Brexit - bad news for conservatoires

A lot of people within the HE sector are shocked by the Brexit vote, and the impact is beginning to be felt. Individually, people on both sides of the issue will take time to adjust, but it’s important for institutional leaders to get quickly beyond the shock and think about how Brexit will affect them.

One obvious concern relates to students from other EU countries. Presently, such students are able to access student loans company funding, and are treated the same as students in the home nation for fees purposes. (This latter point gives some curious results: Scottish universities charge zero fees to Scottish domiciled students, and £9k for students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Students from other EU countries are treated the same as Scottish students, paying zero fees.)

There’s obviously big uncertainty about what happens in the future. In the short term, current EU students, and those who start in 2016-17, will continue on the same terms and conditions. Beyond this, there isn’t certainty yet. And so universities need to start contingency planning. (It’s all in the negotiations. An EEA-type outcome may include special dispensation for students, but that is simply an unknown.)

At some point it seems possible that EU students will be treated the same as any other overseas student. If that were to happen, we could expect EU student numbers to decline. Universities will need to respond, and there are fundamentally two choices – replace the ‘lost’ EU students with others, or admit fewer students. So what is the scale of the challenge, and who is most affected?

EU undergraduates comprise over 5% of the current (2014-15 HESA data) Home/EU undergraduate population. Scotland has the highest proportion – perhaps unsurprisingly as EU students pay no tuition fees – but London is not far behind.

It is reasonable to assume that some universities at least will try to make up the shortfall with UK students, and that means greater competition. Universities with stronger recruitment profiles will admit students who may have gone elsewhere, and universities which recruit less strongly will have to admit students they otherwise would not have, if they wish to remain the same size. This may not always be possible. In London this competition will possibly be intense – the number of EU students in the region - almost 17000 - is larger than most universities’ total student intakes.

It’s also useful to look at the impact on individual universities. In absolute terms, the ten universities with the most EU undergraduates are:

The three Scottish universities are unsurprising, and the differences in Scottish university finance probably mean that in purely financial terms the loss will be less significant for them than if they were in England. But the English universities in the list vary in character, some being very strong recruiters, others less so.

In proportionate terms, another issues arises. Here’s the ten institutions with the greatest percentage reduction, if EU students are lost:

This list includes the four London conservatoires – specialist music institutions – and the broader performing arts conservatoire which is the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama. These institutions don’t have a normal recruitment pattern. To gain admittance you have to already be a very capable musical performer. The number of lost students is greater than the total intake at two of these institutions. It is hard to see how the conservatoires could remain at their current size without EU students. And they probably aren't big enough to easily survive such large changes in tuition fee income.

Here is, I suspect, the first unanticipated and unintended consequence of Brexit: there’ll be fewer conservatoires. To avoid this, increased governmental support will be needed. Which won’t be straightforward in the more straitened times we face.

A capital week

I write at the end of a long week which saw me in each of the three capital cities on the UK mainland: Cardiff on Monday and Thursday; London on Tuesday and Friday; and Edinburgh on Wednesday. Plenty of opportunity for reflection.

Cardiff, London, Edinburgh: and some other places too

One strand of this reflection was about the changes which are occurring in the UK through devolution, and the unequal parts into which the UK is divided. Universities’ behaviour is being affected by this.

Firstly, with respect to students. Each of the nations has its own policy around student support and student tuition fees, but England, as the largest in volume and wealth, is clearly setting a tone. With each student paying £9k per year, funded through the SLC; and now without any cap on student numbers, English universities can seek to recruit (they might not succeed) as many as they like, from wherever they like.

In Wales, the government subsidises students’ fees, so that they pay only about £3,600 per year, wherever in the UK they study. Welsh universities have a financial cap on how many Welsh-domiciled students they can admit (although I understand that in practice this doesn’t constrain recruitment of Welsh students) and the net effect of this is that Welsh universities do best, financially, when they recruit plenty of students from England, creating a net inwards flow of state funding for universities.

In Scotland, universities cannot charge fees for home (or non-UK EU students), but can charge for students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland. They are grant funded in respect of the costs of educating Scottish students. This means that for Scottish universities, students from the rest of the UK are valuable, bringing fee income. But, universities are not funded at the same fee per student basis as in England and Wales, so competing with their counterparts elsewhere in the UK is tricky.

In research things are different (for now): the principal of dual support (through the block grant and, in competition, from Research Councils) is so far safe. This means that every university will get some funds for research, dependent upon their baseline quality assessed through REF. But how long will this last? As national governments (ie Scotland, Wales, NI) gain more power, will they wish to include their ‘share’ of research council funding in their allocations? Will experiments in devolution in England, like that in Manchester, lead to regional university funding?

It is an uncertain time, and each university is also having to plot its own sustainability, with uncertainties about future state/fee funding arrangements, the prospect of further cuts in the coming years, and no real confidence that post-election things will be any clearer.

There’s no moral to this reflection. But there is an obvious truth that the future for university funding and system behaviour won’t be stable for a while yet.

It's very complicated

Take a look at this article in the University World News, reporting work done by Claud Xiao and Rob Downs at Palo Alto Networks, a US internet-security company. It seems that it usernames and passwords, valid at universities across the world, are available on Taobao, the Chinese version of e-Bay. Accounts were available to buy at universities in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Italy, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

I’m not an IT security expert, and this post isn’t about the technologies behind this: if you need counsel in that regard, don’t talk to me! My observations here are more about how complex the world is becoming for universities.

The accounts for sale were, reportedly, valid current student accounts – often accounts which were being used without the knowledge or permission of the student. “Don’t change the password” was the vendors’ advice, so as not to raise suspicions.

The most popular type of account was one which enabled the purchaser to unlock their Windows phone. This won’t be good news for the universities concerned, which will probably have a bit of explaining to do when the renegotiate their license fee with Microsoft. But at least in that case the use was external to the university. But also flagged were accounts which got access to research and library databases, and support. A university’s knowledge is the core of its value to the world, so this is looking difficult (albeit probably marginal for now) for universities.

But here’s a couple of bigger thoughts.

Firstly, universities are places which work on trust. Once you’re in, the culture is that you’re an equal member of the family, and that people will treat you as such. Does this sort of problem nudge universities even more to regarding their students instead as customers who perhaps aren’t what they seem? My guess is that the human factor (easily guessable passwords; risky online behaviour) is behind these hacks, so it isn’t about the unwitting students here trying to be bad. But the consequences of their behaviours gnaw away at trust.

And secondly, how much of our view of the world is conditioned by the language in which we browse? The world has lots of different alphabet types, let alone languages, and whilst I can’t speak and translate Danish, for instance, without help, I can at least recognise it as Danish and I can use Google to help. But my keyboard doesn’t do other sorts of alphabets – logographies, syllabaries, abjads. (If you want a good distraction check out this Wikipedia page on alphabet types, which enabled me to write the last sentence; you can find out what an abjad is too, aside from being a great Scrabble word). How can I even begin to understand what is going on with web pages which I don’t know how to read?

I don't know what this says ...

Many universities seek to act on a world stage, but how many are really equipped to do this? The IT account issue above shows that on the web, some of your neighbours speak and write in ways you can’t understand. This might worry you. But to push the neighbour metaphor a bit more, when you live in a multicultural place, you can either get suspicious, lock the doors and grumble about how it isn’t like it used to be; or you can accept change, have fun, and learn a bit of the lingo, so your neighbours become less like strangers.

If universities really want to internationalise then perhaps there’s a need to have more language fluency within management teams.

Academic dinosaurs?

A strand of the public discourse around higher education, since the coalition’s funding reforms in 2010, has been about how alternative providers (ie the private sector) will enter the market, compete with established universities and force those ‘academic dinosaurs’ to improve their offer to students, to compete on successful terms.

Two friendly academic dinosaurs

Now no doubt there is a market – you can see some evidence for this in the UCAS data – but I’m not sure that it’s as simple as the ‘more competition = better all round” narrative might have you believe.

Markets are segmented. There are different types of customer; and different types of supplier. This is true for all markets; and hence true for higher education.  Higher education differs in that price is not only about money, but also about entry tariff: you aren’t able to go to some universities unless you have the right qualifications.

On the supplier side (and for simplicity let’s focus on undergraduates only here), you have differentiation by

• length of study (accelerated degrees versus ‘traditional’ degrees; foundation years; part-time study)
• range of subjects (specialist institutions versus multi-faculty)
• mode of study (distance learning versus campus based; daytime versus evening)
• focus on teaching versus focus on research
• qualifications needed to gain entry
• price
• location (near home; another city; a rural location; a different nation)

On the ‘customer’ side, you have differentiation around:

• Price sensitivity (in relation to living costs; total fees; willingness to commit time)
• Confidence (in their own ability)
• Focus (are they looking for ‘the student experience’ or for a qualification?)
• Willingness or ability to travel to university
• Instrumentality (that is, are they focused on the career options open to them, or looking only at the educational aspects)
• Flexibility (that is, how flexible a university must be in the facilities and options it offers the student: think childcare on campus; 24/7 library opening)

This isn’t a simple marketplace. It also strikes me that the alternative providers are seeking out particular niches – a particular subject or a rigorous focus on the learner – and that only one private provider – the University of Buckingham – seeks to play on level terms with other universities.  Not a surprise, but also not a revolution.

My prediction (and it is just that! no value judgments are made here!) would be that private providers will compete mostly with some of the newer universities: attracting students with less familiarity with higher education; focusing on the learner; offering flexible study.  The older universities will continue to be popular with students who have familial experience of university, and for whom ‘going to university’ has been part of their life plan since before they knew it, in short, who come from ‘traditional’ backgrounds..

If this is right, the effects of competition won’t be on the sector as a whole, but on a subset of existing institutions only. And not, noticeably, on those institutions with a strong focus on research, which I’ve heard as a particular bugbear of the alternative providers (why subsidize research with fees? they ask).

Back to the dinosaur metaphor, this is consistent with what know – evolution is a slow process, impacting on particular ecosystems and subspecies; changing a food chain here and there; but passing almost unnoticed from one generation to the next. In the absence of a metaphorical meteorite hitting the UK university sector, the dinosaurs may be successful for some time yet.

Should I stay or should I go now?

Last night’s TV debate between Alec Salmond and Alastair Darling brought home to me that the prospect of Scottish independence is possibly very real.  I’m not foolish enough to prognosticate publicly on the rights and wrongs of the question, but it is worth looking at what Scottish independence might do to higher education in the UK.  For this post I’ll look at the student side; research comes another day.

It’s a moot point as to whether there is a single UK higher education sector.  Funding and oversight has been through national funding councils (or similar mechanisms) for some time. And being a devolved matter, quite different approaches to funding of institutions and students have developed in the four UK nations – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.  On the other hand, the mission groups (the Russell Group, Million+, University Alliance and the now-departed 1994 Group) and Universities UK, the sector umbrella body, have always worked on a UK-wide basis.  

HESA publish data on undergraduate student mobility between the four nations (the raw data is in a table at the end of this post), and these show what looks like a politically and sociologically interesting pattern.  For starters, here’s the absolute numbers (2012-13 data) in each of the four nations who choose to study in their home country (‘stay’) or study in one of the other UK nations (‘go’):

2012-13 HESA data; first degree students only

The disparity in scale between the four nations is clear here: England has 85% of student numbers. Not surprising really: it has more universities and more people anyway.

But when you look at percentages a striking picture emerges:

2012-13 HESA data, first degree students only

On this view, England and Scotland are very similar: 95% of students from England and Scotland stay in their home nation.  And Northern Ireland and Wales are also similar: about two in three students from Wales and Northern Ireland stay in their home, but one in three go elsewhere (mostly to England, by the way.)

It’s possible to make broad historico-political points here, about Scotland and England being sustainable polities, and Wales and Northern Ireland being places from which that some people see the need to leave to thrive. But I’m going to refrain from that. 

The balance of trade is interesting too (that is, the difference between total numbers of students from the nation studying the UK, and total number of places taken by UK students in that nation). England and Northern Ireland are net exporters of students, and Wales and Scotland net importers. Also, despite the vastly different sizes of the sectors, the actual numbers have a very similar order of absolute magnitude – between 11,000 and 13,500 for each of the four nations.

Balance of trade	Students:
	From	In	Balance
England	924,680	912,615	12,065
Wales	51,095	62,180	-11,085
Scotland	95,930	109,450	-13,520
Northern Ireland	41,370	28,830	12,540

Overall, if Scotland left the UK, the HE sectors in England, Wales and Northern Ireland probably wouldn’t be much affected. The blunt truth is that compared to the whole, not many Scottish students leave (a short 5,000), and most of these go to England, where their number is but a drop in the ocean. Scotland might notice a change more: 16% of home students at Scottish universities – over 18,000 - come from other UK nations.

I don’t imagine that the vote on 18 September will be swayed by the impact on the university sectors. Nor, by these data, should it.

Here’s the raw data I promised:

	Nation of institution
Origin of students	England	Wales	Scotland	NI	Total
England	880,210	29,610	14,195	665	924,680
Wales	18,725	31,955	400	15	51,095
Scotland	4,515	165	91,200	50	95,930
Northern Ireland	9,165	450	3,655	28,100	41,370
Total	912,615	62,180	109,450	28,830

The numbers are from 2012-13 HESA data (did I mention this?) and refer to first degree students only.

Why are students so hard to count?

A common phenomenon in universities is the argument about data, and in particular differences between the number of students a department thinks it has, and the number of students that ‘the university’ thinks the department has. Let’s set aside for a moment the unworthy suspicion that such arguments are a smokescreen to disguise other issues. Why is it so hard to get student data right?

One reason is the specificity with which student data is defined. If you’re counting students to work out what size classroom to put a course in, then you need to know how many people it is (headcount) and how many are following that course. If you’re counting for budgeting purposes you might prefer full-time-equivalent (fte) and only those that are enrolled and paying fees. (And, by the way, there are students who are following courses who haven’t enrolled or haven’t paid fees.) The perspectives about the right data differ depending on need. And if you think about students who might be re-sitting a module or a year; or who might be undertaking placement work for all or some of their study; or who might be part-time at the moment but in a broadly full-time pattern of study; or many other possibilities, then you can see that there’s a lot of detail to be argued over.

Another, related, reason is that data is often collected by a university to satisfy the demands of an external return – from HESA, for instance, or from a funding council. The definitions used in such collections can be abstruse, to say the best. For instance, a few years ago there was a change in the way that taught postgraduate students were counted for funding purposes, meaning that students might be very present in a university – enrolled, having tutorials, using library facilities – but would be counted as zero fte for funding purposes. They weren’t being ignored – they’d have been accounted for in a previous year’s return – but a data set used for an external return is not then comparable directly with the reality of the institution. Sometimes an almost theological attention to the detail of definitions and rules is needed.

A third, big, reason, is life itself. The model whereby a cohort of students enrols in September and pursues study diligently through the year is just that: a model. In reality people come and go – because of funding, because of family reasons, because they themselves are not sure if the course they are following is right for them. Universities ask students to inform them when they have a change in circumstances or attendance, and so students sometimes do this. And it makes the record a fluid thing. A count of students in the morning may not be the same as a cont taken that afternoon – it isn’t a data problem, it’s life.

A fourth reason is that data systems are complex things. In any reasonably large university there will be many people who interact with students and who record the transactions on the student record system. These record systems have a lot of fields (check out the HESA list of fields for the student return if you don’t believe me). There’s a lot of scope for errors. Nowadays systems do have checks within them, but they aren’t foolproof – the human capacity to find new ways to input data is truly wonderful. (For instance, I once was supported by a temporary PA, who was ordering stationery for me. The finance system required cost codes and account codes, and as this person didn’t have access to the manual, the approach used was to put in random numbers ‘til it worked. I got the stationery, for sure, but it probably didn’t help the management accountants ...)

So what to do about this? Here are three approaches which can help.

Firstly, get in the habit of specifying exactly what data you need. Precisely. Planning and data teams can help by giving menus of data, so users have the knowledge to ask precisely. You’ll reduce apparent data errors this way, but more importantly you’ll promote the idea that precision of specification matters. More sophisticated data users can then have more sophisticated arguments.

Secondly, and related, don’t make data collection and submission the business only of a few people. It can be easy for those who make external returns appear as the guardians of secret and arcane knowledge. (Is a countable year one of my three score and ten?) Not everyone will want to engage with the detail of the HESA return, but if more people know that there is a specific coding, and that it can be found (HESA are very good and transparent) then more people might recognise that what they input does matter.

Thirdly, help the people who collect and own the data in your university to work together. Data quality isn’t about doing a hard sum, it’s more like weeding a vegetable patch. Unless you check regularly and are willing to get your hands dirty, then data errors will occur. Give someone the role of overseeing data quality (often the planning function will do this) and ensure that they bring the data owners together regularly. The more a sense of team develops here, the better your data quality will be, and the fewer arguments you will have.