Podcasts as academic book promotion

Since the publication of my latest book, Universities Under Fire, I’ve been asked to give a couple interviews with well-known US podcasters. The genre is new to me, but the experiences were interesting, and it was fun attempting to reach different kinds of audience.

First, I found myself in conversation with Andrew Keen, a San Francisco based entrepreneur and author. Andrew’s questions suggested his familiarity with contemporary English higher education wasn’t in-depth, but his enthusiasm more than compensated for any gaps in knowledge.

Shortly afterwards, I spoke to The Curious Man. The curious man is Matt Crawford, a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Matt’s insider understandings of how universities operate allowed for a more informed exchange, and I soon warmed to his values and politics.

Podcasts potentially offer a way for scholars to reach much larger audiences, and to influence folk outside the usual conference circle and seminar series. It’s a challenge, because usually the only people who want to talk to you for an hour about a book you’ve written are fellow academics (and among your peers you can safely assume lots of shared knowledge). But engaging with podcasters is a worthwhile endeavour, and I’m grateful for the opportunities that Andrew and Matt afforded me.

The Tory leadership race shows what a soft target universities have become

This piece was originally published in the Times Higher Education (05.08.22)

When the Conservative Party leadership hopefuls launched their campaigns at the start of July, the focus of one candidate, Kemi Badenoch, seemed different from that of the others. In addition to pledging tax cuts and economic growth, Badenoch used her platform to needle the UK higher education sector, taking potshots at universities’ brainwashing of students and their “pointless” degrees.

“Some universities spend more time indoctrinating social attitudes instead of teaching lifelong skills or how to solve problems,” she told The Sun newspaper on 11 July. The following day, writing for The Spectator, Badenoch expressed that anti-university sentiment in a way that was more coded but no less recognisable: “I’m not the sort of person who you can sideline, silence, or cancel,” she warned.

Badenoch has a reputation for HE baiting. When minister for equalities, in late 2020 she used Black History Month to pivot into an attack on critical race theory (CRT), accusing educators of presenting white privilege as fact to their students and describing CRT as “an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression”.

The rhetoric was powerful, but it was also misleading. CRT is a set of cross-disciplinary tools and methods that emerged in the late 1980s for exploring racial injustices. It involves analysis of social structures, not individual identities.

The problem is that, as academics, we tend not to be very good at explaining our methodologies. Historically, we haven’t needed to because the separation of state and university was always enough to keep politicians’ noses out of our curricula. But those days have gone, and we must now find ways to articulate more clearly and more persuasively the value of our approaches.

In an age of culture wars, all kinds of petty non-stories can be blown up into a headline event if it is politically expedient to do so. Even a vaguely unpatriotic gesture by a small group of students can be seized upon by a government keen to divert voter gaze from its economic and social policy. Once outrage is manufactured, the truth matters little.

The temptation for universities is to look the other way until the news cycles roll on. But news cycles don’t roll on. For a public conditioned into distrusting universities, the idea that academics are secretly radicalising their students through CRT is depressingly plausible. So politicians and media commentators continue to fabricate or exaggerate tales of “wokeness” on campus: biased lecturers, student snowflakes, Mickey Mouse degrees and no-platforming.

A programme of marketisation has compromised universities, leaving them unsure how to rebut criticism like Badenoch’s. Discourses of the public good have been mostly displaced by a narrow, utilitarian focus on value for money. Right-wing governments realised that universities were a block to free-market thinking, so they sought to impose competition as disciplining strategy. Now the sector is losing confidence in its core social purposes.

Pushing back against increasingly populist forms of government isn’t easy. However, it is vital that the anti-university narrative isn’t allowed to take hold uncontested. Evidence of the limits of a quasi-market in higher education is ubiquitous: graduates repay loans for most of their working lives, but the cost to the state remains substantial; institutions spend millions on marketing, but price differentiation remains rare; and despite institutions being ranked in every way imaginable, traditional hierarchies of prestige are arguably stronger than ever.

Yet vice-chancellors remain reluctant to dissent. Many were quick to accept sizeable pay rises when the marketisation project began, seemingly unaware that they were being co-opted by the reformers. Meanwhile, the sector’s representative bodies stubbornly favour strategies of soft power and behind-the-scenes influence over more public confrontation. So market logic persists despite strong indications that it is neither sustainable nor equitable.

As academics, we are also sometimes complicit in our silence, swept along by tides of metrics and oblivious to the treacherous undercurrents. Those of us fortunate enough to hold permanent posts can turn blind eyes to creeping contractual and intellectual precarity elsewhere, preoccupied by – and sometimes enticed by – an embarrassment of individualistic metrics.

But a counter-narrative needs to emerge from somewhere. Someone needs to be pointing out that universities remain the lifeblood of many communities, particularly in straitened times, and that higher education is one of the few ways through which the status quo can be challenged. The culture wars and the snipes about academic methods are not inconsequential. They form part of an agenda to soften up the sector for further structural overhaul, and ultimately for cleansing society of critical or counter-hegemonic thinking.

Badenoch didn’t make it to the final two in the Conservative leadership contest. However, she progressed further than most commentators expected, and her anti-university sentiment played well with many in her party and beyond. Other politicians and strategists will have noticed the immense capital to be gained from a plain-speaking, anti-woke stance.

They may also have noticed that the UK higher education sector is a soft target because almost no one is fighting back.

Narrowing participation: calculating the likely impact of two-year degrees isn’t simple maths

This piece was originally published on the LSE’s Politics and Policy blog (December 20th 2017)

For some, the numbers are straightforward. You take the 78 weeks ostensibly needed for an undergraduate degree, and you squash them into two years instead of three. You raise tuition fees for each of those two years, but make sure that the overall cost of the degree remains lower than for the three-year version. Then you sit back and watch as your accelerated degrees lead to accelerated job market entry and accelerated student loan repayments.

Perhaps that’s part of the thinking behind the consultation recently launched by the government. Some newspapers went out of their way to frame the proposal as a breakthrough for young people. The Express picked up on the idea that two-year degrees will “save students £25,000,” a figure arrived at by opportunistically adding one year’s projected graduate income to the actual saving. A Telegraph piece made unsupported claims about knowledge accumulation being stunted during the long summer months, and two-year degrees enabling stronger friendships to be forged. That students currently spend half of their degree “on holidays,” the report claimed, was “astonishing”.

What’s astonishing is that such myths persist. The students that I teach, and who’ve participated in research projects with which I’ve been involved, rarely talk of holidays. What they do talk about are the part-time jobs they need to pay down urgent debts, and often to top up maintenance loans. And the unpaid work experience they need to get a graduate job. And the performance anxiety that’s inevitable when there’s so much at stake.

Non-teaching time is often used for independent learning, with dissertations planned, re-sits revised for, and course reading absorbed in advance. Universities facilitate, and increasingly expect, academic engagement the whole year round. It’s hardly a ‘high-drink, low-work’ culture, and it’s very different from the summers that policy-makers and commentators may fondly recollect, where some ventured overseas to ‘find themselves’ while others stayed home to sign on.

Like most lecturers, I receive (and respond to) hundreds of e-mails from students during ‘holiday’ periods. But academics are routinely positioned as part of the problem, perhaps softened up in public discourse by mischievous tweets about their “sacrosanct” three-month summer break.

As usual, ‘diversity’ is framed as a key driver for change (because how can anyone be anti-diversity?), but when it comes to accelerated degrees the heavy lifting would most likely be done not by the elite providers but by those institutions already over-achieving in terms of widening participation. It’s greater choice, perhaps, but it’s not the kind of diversity that the sector requires: cultural and academic mixing, across institutions, regardless of socioeconomic and ethnic background.

The Office of Fair Access welcomed the proposals as a response to the alarming drop in mature students since the 2012 fees hike. But mature students, always more likely to be juggling family and workplace commitments, have historically been drawn to slower, part-time, and flexible routes. It’s unclear how many would embrace an accelerated option.

Is the financial incentive meaningful? Perhaps, but given how few graduates are now projected to pay off their student loan in full, it’s questionable whether a modest cut in the total bill would make much difference. Concerns have been raised that the two-year degree is a backdoor route to higher fees.

The 2017 end-of-cycle report from UCAS show the participation gap – the difference in likelihood of attending university between those in the most and least disadvantaged quintiles – extending for a third consecutive year. It’s now as wide as it has been at any point in the last decade. Could accelerated degrees divide society further, as those with the financial means and the cultural inclination to study at a leisurely pace become further detached from their less fortunate peers? Will employers value a two-year degree if those from the higher socioeconomic quintiles quietly ignore it?

That only 0.2% of students are currently enrolled on an accelerated degree programme does suggest more could be done to accommodate the needs of young people who make an informed decision to opt for a shorter programme. But in the current climate, it’s too easy to dismiss the ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of undergraduate teaching as another example of universities’ self-interest. The impression given by supporters of the two-year route is that students are left twiddling their thumbs every summer, but this understates the immense academic and financial pressure under which they find themselves.

The main objection to accelerated degrees is that some students will continue to enjoy an all-round university experience, as their parents did, while others will be fast-tracked towards premature entry into a precarious graduate labour market. Mathematically, three years of learning could indeed be compressed into two. But what complicates the calculation is that the option to accelerate would be viewed very differently across social classes.

Are headline writers getting it wrong on fees?

This piece was originally published by WonkHE on July 6th 2017.

Yesterday’s briefing by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (Higher Education Funding in England: Past, Present and Options for the Future) was covered in the same way by most of the national press. “Three quarters of graduates will never pay off student debts” ran the headline the Independent. Coverage in the Times was almost indistinguishable. The Mirror did little more than capitalise its NEVER, and the Telegraph headline merely framed the 77.4% figure as “almost eight in ten.”

For journalists, it’s the obvious way into a complex story, a hook that ostensibly captures the current system’s flaws and rank unfairness. What better evidence of a broken model than millions of graduates weighed down with debt they’ll never earn enough to repay?

 

But there’s a danger that the terms of the much-anticipated national debate (as called for by Damian Green last week) will be shaped too narrowly by this statistic. While some evidence suggests that students graduating into higher levels of debt feel more anxiety than those in previous generations, the report offers other kinds of evidence that should arguably have a greater bearing on public thinking.

Indeed, to some extent, the unrepaid bit of a graduate’s debt embodies the funding model’s most progressive element. Because it kicks in when a graduate’s earnings are too low for repayment to be deemed possible, it’s effectively the government’s subsidy for HE, a solitary concession that universities might just be a public good as well as a private one. Jo Johnson hints at this when he talks about “a vital and deliberate investment in the skills base of this country”.

The problem is that the more substantive defects of the current system are trickier for newspapers to distill into a few big-font words on the front page. Take the “back-door” freeze on graduates’ opening repayment level. This not only contravened assurances that the threshold would rise with inflation, but we now learn that it costs students an average of more than £4,000 each. As the IFS briefing note explains, this is because the impact of the freeze is permanent. Over the five year period to which it initially applies, the long-run taxpayer cost is reduced from £7 billion to £5.9 billion. If extended for another five years, the government saves a further £700 million. Middle earners are hit hardest.

The 6.1% interest rate that some graduates will face come September is equally difficult to justify. For high earners, the use of RPI + 0–3% (rather than CPI + 0%) increases lifetime repayments by almost £40,000 in today’s money. A blog from Million Plus’s CEO uses adjectives like “staggering” and “usurious”.

We also need to be more mindful of those who don’t fall into the government’s go-to definition of a ‘student’. While recruitment holds firm among the young, full-time cohort, the same cannot be said of part-time or mature students. Many commentators have explained why we should avoid looking at HE participation through such a conveniently narrow lens, but policy discourse doesn’t budge, and the sector’s part-time and mature students remain largely invisible.

Claims about the graduate premium, such as Jo Johnson’s that “a degree is worth on average £250,000 in higher lifetime earnings for a woman”, should always be accompanied by an acknowledgement that subject-by-subject differentials are enormous. Other broken promises – on maintenance grants, on nurses’ bursaries – must be central to any national debate. Perhaps IFS’s most damning observations is that “incentives for universities to provide high-quality courses in return for the money they receive are surprisingly limited.”

As David Kernohan notes, the briefing should allow the sector to take a more nuanced and long-term view on HE funding in the aftermath of a heated election campaign. Our students deserve nothing less. The immediate focus of the press has been on the proportion of graduates who are projected never to earn enough that their debt is paid in full. But beneath the headlines lie a series of issues that more directly impact on equity, and potentially present greater long-term threats to students’ participation and the sector’s sustainability.