant, disabled, or just unlucky enough to be poor your rights are an unaffordable luxury. They are an extravagance, a throwback to a bygone age, a toxin that destroys your profitability.

If you are a member of the global 1% (and if you are reading this you most likely are), your rights are inviolable and must be staunchly defended. Especially your consumer rights, and your right to choose to give large corporations money. Those ones are especially important.

Recently, a group of wealthy educators (though not the ones that actually do any educating), leavened with a few writers, commentators and others came together to defend a new bunch of consumer rights – your rights in the emerging market place of high-capacity online learning.

There is much to agree with, both in the initial draft and the document as it currently stands. You can still contribute to the google doc should you wish, and many others have done so. But it remains, at its heart, equivalent to the rights you have to return your malfunctioning MacBook and have it replaced. Or it would if it actually conferred any rights.

It disappeared on later drafts, but one of the telling phrases on the original Bill of Rights was “the right to have great teachers”.  Language like this echoes that of people like Joel Klein at NewsCorp:

“Last, to shake up the system, we must change how we use technology to deliver instruction. (This is what I’m now seeking to do at News Corporation.)… [O]ne of the best things we could do is hire fewer teachers and pay more to the ones we hire. And, as in any other field, technology can help get us there. If you have 5,000 math teachers, many of whom are underperforming, significantly improving overall quality is nearly impossible. But if you get the best math professors in the world—who are great teachers and who deeply understand math—and match them with great software developers, they can create sophisticated interactive programs that engage kids and empower teachers.”

Those “many of whom are underperforming” teachers are your adjuncts. Also known as regular folks doing a difficult job well for too little money. And this kind of idea is being smuggled under the cover of reaching new groups of students.  Automating marking, signature track typing-style recognition, superstar lectures streamed online… all of these ideas represent a way not to employ an adjunct professor.

Simultaneously, “adjunct” professors (or part-time hourly-paid early-career teaching-only-contract staff, as we call them rather less snappily in the UK) are asserting their own right to withdraw their labour. Adjunct Project’s “Quit” initiative feels like the beginning of the HE equivalent of Colony Collapse Disorder, where hives become unviable as masses of worker-bees disappear without explanation.

Across the world, academic tenure has shifted from an expectation, to a dream, to an unheard of state of employment for anyone under 40. And unsurprisingly, young academics are tiring of being exploited and patronised (“many of whom are underperforming”), and moving elsewhere. Out of academica. Into a career where they can one day aspire to rent their own home.

This is the aspect that Clay Shirky (yes, him again) misses entirely when he defends himself against detractors in The Awl. He’s comparing MOOCs to mass education (specifically mass lectures) without contemplating that mass education is only like that because we are unwilling to invest in human resources to provide a better experience.

And the MOOC difference. It’s cheaper. Initially. While the venture capital lasts. And that’s it.

There’s no increase in the quality of the experience, it’s not a better product. Just a subsidised one.  If you want a comparison from another industry, it’s what happened when call centres realised they could replace swathes of staff with an automated attendant.

In that case, as with what is happening in education, it was a cost (salary) saving that drove the change. Swathes of skilled and knowledgeable staff could be replaced by an inflexible system and scripted (but untrained) low-paid offshore staff.  But this led to a drastic lowering of customer satisfaction – these days the trend is to bring back the old-fashioned call centre – with major airlines and banks promoting the chance to speak to a real person to solve complex queries.

The almost one hundered million google results for “speak to a real person” bear this out. There is a demand for human intelligence in solving complex banking and ticketing queries –  it is bizarre to believe that there would not be a demand for human intelligence in supporting learning.

So what of the humans in question – the adjuncts? If we are not spending the money on proper jobs for educators – if we literally cannot afford to grow the professors, provosts and vice-chancellors of the future -what exactly are we spending ever rising student fees on?

Most predictions are wrong. The small number that turn out to be right are largely luck, but we tend to remember them because they reinforce our naive belief that the future can be predicted.

Apophenia, they call it. The predilection of people to perceive patterns in meaningless noise.

Politics, ideology, is the battle for the narrative. The imposition of a pattern on the noise of life. I’ve talked about it in the past as a branch of storytelling – on reflection I might have been wrong. In storytelling there is a pattern, in politics only the ghostly perception of a pattern.

With enough events, enough data points, you can back up any narrative concerning the immediate past. The rise of “big data” makes this more, rather than less, of a problem. I have found myself, when confronted by a position ostensibly backed by a mass of data (be it university funding or climate change), to treat it the same as an unreferenced opinion. Given all the possible narratives you could construct with that data, why have you chosen this one?

People who play with big datasets (and increasingly, people who don’t) like to imagine the emergence of unassailable truth within them. A misunderstanding of the scientific method means that the idea of data as backing up a theory until either more data or a better theory comes along and changes everything has been lost.

So it would be unfair to dismiss something like the Gartner Technology Hype Cycle as being wrong because of an absence of hard data. It is wrong for far more interesting reasons than that.

(1) it presents the graph as an external, “natural”, process – seperate from human intervention. The cycle (and accompanying guidance) is sold as an investment aid. You “understand” the hype cycle, you don’t “use” it. It’s a map of the future. A future which cannot be changed.

(2) It reinforces our greatest secular myth – that “it will all turn out right in the end”. Technologies, no matter their idiocy, will eventually sail up onto the plateau of productivity. The difficulties – why, that’s just the trough of disillusionment. Soon the world will somehow see the light (without intervention, mind you) and the slope of enlightenment will be scaled. Our own experience tells us this is not true, but so desperate are we for it to be true we believe it anyway.

(3) It’s NOT A BLOODY CYCLE. there’s no iteration. there’s no improvements to old technology. Everything is a technology trigger – not an adaption based on findings out there in the real world.

So the hype cycle is just a model of an idealised closed system. It neatly illustrates the danger of too much data – so many technologies have been hyped, trashed, re-evaluated and used that we assume that they all must do.

Now I’m loath to do this, because I know the graphic will be used out of context and people will ask about the datapoints and complain even though I will tell you how it was prepared, but I present the FOTA EdubBeardStroke Parabola 2013:

[Methodology: This diagram was prepared by taking one person who thinks too much about learning technology, leaving them on a train for a stupid amount of time and then marinating in beer and nachos]

So, in terms of a prediction of what might happen this year it probably works as well as anything else I might do – it’s got most of the right things in most of the right places, it’s arguable enough to get clicks and comments and it slags off Clay Shirkey. Typical cynical blogging really.

If you want something more real – technology (and technology aided learning processes) only work when fun. As soon as they get boring, codified, standardised they stop working. They become a part of the “grind” of education that they initially promised to free us from. They stop being interesting – they stop being chosen and start being imposed.

Most technology is awful, it doesn’t work and it causes us endless pain trying to make it work. People will get renumerative careers in helping us to get within touching distance of the initial promise. Eventually they will write books and articles, run conferences and workshops, and the problem will be filed as completed.

It won’t be. We will never, never solve education with technology. It won’t work. We will solve education with education, and we will solve education with a way of educating that is closer to collaborative play than anything we currently do. Technology might help us start to understand education a bit better. That’s it.

(trouble is, I suspect we’ll need to solve capitalism before we get there… and I suspect that technology is only going to be a distraction there as well)

Just a quick update from me based on the data I shared last night.

This morning I read a comment from the shadow higher education minister, Shabana Mahmood MP, which said:

“UCAS reports wild and dangerous swings – with some huge losers and some winners – but the variations show severe volatility in the system that should be a concern for everyone. With some universities reporting drops larger than 40% in one year, the government must now answer for the damage it has done to those universities that have suffered as a consequence of their reforms and decision to raise fees to £9,000.”

And I agree – the government should be held to account for the damage it has done to the English Higher Education sector. But I disagree about the interpretation of the data.

Here then, are the top and bottom ten changes in recruitment between 2011-12 and (for comparison) 2010-2011:

(more…)

Percentage change in acceptances
% change in number of acceptances between two cycles, where acceptances >1000
Prepared by	http://followersoftheapocalyp.se
2010-2011	%	2011-2012	%
London Metropolitan University	50.55%	University of Bristol	24.49%
University of Bolton	19.10%	University College London (University of London)	19.47%
University of Hertfordshire	17.23%	King’s College London (University of London)	10.96%
Canterbury Christ Church University	14.53%	London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)

(note, you’ll need to open this post fully to read all the tables)

What are the “best” Universities in England? By apparently common governmental consent, the “best” universities are the most “popular” and/or the most “selective” – a lot of people want to go there, not a lot of people get in.

(of course this has no relation at all to the actual best university, which is the one that offers a particular course and supporting environment that suits a particular student’s needs. Everything else is prejudice, and league table compilers should be ashamed of themselves.)

Just finding the most popular universities yields a surprising list (start this tune here):

Most “popular” English Universities
Number of applicants in each UCAS cycle (data: UCAS)
Prepared by	http://followersoftheapocalyp.se
2010		2011		2012
University of Manchester	58,252	Manchester Metropolitan University	58,752	University of Manchester	52,780
Manchester Metropolitan University	54,286	University of Manchester	57,830	University of Nottingham	52,271
University of Leeds	52,823	University of Leeds	52,488	University of Leeds	49,389
University of Nottingham	48,904	University of Nottingham	52,122	Manchester  Metropolitan University	49,327
Sheffield Hallam University	46,218	Sheffield Hallam University	50,596	Sheffield Hallam University	41,737
Kingston University	44,083	Leeds Metropolitan University	46,644	Leeds Metropolitan University	39,504
University of Birmingham	43,383	Kingston University	46,540	Kingston University	39,341
Leeds Metropolitan University	42,806	Nottingham Trent University	43,218	University of Birmingham	38,807
University of Sheffield	39,920	University of Birmingham	42,962	University of Bristol	36,451
Nottingham Trent University	39,525	University of Bristol	39,305	Nottingham Trent University	35,898
Total 2010 applicants	2,720,498	Total 2011 applicants	2,847,012	Total 2012 applicants	2,636,252

The first thing you’ll note is that there is clearly something very wrong with the list – half of the most “popular” universities are post-92 “new” universities, as widely disparaged in the comments sections of  the web presences popular HE-focused magazines.

The second, and perhaps more important, issue is the relative stability of the “top 10” despite three years of coalition inspired turmoil aimed at ensuring that students get to the universities that they want to. The University of Sheffield dropped out of the “top 10” in 2011, to be replaced by the University of Bristol, but other than that it’s a fairly stable chart – with the share of the top ten near-static at between 16-17% of all applicants that year.

One further point to note – certain cities (Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds) are consistently popular with students, suggesting that the location of a university may be more important to many students than a number of more fashionable metrics.

All right pop pickers… how about the most selective universities – those that accept the smallest percentage of their applicants each year. Well:

Most “selective” English Universities
Percentage of applicants offered a place in each UCAS cycle, where total number of students accepted >1000 (data: UCAS)
Prepared by	http://followersoftheapocalyp.se
2010	%	2011	%	2012	%
London School of Economics	6.90	London School of Economics	7.20	London School of Economics	8.73
University of Bristol	9.79	University of Bristol	9.38	Keele University	11.18
King’s College, London	10.96	King’s College, London	10.21	University of Liverpool	12.49
City University	11.52	University College, London	10.49	University of Greenwich	12.87
University College, London	11.66	Keele University	11.19	King’s College, London	12.87
University of Warwick	11.98	City University	11.43	Brunel University	12.92
University of Birmingham	12.63	University of Chester	11.81	University of Bristol	12.94
University of Sheffield	12.65	University of Warwick	12.14	University College, London	13.01
Queen Mary, University of London	13.00	University of Liverpool	12.29	University of Southampton	13.06
University of the Arts, London	13.22	The University of Birmingham	12.85	University of Leeds	13.15
total % of 2010 applicants offered a place	17.35	total % of 2011 applicants offered a place	16.63	total % of 2012 applicants offered a place	17.01

Well. A good showing by the institutions that we may traditionally *think* of as selective. But no Cambridge. No Oxford (it still remains easier for an applicant to get in to Oxford Brookes than Oxford, as people from Oxford Brookes never tire of telling you!). Not quite as stable a list as the most popular – some one year surprises. And if you include institutions with a recruitment under 1,000 the list is dominated by small specialist institutions, with low applications and even lower student numbers.

One interesting point to note is Bristol University’s decision to become less selective this year, admitting nearly 1,000 more students this year than in 2010 or 2011. Such unexpected growth is possible because of the lifting of the cap on AAB recruitment – it appears Bristol has taken advantage of traditionally strong applications to recruit more students. So academics with itchy bottoms should bookmark the jobs page of Bristol University, one assumes. More prosaically, just because such a rapid expansion is possible for a university, is it necessarily a good idea? Wonks will be watching Bristol student stats very keenly in 12/13, and Bristol students have already picked up on the issue.

But how about the least selective institutions ? Let’s run down from 10 till 1 for each year… ready… not ‘arf:

Least “selective” English Universities
Percentage of applicants offered a place in each UCAS cycle, where total number of students accepted >1000 (data: UCAS)
Prepared by	http://followersoftheapocalyp.se
2010	%	2011	%	2012	%
University Campus Suffolk	46.95	University Campus Suffolk	42.31	University Campus Suffolk	39.91
Plymouth University	33.16	University of Cumbria	28.74	Roehampton University	28.77
University College Falmouth	29.08	London Metropolitan University	28.31	Southampton Solent University	27.34
University of Cumbria	28.31	University of Lincoln	27.01	University College Falmouth	27.26
Teeside University	27.63	University of Bolton	26.56	University of Hull	26.61
Roehampton University	27.45	University of Gloucestershire	25.04	Teeside University	25.89
University of East London	27.35	University of Hull	24.48	University for the Creative Arts	25.24
University of Bolton	24.15	University of East London	24.34	University of Cumbria	25.02
University of Hull	23.88	Anglia Ruskin University	24.15	University of Gloucestershire	24.45
University of Bradford	23.75	Southampton Solent University	24.02	Buckinghamshire New University	23.97

First thing to remember is that between 2/3 and 3/4 of applicants to these institutions do not get a place to study there. That’s hardly taking everyone who asks.

Secondly – least selective can also mean most effective marketing. If the students applying are going to be the students  that the institution wants, this is clearly wasting a lot less of everyone’s time. You can see that if you add back in institutions with less than 1,000 students – again, there’s small specialist and local institutions with carefully targeted marketing. A couple of the institutions in the list above (Suffolk, Cumbria) were established comparatively recently to meet particular local needs – the fact that they are accepting so many of the students that are applying could suggest that they are doing what they are designed to do.

But finally, it suggests that we have about the right number of student places in the system for students who want to and are able to benefit from them, and that few if any students would just attend any institution that will take them. Which is a shame, as Lord Browne decided that there weren’t enough places and students would go to the “best” universities they could. A missed opportunity, or a long-term forecast?

I guess we’ll know next year for sure, but changes to the university system like the one last year are nearly as rare as Halley’s Comet.

full data (cc-by-sa, followersoftheapocalyp.se)
td class=”xl73″

It was way back in 2010 when I last unpicked a grant letter on here, but even despite my sporadic discovery of more interesting things to write about they keep on coming – despite the persistent rumours of the waning of HEFCE’s power.

And here we are in 2013. Maybe there’s robots knocking about and Davina McCall is the new Pope? Maybe you can download rice? Maybe BIS and HEFCE, working together, have solved some of the many, many issues that are still firmly lodged within the now almost completely discredited Willetts/Browne funding model.

Nope.

You’ll remember from the 2010 post that such is the convoluted drafting system of this alleged letter from BIS to HEFCE that every turn of phrase, every structural choice, is tremendously important? The 2013 letter kicks off with five entire paragraphs of BIS expressing gratitude to HEFCE. The quasi-QANGO is thanked for support in embedding white paper reforms, supporting students across the UKBA/little englander malarkey, for oversight of a bag of committees around regulatory oversight and university titles, and for  reporting on philanthropy and the whole MarginCore shooting match.

Is BIS up for “best actress”?

More likely, HEFCE is in need of some serious love from BIS after a difficult few years – and wants to demonstrate to staff and the wider sector that it still has a purpose even though another billion has been lopped off its budget.

As more and more of HE funding goes through a bizarre and expensive loan system to institutions (which allows the Treasury to keep HE Funding off-balance-sheet) the traditional “do as we say or lose the money” power that HEFCE has exercised is lost. And there is no sign of a HE Bill to provide the regulatory powers that are supposed to replace this lever.

Way back in November Sir Alan Langlands was warning us that legislation was needed to properly control student numbers (and thus government financial exposure), a position compounded last week when it emerged that HEFCE were seeking legal advice as to what they could actually do to fine institutions who over recruited.

The 2013 Grant Letter, attempts – once again – to push this issue into the long grass.

“We will also look to HEFCE to help us develop a mechanism for controlling the number of students recruited by alternative providers as outlined in the recent BIS consultation” (para 6)

And more specifically, and more worryingly:

“Secondly, at a time of continued pressure on the public purse, there remains an overriding need to manage the demands on public funds. So, we are asking the Council to recoup unanticipated student support costs wherever possible. We would like this to be on the basis of cost recovery. To achieve this, grant adjustments should reflect both the average life time and the upfront outlay cost to Government of providing student support, recognising this latter is particularly influenced by the different fees institutions charge.” (para 33)

I say more worryingly, because para 33 implies a whole range of things that are at best mistaken, and at worst outside of what HEFCE is legally permitted to do. “Unanticipated student support costs”, here, are costs relating to paying fee loans with respect to students that an institution has recruited outside of the numbers it is permitted and expected to recruit.

“Now hang on a second,” you are probably asking, “wasn’t the whole point of AAB and MarginCore and all that lot that you wouldn’t know how many students any given institution (or indeed the whole system) would recruit?”

And you would be right. That was the point, but as usual the implications have not been properly thought through.

Remember those provisional allocations, where it emerged that the effect of the market would be that institutions who took a lot of students with grade AAB or above might decide to take some more, roughly in proportion with their share of the existing AAB pool?

Over-recruitment appears to mean that the institution exceeded those provisional allocations (which are now “Permitted Allocations”, it seems.) And those institutions that have done this will be fined at least £5000 per student for being just too damned popular.

By fined here we mean having to give HEFCE money that they didn’t get from HEFCE (ie they got it from the deferred future income of the student in happy-lala-Willetts-land, or from the massively screwed BIS budget in our universe). And for such a fine, as we know from a Knight of the Realm, HEFCE may or may not have the legal powers to make happen.

In an effort to avoidexacerbate this issue in 2014, BIS recommend that HEFCE are more lenient in setting targets (which might mean the glorious return of the tolerance band!) and just generally lighten up and ease off on the whole MarginCore rules. Meaning even more potential overexposure the year before the entirely coincidental 2015 general election.

But wait, wait, it gets better (and non-wonks and overseas readers: no, I am not making this up) – all this leniency will be possible because:

“Given the pattern of recruitment in 2012/13 […] we have the flexibility to apply student number controls less rigidly in 2013/14” (para 32)

So, just to recap. We have flexibility in the system due to under-recruitment, but “there remains an overriding need to manage the demands on public funds”. Institutional managers may, at this point, wish to hide under their desks and gibber.

But – never fear, Vice-Chancellor – help is at hand.

“we know that many institutions will take a cautious approach to recruitment in attempting to avoid such grant reductions. This can lead to unfilled places.” (para 34)

In a hope to remove such caution, BIS propose that HEFCE allows institutions that recruit strongly more flexibility to, er, recruit strongly – and institutions that recruit less strongly correspondingly less flexibility to suddenly start recruiting strongly. Oh, and:

“You should also consider mechanisms to allow new providers to enter the system.”

Gertcha, cowson. Gertcha.

 

The start of a new year is a chance to re-read some old favourites. I found myself particularly drawn to my old copy of the Browne Review: “Securing a Sustainable Future For Higher Education”. Blowing the dust off the calfskin covers, I was met initially with a series of six principles. “These may not be universally accepted but we believe that they are widely shared by those with an interest in higher education.”, runs the caveat (p28).

I guess that now, twenty-six months later, we should be able to see how subsequent changes to English HE funding policy have supported or undermined these principles – which should, in turn, give us some clue as to whether these we had the right principles to start with.

Principle 1: There should be more investment in higher education – but institutions will have to convince students of the benefits of investing more

Changes to the Browne model of uncapped fees, and later forays into the murky world of MarginCore, have been based on the opposite principle, namely that public financial exposure to HE should be limited in the short term and that spending should not be grossly higher than it was under the previous system.

And institutions convincing students to spend more has not been a key trend – enrollment is, reportedly, down slightly on previous years – suggesting the best that can be said is that this brave new market has made little difference to student choices. HEFCE tacitly admitted this when they made their remarkably pessimistic prediction regarding the effects on the removal of the student number cap for students scoring AAB at A level.

Principle 2: Student choice should increase

All the above suggests that the marketisation of HE has had very little effect on student choices. Certainly, it is too early to say at a macro level whether the emergence of new providers has balanced the steady drip of “unviable” courses lost at existing universities.

Also, the highly professional programme manager in me begs to point out that this is a supply-side change and therefore it is not possible to extrapolate the amount of “choice” available to a student with meeting the needs of said student. And the immature blogger in me adds “ner-ner ner ner-ner ner” and several rude gestures.

Principle 3: Everyone who has the potential should have the opportunity to benefit from higher education

Winningly, this principle was not in any way addressed by the the proposals in the Browne review at all. But subsequent disquiet at the appointment of someone who actually wanted to widen participation in HE properly perhaps offered a hint to the real sympathies of the government.

You could also point to the re-emergence of a binary divide between “premium” and “affordable” courses and institutions as a suggestion that although everyone should have access to some form of higher education, it would be of a very different kind to that experienced by the traditional elite.

Principle 4: No student should have to pay towards the costs of learning until they are working

Principle 5: When payments are made they should be affordable

I always like to refer to the Nick Clegg (apparently still the leader of the liberal democrats) line that graduates would see a lower monthly repayment, but for a longer period. Prospective students and current graduates have not been fooled by this, as one would perhaps hope given the expense of their continued education. Of course, no student has to pay fees until they were earning under the previous system – what Browne did was to recommend an inflationary raise, which so far (given the continued absence of a HE Bill) has not been delivered other than the initial uprating.

“Affordable” is another one of those words that can be slippery to define. Certainly, a loan with a variable rate of interest which is not index-linked can hardly be said to be “affordable”. What if parliament decides to up the repayment rates in order to defray the costs of the new system. There is nothing in legislation to stop it.

And sinister mutterings from ministers about institutional (and course) RAB rates can’t be helping matters.

Principle 6 : There should be better support for part time students.

Ah, yes, so there should be. However, better support has ended up equating to “the same deal as full time students”. And not the old deal. The new deal, with the big fees and the loans. However, the big fee aspect has pushed the price of part-time study  far beyond the reach of many students, and even the institutions that were quietly lobbying for a better deal.

So better support in this instance means they can get loans. Quite expensive loans that will most likely never go away until they die.

Lasting for a little under one year, and designed to provide a lasting solution to the problems of student funding, the recommendations of the report have now been completely discredited. Not even David Willetts bothers to refer to it any more.

The next step for any serious HE policy making is the commissioning of a new, fully independent review of funding. I’m going to stick my neck out here and suggest that the review is conducted by people with some knowledge of how English university funding works currently, and has worked in the past.

We need someone to go head to head with the flawed recommendations of the Browne review.

 

Dear Clay,
Please stop being wrong about the future of Higher Education. It’s embarrassing, and it is damaging to those of us who actually work in the field and care about it.

But first up, could you stop being wrong about the record industry. The pattern of a newer, low quality format supplanting an old one is not an unusual experience for them . Cassette tapes were a lower quality than vinyl. CDs are a lower quality than vinyl (and to be honest, it is also arguable regarding cassettes). And record companies love this stuff because it means that they can sell us content we already own all over again. Why do we let them do it? Because the new formats are more convenient for some uses.

The recording industry has singularly failed to die as a result of the mp3. True, they didn’t develop ways of selling mp3s online but – guess what? – they didn’t develop record shops either. Record shops did that, and iTunes (etc) are just online record shops. Very successful record shops. More music was sold last year in the UK than at any other point in history.

One of the reasons for this *was* a by-product of Napster. Record companies realised that mp3 meant it was now viable to sell more of their back-catalogue, and that the interest was there. Previously as long as the Beatles and a few others were always available, most music was allowed to fall out of print. Which led to people searching second-hand record shops for that elusive single.

What Napster meant was I could search for the rare music I wanted to hear and have a real expectation of being able to hear it. That was new, that was great. There was no other way I could hear the music I was now hearing. If I could have paid for it, I would. Eventually, I did buy recordings by artists I wouldn’t have known about if it hadn’t been for Napster. And it wasn’t just me.

Mp3s cost much less to produce than CDs or records, so it was much easier to keep all the old music around. No need to store it in a warehouse, no need to distribute it to shops. And record companies didn’t make any money out of second-hand record shops, but they do make money out of iTunes.

And of course, there is a load of things you *can’t* do with new formats. If you are a serious DJ, you’re probably into vinyl. Sales of which have soared. You can do things with vinyl that you cannot do with CDs or mp3s. Maybe you are an audiophile – maybe you have a great sound system and miss all of that harmonic stuff going on up there above 41kHz. (of course, you can’t *hear* stuff above about kHz but you can hear the way that it interacts with the stuff you can hear.) Vinyl is good for you, as are raw audio files, SA-CD and DVD-audio. More formats to sell.

And then there is stuff like Spotify and YouTube. New ways for record companies to get paid, by subscription or via advertising.

So the impact of the “disruptive” Napster was that the recording industry was able to sell more music to us, and a greater variety of music, at a lower cost to them.

Maybe cancel the flowers?

Another alarming component in your argument is that you managed to attend Harvard, hear great lectures, but didn’t see the development of a scholarly community. Guess what Clay? – you messed up. You were kind of “lossy”. Your education was riven with compression artefacts.

Scholarly communities of interest don’t just form – you have to work at them. You have to make them happen by talking to people. Maybe you weren’t bothered – maybe you had other interests, but don’t hold the system responsible for your choice not to participate fully in it. If you do just want a pile of lectures and some essay questions maybe a MOOC would work for you, but many of the rest of us *did* get a lot more out of our university experience.

That would be a superb way of “screwing it up”, to use your scholarly term. To think that all a university experience can be is a bunch of lectures and some essay questions. To think that the availablity of a new format that suits some peoples needs a bit better means that nothing else is viable. To think that a degree is something that you purchase and experience, not something you work for with a great degree of pain and personal change.

The needs that MOOCs satisfy are the needs of a bunch of middle-aged men (and it is – nearly – always men) who are comfortably tenured but seek the thrill of being on the cutting edge of technology and “innovation” (whatever that is – looks to me like inventiveness with all the fun sucked out of it). They make for great TED talks. Wonderful blog posts. But they are nothing more than a surface solution to the surface problems a non-specialist observer could see in higher education.

The problems Higher Education does face is that it is a marketplace when it doesn’t need to be. We spend billions of dollars forcing universities to compete without any evidence whatsoever that this leads to a better or cheaper product. We spend more on HE than at any point in our history whilst departments are closing, services are withering and talented young academics are leaving in droves because they have reached their mid 30s without finding anything other than temporary hourly-paid work.

The last great hurrah of the baby boom. Grey-haired millionaires trashing our cultural heritage, denying to others the opportunities that they have benefited from, and using a free product to undermine the maturation of education systems in the developing world. Maybe that works for you -it doesn’t work for the rest of us. There are other formats we would prefer.

Thanks for that.

David

[p.s: See also Aaron Brady]