No longer a needle in a haystack!

I’ve been working supporting the HE sector as a consultant for over six years now. Lots of different clients – universities, students’ unions, sector bodies, private firms – and a huge variety of different projects. It’s clear that universities sometimes can benefit from an external perspective – consultants can bring capacity and expertise as well as independence.

Artist Sven Sachsalber searches for a needle in a haystack, so you don't have to...

One of the challenges is to enable universities to find the support that is out there. Google is surprisingly rubbish at finding individual practitioners: there isn’t a shared notion of what search terms to use; and folk who work as student recruitment consultants crowd out other specialties in the search listings. Whilst there are a few big firms, it is often about networks – who knows who, or used to work with someone.  This is very validating when former colleagues recommend you, but its hardly a robust system. And it doesn’t always mean that Universities find the best expertise to help them.


That’s why Andy Youell and I have set up the Directory of Tertiary Education Consultants - http://www.dtec.org.uk/ - which launches today. (Note: Andy did more of the work for this than I did.) It’s a simple concept – a free-to-use, searchable directory of individual and corporate consultants who can support the HE and FE sectors in the UK. Connecting institutions with those who can support them.


There’s no need to register to search the site; just search. It genuinely is free to the user. You can browse just for interest: the site won’t ask you why you’re visiting!


It’s also free to consultants to register on the site: a simple form to fill in, which is then put on the directory. That’s it. The costs are minimal and we’re happy to bear them ourselves, to provide what we think is a useful site to support the sector.


So here’s my thought for the weekend – check out the directory; bookmark it; and next time someone asks you if “you know anyone who might be able to help with x …” point them to DTEC.

Climate change - what can universities do?

Climate change is becoming recognised – within the UK and many other nations – as a serious, existential, threat to humanity and society. In this and my next few blog posts I plan to look in a little more detail about how policy responses to climate change will affect universities.


I’m working on the assumption that the current governmental plan for responding to climate change will not hold. The targets are regarded as insufficiently ambitious (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50799903), and the action to deliver the targets is behind schedule (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50827507). So, for the purpose of these blogs, I’m going to use as a reference point the Zero Carbon Britain work done by the Centre for Alternative Technology (https://www.cat.org.uk/info-resources/zero-carbon-britain/). This sets out a way of achieving net zero carbon within the UK using only existing and proven technology (and a heck of a lot of behavioural changes!)


Undoubtedly, the details of the response that the UK makes to climate change will differ in detail from this work, but it is a useful pointed to the nature, the scale, and the timescale needed if we are to effectively address climate change. As part of the Zero Carbon Britain project, a new report – Rising to the Climate Emergency (https://www.cat.org.uk/info-resources/zero-carbon-britain/research-reports/zero-carbon-britain-rising-to-the-climate-emergency/) – shows the details of the action plan.

There are four main strands to the plan: reducing demand for energy (make the carbon emissions problem smaller); replacing carbon-emitting energy generation with renewable sources; restoring land so that it helps to extract carbon from the atmosphere; and changing diet to reduce the carbon impact of what we eat.


These themes which will form the topics for this and the next few blogs which I write. They are:

• Reducing demand: buildings
• Reducing demand: transport
• Generating clean energy
• Land use 
• Diet

Let’s start with buildings.


The approach here is straightforward. If buildings are better designed and better insulated, we’ll need less energy to heat and cool them. The Zero Carbon Britain plan calculates that action here can reduce demand by about 50%.


This means that future university buildings need to be designed to reduce the need for heating and cooling. The approach suggested in the Zero Carbon Britain is called passivhaus (it’s a German word which translates just as you’d expect – passive house) and it involves using materials and techniques in buildings so that “the heat losses of the building are reduced so much that it hardly needs any heating at all. Passive heat sources like the sun, human occupants, household appliances and the heat from the extract air cover a large part of the heating demand.” (Univ. Prof. Dr Wolfgang Feist of the University of Innsbruck, quoted at https://passivhaustrust.org.uk/what_is_passivhaus.php).


However, new buildings – despite the building sites which pepper most university campuses at the moment – are not the major part of university estates. Most universities have some much older building stock, and in the main the challenge will be making existing buildings more energy efficient: better insulation, and only using energy when necessary.


Currently (using the most recent Estate Management Statistics from HESA at https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/estates) the HE sector uses 7.8 Gigawatt hours* per year to heat and cool its buildings. About 20% of this is for residential buildings (halls of residence); the remaining 80% is for non-residential – classrooms, labs, lecture theatres, libraries, offices, corridors and so on.


HESA data also shows that universities spent £2billion on running buildings. This figure excludes staff, and is recurrent not capital expenditure. Most of this cost will be energy costs (other costs include, for example, the cost of materials for minor maintenance and decoration). Of the energy costs, some will be for heating and cooling, some will be to power equipment (IT, lighting and so on).

We need to make some assumptions to work out the financial benefit of reducing spend on energy. Looking at the finance data, I estimate that about 75% of the £2bn is energy spend. Of this, about half will be heating and cooling costs. So, multiplying through, A 50% reduction in energy use for heating would save universities £375m per year. Which means that there’s money available to spend on reducing emissions.


Techniques for reducing emissions are already being implemented. Better insulation means making windows airtight; fitting better blinds so that glare and solar heat can be managed when necessary; fitting sensors which lower heating systems when no-one is in the rooms. There are also ways to reduce demand by using space better. If there are fewer buildings, because teaching and office space is used more intensively, then you need to use less energy to heat them. (There’s a bonus here too – more intensively used spaces automatically need less heating because we humans are ourselves mini heat generators.)


Energy efficiency is a journey which universities have been on for some years now, so pans will be in place. What universities will need to do is look to see how these plans can be accelerated – don’t forget, there’s money for investment because of reduced future energy costs – and whether they go far enough. You should expect to see estates teams doing a lot of good housekeeping over the next few years.


So reducing demand for energy is fairly benign for universities. There are behaviour changes needed and investment, but there’s also a business case for it. My next blog – looking at the HE sector’s role in reducing transport emissions – gets more challenging.



* Yes, 7.8 Gigawatts hours is a big number. The average house in the UK uses 16,400 kilowatt-hours per year, and a gigawatt is a million times more than a kilowatt. The HE sector uses the same energy as about half a million houses.

What’s in a word?

In English, it’s a university. In Welsh, it’s prifysgol. (Pronounced something like preeve-us-goll.) A bit of digging into those two different words can tell us a lot, I think, about the underlying reasons for the industrial action taking place in many UK universities today and for the coming days.

The industrial action (I think technically it looks like two different but overlapping actions) has a number of immediate causes. One is pensions – a dispute about USS contributions, the nature of the scheme and sustainability. The other is pay and conditions, including equality. (nb I’m not trying to provide a detailed account of the issues, just giving the context. The UCU website https://www.ucu.org.uk/heaction sets out the issues as they see them.)

The two words help us to understand the underlying issues.

Let’s go English language first. University comes from universitas – a Latin word meaning, roughly, a single body. A university is, in the medieval concept, a single corporate body, staff and students alike being subject to specific laws and rules, distinct from the laws which apply to others outside the community. And although the legal framework has changed in the last 800 years or so, universities do (claim to) hold values of collegiality. Members of university Senates and Academic Boards – at least those who aren’t on the university executive – behave in ways consistent with universities being a single corporate community.

Now the Welsh language word. Prifysgol is a compound word: Prif – meaning something like ‘main’, or ‘chief’, and Ysgol, meaning ‘school’. So a Prifysgol is the main school. Universities are the most advanced teaching organisations we have. And in the last twenty years or so (perhaps longer if you go back to the Jarrett report in the mid 1980’s) there has been an emphasis on value for the student and the transactional nature of the student contract. This is most pronounced in England – where there is now a regulator in the student interest, rather than a steward looking out for the sector as a whole – but the change can be seen across the UK in, for instance, the rise in the number of complaints made by students. There’s a correlation with the introduction of tuition fees for full-time undergraduate study, but I suspect you’ll also find a correlation with the increasing size of universities and the increasing proportion of people within an age cohort who go to university.

On these understandings, the strikes speak to two things. Firstly, as satisfying the students becomes more explicitly important, and university managers seek to identify what is wrong in a given situation and how to improve it, the autonomy of individual members of staff – academic and professional service – is diminished. The desires for consistency of approach to students, and for economy of action and cost, mean that universities increasingly try to agree standard approaches. This, coupled with increasing numbers of students, means that the job of teaching can become more routinized, and more subject to scrutiny. Greater micromanagement clever people is rarely a recipe for organisational happiness.

Secondly, the reality that universities are not really single communities. They are complex organisations, closely regulated, which require management. The sense that academic staff can control their work, and that they are working within a system which is fair, is diminishing. Let’s look, for example, at tweets from one academic - @sstroschein2 - to understand a perspective on strike action (I’m going to paraphrase rather than quote directly):

• Incremental changes over 15 years which make the job increasingly unmanageable
• High turnover of staff
• More students, larger classes
• Increasingly active but inapt management of teaching 
• More automation
• Research ranking which harms organisational dynamics and adds no value
• More pressure to compete in research
• Casualisation of junior academic staff roles and exploitation, leading to morale problems

Without trying to get into the rights and wrongs of these concerns (although from my observations there is a lot of truth in there), it is clear that there isn’t a broadly shared vision within many universities of what the university is for and how it should be run in the world of mass, student-focused higher education. This contrasts with the apparent culture of collegiality, and leads to discontented staff. In the long run this can’t hold.

What’s to be done? At some point the industrial action will end, with some sorts of compromises. Who knows what and when.

In the longer run, there’s a need for universities to find a stable way to work, which provides for sustainable and fulfilling academic and professional service careers, and which recognises that students are the raison d’être for most universities. Maybe this is a single sector-wide question; maybe it’s a question which each university needs to answer in its own way. (It’s probably a bit of both!)

A precursor, though, will be good leadership, and that means listening not fighting. If we like the notion of the university as a single community, and if we recognise that the students in the main school matter, it would be best to start the sitting round the table now.

Small is beautiful - discuss

My consulting work takes me to many different universities and higher education institutions across the country – 31 in the five years so far – and the differences can be striking. My clients have included very large universities – tens of thousands of students; thousands of staff; more real estate than you can shake a stick at. And very small institutions – tens of students, or maybe a hundred or so at most; tens or low hundreds of staff; one building.

Different sizes, but both are dogs

You can feel the differences. The large institutions have a buzz, a busy-ness, a sense of possibility and the unknown. And they also can have a sense of anonymity. You’re an individual navigating a complex bureaucracy; you’re one face in hundreds in your lectures. The small institutions can feel more friendly: you can see that students and staff recognise each other; people know who you are. You don't get lost. Equally, you have no place to hide.


The reasons why universities choose to grow are clear. It brings possibilities. It makes fixed costs cheaper. It means you can find resource to solve most problems. Boards of Governors tend to promote growth: it looks like a proxy for success. As higher education expands, governments like universities which grow: they make it easier to reach participation targets.


It's also true that smaller institutions can have real problems. A small HEI has exactly the same governance and compliance duties as a large university, but with a fraction of the resource to solve the problem. In a large university, a bad year’s recruitment to a discipline can be lost in the noise of the bigger picture; for a small HEI it can mean imminent financial disaster. There’s no fat to keep going through a difficult winter.


So here’s a provocation. I wonder if, in the expansion of universities to accommodate higher rates of participation, we’ve lost something important about the scale of learning communities. We’ve lost the sense of the learner being an important part of that community, and the sense that the individual matters. What if we have a new rule, that no university could have more than 5000 students?


We’d obviously have more universities. Maybe every town would have its own university. Every large city would have several - one in each suburb.  This would address supply in cold-spots at a stroke. The current behemoths would have to split – maybe on disciplinary lines; maybe by adopting towns nearby and creating new, smaller campuses. It would be easier for students to get to a university; the possibilities for working and studying at the same time, without life being impossible, would be much greater.


And with a more consistent scale of institution, regulation could be more proportionate, with much more transferable approaches to good practice. If something works in one place, there’s a much greater chance it would work elsewhere.


When Robbins was published in the 1960s, 3000 students was a big university. What have we lost in the growth since then?


Could we have smaller universities? Should we? What do you think?

Climate change and university governance

Governance is, in a nutshell, a set of principles and practices which ensure that good decisions are taken properly. (Longer definitions are available, but that’s my working shorthand.)

In the context of universities, these practices include the use of risk management, and a focus on evidence to support decision-making. Risk management helps universities to identify priorities and to ensure that significant issues are not ignored; the encouragement to use evidence is to ensure that decisions are grounded, where possible, in knowledge about the situation.

In this blog I want to look at how climate change poses a challenge for university governance.

Rising sea levels

A recent paper by Kulp and Strauss in Nature Communications gives the results of a more precise modelling of the likely impact of sea-level rise. The model uses a method which reduces the uncertainty in previous models, arising from problems in interpreting satellite data.


The data has been used to create maps of the forecast rises in sea level. In red are those areas which are currently land and which, the authors forecast, will be under water at high tide by 2050. (The map works on most browsers but not Edge or Internet Explorer. A quick download of another browser, if you need to, solves the problem, I found).


Naturally, the maps spark curiosity. Looking at Great Britain, there are areas of the south coast; of Kent; of the Thames Estuary; of East Anglia; of Lincolnshire and Humberside; of the Tees valley; of the Lancashire Coast; of South Wales; of the Clyde valley, and of the Somerset levels; which are forecast to be sea not land. By 2050. If I do well, that’s in my lifetime – its only 31 years hence. And it won’t happen with a swoosh in 2050 – some of these areas will be under water sooner, if nothing is done.


Now Nature Communications is a serious journal, and the work presented has been subject to serious peer review. (It is educative to look at the Peer Review File which is linked at the end of the Nature Communications paper – this shows experts working to improve a publication. Proper science.) Any forecast will always be subject to the ultimate scrutiny of reality, and what has actually happened by 2050 will no doubt differ in some respects, but the paper and the maps derived from it represent current best estimates. They are evidence.


So what impact is there on universities?

A quick tour round the areas of Great Britain which are impacted shows that a number of universities, or university campuses, are in areas which are forecast to be under water in 2050. Working clockwise, and starting at North, we have:

• Durham University, Queens campus
• The University of Hull
• The University of Lincoln
• The University of East London
• The University of Portsmouth
• The University of South Wales, Newport and Cardiff campuses

 Here's some of the maps; remember - the red is forecast to be under water in 2050.

University of Portsmouth

Durham University Queen's Campus

University of East London Docklands

This looks properly scary. The forecast inundation of Portsmouth in particular strikes home to me. My nan lived in Portsmouth, and I spent a fair few childhood holidays staying with her. I’m feeling slightly teary as I write – no more Southsea Beach; no more dockyard. Sic transit gloria mundi.


Rationally, we can argue that reality will be different. The maps, obviously, take no account of mitigations which might be put in place (sea defences, for example). There’ll probably be local factors which will make a general model inappropriate for a specific location. But the broad parameters of the model seem robust. And the challenges it presents for universities – some very specifically, some by implication – are surely a matter which now begins to fall within the scope of university governance.


The challenge for university governance

The challenge is two-fold.


Firstly, there’s a case that risk registers should now include the potential impacts of climate change. Sea-level rise is one example of this; changed weather patterns (flooding seems to be getting more common in the UK) are another. These will become pressing matters.


There are also the impacts of measures to mitigate climate change. Changing diets. The installation of charging points within university car parks. Stopping flying for university business – academic conferences, overseas student recruitment, university field trips.


And if as a society we’re spending more on mitigation (which we will be!) then there’s less to go around elsewhere – funding for HE will be more pressured.


Risk registers should arguably begin to include all of these things: not as a bureaucratic exercise, but as a prompt for university managers to begin to think about the impact of these on the university’s life and operations, and begin to come up with workable and sustainable long-term approaches.


The second challenge relates to financial governance.


Put simply it is this: If it is reasonable to assume that climate change will impact upon the usability of university buildings and property, when does this get reflected in balance sheets? Do buildings which may in the medium-term become unusable retain their current asset value? 30 years is within the scope of long-term borrowing. When do lenders begin to demand higher interest rates, or even refuse to lend on certain areas? Perhaps more critically, how do insurers react? Higher premiums are one approach; but when do business premises become uninsurable?


In answering these questions, we’d need to look at the likely effectiveness of government action to mitigate. Universities do not exist in a vacuum: their local communities will have similar concerns. Are universities playing a role in looking at mitigating actions? Is government responding?


Mitigating against sea-level rises of this magnitude means large scale engineering projects. These don’t happen quickly, and they’re not cheap. For example, work on HS2 – the high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham and the North – began in earnest in 2009, when the company was formed. The first trains won’t run to Birmingham until 2026 by the company’s own estimates, and until 2033 to Leeds/Manchester. That’s twenty-four years, with what are likely to be optimistic estimates. And the cost is between £81bn and £88bn.


This means that a plan to the impact of rising sea levels in 30 years’ time needs to be put in place pretty quickly, with resources allocated, for it to have a chance of succeeding. The evidence on its likely effectiveness will begin to be available quite soon.


The robustness of local and governmental responses to climate change will be a factor in considerations of risk – not just for universities but for businesses with which they work, including banks and insurers. The more that is done effectively now – mitigation measures and carbon reduction at a suitably quick rate – the less risk arises. We’ll all have our individual views on this and how likely it is to work.


What should universities and university governors do?


What’s clear to me is that all universities – and definitely those which can identify a clear issue which impacts on them – should be considering climate change as an increasingly significant risk. This means:

• Identifying how climate change might impact upon them – sea levels, changed weather patterns
• Identifying how changes behaviours to mitigate climate change might impact on business and operating models – reductions in the availability or acceptability of flying; changed diets, using less meat and dairy; changed local transport
• Identifying what they can do to become more sustainable, and to live more within their values. Are university cars and vans electric rather than petrol or diesel? Do policy frameworks mandate the most sustainable/least carbon transport options?
• Making sure that governors are aware of what is being done, and why. If radical changes are necessary at some point, a governing body which is forewarned is much more likely to be onside.

The challenge to governance – coming back to where I started – is that these are very big questions. The changes which are likely to be necessary represent significant changes from business as usual. Will university governance be up to the challenge?

On conferences

I’ve just spent a fantastic two days at the 2019 AUA Conference. Here’s some of my highlights, and my thoughts about why it’s important to make time to tend your professional development.

The AUA is the Association of University Administrators – a body of which I’m a Fellow, having been a member and been involved since the late 1990’s. (I’m currently programme lead for its rather excellent Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Administration, Management and Leadership.)  It runs – amongst many other things – an annual conference, focused on professional development, and a very excellent conference it is too. There’s a mixture of plenary session and workshops; I’ll focus on the workshops I attended.

Sketch-noting: If you’re on Twitter you may have seen @Katrina_Swanton tweet her fantastic sketch-notes of workshops and conferences she has attended. Sketch-noting is a method of taking notes using pictures as well as words. As well as being interesting to see afterwards, they work well as a learning tool. Dual-coding is the thing here: by drawing pictures as well as writing words, we will better remember the material. And Katrina ran a great session, giving us the confidence to develop our skills and then to practice on a couple of TED talks. You don’t need to be an artist to sketch-note, you just need to be open to a new way to take in information. You can see below my first go, at a later session.

Defining the future profession: A session I co-presented with Susannah Marsden, of City, University of London. I’ll blog about this another time. Sufficient for now to say that the session seemed to go well, and people confronted the eternal question. With respect to trivial pursuits, is it pie or cheese?

Digital transformations: Fola Ikpehai of SUMS Consulting led a lively session focusing on digital transformation. Fola is a really engaging presenter, and her approach – rightly – focused on the organisational., process and cultural issues necessary to succeed in any digital transformation project. Its always interesting to hear another’s approach on a familiar topic: Fola’s experience in digital transformations in the museums sector meant that she had a great perspective on how to think like a customer, and how to embed digital thinking within an organisation.

The Changing University: A tour de force from @mike_rat which took us on a historical journey to see how universities have changed over time, adapting to the different demands that society places on them. From first foundations at Oxford, through to the abolition of the binary divide, Mike shared some fascinating images and created a narrative of quirky adaptability. Plus some great facts, which you’ll have to hear Mike talk to find out more about. For instance, why Oxford MAs had to swear an oath not to teach in Stamford; why elevenses were banned at an English University; and why freedom of speech is so strong a thread in the US university sector. A really fantastic session, plus, the chance to try out sketch-noting in the wild. What do you think?

A sketch-note, by me, of the great session by @mike_rat 

All of the sessions, in different ways, gave me cause to reflect on my own practice, and to rethink the contexts within which I work. I learnt about approaches and techniques which will help me to solve real problems in my work; I found out about good practice in many university activities. And, as always, I met up with old friends and made plenty of new ones. UK universities are fortunate in the calibre of people working within their professional services. The sector is fortunate to have the AUA.

Two days well spent, I’d say. Why not join me next year at the AUA conference in Nottingham?

1844 days …

… is, by my sums, how long I’ve now been consulting as a freelance. Just over 5 years. Here’s some reflections on lessons I’ve learnt during those years.

Stay flexible. Arrangements change. Things can (and do!) take more or less time than you expect; events might mean that when on your travels you need to add new destinations, or change dates. Don’t grumble, just go with it. Practically, this means avoid the cheaper advanced tickets on trains (the ones that tie you to a specific train). And trains are better than cars. Not just for the environment, but for the thinking and working time that they bring. Just allow yourself an extra hour for signal failure.

Its always wise to check that you’ve understood the client. Listen, really listen. Try to give yourself time to pick up the nuances. What assumptions are you making about what the client is saying which might be wrong? What situational changes might be occurring within the client’s organisation that might have an impact. The client is often in a hurry – its useful to know why. Is it an urgent to deliver a result, or is it simply urgent to start a process? This last point isn’t as cynical as it might sound: once a person knows that they will get some help and that a solution can be found, it can free them up to be more reflective and to open up about their underlying worries, fears, and hopes. Time spent growing your understanding of the problem repays itself later. Big time.

You’ll be living with uncertainty, and its important to make your own peace with that. As a freelance you are dependent upon others’ timescales, both when it comes to initial discussions and also, sometimes, when in mid-project. Your planning horizon gets much shorter. When I used to have a ‘proper’ job, I could reasonably book leave, for example, months ahead, knowing that work cycles would permit it. Now, I can often only see clearly, in work terms, for 4-5 weeks ahead. That doesn’t mean that you can’t plan ahead, but it is riskier to do so. Can I be sure that no big project will present itself, needing attention at precisely the time I’ve committed to something personal? You need to learn to go with the flow, I think.

You need a different sort of resilience. There are hard days, where for whatever reason it’s tough to focus. If you’re in an organisation, the routines of office life can help you to kick start yourself (or to give you a kick up the backside) but when you make your own routines, you have to dig yourself out of the hole. I miss having close colleagues: the day-to-day benefits of social chitchat in the office are not to be underestimated. So its good to develop a new group of colleagues: folk who you might not see every day but with whom – through phone, text, social media – you can chew the fat, shoot the breeze, and generally know that here are people who notice you. Some of my new tribe are fellows in the consulting world (and I’ve inducted a few …), some are folk who work at places where I’ve done projects. And they all make it into the pantheon of people I’d consider friends not acquaintances.

There’s a real joy in being your own boss. Everything that you do is because of your choice, in a much closer way than when you work for an organisation. And this means that things like backing up your IT aren’t a chore, they’re an obvious must do. So they don’t seem as faffy. Yea, even unto the recording of expenses. But because everything that you do is your own choice, it’s really important to be consistent with your values. Earning money is the transactional reason for my consulting practice, but that doesn’t sustain you through dull days and hard hours. You need to know that the big thing you’re doing – in my case helping universities to be better places – is worth it. And as I’ve worked with different universities, students’ unions, and sector bodies (over 25 different clients on over 40 projects in five years, since you ask!), my belief that higher education matters, and that universities can be made better places, has deepened and grown. It’s a sector that I love.

Finally, get over yourself and chase the invoice. The fear that they don’t want to pay because what you did was rubbish is just a voice in your head! Invoices are late mostly because of bureaucracy, because emails get forgotten in inboxes, and because nobody (well, almost nobody) outside of finance departments and suppliers understands the importance of a purchase order in enabling subsequent payment of an invoice. But the feeling when your first invoice is paid – wonderful! Repeat business is a real pat on the back. And projects with clients who you didn’t know, where you’ve been contacted because of recommendation from elsewhere the sector, is a very positive appraisal.

When I started out on this journey I had a deal with my partner to see how it was going after two years. And it turns out that it was going fine. The five-year anniversary tells me that so far I’m on the right path. Here’s to the next five years!

#BanEssayMills

I’ve posted before about a petition to government, askingfor legislation to ban essay mills. The petition is more than half-way towards its first target – enough signatures to require a government response.

Let’s rehearse the issues.

There are organisations – known as essay mills – which for a fee will write an essay or similar piece of work to whatever specification a student asks. Although they market themselves as revision aids, there is no doubt that they are aiming to encourage students to buy an essay which they can submit as part of their university assessment, instead of writing it themselves.

This is a bad thing. The student doesn’t learn, and is cheating. So for those of you keeping count, this is in fact two bad things. And it’s hard to stop.

Half-way there ...

It’s hard to stop because the bought essay may not show up as such in plagiarism detection software used by universities. In fact, essay mills typically guarantee that they will pass such software checks – why would they make this guarantee this if they were only revision aids?

So why the petition? A law won’t make plagiarism software any better. But it can make it possible to deal with the essay mills, not just the students who use them. At the moment, if a university suspects that a student has submitted an essay that they have bought, the only laws which could apply are those governing fraud. But to use this would involve university staff giving evidence against individual students, which is time consuming and unlikely to happen. (It’s important that students trust their academic tutors. Anything which reduces this trust is a bad thing. That’s one of the problems with Prevent, by the way.)

It’s also using heavy tactics. In my career I’ve had to deal with many hundreds of cases where students have cheated, and nearly always it was a student who didn’t understand what that what they’re doing was wrong (plagiarism is a difficult concept, and culturally dependent). I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times where a cheating student was clearly being malevolent. So by all means punish students who cheat – and help them understand that what they have done is wrong – but we must remember that often they cheat through ignorance or desperation.

If there was a law banning the advertising of essay writing services, and the sale of essays through such services, it would be possible to remove the issue at source. Accounts by those who have used such services show that they are clearly seeking to entice students. There are also stories of students being blackmailed once they have used the essay writing service. And under the current legal framework, universities are powerless to deal with the essay mills themselves.

This is why we need a law. It isn’t enough to deal with individual students who cheat: they need to learn; and the problem of catching them is real. There isn’t an existing legal framework which will enable universities and sector bodies to deal with the essay mills themselves. It’s time for the government to lend a helping hand.

Here’s the link to the petition. Please sign it, please share the petition. Help to #BanEssayMills

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?

Down with cheats!

There’s a petition open on the government petitions website which seeks to address a real problem for UK higher education.  In my view, anyone with an interest in quality and standards, the health of our sector, and student wellbeing, should consider signing it.

The petition ...

The petition – here it is – asks government to legislate to make it illegal to provide or advertise contract cheating services.  Contract cheating services offer to provide essays for students – written to the precise specification provided by the student, and often guaranteed ‘plagiarism free’.  The services claim to be an aid for students’ revision, but this strains credibility.  If all students needed for revision was a model answer, why would a plagiarism free guarantee be a particular selling point?

The truth is that these services are writing essays to order, which students can submit as their own coursework.  This is cheating, plain and simple, and is bad for the reputation of UK higher education, for the student experience and for academic standards.

The petition has been started by Iain Mansfield – you’ll find him on Twitter as @IGMansfield – a former civil servant who knows about higher education from a governmental angle.  I’ve dealt with a fair few examination irregularities during my career, and it is clear that when students are desperate, they can do silly things.  Remove the supply of contract written essays, and there’s one fewer way for students to make a serious mistake.

If the petition gets 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in Parliament, which is a starting point.  Similar laws have been passed in New Zealand, Ireland and many US states.  If they can do it, so can we.  And we should, in my view, do something about a real problem.

According to HESA there’s almost half a million people working in UK HE.  This gives us plenty of directly affected people who can help to make a difference.  Please spread the word, and sign the petition.

Mastering support for students

One of the things I enjoy about my job is that I get to meet and work with people from across the UK higher education sector, and one of these great folk – Gale Macleod at the University of Edinburgh – recently pointed me to an interesting research paper she had co-authored. The paper – “Teaching at Master’s level: between a rock and a hard place” – looks at programme directors’ perceptions of the challenges faced by PGT students.

(The full reference is: Gale Macleod, Tina Barnes & Sharon R. A. Huttly (2018) Teaching at Master's level: between a rock and a hard place, Teaching in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2018.1491025; it’s at https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1491025 if you have access to the journal …)

The paper argues that there’s a mismatch between the formal expectations of postgraduate students (for instance, via the QAA’s level descriptors) and the reality as experienced by programme directors. The study is based upon a reasonably sample-sized survey; my more limited direct experience chimes well with the paper: “… there is a gap between the reality of PGT students’ readiness for study at Master’s level and institutional assumptions and the QAA vision”.

Since we're talking about Master's, here's a Margherita ...

The issues are about readiness for Masters’ study – the extent to which students are able to be independent and critical learners – and also about the impact of students’ lives on their ability to study: taught postgraduate students are more likely to have work or family responsibilities, meaning that their face real time pressures on their studies. And as well as this, universities often (and my experience definitely chimes with this) assume that taught postgraduate students are much more capable of managing their own learning. This creates a serious problem – learners are less capable (in the sense of being able to facilitate their own learning) than assumed; and institutions do not focus support on these same students.

So what conclusions do I draw from the paper?

This is a tricky problem. Taught postgraduate programmes are serious endeavours for UK universities. In 2016-17, income from taught postgraduate fees amounted to almost £1.25billion across the whole of the sector. That’s about 3.5% of all income, so it’s not by any means overwhelming; but it’s also a tidy sum in absolute terms and about half of the net institutional surplus across the sector. About 1 in every six students in UK universities are studying for a taught postgraduate qualification: again, not the largest group, but also not trivial.

So it’s a problem worth solving, but with these kinds of numbers it isn’t business-critical for most universities. The issues will also vary more sharply by programme: where a programme attracts many students and has higher fees, it is more likely that the university will put in place (at a programme or faculty level) resources to support students. (Some of the most impressive teaching and learning support takes place on MBA programmes …) Conversely, where a programme doesn’t attract many students the likelihood that the university will put in place any necessary support is low.

This is the nub of the problem. In my experience, universities often have a number of taught postgraduate programmes which are very marginal – low student numbers, low fees. They may play an important role in the academic life of a department or school, and provide a small but important pathway for research students. But in financial terms they are a cost. The challenge for universities is whether they should take any action, as the net cost of delivery is often small.

What would action look like? On the positive side, it is possible that a university which addressed student support for taught postgraduate would see an increase in student numbers, and therefore a reduction or elimination of the financial problem. But the reality is that many universities are operating in relatively fixed markets, and this won’t happen in the short term. More likely, there is a need to look at how the cost of a programme can be reduced: sharing modules, reducing options – this can create the space to provide better support for students. Whilst this can look like central managerialism whittling away at the freedom of a school or department to offer interesting programmes, if done well it can help to create a more vibrant departmental offer. Local academic leadership matters tremendously for this to work.

University professional services can play an important role in helping to address the problems identified in the paper. The accessibility of support services to students who are have time pressures is critical. For example, are librarians available online, or out of normal hours? How easy is it to learn how to use online resources such as VLE’s or library catalogues? Do inductions or student welcomes take account of the distinct needs of taught postgraduate students? These matters can often be improved without any – or much – resource, and can make a big difference.

Perhaps something which should be higher up to-do lists than it is at the moment?

Whose money is it anyway?

It’s hard not to notice the current focus by some in government, parliament and the media on universities, and in particular issues of value (levels of tuition fees) and accountability (how can VC’s high salaries be justified).

There’s lots to be said on this, but in this blog I want to focus on an underlying issue: whose money is it anyway? Put bluntly, if universities are spending private money, then it’s no business of the state what they spend it on, as long as it’s legal.

Universities get money from lots of sources, and they publish information annually – through their annual accounts and through statutory returns to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) – about what exactly they get and from who. The information is in a standard format, with many categories. Bear with me while I list these; it’s worth seeing to give context to the argument I’ll be making later. There are:

• Funding body grants

• Tuition fees, comprising Full-time undergraduate, Full-time postgraduate, Part-time undergraduate, Part-time postgraduate, PGCE, Non-EU domicile, Non-credit-bearing course fees, FE course fees, and Research training support grants.

• Research grants and contracts, comprising grants from: BEIS Research Councils, The Royal Society, British Academy and The Royal Society of Edinburgh; UK-based charities; UK central government bodies/local authorities, health and hospital authorities; UK central government tax credits for research and development expenditure; UK industry, commerce and public corporations; other UK sources; EU government bodies; EU-based charities; EU industry, commerce and public corporations; EU (excluding UK) other; Non-EU-based charities; Non-EU industry, commerce and public corporations; Non-EU other

• Other services rendered, comprising income from BEIS Research Councils, UK central government/local authorities, health and hospital authorities, EU government bodies and other sources

• Other income, comprising: Residences and catering operations (including conferences); Grants from local authorities; Income from health and hospital authorities (excluding teaching contracts for student provision); Other grant income; Capital grants recognised in the year; Income from intellectual property rights; and Other operating income

• Donations and endowments, comprising New endowments; Donations with restrictions and Unrestricted donations

If you’ve made it through the list (well done!) you’ll see that some of these come from public sources (eg BEIS research grants), some of these are private (eg UK industry grants). Add together all of the public income for a university, divide by the total incomer, and you can work out what percentage of the university’s income is from public sources. Which is surely relevant for understanding how accountable universities need to be with their spending choices.

For some categories, though, it isn’t obvious if it’s public money. The big one here is tuition fee income.

For income from non-EU students, it is clearly private income. Even if they’re supported by their own government, the UK government doesn’t have a duty or obligation in relation to the money.

For postgraduate tuition fees paid by home and EU students, it will be a mixed bag: some will be paid by the students themselves or their employers; some will be funded via postgraduate grants; some will be paid via public PG loans schemes.

For home and EU undergraduate fees, we need to think about it. Where students have to pay tuition fees (remember that Scottish students in Scotland pay no fees) they are able to take out a loan, on less than commercial terms, from the Student Loans Company. And students do this. After graduation, students make repayments towards the loan from their salary; the amount they repay depends on how much they earn. And after 30 years the remaining debt is cancelled. The initial funds are provided to the Student Loans Company by the state; and an allowance for the ultimately unrepaid element – called the RAB charge – is also part of government spending. So is it public or private money? With hindsight, a proportion of it is private, and a proportion public. Up front, the cash is public.

On this basis it is possible to masker the calculation about the proportion of universities income which comes from public funds. I’ve included home and EU undergraduate tuition fees; I’ve excluded postgraduate tuition fees; I’ve included research and other services rendered sources from UK government and public bodies, and from EU government and public bodies (the income for this ultimately derives from UK government funds, as we’re a net contributor to the EU budget.)

What this shows is that universities receive significant public funding. Across the UK as a whole, 58% of income in 2015-16 (the most recent year for which HESA data is available) comes from public sources. In actual money, that is £20.3 billion out of a total income of £34.7 billion. Yes, I did say billion. It is a lot of money!

Nation	% Publicly-funded
England	58%
Wales	65%
Scotland	59%
Northern Ireland	75%
Total UK	58%

Of course this varies between individual universities. Some have very little income (comparatively!) from non-public sources; a few have very little (again, comparatively!) from the public. 

The graph shows the data: each university is one of the bars; they’re rank ordered from the most dependent on the left (Plymouth College of Art, since you ask, with 96% dependency on public funding) through to Heythrop College on the right (with no public funding whatsoever.) Even the famously-private Buckingham University has a little public income - £95k in funding body grants and research income from UK public bodies. Which means that it is second from the right, with about 0.25% of its income from public sources.

Source: HESA data

What of other universities? The Russell Group members range from the mid 20s (LSe with 24%) to the high 60s (Queen’s Belfast with 69%). The big post 1992 civic universities range from the mid 50s (Sunderland with 56%) to the mid 80s (Liverpool John Moores with 86%). The smaller or specialist research intensives (the 1994 Group, as was) range from the high 30s (SOAS with 38%) to the mid 60s (Birkbeck College, with 66%).

So does the state have an interest in how universities spend their money? The data say yes: at least to the extent that the money derives from public sources.

This doesn’t mean that all of the criticisms made of universities are valid. And it doesn’t mean that university autonomy isn’t a good idea. History, and international comparisons, tell us that the best universities are those that have the most freedom to make their own academic choices.

But it does lend validity to arguments that universities need to be accountable for their spending choices. In my experience, universities don’t disagree with this need for accountability. 

What of current criticisms? The danger is that the huge good that universities do for individuals and for society as a whole is forgotten amongst the current hubbub, and damage is then done. To avoid this, those making the noise need to be careful that their criticisms are well-founded. There’s an anti-elitism in current public discourse which easily mutates into unthinking policy.

And universities themselves need to be aware that (some at least) of the criticisms come from a real point. Are student always the first thought? Sometimes research sees like it is king. And is there real transparency? A few universities have a student on their remuneration committees, and their world has not fallen down. Why not more?

Make the National Student Survey Great Again!

The NSS data was out last week. This year it’s a new set of questions – some are the same as in previous surveys, some are amended versions of previous questions, and some are entirely new. This means that year-on-year comparisons need to be treated with a little caution.

But one aspect of reporting continues to bother me. The survey measures final year undergraduate student responses to a number of statements. For instance, “Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of the course” on a Likert scale - that is, a 1-5 scale, where 1 = definitely disagree; 2 = mostly disagree; 3 = neither agree nor disagree; 4 = mostly agree; and 5 = definitely agree. The data is presented with a simple summing of the percentages who respond 4 or 5 to given a ‘% agree’ score for every question at every institution. Which in turn means universities can say “93% satisfaction” or whatever it might be.

This is simple and straightforward, but loses important data which could be summarised by using a GPA (Grade Point Average) approach – just like the HE sector commonly uses in other responses, for instance in REF outcomes. Using a GPA, an overall score for a question reflects the proportion giving the five different responses.

To calculate a GPA, there’s a simple sum:

GPA = (% saying ‘1’ x 1) + (% saying ‘2’ x 2) + (% saying ‘3’ x 3) + (% saying ‘4’ x 4) + (% saying ‘5’ x 5)

This gives a number which will be 5 at most (if all respondents definitely agreed) and a minimum of 1 (if all respondents definitely disagreed).

If GPA was used for the reporting, there’d still be one number which users would see, but it would contain more nuance. GPA measures how extreme people’s agreement or disagreement is, not just the proportion who are positive. And this matters.

I looked at the raw data for all 457 teaching institutions in the 2017 NSS. (This is not just universities but also FE Colleges, which work with universities to provide foundation years, foundation degrees and top-up degrees, and alternative providers.)  I calculated the agreement score and the GPA for all teaching institutions for question 27: Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of the course. And then I rank-ordered the institutions using each method.

What this gives you are two ordered lists, each with 457 institutions in it. Obviously, in some cases institutions get the same score; where this happens, they all have the same rank order. And institutional rank is reflects the number of institutions above them in the rank order.

So, for example, on the ‘agreement score’ method, 27 institutions score 100%, the top score available in this method. So they are all joint first place. One institution scored 99%: so this is placed 28th.  Similarly, on the GPA ranking, one institution scored 5.00, the top score using the GPA method. The next highest score was 4.92, which two institutions got. So those two are both joint second.

What I did next was compare the rank orders, to see what difference it made. And it makes a big difference! Take, for example, the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic. It’s 100% score on the ‘agreement score’ method puts it in joint first place. But its GPA of 4.39 places it in joint 79th place. In this instance, its agreement score was 61% ‘mostly agree’ and 39% ‘definitely agree’. Very creditable. But clearly not as overwhelmingly positive as Newbury College, which with 100% ‘definitely agree’ was joint 1st on the agreement score method and also in first place (and all on its own) on the GPA measure.

The different measures can lead to very significant rank-order differences. The examples I’m going to give relate to institutions lower down the pecking order.  I’m not into name and shame so I won’t be saying which ones (top tip – the data is public so if you’re really curious you can find out for yourself with just a bit of Excel work), but take a look at these cases:

Institution A: With a score of 87% on the agreement score method, it is ranked 138/457 overall: just outside the top 30%. With a GPA of 3.95, it is ranked 349/457: in the bottom quarter.

Same institution, same data. 

Or try Institution B: with an agreement score of 73% it is ranked 382/457, putting it in the bottom one-sixth of institutions. But its GPA of 4.28 places it at 129/457, well within the top 30%.

Again, same institution, same data.

In the case of Institution A, 9% of respondents ‘definitely disagreed’ with the overall satisfaction statement. This means that the GPA was brought down. Nearly one in ten students were definitely not satisfied overall.

In the case of institution B, no students at all disagreed that they were satisfied overall (although a decent number, more than a quarter, were neutral on the subject.) This means that their GPA was higher, but the overall satisfaction reflected the non-committal quarter.

I’m not saying that institution A is better than B or vice versa. It would be easy to argue that the 9% definitely disagree was simply a bad experience for one class, and unlikely to be repeated. Or that the 27% non-committal indicated a lack of enthusiasm. Or that the 9% definitely disagree was a worrying rump who were ignored. But what I am saying is that we’re doing a disservice by not making it easier for applicants to access a more meaningful picture.

The whole point of the National Student Survey is to help prospective students make judgements about where they want to study. By using a simple ‘agreement’ measure, the HE sector is letting them down. Without any more complexity we can give a more nuanced picture, and help prospective students. It’ll also give a stronger incentive to universities to work on ensuring that nobody is unhappy. Can this be a bad thing?

GPA is just as simple as the ‘agreement score’. It communicates more information. It encourages universities to address real dissatisfaction.

So this is my call: let’s make 2017 the last year that we report student satisfaction in the crude ‘agreement score’ way. GPA now.

Value for money

Universities seems to be having a torrid time, at least as far as their standing in the political firmament goes. As well as pension headaches for USS member institutions (mostly the pre-1992's), there are high-profile stories on VC salaries, Lord Adonis' campaign about a fee-setting cartel, and (low) teaching contact hours. So far, so not very good at all.

There's a feeling that this might be more than a quiet season set of grumbles: David Morris at Wonkhe writes interestingly on this. For what its worth, I suspect that this is indeed politically driven rather than accidental. Maybe Lord Adonis is marking out ground for his re-emergence within a new model Labour Party; maybe Jo Johnson is preparing for tough discussions around future fees. But whatever the end point, it's worth looking at whether the concerns are real.

An underlying point is value for money. The charge is that (English) students don't get a lot for their money. One quick way to look at this is university spend on staff, the single biggest item on university's accounts. HESA publish handy data on student numbers and staff numbers. It's straightforward to calculate the ratio of students to academic staff over the years.

source: HESA, my calculations

The data show that from 2004-05 to 2011-12, for every member of academic staff there were about 14 students. In 2012-13 - the first year of the new fees regime in England - this ratio started to fall, and by 2015-16 there were just over 11 students for every member of academic staff.

Does this mean that the stories of low contact hours, and questionable value for money are wrong? Not necessarily - the data doesn't speak to the reality at individual universities or programmes, nor does it describe any individual student's experience. But it does show that universities have invested in the most important element of their provision: academic staff.

Reflections on the UK 'Carnegie Classification'

I posted yesterday on how UK universities and higher education institutions would map onto the US Carnegie classifications. That post simply presented the data; its worth a little reflection on what the data show.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Doctoral classification is the biggest, but there is more differentiation than I expected. When I did a similar exercise 15-20 years ago there weren’t any UK HEI’s in the Masters or Baccalaureate categories - every institutions was R1 or R2 (in the old Carnegie scheme). This reflects the broadening of the pool in the UK (there are more universities now than there were); but also, perhaps, the more selective approach to funding of research studentships. Some of the institutions which are now Master's universities made the Doctoral cut, if I remember correctly, on the old classification.

Also not present in this list are HE and FE Colleges, which between them would occupy the Baccalaureate category, the Baccalaureate/Associate’s category and the Associate’s category. In the UK the equivalent of the Associate's category is Foundation Degrees and foundation years, but the principle remains the same. Its clear that if you want to understand the breadth of UK HE you need to look at HE delivered in FE Colleges. This is a challenge to most of the usual narratives about UK higher education; perhaps it reflects the university-sector 'ownership' of some sector wide bodies such as UCAS, HESA etc. (I'm using 'ownership' loosely here.)

And of course, as the UK did most of its historical oppressing in countries which are now sovereign, there isn’t an equivalent of the Tribal Colleges category.

Is this a useful analytical framework? At the moment the categories used are often driven by mission groups. Whilst membership of these is in part driven by data, it isn't transparent. And as mission groups are clubs not leagues, there isn't often relegation, although promotion does happen. (Remember the expansion of the Russell Group in 2012). Perhaps we need a UK equivalent, to allow for more transparent analysis of the section and how it is developing?

Mapping UK universities against the US Carnegie Classifications

In 1970 the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education developed a framework for analysing university and colleges, to facilitate research and policy development on higher education. The framework has continued to be developed by higher education researchers in the US. As England’s HE policy framework begins to approximate the US – with an increasing emphasis on diversity of institution, market entry and exit, and the student as consumer – in this blog I’m looking at the US classifications, what they tell us, and how the UK’s HEI’s would map onto the Carnegie classification.

The current Carnegie Classifications – using a methodology last significantly updated in 2005 – divide universities and colleges into seven broad classes. In some classes there is further differentiation by scale of activity. These are:

Doctoral University (with subclasses R1, R2, R3 defined by scale)	Institutions that award at least 20 PhD/DPhil degrees per year
Master’s University (with subclasses M1, M2, M3 defined by scale)	Institutions that award at last 50 Master’s degrees per year
Baccalaureate Colleges	Institutions where bachelor’s degrees made up more than 50% of degrees awarded
Baccalaureate/Associates Colleges	Institutions with at last one Bachelor’s programme and with more than 50% of awards at the Associate degree level
Associate's Colleges	Institutions whose highest qualification awarded was an Associate degree
Special Focus Institutions	Institutions where more than 75% of degree awards relates to a single field or set of related fields
Tribal Colleges	Institutions which are members of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium

The first four categories are applied hierarchically: if you’re doctoral, you’re not counted in Masters; if you’re Master’s, you’re not counted in Baccalaureate, even though numerically you’d meet both sets of criteria.

An associate degree is a two-year undergraduate qualification. Typically it would equate to the first two years of the four-year baccalaureate degree. 

Using HESA data from 2015-16, it’s possible to match UK institutions to these categories. I haven’t done the detailed analysis required to categorise Doctoral universities as RE1, R2 or R3; or Master’s universities similarly. 

All UK HEI’s – or at least those which reported to HESA in 2015-16 – fall within one of the Doctoral, Master’s, Baccalaureate or Specialist classes. Here’s the classification. 

Doctoral Universities

• Aberystwyth University
• Anglia Ruskin University
• Aston University
• Bangor University
• Birkbeck College
• Birmingham City University
• Bournemouth University
• Brunel University London
• Canterbury Christ Church University
• Cardiff Metropolitan University
• Cardiff University
• City, University of London
• Coventry University
• Cranfield University
• De Montfort University
• Edinburgh Napier University
• Glasgow Caledonian University
• Goldsmiths College
• Heriot-Watt University
• Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
• Keele University
• King's College London
• Kingston University
• Leeds Beckett University
• Liverpool John Moores University
• London Metropolitan University
• London School of Economics and Political Science
• London South Bank University
• Loughborough University
• Middlesex University
• Newcastle University
• Oxford Brookes University
• Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
• Queen Mary University of London
• Roehampton University
• Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
• Sheffield Hallam University
• St George's, University of London
• Staffordshire University
• Swansea University
• Teesside University
• The Institute of Cancer Research
• The Manchester Metropolitan University
• The Nottingham Trent University
• The Open University
• The Queen's University of Belfast
• The Robert Gordon University
• The School of Oriental and African Studies
• The University of Aberdeen
• The University of Bath
• The University of Birmingham
• The University of Bradford
• The University of Brighton
• The University of Bristol
• The University of Buckingham
• The University of Cambridge
• The University of Central Lancashire
• The University of Dundee
• The University of East Anglia
• The University of East London
• The University of Edinburgh
• The University of Essex
• The University of Exeter
• The University of Glasgow
• The University of Greenwich
• The University of Huddersfield
• The University of Hull
• The University of Kent
• The University of Lancaster
• The University of Leeds
• The University of Leicester
• The University of Lincoln
• The University of Liverpool†
• The University of Manchester
• The University of Northampton
• The University of Oxford
• The University of Portsmouth
• The University of Reading
• The University of Salford
• The University of Sheffield
• The University of Southampton
• The University of St Andrews
• The University of Stirling
• The University of Strathclyde
• The University of Sunderland
• The University of Surrey
• The University of Sussex
• The University of Warwick
• The University of Westminster
• The University of Wolverhampton
• The University of York
• University College London
• University of Abertay Dundee
• University of Bedfordshire
• University of Chester
• University of Durham
• University of Gloucestershire
• University of Hertfordshire
• University of Northumbria at Newcastle
• University of Nottingham
• University of Plymouth
• University of South Wales
• University of the Arts, London
• University of the Highlands and Islands
• University of the West of England, Bristol
• University of Ulster
• University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Master's Universities

• Bath Spa University
• Buckinghamshire New University
• Edge Hill University
• Falmouth University
• Glyndŵr University
• Liverpool Hope University
• Newman University
• Royal Agricultural University
• Southampton Solent University
• St Mary's University, Twickenham
• The University of Bolton
• The University of Chichester
• The University of the West of Scotland
• The University of West London
• The University of Winchester
• University College Birmingham
• University of Cumbria
• University of Derby
• University of Suffolk
• University of Worcester
• York St John University

Baccalaureate Universities

• Bishop Grosseteste University
• Leeds Trinity University
• SRUC
• St Mary's University College
• University of St Mark and St John

Specialist Focus Institutions

• Conservatoire for Dance and Drama
• Courtauld Institute of Art
• Glasgow School of Art
• Guildhall School of Music and Drama
• Harper Adams University
• Heythrop College
• Leeds College of Art
• Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
• London Business School
• London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
• Norwich University of the Arts
• Plymouth College of Art
• Ravensbourne
• Rose Bruford College
• Royal Academy of Music
• Royal College of Art
• Royal College of Music
• Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
• Royal Northern College of Music
• Stranmillis University College
• The Arts University Bournemouth
• The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts
• The National Film and Television School
• The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
• The Royal Veterinary College
• The University of Wales (central functions)
• Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
• University for the Creative Arts
• University of London (Institutes and activities)
• Writtle University College