New universities are in the government 's sights?

[mids2019]

www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/20/ofs-publishes-plans-to-punish-english-universities-for-poor-value-for-money

The government plans to penalise universities whose courses are "poor value for money' . Won't this disproportionately effect newer universities and by extension students from poorer backgrounds? Are we starting to see the end of social mobility being extended through education?

Or.....is this a sensible approach to prevent students wasting time and money?

DD was offered a place on one of these courses that's been mentioned in a different article as being particularly bad - Bakery and Patisserie Technology at UCB. She wanted to do food science - and who wouldn't want to study chocolate and cake for three years, if you're told it's a perfectly acceptable degree.

So I think it's the right thing to do - if industry isn't accepting of the qualification, students like my DD, who fit all the widening participation criteria, can be very easily misled into taking something that is not worthwhile.

DD decided to take an industry recognised food science and technology course elsewhere in the end, but there are lots that wouldn't even consider that.

A truly abysmal and shocking plan

It will undoubtedly affect those institutions who do the heavy lifting in terms of social mobility.

Effectively unis will have to choose whether or not to take the risk on their poorer, older, blacker applicants.

It's entirely possible some regions could end up with no HE provision at all - so much for levelling up.

I can see both sides here. I work in a role where I meet a lot of families and I happen to work in a relatively deprived area with pockets of affluence. Over the years I have seen far too many young people with poor A levels become the first in the family to go to uni (which is hugely exciting and important for them) do a degree at a less-well-regarded uni, often with insufficient support for a student who scraped Ds at A level (and I've occasionally seen examples of essays etc at those units being marked at 2:2 or similar which would have barely scraped a pass in my children's year 9 class for example), and then return home with zero increased opportunities in terms of work/employment/income.
I have seen students from the same backgrounds get good jobs too - don't get me wrong - but far more frequently these are students who have managed C's at A level and gone to unis higher up the rankings.
I think that there are too many families being hoodwinked into the notion that a degree is a degree is a degree and their child is getting into huge amounts of debt for a definite future return. It's often not the case.
On the other hand I do accept that many poorer students are only going to be able to attend close to where they live and that, for some of them, it will absolutely be the route out of poverty that they are looking for - but at some institutions these are sadly going to be few and far between.
I don't know what the answer is but I do think that some people are being badly served by pushing them into getting a poor degree from a poor uni. I would improve the bursary system so that truly talented youngsters from impoverished backgrounds really could go to great universities and afford to live and where people who aren't going to benefit from their degree just don't go to uni and aren't expected to do so (from any social background).
I think I'm suggesting going back to the 80s!

The proposal is not looking at standards of degree quality though. It doesn't care if year 9 standard essays are good enough for a 2:2 - there is no judgement of quality at all. Simply do enough students stay to the end and go into a graduate level job (and how many of those are there for students in the NE compared to London?) or further study.

@titchy

The proposal is not looking at standards of degree quality though. It doesn't care if year 9 standard essays are good enough for a 2:2 - there is no judgement of quality at all. Simply do enough students stay to the end and go into a graduate level job (and how many of those are there for students in the NE compared to London?) or further study.

Ok. So they're using unhelpful metrics and assuming they are a proxy measure of quality. That clearly is not good but it's typical of this government's short-hand blinkered approach to most things...

I can see both sides in this debate and one question I have is why employers aren't considering applicants from some of the newer universities? It may be the case that the degree quality may not be great but also simply the fact that employers have not traditionally looked at these universites? A course could actually be rigorous but if not an employer's radar the student may struggle.

The idea of rating courses on the proportion of graduates getting 'graduate jobs' could really hurt the newer universities as I am guessing the first pick of those jobs go to RG uni graduates.

I think the government policy overall is to bring back more vocational qualifications, apprenticeships etc for working class students for certain sectors and reserve higher education to the middle classes on the whole by reducing access.

The idea of rating courses on the proportion of graduates getting 'graduate jobs' could really hurt the newer universities as I am guessing the first pick of those jobs go to RG uni graduates.

The gaps between black graduate employment and white graduate employment, and disabled v non-disabled, high deprivation background v low, is far wider than RG vs non-RG.

But apparently if black or visually impaired students can't get a foothold in the graduate labour market it'll be the fault of the universities they went to rather than the bias of employers.

A friends Ds applied for the bakery and patisserie tech degree. He is currently on a very similar degree elsewhere.

He has known fir a young age that he wants to specialise in patisserie. I actually think that type of degree is a good thing if they are industry linked.

A degree that often gets a lot of flak as being Mickey Mouse is Theme Park Managment at my local Uni. Nothing about the fact a massive local theme park identified a lack of training/suitable graduates and partnered with the university. Students on the Visitor Attraction & Resort Managment degree get 20 weeks PAID placement and an excellent graduate employment rate.

Industry linked degree courses often have excellent prospects. It is true. But the metrics should be set so that is recognised.

They need to target the ones that provide few skills and no prospects. Ie a waste of £27,000+

Universities are all about income generation now (sadly), so they should absolutely be scrutinised like any other business selling something to the public.

@Ohsugarhoneyicetea

Universities are all about income generation now (sadly), so they should absolutely be scrutinised like any other business selling something to the public.

Eh? Unis don't make profits you know....

And no one is against being scrutinised. People are just pointing out that the not so unintended consequences of using these specific metrics as a proxy for quality (which they're not) is catastrophic for social mobility.

There was (or is) an element of bias by recruiters (especially for competitive roles). A lot of roles do not specify a particular degree (approximately 80%?) and it seems a lot of jobs go to generic degree holders from RG universities rather than those who hold possibly more role specific degrees from the newer universities. I went to an RG uni with someone who studied American History who gained a job with KPMG and I wonder how many financial grads from the newer universities would have really liked that opportunity?

Newer uni s do offer very good specific vocational degrees e.g. in patisseries and theme management but I think the government s overall strategy is to make these courses non degree level and link them more to apprenticeships or other vocational quaifications.

There is considerable hidden pressure to remove such recruiting practice as 'university blindness' in the public sector from certain quarters. Widening participation isn't universally popular.

A more general question should be is how do you convince employers to recruit grads from newer universities (especially high profile employers). I know someone who works in careers at a non RG uni and he is frustrated by employer's attitudes but gains pleasure when he sees graduates from his uni finally manage to get high profile/status jobs.

This is probably over-simplistic but if I was an employer looking for "graduates" (not in a specific field) for a professional role I would probably want the one that I thought was likely to be the most intelligent.
And if I knew one course required CCC and another required AAA I'd probably go for the one requiring the higher grades.
Is that not what most people would do?
I totally accept that there is bias in the system and that people from different ethnicities etc are treated unfairly in recruitment (even when they're graduates from identical institutions) BUT when people are looking at graduates from different unis they're not comparing like with like? Am I missing something?

@Thelastbattle

Are employers looking for the most intelligent candidate or the best suited for the job? I think the two aren't necessarily the same.

Additionally from your reasoning should employers be purely looking at A levels (or giving additional emphasis to them)?

To judge the 'calibre' of a graduate simply from the A level tariff of entrance is in itself simplistic as it does not take into such things as requirement changes for clearing.

In addition it could be argued that A levels themselves do not fully reflect ability as socio-economic conditions as well as school environment come into play.

The problem with these debates is that in theory universities should offer degrees with similar rigour but in reality people have their own perceptions of degree worth.

Employers often state a 2:1 or first as an entrance criterion but actually don't state a university so again in theory that 1st from Bolton is equivalent to that 1st from Oxford (in reality of course it doesn't work like this)

I think we need employers to be more transparent about how they recruit and an honesty if university is being used a filter. We would then get a clearer picture why certain universities do not have the best employment figures and lower graduate earnings.

@mids2019
Yes you're right.
Both my dh and I work in sectors where our qualifications are literally the same wherever we get them (rather like nursing or social work I guess) so we've never been in a position to be looking for employees where this comes into play.
I think that, as I said above, there are too many people who do believe that a first from Bolton does equate to a first from Oxford and that there should be more transparency for both parents and students (and that that's probably needed more amongst communities where there isn't a tradition of people attending uni). On the other hand a first from Oxford wouldn't be particularly more impressive than, say, a first from Bath or Bristol so it is clear that there is a hierarchy of unis.
I agree it would be really good if employers were more transparent. I suspect in reality many of them would say they don't filter by such things but are far more subjective than that - which means that they might be filtering by such things either subconsciously or in a "your face fits" kind of way.

I mean, the article explicitly says that the review is unlikely to affect most "mainstream" universities, which would include post-92 ones, at all, and will target mostly "private and alternative" provision.

And if a course has very high dropout rates, it seems reasonable to investigate why.

@Thelastbattle

Difficult isn't it?

I think you could add medicine and pharmacy to the list of degree types where institution doesn't have much of a bearing.

In the public sector there is an extension of this philosophy to other careers and to be honest it isn't entirely uncontroversial. We recruit by being 'university blind' for a scientific degree (a 2:1 or 1st gets you shortlisted no matter the university and the scoring from interview does not consider university). I have interviewed where a candidate mentioned rowing at a Cambridge college was a good leadership skill but the fact she attended Cambridge was immaterial. There are those in our profession that disagree that this shouldn't be a consideration.

In some sense therefore there is enforced equality of degrees for entrance to my profession but as said before it is not universally popular.

The question whether our profession necessarily is disavantaged by this policy is open to debate.

I think there is a hidden view that degree equivalence does not reward students at the more elite end of the HE spectrum and so the newer universities are targeted by government when it comes to funding etc

@ZoeTheThornyDevil

That is true but it is the direction of travel I would be concerned about. The teaching gradings of bronze, silver and gold will make little difference to degree perception. If the university of Bolton has a gold standard as well as Oxford for a given subject you still won't argue that is degree quality equivalence. However the ratings will be a sword of Damocles for some if the newer universities and potentially a means to pressurise these universities to drop courses.

It's a bit like OFSTED where leafy comps in middle class areas come out with outstanding grades but struggling inner city comps often are graded lower adding pressure on teaching staff as well as adding an unwanted label to a challenging school.

Tbh, I used to be a lecturer at a post-92 on a degree programme with shocking employability. And really low academic standards. Seriously, many of them ended up going to FE college afterwards to do level 2 and 3 qualifications to get very poorly paid jobs. Loads.

It was utterly demoralising feeling that it was a total waste of everyone’s time. After several years of fighting to try to improve standards (against colleagues who had no experience of HE beyond the degree programme they worked on, no willingness to improve things, and a bums on seats ethos across the university), I was just so fed up and burnt out that I left HE entirely.

There are some atrociously bad degrees out there. And it is utterly immoral that these disproportionately end up being the degrees that no one ever pays any fees back for taking. For so many reasons.

I really object to the idea that these kind of poor degrees are acceptable for young people from deprived backgrounds. Or the assumption that you have to have low standards if your students come from more deprived backgrounds (which so many of my colleagues did). If anything, I think we should work much harder to give people who haven’t been born into a whole set of cultural capital and other advantages the best degrees we can. They deserve that.

Equally, I think that 95% of the students who took the programme I worked on should have been told to go and get any job they can, and choose to go to university when they knew why they wanted to go and were in a place to make the most of that. They were so often not even interested in the subject (or studying anything), they just went to university because everyone told them that’s what they should be doing after school.

It was like teaching bottom set Y9. And awful for the students who were trying to make the most of it and do well. Seriously, they’d all hide the fact they’d done any work because they’d be mocked as ‘swots’ for actually reading anything or trying.

Just awful. All round. And unacceptable. These kids only get one chance at HE funding. They shouldn’t be wasting it like this - even if the fact that it makes them less employable than they were before they started means they’ll probably never have to pay any of it back. They could have had a chance to use the funding at 25 or 30 or something when they’d figured out what they wanted and were able to make the most of it. And they could have taken the kind of high quality course that they deserved.

It used to anger me so much that so many people in that university had such low expectations of working class students. And were happy to keep lowering standards because unchallenged students who were given high marks for atrociously poor work stayed the course and gave positive scores on the NSS. I suspect many of them felt very differently about that years later when the were working in minimum wage jobs they could have gotten straight out of school. They deserved better.

Before I ended up there (for complex family reasons) I taught for many years on extremely high quality programmes at 2 different universities (one is a top 20 in the world university 🤣).

So I do absolutely know that the standards were lower. As was the quality of the content. They were being taught by people who just didn’t have the depth of expertise. And in many cases didn’t realise they didn’t.

I had to learn to mark at the new university by thinking: what would I give this? And then adding at least 20 marks.

I had colleagues telling me I shouldn’t be expecting final year undergraduates to read journal articles because they were too hard. Those same colleagues would have passed literally anything the students handed in - and given a 2:i in the final year because that’s what the students wanted.

I sat in moderation meetings where course leaders said: oh we’ve just decided to pass everyone. I know this essay probably should get 25 but we’re going to give it 40 anyway. And other meetings where no one had marked anonymously and they cherry picked essays from students they liked and said: ‘oh she’s so lovely, see if you can find another 5 marks in there’. And then just changed that individual mark.

It was genuinely atrocious and unacceptable. It’s a scandal that public funds are used to pay for this stuff.

@BurntToastAgain
You have explained very clearly why the students at some universities will struggle to get grad jobs. They are simply not well educated enough to pass the selection tests if they compete against AAA type students and have not had a rigorous degree course. Employers don’t trust some university degrees.

These students never pay for their degrees so they cost the rest of us money but crucially they are mis-sold the degree. It won’t do what it says on the tin. As a result, there isn’t social mobility for many. It’s an illusion. They don’t get a grad job and they are no better off! Obviously that’s not everyone but it’s now 50% of grads. They needed far better advice pre A level and university.

Employers need to employ the best they can get for their companies. They are not in the business of giving jobs to people who are demonstrably less able than very many others who have applied. Why would anyone do this? You would expect an employer to sift applicants. How will they do this? They must look at info about the candidate. You can remove university from the criteria but unfortunately employers tend to set tests that sort out the higher achievers and best fit for the jobs. Lots of grads don’t have relevant work experience and scattergun applications too, so better careers advice is needed.

It is therefore not an aid to social mobility or even kind to keep such courses going. Grad employment isn’t a bad measure. What did the student think they were going to do afterwards if it was not a grad job? Surely this was the expectation? It would be far better to move to employment at 18 and train on the job.

@BurntToastAgain those are exactly the students I was talking about earlier. Often their families have genuinely sacrificed for this opportunity for their children and truly believe that this is an amazing route out of puberty for them - but the kind if course you are describing is so not that. It used to make me so cross for them. (And these were students that probably weren't as lazy as you're describing but simply didn't have the skillset and probably the ability to develop the skillset that they would have needed to get a degree elsewhere).
I'm not a hater of Tony Blair generally (unlike many others!) but I think the way his government widened access to higher education was a travesty really - and I am so so supportive of widening access in the proper sense (so I massively approve of the WP programmes for medicine etc) but the "80% of people should have a degree" rhetoric is actively harmful (except to those with an investment in the student loans company)..

I haven't read the full thread but I kind of agree with this. A degree is not a necessity for all roles and doesn't increase job prospected for all. Academic study is not suited to all but this shouldn't mean you can't succeed or get any meaningful qualifications. There needs to be other career paths such as apprenticeships.

In addition I think if DC can't be earning more than the government threshold for paying pack their student loan- then why is the government funding the degree?

I think there is a baby and bathwater situation here. Posters have passionately demonstrated that some university courses are simply poor and do not serve their students.

However the problem is that these poor courses tarnish the image of presumably the newer universities that offer them and that should be a concern.

I think the newer universities could be a factor in improving social mobility and can give often working class students a chance of gaining a degree and furthering their careers.

The concept of employer trust is important and therefore it is imperative courses where students are effectively being exploited have to be condemned.

Many with degrees from newer universities do go on to well numerated and fulfilling careers but for this to continue to happen that relationship with employers needs to be maintained

The issue ,and it is unfair, is that employers are not looking at certain universities because if reputation and that needs to be challenged

Lack of confidence in degree awards will result in more companies setting their own tests and to an extent that undermines the degree system in the first place.

The problem for students us that without knowledge of HE there will be those that choose degrees that aren't suitable and perhaps some would be better served with other qualifications.

However having said that newer universities can be exceptional in offering vocation specific degrees and allowing degrees to be acquired by those that may not have had opportunities otherwise.