Is university admission an academic decision?

One topic which exercises many universities is admissions: not only for the obvious reason of recruiting enough students to meet targets, but also for the question about who should be in charge.

Across UK higher education, the underlying culture is that it is an academic decision: suitability to study for a programme should be determined by the academics who teach the programme.  This doesn’t mean that actual academics always take decisions, however: many universities have agreed that specific decisions can be taken by professional service staff, as long as they fall within parameters agreed with admissions tutors. So, if a student gets more than so-many tariff points, or better than such-and-such A level grades, they can be offered a place without reference to a tutor.

David Willetts (in his very interesting book, A University Education) reminds us that the UK is odd in this regard. In the US, admissions decisions are not typically made by faculty tutors, or not even in consultation with faculty tutors. Decisions can be based, for example, upon familial donations; upon siblings having attended; or on residency within a particular state. (Before you get too shocked, I recommend that you have a read of Willetts’ book: there’s more too it than nepotism and a disregard for academic standards.)

The difference can be understood, I think, in relation to a very good underlying principle, which is that academic decisions can only be made by academics in the discipline concerned. This is at the heart of academic freedom. Ask yourself a question: what is the academic decision which is at the heart of university admission?  Is it about who socially gets to do higher education? That doesn’t feel academic to me. Is it about whether a person has the necessary prerequisite knowledge? (For instance, do you need A-level maths to take the first-year modules on the programme?) That sounds much more academic, and is at the heart of the differences in the UK. In the UK specialism takes place at the start of university education; in the US students enrol, study a wide variety of modules for a couple of years, and then choose their specialism. And they take an extra year (at least) to study, so there’s time for this breadth.

It's that picture again! 

I don’t think its controversial to say that there are US universities operating this approach which are at least as good as UK universities. The UK systems generates good graduates a year sooner than the US system, but that isn’t because we’re cleverer: its because the system is structured to produce graduates after three years. As part of this, it is necessary to have early specialisation, and this means that admissions decision have to consider specific subject knowledge and readiness for study.

Now I am going to say something slightly controversial. These tests are more about the resources devoted to pre-university education and upbringing rather than any intrinsic academic merit. We know that a private school education boosts a person’s chances of getting good A-level grades and hence a place at a ‘better’ university. We also know that, in aggregate, for students with the same A-level grades, those educated at state schools will do better overall than those educated at private school (see, for instance, this HEFCE research). This means, I think, that private school – with better resources, smaller classes, and concomitant greater parental support for learning – has a better short-term impact.  But when learning resources and chances are evened out at university, the impact dissipates.

The point is that university entry based on A levels is about readiness to study. Background knowledge, confidence and social capital are what matters, because this enables a person to graduate in three years.

On this telling, university admissions should really be understood as a business decision. Remove some of the selective elements, and you won’t get the three-year throughput upon which the UK higher education system is built. (The development of foundation years to enable wider entry to selective universities supports this point: only by an extra year can pre-university educational differences be resolved.) University admission is only an academic decision because we set the system up to make it so. More time at university would enable foundation level study to become a norm. And at that point entry decisions would not be about pre-requisite knowledge, and entry barriers would come down.

And this is my challenge to the Office for Students, and to the UK government’s review of higher education. If you’re serious about removing social barriers to higher education participation, what are you going to do to enable longer degree programmes, to take the apparently academic decision out of the admissions loop?

Class action

The Department for Education released this week data on the destinations of key stage 4 and 5 school leavers in England, in 2012-13. The BBC picked up this story in relation to the proportion of schools which send few (or zero) pupils to Oxbridge, but there’s more to the data than that.

Included in the data was an analysis broken down by parliamentary constituency. I added to this data on the political party which currently holds the seats, and the resulting data set shows some interesting patterns.

Before the excitement of seeing the patterns, some caveats. Firstly, the data relate to England only: education is a devolved matter. Secondly, remember that this isn’t about the voting of the student themselves, or their families: it is simply the party which won in 2010 (or at a subsequent by-election) in the constituency in which schools are based. Thirdly, a few constituencies are omitted: either because they have an MP of a different stripe (Green, Respect, UKIP) or because there are no schools with Key Stage 5 leavers in them.

Just to show a modicum of thoroughness, the sample is 519 seats, of which 293 elected a Conservative MP; 184 a Labour MP and 42 a Liberal Democrat MP.

Who goes to university? School leavers in Labour seats are more likely to do so: 51.7% compared to 48.7% in Conservative seats and 46.6% in Lib Dem seats. But the population demographics are the other way round: the average Lib Dem seat saw 413 go to university, as compared to 362 in Conservative seats and 333 in Labour seats. Labour seats have fewer young people in key stage 5.

The data also tell us what sort of university they went to. DfE identify three groups here: the top third most selective, based on entry tariff (this is pretty much Russell Group plus old 1994 Group plus a few odd others); the Russell Group; and Oxbridge. Did the same pattern hold here? Hint: No!

20.1% of school leavers in English Conservative seats went to the top-third most selective universities. Slightly fewer (19.7%) from Lib Dem seats; and noticeably fewer – 15.5% - from Labour seats.

For Russell Group entry, Lib Dem constituencies nose ahead to first place: 14.6% of school leavers from Lib Dem constituencies go to a Russell Group university; 13.9% of school leavers from Conservative seats; and 11.5% of school leavers from Labour seats. 

And this patterns seems more extreme, when looking at Oxbridge. 1.4% of school leavers from Lib Dem constituencies went to Oxbridge; 1.2% from Conservative seats, and 0.8% from Labour seats.

What conclusions to draw? I think a couple of big points can be argued from the data. 

Firstly, in relation to HE policy and manifestoes: all MPs have constituents with offspring at university; and at all types of university, But for Labour MPs, the non-elite universities are more prominent; for Conservatives and (especially) Lib Dems, more elite universities are more of a concern. But for all MPs, most of the young people in their constituency who go to university go to non-elite universities.

This is the opposite of what one might expect from reading THES. University culture continues to be defined by the research elite. This is an important point for universities when lobbying MPs. The concerns of research intensive, elite, universities, will not be the most common issue raised about higher education by constituents.

Secondly, there’s a story to be read here about fair access. If the politics of the constituency MP can be taken as a proxy for economic and social wellbeing of an area (which is a defensible assumption), then it is clear that access to universities is not fair. And it isn’t only Oxbridge and the Russell Group that need to take action: the top third most selective don’t do too well here.

Food for thought, I think.

Say hello, wave goodbye

UCAS release regular statistics on applications and entry to UK universities, and there’s some really interesting data available to download.  One aspect that caught my eye recently was the growth in the number of institutions which recruit through UCAS:

Year of entry	Institutions
2008-09	307
2009-10	306
2010-11	306
2011-12	302
2012-13	320
2013-14	361

Aha! I thought – that’ll be the growth in alternative providers. But I looked at the data more closely and found that it wasn’t as simple as that.

Firstly, the data show more entry to and exit from the UCAS sector than I’d expected:

	2013-14	2012-13	2011-12	2010-11	2009-10
Total institutions	361	320	302	306	306
Total new this year	45	24	7	12	8
Total gone from year before	4	6	10	12	9

In total, 402 establishments had recruited through UCAS in the period.

Secondly, the new entrants and leavers were quite varied:

	Coming				Going
	Renaming	FE	HE	Alternative	FE	HE	Alternative
2009-10	1	2	3	3	3	2	1
2010-11	6	6	2	1	4	1	1
2011-12	1	2	0	3	5	1	1
2012-13	2	11	0	8	4	0	0
2013-14	2	36	1	6	0	2	0

(The numbers don’t quite tally because some of the changes happened over several academic years, with parallel running in the UCAS lists)

My conclusions? Firstly, the growth in ‘HE in FE’ Colleges having direct entry through UCAS is likely to be connected to the legislative and regulatory changes which came about in 2010-11 as a result of the coalition government’s changes.  But I suspect that it is too early (and the data set here is too small an evidence base) to make any larger prognostications.

Secondly, there is a real growth in alternative providers.  Here is a little more data, showing total UCAS acceptances by providers for the past five sessions, with providers analysed into higher education institutions, further education colleges offering HE, and alternative HE providers:

	2009-10	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14
HEIs	451,040	461,305	482,035	428,115	465,380
FECs	18,155	16,735	19,710	18,675	20,235
Alternative	705	1200	2560	2095	3090
Total	469,900	479,240	504,305	448,885	488,705

And in percentages:

	2009-10	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14
HEIs	95.99%	96.26%	95.58%	95.37%	95.23%
FECs	3.86%	3.49%	3.91%	4.16%	4.14%
Alternative	0.15%	0.25%	0.51%	0.47%	0.63%
Total	100.00%	100.00%	100.00%	100.00%	100.00%

And my final conclusion? There’s a real opportunity for the Times Higher to run a ‘births, marriages and deaths’ column: only 267 of the 402 establishments hadn’t stopped or started using UCAS during the period.