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?

Increased tuition fees do not cause increased participation

Tuition fees are back on the political agenda, big time. Arguably a significant component in the unexpected relative success of the Labour Party at the 2017 General Election, there are now calls by senior Ministers for a ‘national debate’ on the issue: see, for instance, Damian Green’s speech to the Bright Blue think tank on the weekend.

One aspect of this which is worth examining is the connection between fees and access: on the one hand there us the fear that debt will put people off university (and hinder their subsequent life-chances); on the other there is the evidence that participation by students from less advantaged backgrounds has grown since the introduction of higher tuition fees in 2012. I've seen it argued - by people including a Vice-Chancellor of a UK university - that fees have helped with this process.

But of course, correlation does not imply causality. And because higher education is a devolved matter, there’s a simple experiment which can shed light on the question about whether fees encourage participation.

Scottish domiciled students pay no tuition fees if they attend Scottish universities. If they attend universities in England they pay the normal home rate – that is, £9,000. HESA data lets us see whether more Scottish students attended universities in England after fees were increased in 2012, which they should if tuition fees encouraged greater participation.

Here’s the data. It shows the number of undergraduate students attending universities in England from each of the four UK nations: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (NI). The data covers the years 2008-09 to 2015-16: that is, four years under the £3k tuition fee regime and four years under the £9k regime. The number of English students is several orders of magnitude higher than those from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so I’ve used two vertical axes. The left had axis show student numbers from Wales, Scotland and NI; the right hand axis shows students from England.

Data from HESA Student data, table N

The chart shows that the number of English students at English universities grew over the eight years, from about 780,000 to 925,000. The number of Welsh and Northern Irish students at English Universities also grew, from 15,000 to 22,000 in the case of Wales, and from just shy of 8,000 to just over 9,000 in the case of Northern Ireland.

The number of Scottish students at English universities did not grow. 4,840 Scottish students attended English universities in 2008-09; 4,255 attended in 2015-16.  And just to be clear, there isn’t a peculiar effect of declining number of eligible Scottish students: the number of Scottish students attending Scottish universities grew from about 84,000 to about 94,000 over the same period.

So it seems that tuition fees do not cause increased participation. The growth in English students can be explained by the availability of places: the cap on recruitment was removed in the couple of years following 2012, giving universities an incentive to recruit as many students as they wished. But if students could study in their home country for free, as in the case of Scotland, they were immune to the charms and marketing persuasions of English universities.

So when the debate plays out, be careful to spot when correlation (growth in student numbers in England) elides into claims of causation. The evidence is that tuition fees do not cause a growth in student numbers.

Widening participation - what do the data really say?

Earlier this month HEFCE published a monitoring report on the Student Opportunity Allocation and National Scholarship Programme for 2014-15, which contained some fascinating data on spend on widening participation by English universities and HEIs. Included was a table and graph showing how annual spend on WP had increased between 2010-11 and 2014-15 by over £150m: a good news story, surely.

Here’s the data that HEFCE presented: I’ve put it in a table rather than the graph on page 11 of the report, to make it easier to compare. It’s separated into categories; these have changed over time, with some categories added, and a miscellaneous category lost – they are the cells in the table with nothing in them. Note also that the early years’ don’t add up, and by more than just rounding errors. Consistent data collection on WP was in its infancy at this point, so some errors aren’t too surprising.

	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15
Outreach work with Schools and young people	82.7	67.2	108.1	122.2	124.7
Outreach work with communities and adults	31.2	28.9	32.3	34.4	35.5
Outreach work with disabled students			4.2	5.7	6.3
Strategic partnerships with schools					8.1
Support for current students (academic and pastoral)	435.2	444.2	425.1	434.2	447.0
Support for disabled students	40.5	49.9	47.5	48.4	55.6
Support for progression into employment or pg study	17.1	19	40.9	59.2	68.9
Support for progression of disabled students				4.9	5.2
WP staffing and administration	78.8	70.5	84.1	93.4	90.8
Other	2.9	0.9	0.8
Total	690.7	681.6	743.0	802.5	842.2

So it looks like, across the board, universities are spending more on widening participation. Hooray!

But hang on a minute, what about inflation? The data HEFCE report look like they are cash sums. What is it in real terms?

I calculated inflation to match University reporting years using ONS CPI data. Although inflation isn’t much now, it was higher in this period – 4.0% in 2010-11, 3.6% the following year, for instance. When the data is presented at 2010-11 constant prices, this is what the table looks like:

	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15
Outreach work with Schools and young people	82.7	64.9	101.6	112.7	114.6
Outreach work with communities and adults	31.2	27.9	30.4	31.7	32.6
Outreach work with disabled students			3.9	5.3	5.8
Strategic partnerships with schools					7.4
Support for current students (academic and pastoral)	435.2	428.8	399.5	400.5	410.6
Support for disabled students	40.5	48.2	44.6	44.6	51.1
Support for progression into employment or pg study	17.1	18.3	38.4	54.6	63.3
Support for progression of disabled students				4.5	4.8
WP staffing and administration	78.8	68.1	79.0	86.1	83.4
Other	2.9	0.9	0.8
Total	690.7	657.9	698.3	740.2	773.7

Now some real patterns start to emerge.

Three of the categories have seen real increases: outreach work with schools and young people; support for disabled students; and support for progression from HE into employment or postgraduate study.  Spend on outreach work with communities and adults, and WP staffing costs, have stayed pretty constant. And spend on academic and pastoral support for current students has fallen.

It seems to me that spending on support for current students – academic and pastoral – is also related to the number of students. Over the period the HE sector has grown. It’s possible to identify the total number of UK-domiciled undergraduates at English universities, so that spend per student can be calculated.

Support for current students	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15
Spend in 2010-11 prices (£m)	£435.2m	£428.8m	£399.5m	£400.5m	£410.6m
UK domiciled students	873,910	919,990	915,710	928,365	929,200
Spend per student, 2010-11 prices (£)	£498	£483	£464	£468	£481

The data shows that per student, spend on academic and pastoral support has reduced from £498 in 2010-11 to £481 in 2014-15.

So in conclusion, we see that rather than spend increasing in all categories, there’s actually been a focus on outreach with schools, support for students with disabilities and with post-HE progression. These are things which make a big difference to life-chances, and that’s what it’s all about.

Does this mean that HEFCE wasn’t being accurate?  I think that would be going too far, but it’s always worth looking at data carefully to see what it really means, and what it really says. If spend per student on actual support is really declining, not increasing, isn’t that worth knowing? 

A curate's egg

Higher Education Minister Jo Johnson’s speech to Universities UK this morning presages an interesting few months. He set the scene for a forthcoming green paper, with four broad themes.

Firstly, teaching excellence. The idea of a Teaching Excellence Framework was set out in July; we now know a bit more, but I’m not certain that BIS have a clear idea yet. On the one hand, they know their target: it’s the idea of students’ workload, with the Minister comparing a busy engineering student at Bristol with a drop-out humanities student at ‘a prestigious London university’.  And there’s the notion of a disengagement contract.

The Minister quotes Palfreyman and Tapper; it’s worth looking at the full quote (from Reshaping the University: the Rise of the Regulated Market in Higher Education):

The last item paints a grim picture indeed of ‘limited learning on college campuses’ based on an extensive research project funded by the US Social Science Research Council (this is not some hysterical polemic to be brushed aside by the HE establishment): students’ ‘academic effort has dramatically declined in recent decades’ from some 40 hours per week in the 1960s to about 27 in the 2000s, and the ‘faculty cultures and orientations’ of ‘the college professoriate’ has much to answer for, since they have struck a ‘disengagement contract’ with their students (along the lines of ‘I don’t want to have to set and mark much by way of essays and assignments which would be a distraction from my research, and you don’t want to do coursework that would distract you from partying: so we’ll award you the degree as the hoped-for job ticket in return for compliance with minimal academic requirements and due receipt of fees’; and on the Party Pathway through HE as some HEIs come to resemble country clubs see Armstrong and Hamilton 2013).

The words quoted by the minister are italicised; the whole sentence shows that the authors were describing a US study of a US issue. There may well be issues with teaching in UK universities, but I’m not sure that it’s right to raise the temperature by scare stories from across the Atlantic. And increasing the marketization of HE is precisely moving us towards a US model, not away from it.

That aside, there’s also a little bit of muddle between what they’re seeking to encourage. There’s speak of excellence in teaching, assessment, feedback and employment skills. From students being busy, and the Minister’s recollections of university life (Oxford, Balliol, Modern History) we also get an implicit elision to contact hours. So do we care about students being busy, or being in the classroom? They’re not the same thing.

And there’s an emphasis on information to applicants so they can see what they get (presumably KIS hasn’t done the trick). It’ll be good to see what this actually looks like when the Green paper is published; but there’s also a clarity that it’ll matter. Success in TEF will enable a university to increase its £9k fee in line with inflation. Ouch!

Second up is Widening Participation. The Minister has two issues in his sights: participation by black and minority ethnic students with a Caribbean background, and participation by white British boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. Participation by both of these groups is low, and I think that the focus is spot on in this regard. And there’s talk of better data to enable this to be understood (be still my beating heart!)

Third up, a blast form the past. Having spotted that alternative providers need validation to be able to award degrees, and that this presents a potential conflict of interest, there’ll be a consultation on ‘alternative options for new providers if they do not want to go down the current validation route’. Which sounds an awful lot like the return of the CNAA. The old Gray’s Inn Road building looks like rental office space now – I wonder if that could be used …

Parts of the speech are excellent

And finally, a level playing field. There’s a recognition that the current regulatory environment is complicated, with different levels of scrutiny for different types of provider, and, now that HEFCE funds universities less and students themselves fund more, a more limited range of sanctions are available to regulators. If you only have a nuclear option, you never use it, which isn’t good for regulation. Wales has got this a bit better – by having HEFCW oversee access agreements, there’s a more nuanced approach possible. I wouldn’t be surprised if HEFCE and OFFA went the same way.

Another aspect of a level playing field is recognising that entry to the market implies the possibility of exit from the market, and the promise of consultation on ‘measures to require all providers to have protection measures in place so that students who benefit from greater choice and diversity do not lose out in the event of provider failure’. An insurance bond scheme for universities? It’s an idea from the travel market, but the costs of securing provision elsewhere would be potentially large: I’ll be interested to see how the economics of this play out.

So lots to come, and some good and necessary issues flagged, but there’s still woolly and ideological thinking in there.

Fair access?

There’s a fascinating pair of stories on the BBC Education website today.

Firstly, university access, and the release by OFFA of details of access agreements for 2016-17. Access agreements are the documents which set out what resources English universities will commit, from their tuition fee income, to support access by students from socially under-represented groups to higher education. There’s lots of data in the report (pdf file), about which perhaps I’ll post another time, but for now what caught my eye was the spin in the reporting:

“Universities agree to take more disadvantaged students” (my emphasis). 

As if the reason for disproportionately low participation rates amongst some social groups was all to do with universities’ willingness to admit students and not to do with a myriad other factors.

And the second story: that the average cost of school-age private education in the UK (that is, the fourteen years from ages 5 to 18) is £286k and, if on a boarding basis, £468k. By my reckoning this makes £20k plus per year or, at the boarding rate, £33k per year. So, parents who send their children to private schools think that the investment is well worth it, and they spend a lot of money on it too.

There’s all sorts of trails to follow from this. One is about class sizes and contact hours: private schools do well in part because they have smaller class sizes – the pupils get more attention from their teachers, and hence do better. At a cost of £20k per year. Compare the pressure on contact hours for universities where fees are set at a maximum of £9k per year. I can do the maths, and it doesn’t surprise me that universities are feeling the pinch a little – although £9k per year feels a lot for a young adult to take on as their first financial obligation in life, it isn’t much compared to the amounts parents are willing to spend on their children’s behalf.

Another is about how to address widening participation. By and large universities admit on the basis of prior educational attainment. Better A-levels get you into a better university. If you want to increase participation from deprived social backgrounds, invest in the schooling – more teachers, better equipment. It’ll help get better outcomes for the children. More of whom can then get into university.

Just your average students

And if you want to think about raising their aspiration to go to university? Rather than beat up universities, I think a better place to start is asking why society enables some parents to buy their children a brighter future, and how does the dominance of certain social groups in our society persist. The Bullingdon Club of the 1980’s is ruling the country now, and I’d be astonished if the rulers of 30 years’ time weren’t about to enrol in Oxford and Cambridge, having come from the better private schools.