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?

what happens to those students who worked hard to get to a “top tier” university and end up with a 2.2 when another candidate goes to a “lower tier” university and gets a 2.1. This seems unfair

As was alluded to earlier in the thread, not all 2:1s are equal.

It's not so much what you get as where you got it that counts.

@Dancingdreamer
These days a 2:2 grad is a rare person! Basically they struggle to get into any grad training scheme. A friend’s DC got a 2:2 in maths from Cambridge. Took a year to get a job. Ditto another DC with a 1st from an ex poly in Sociology. I do know which DC is brighter! But the 2:2 was a major handicap!

A 2:2 is too low for many employers grad schemes and masters courses.

Such an interesting thread. My personal opinion is that the number of grads leaving uni and not gaining a grad job is not just down to the universities but a failure of the school system to talk about careers. Some children do not have adults knowledgeable about current careers and how to get into those careers. This leads to poor GCSE choices, which can effectively shut down certain career paths. There is also a romantic notion to go to uni when it maybe better for the individual to secure an apprenticeship instead. I also think that prospective uni students should be given detailed information regarding the outcomes of graduates for their chosen degrees. Maybe this would show the real value of a degree. The current info provided via league tables etc is quite vague.

@TizerorFizz absolutely agree with your post below about different people having different talents.

For those of you who are not aware, there are law apprenticeships as well. Highly competitive though. There was talk of bringing in medicine apprenticeships but I don't see how this would happen without it being even a longer process than the current 5 or 6 years

I feel if there is no prospect of earning above £27K or whatever the threshold for paying back the student loan - a degree is not a good investment. I feel in UK more people go to university for the rite of passage/ experience rather than for the academic value.

An issue in the UK as opposed to say Scandinavian countries is the discrepancies in salaries. In some of those countries a midwife may earn almost as much as a solicitor. Everyone wants to better their prospects / earning capacity and education is seen as key.

@chopc

I agree with a lot of the above. However we have to accept that state paid salaries are paid by all of us. You choose to use a solicitor, by and large,you pay. The midwife is paid via taxation. They are not the same and neither is their length of training. That isn’t to say some people are under valued. It’s also worth remembering that no one thought our nurses and midwife’s were poorly trained pre degree days. I had nurses as friends and in the family and they were no less good at nursing than current degree holders. My DM was a midwife. You trained after your SRN training. You didn’t start from scratch on a degree. A very good friend trained midwives and they were not university lecturers. Midwife Tutors. I’m not convinced anyone received a poor training this way but now a profession must have degree holders to be considered a profession.

I think apprenticeships are a mixed bag. The degree ones are very competitive. Post A level: I suspect not enough to go round. I think it’s at this level where the huge boost should be. Working, training on the job and studying should be an easy option to choose and it should be available. This route took people like me! I ended up with professional qualifications and I went to Colleges with many others who took a slower route. We all seemed valued by our employers and opportunities opened up in the same way they did for degree holders. I feel we could usefully return to this model. At least it has a “degree “ of honesty about it!

I think earnings post degree for a lot of courses could be used. However arts courses could be difficult to judge. I think percentage doing grad work might be useful too. We have to think about what the country should pay for and whether degrees are the best way forward for the CCC type young person.

I had nurses as friends and in the family and they were no less good at nursing than current degree holders. My DM was a midwife. You trained after your SRN training. You didn’t start from scratch on a degree. A very good friend trained midwives and they were not university lecturers. Midwife Tutors. I’m not convinced anyone received a poor training this way but now a profession must have degree holders to be considered a profession.

This is absolutely right. A close family member is a physio who now trains student physios. It used to be a diploma – still 3 years' training like current degrees but mostly in hospitals and more akin to an apprenticeship in terms of on-the-job training.

Family member does not think turning it into a more academic degree has in any way led to an improvement in standards of physios but does prevent some DCs who might have been excellent at the job getting onto a degree-level course.

The points about degree apprenticeships based in a work placed environment and general interleaving work and study are interesting.

We have always had such options but there seems to be a more of a focus on such learning.

The idea of the 3 year degree post A level is embedded in our society but does this need to change to some extent?

One open question I have from these discussions is do you wish students to aspire to the highest grades possible and what is their motivation for doing so (apart from personal pride)?

Someone mentioned above (correctly) that as long as you can pay or obtain a master's student loan (or have a law firm to sponsor you or parent) you can do the law professional courses you do after your first degree. The bottle neck for careers is then obtaining your two years of qualifying work training (training contract) for solicitors and passing the professional exams - about 50 - 60% failure rate.

However the bigger law firms recruit people during their first degree for a few years ahead. Therefore they want to find people who are very likely to be able to pass the professional exams and if people fail they then lose their future job/training contract in many cases - even if they just fail one subject and pass on a resit.

I was probably the one to side track us into legal careers. I read law and loved it and still do all these years on. My lawyer daughters did a different subject first for their degree.

i think my mother was an excellent primary school teacher after her 2 years residential teacher training (living away from home helps gain people independence, self confidence etc) Cert Ed for teaching 5 and 6 year olds (which was the years she taught) without a degree. I doubt there is much chance teaching will return to that system however even for those teaching 5 year olds. I also think the school exams were harder then - most people did not pass them and yo uhad to pass every subject for "school certificate" (I still have my mother's 1940s results in those - she had to redo a whole year because she failed one subject first time round at school for example at the state grammar school where she went; later we brought in CSEs and O levels - easy and hard respectively and in my school we were forced to do CSE maths and English even if also doing O levels in them in case we failed the O level and some girls just did CSEs as they were so much easier - I suspect O level is probably about AS level standard today.

in my school we were forced to do CSE maths and English even if also doing O levels in them in case we failed the O

It was the same at my school. The CSE papers were so easy it was a bit of a joke. Particularly the maths. I wouldn't be surprised if I scored 100%. I struggled a bit with the O as calculus was never my strong point.

@Xenia
My grammar absolutely did not offer CSEs. You either got the O level or didn’t. Plenty only got 3 or 4 O levels: a couple of people I know got 1.

I think students absolutely should aspire to the best grades they can get. I think it’s been established that unconditional offers from unis encourage coasting. I don’t think we need this to expand any further!

If DC try their best, that’s absolutely fine. We do have to accept that some DC really would be better off working and training. Lots of apprenticeships go to retraining adults who have already earned good money for years. They often have first degrees. Yet they get degree apprenticeships over 18 year olds. If we want 18 year olds to thrive, they need to be prioritised. Opportunities need to be opened up for them and not necessarily career changers. So amend the apprenticeship scheme. Cull poor performing courses at universities and re establish colleges of higher education to offer HND/HNC type courses as well as degrees (as was offered by polytechnics). These interim courses can lead to a degree or lead to professional qualifications. I do think we can educate everyone for a job but we still need the arts.

I spent many years sifting CV's whilst recruiting for finance sector trainee roles and then had to help train/mentor the applicants who were successful at interview. We didn't just recruit graduates, we also took on some 18 year olds with

I found from experience that, providing they had A Level Maths ( or at the very least, top GCSE grade in Maths/Further Maths), a candidate with a non-relevant degree from a RG Uni almost always coped better with the academic rigour of the post grad qualification they'd be training for alongside working full time than someone with a 2.1 in Business/Accounting/Finance etc from a post 1992 Uni.

A year or so ago, a friend still in the sector was persuaded that they should support their local Uni when recruiting and hired someone with a 2.1 in Accounting & Finance + a Masters in something similar, both awarded by that local, post 1992 Uni.
The other successful candidate hired at the same time was someone from the local area who had done 2 years of a pure science degree at a RG Uni but then dropped out as he realised it wasn't what he wanted and spending a year in industry plus a final year back at Uni was just not for him, particularly as he'd found he could apply for some training roles without a degree but which still led to a post grad level qualification and good career.

The RG uni drop out is apparently passing the professional exams with ease and impressing staff in the office with his ability to pick things up quickly, research matters for himself. As she says, I knew he'd be bright because of Uni/Course he'd managed to obtain a place at in the first place. He just didn't make the right choice at the age of 18.

The 2:1 + masters candidate struggles a lot of the time and is very unlikely to be offered a post qualification position, although friend is doubtful that he'll ever attain the professional qualification required. He initially had a bit of a superiority complex over his stable mate (the Uni drop out) but that vanished after their respective performances in the first level of professional exams became known.

If employers are obliged to recruit blind to the Uni which awarded the degree then I suspect a whole raft of evaluation testing will be utilised to eliminate weaker candidates no matter where they studied and no doubt there'll be a thriving industry in helping people perform well in those tests. Perhaps Unis will find they need to offer this instead of all the Masters being undertaken these days.

@littlegreenalien
It’s difficult to do well in the tests if they are well designed even with coaching! People might be duped to pay of course!

I’m always flamed for saying a masters doesn’t equal suitability for work. It indicates a great interest in a small area. It doesn’t indicate soft skills, wider intelligence or ability to train further in the work place. We probably need to understand that employers will sift rigorously by other tests, and even if they don’t know the university, they will always want to get best fit for their organisations.

DH wouldn’t be persuaded to take anyone local if they were not good enough. They have tested for decades.

I agree. That is why a fair later test such as a professional examination can be a good filter.

On masters it will depend on the subject but a masters sometimes means candidate too lazy to job search during their degree who is filling in a year pointlessly or who did not have a good degree nor A levels and is trying to make up for it by one year in an institution which they could never have got into for a first degree but can for a masters.

@Xenia
I said that about a masters - I think very many students have done a masters because they haven’t got jobs as an undergrad. Not all of course and some news them. Others are just filling in time and then still don’t get jobs.

I think a Masters undertaken during the pandemic might be taken differently. Many employers simply didn't have the intake of graduates they would have done previously so a Masters to fill in a year......maybe not a bad idea.

I'm a lecture in a Post-92 uni and I'm a bit shocked by some of the comments here. I've previously taught at RG and indeed non-RG high tariff institutions, as have most of.my colleagues, and my UG degree was from Cambridge. Our external examiners are from high-ranked RG and other institutions and I would absolutely rank our provision as every bit as good as any RG or Oxbridge course. In fact, depending on the direction a student wanted to go in they might be better with us than Oxbridge as the Oxford and Cambridge versions of our subject are very theory-heavy while we teach a LOT of practice. The difference is that Oxbridge grads tend to go into non-discipline specific jobs with high pay (yup, including law...), whereas ours go into the poorly paid.public sevtor. At the moment students have that choice - if we are hounded out of existence because our intake has less good a-level results there will be a (further!) skills shortage in our area and young people will have less choice all round!

Lots of reasons to do a Masters. Yes, it might be because the student can't think what else to do, or has tried to get a graduate job and hasn't been able to.

It might also be out of a desire to study some aspect of their subject in greater depth, or because they want to change direction slightly from the career path suggested by their first degree, or they might have looked at a particular career path and seen that further academic qualifications will be required at some point, or they might wish to conduct some original research, or they might just have loved their subject so much they want to study it for a bit longer.

Of course, professional qualification might be more relevant, and of more use, but it's very dismissive to assume that many students undertaking a Masters are too lazy to do anything else. It is just as likely to be a proactive decision.

Interesting and sobering read. In terms of social mobility and giving poor students the best possible chance, is there anything universities can do when students with poorer grades and lack of cultural capital join at 18?
What can be taught at this point, if they've gone to a shit school, got poor grades and have a defeatist 'no can do' attitude? Is it always too late or are there teaching methods to catch these guys?

@QueenRefusenik
I would argue quite strongly that some people in public service at local level need to be better educated. Teachers in some schools and SLT are not good enough. Hospitals have failed. Just look at the police and social services. I don’t get the mantra that you must stay local and then aim low. Whatever happened to ambition? Lots of students would be better off not doing the degrees but learning practical skills on the job. I’m sorry but post 92 being as good as Oxbridge? That’s a disastrous comparison and presumably right out of the marketing manual to get bums on seats.

@GingerWithMustard
Why should the universities have students with poor grades in the first place? Surely the answer is foundation courses, HND and similar. Learn a bit more and work up to degree level. This used to work but we abandoned it. We don’t abandon young people but we do insist on courses pre degree. Then they might actually get a job. We have huge numbers who don’t right now. What a waste that is!

What can be taught at this point, if they've gone to a shit school, got poor grades and have a defeatist 'no can do' attitude? Is it always too late or are there teaching methods to catch these guys?

I honestly think these sort of young people would do better to go into the workplace and given the chance to work their way up if they prove themselves. Often, young people like that mature quite quickly when given a chance to prove themselves at an actual job, and surrounded by older adults who won't put up with any immature behaviour or lackadaisical work ethic. Allowing them into a lower-tier uni with poor A-level grades, on an undemanding course, surrounded by others like them (I'm thinking of the type of student described upthread, who sit talking and doing each other's hair), just prolongs their childhood in my view.

Put them in an environment where they have older people around them, interacting either as equals or in senior positions, can lead them to mature quickly and really boost their self-esteem. They feel they are worth something, they develop soft skills quickly, they can gain skills which can vary from very general ones needed to work in many work environments (eg the ability to answer the phone professionally, good customer service), to very practical skillls needed for that sector. Often they have lots to offer to their older colleagues too.

Organisations can quickly suss out which of those young people have potential, and can select them for fast track training etc. And it works both ways. Young people can suss out that that particular sector is maybe not for them, and can switch without any financial outlay, unlike now, where we expect 18 year olds to basically decide what job they want to do for the rest of their working life. Not much hope of changing careers later in your working life when you have used your one chance of HE funding at 18 when you felt pressured to pick a path almost from mid air by your sixth form tutor.

I have a relative who works as a professional in allied healthcare in the NHS. She started years ago on the bottom rung, after dropping out of a non-healthcare course at uni. It was all on the job training, and then later on day release to gain a degree in that area. She was able to rise through the ranks and is now highly skilled in a specialised area with a professional qualification. What happened since she started was that someone in their wisdom decided that the job should become degree entry only. Half of 18 year olds wouldn't even be aware that that healthcare role existed, never mind planning to do a degree in it. So I'm not quite sure who the young people are who are so focussed as to apply for that particular specialist degree but my relative says the degree entry system doesn't work as the graduates start with them and basically know nothing at all about how to do the job. They have to train them as if they were an 18 year old straight out of school anyway. So what is the point? They've spent thousands of pounds on their degree, and might decide that the job's not for them anyway once they are doing the job fulltime after graduating. It's absolutely nuts.

This has been a fantastic thread, and I have long thought that we have been heading in the completely wrong direction regarding HE, from 1992 onwards. It was a nice idea, but we have done our young people a disservice. We have created a system where there is a feeling amongst many undergrads is that now even a degree is worth nothing as every Tom, Dick and Harry has one, so a Masters is the thing that you then have to do to get a job after graduating. What happens when every graduate also has a Masters though? Where does it all stop?

Perhaps it's schools' and colleges' fault - or at least the pressure on them to send their pupils off after A-levels and BTECs onto a set path. One box ticked for them, one less pupil of theirs classed as a NEET. Also something to boast about in prospectuses "90% of our students go onto university" etc.......

Ginger, the sobering studies show by age THREE there are children who have had so few words spoken to them their vocabulary never catches up but hopefully that is not so for all. Also there are plenty happy lives lived without being a lawyer on £100k+ a year. My son drives a van - full time PAYE and before that was a postman for 3 years. He will earn £24k or so for life and that is not a bad life - it is different a life from had he made the choices of his 4 lawyer siblings never mind the doctors in the family (my father, uncle, sibling).

What can be done at 18? I would put written and spoken English top of the life, accent, knowledge of words, general knowledge, ability to get on with others, find something in common with them etc. If someone is very bright you can usually tell just by talking to them at how quickly they catch on to ideas, the cut and thrust of their debate whatever their accent or background. Today I randomly thought I would look at the 14 others in my twins Legal Practice Course list. (A post grad course for potential lawyers). One person who seemed to have a more difficult background than some of the others did not spell the name of course correctly. Someone else online today asking about law careers could not write English (and I am sure my posts on MN are full of errors and typos so I am not suggesting I am some kind of perfect guru on that, but helping these people to speak like they may need to speak for that job rather than saying - it is fine to say "haitch" and "you was" does not help them.

We could also make sure we help first year students realise that some employers (such as in law) will want the grade in every single module on your application form even for year 1 subjects so do not slack off in year 1. (You will not gain a first job in law through cultural capital -you need very high exam grades for a start right the way through - even with that there are vast numbers of students with that and a 2/1 and AAB and more in decent traditional A level subjects (not in advanced knitting and PE and never do a law degree if you want to be a lawyer). So even the best of the best face huge competition.

They could give students free sessions in the psychological tests used by some firms to recruit - Watson Glaser tests and help people to think on their feet and debate I suppose. I certainly do not have the right answers . In fact I am probably one of the least successful applicants ever applying to 139 law firms int he last year of my degree and having 25 interviews because getting my first job (in 1982 with 3m unemployed, the worst for 50 years and I was top of my year with law prizes so you can imagine how hard it was for others in that year never mind now).

I think someone alluded to careers advice earlier but can we be surprised if young people are confused. A careers adviser in my opinion will be unwilling to allude to university hierarchies and I don't know if they would be professionally willing to be honest about students' career potential. It is easier to not have the hard conversations and allow unrealistic career ambitions to linger.

There is a whole marketing industry associated with HE aimed at youngsters and universities needs students for financial reasons so this will contnue. No one seems to formally be able to lance the boil of the misconception that all degrees are equal and there is nothing stated from the government that they are not. Graduate jobs are advertised with a a discipline and a degree classification without mentioning institution allowing the fallacy to continue.

@QueenRefusenik

A lot of jobs are not degree specific so do you feel that the chances at a successful job application should be the same for someone having a first from Oxford or the University of Bedford? In theory for a given job that just states a minimum 2:1 or 1st then both applicants would have an equal chance of success of there is no bias towards one or the other university (Given interview performance of course). Is this completely fair?

One argument is that employers should not bias towards any university especially as lower tier universities have a greater proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and therefore recruitment would be potentially discriminatory if that bias was allowed.

Another argument is that the Oxbridge candidate has worked consistently at an extremely high standard throughout their academic career and deserve an advantage for these efforts. A proof that hard work pays off.

Which is the more powerful argument?

If a given recruiter requires someone at least initially who is 'good enough' for a role we could argue we overeducate. For example for my degree (physics) there is actually limited use for quantum mechanics and relativity for the average employer, proficiency seems to a mark of intellect rather than a measure to do an average graduate job where mathematical ability over maybe some basic calculus is not required.

I briefly worked as a VL at a post 92 university. There was (is) a conscious effort to remove the need for good spelling to achieve a high grade in the name of widening participation and decolonising the curriculum. The rationale was that many international students or students from poor backgrounds are disadvantaged due to their lack of English.