2013: the year in HE

In 2012, following a near-trebling of student fees in England, recruitment fell by 9%.

However, 2013’s headline is that normal service has now been resumed. Indeed, entry levels are close to a record high.

This is good news for all. That HE brings both individual and societal gains is well established. Rumours persist that participation may even offer the odd cultural benefit, though ‘public good‘ remains a phrase conspicuously absent from most wider discussions of HE.

History will also record 2013 as the year in which the mature student began heading towards extinction. Application rates for those aged 21 or over have fallen 14% since the fees hike, and there’s little real hope of recovery. (Note that the graph below covers only 18-year-old applicants.) Prospects look similarly bleak for would-be UK postgraduates.

On a more positive note, the 2013 National Student Survey found undergraduates to be happier with their lot than ever before. A blunt instrument though the NSS is, it would be churlish to argue that the ‘student experience’ hasn’t improved since its launch in 2005. 85% of graduating students are satisfied with their degree programme.

With universities now all REF‘d out, the pendulum is likely to swing back towards teaching. For England’s 1.5 million £9k-a-year paying undergrads, this can only be good news.

Private universities continued to be welcomed into the English HE market, though the New College of the Humanities fell short of its very modest recruitment targets once again. Three-quarters of its £18k-a-year paying students attended an independent school.

Such was demand elsewhere, however, the government was left with a black hole in its budget. With plans to sell off the student loan books being likened to a Ponzi scheme, some wonder why we seem intent on following the US down the path of bubbling, unsustainable student debt at a time when Germany are abandoning their fees experiment altogether.

Sadly, 2013 saw the demise of the 1994 Group. Meanwhile, the University Alliance’s end-of-year message raised eyebrows by commending the government for courageously taking the “economic and moral high ground” (my italics). It also raised questions about what exactly HE mission groups and consortia are for.

Politically, Willetts and Cable continue to pull the strings, while Graduate Tax advocate Liam Byrne replaced Shabana Mahmood as Labour’s Shadow HE minister.

Universities UK got told off by Polly Toynbee for suggesting it’s okay to segregate female and male students, and Sussex Uni quickly reversed its decision to suspend five students for protesting peacefully.

In terms of WP, the proportion of poorer students applying for university held firm, though ‘top’ universities continue to recruit at much lower levels than other institutions.

According to a Sutton Trust report issued in November, at least one quarter of this “access gap” can’t be attributed to academic achievement, further evidence that there may be more to Russell Group under-representation than A-level performance.

And what to expect from 2014?

Well, English universities will soon be able to take as many students as they like. That’s good news for many, but it could increase the pressure on struggling institutions to maintain market share as their sought-after WP students are lured elsewhere.

Universities free from recruitment anxieties will continue to press for the £9k cap to rise.

Meanwhile, early applications figures for 2014 are down 3% on the same time last year.

Long-term, it may not be the headline £9,000 figure that’s most damaging to the HE sector.

Rather – as I’ve argued elsewhere this year – a bigger problem could be continued uncertainty about the security, fairness and expense of the student loan system itself.

Metaphors of HE Access: time to mind our language?

“Like applying a bandage to lung cancer.”

That’s how Dr Martin Stephen last week described the idea of allowing disadvantaged students into top universities when they’re an A-level grade or two below the usual threshold.

Dr Martin Stephen is a former chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HHC) and ex high master of St Paul’s School in London. He was responding to Bahram Bekhradnia expressing dismay that, in his time as director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, the top universities had remained “as socially exclusive as ever“.

Mr Bekhradnia suggested that the UK should follow US institutions’ lead in seeking to create cohorts that “represent wider society as far as possible,” obsessing less about academic attainment at the point of entry.

For Dr Stephens, such a move would let low-achieving schools ‘off the hook’. It’s social engineering gone made, or whatever.

“Our schools are not helping disadvantaged children to achieve respectable grades and these things don’t do anything about that problem,” he complained.

There are several problems with this position. First, a good deal of one-way evidence tells us that state schools pupils actually outperform independent school students once they reach university. Second, we know that state school applicants are less likely to be offered a place at Russell Group universities than independent school applicants with the same grades, even when ‘facilitating subjects’ are controlled for. Third, it is questionable whether low-achieving schools are incentivised by their students’ progression rates to top universities in anything like the way Dr Stephens implies.

But more disturbing than the views being represented are the metaphors increasingly being traded by those with vested interests.

Is academic under-performance, and the schooling system responsible for it, really like lung cancer? Or are such schools actually working hard to raise attainment among young people with multiple disadvantages, social problems and often chaotic home lives? The latest PISA findings suggest that socioeconomic background is the key determinant of educational success, not school type.

Note the similarly belligerent response to a recent report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who found that England’s grammar schools were now four times more likely to admit private school children than those on free school meals. This time it was the turn of Robert McCartney, chairman of the National Grammar School Association (NGSA), to return fire:

“Many, many parents from deprived areas, including what is generally called the dependency classes, are essentially not particularly interested in any form of academic education,” said Mr McCartney. “Their interests are directed towards pop culture, sports.”

Naturally, the HHC, NGSA and other such organisation are bound to defend their market edge. Many independent and selective schools actively recruit on promises of entry to prestigious universities.

But should this defence spill over into unsubstantiated slurs against those from less advantaged communities? Poorer parents share the same aspirations for their children as their wealthier counterparts. It helps no-one to liken low-attainment schools to horrible diseases.

Let’s debate the evidence and leave the name-calling in the playground.

Time to stop gambling on advantaged university applicants?

Coinciding with the publication of this summer’s exam results was a familiar spate of media pieces warning universities not to “patronise poor kids” by lowering offers to those who don’t get the grades.

As usual, such students are constructed as a “gamble”, universities as well-meaning but naïve institutions, and OFFA as meddling social engineers. The “real” problem always lies elsewhere.

But is it really an academic “gamble” to acknowledge that not all young people have the same schooling advantages?

No, says most of the evidence. Primarily because such students actually outperform those from the private sector once at university. In fact, to recruit on grades alone would be a far greater gamble – that’s why most universities now consider contextual data when choosing between similarly qualified candidates.

In this week’s TES, Tom Bennett argues that such approaches simply move the injustice elsewhere, “from lack of opportunity for some from birth, to lack of opportunity for some at the point of university admission”.

This is a quite a claim: that advantaged students, often brimming with social capital and coached to game the HE admissions system, could face a “lack of opportunity” at the Russell Group gates.

I’m not sure we need worry about that just yet.

Indeed, using a Freedom of Information request, The Guardian last week showed that private school applicants were 9% more likely to be admitted to Oxford than those from state schools with same grades. Long-term academic studies of UCAS data reach similar conclusions.

Put simply, applicants from the state sector must earn higher grades than their private school counterparts to have the same chance of entry.

This is generally lost on the authors of topical opinion pieces, where the approach tends towards “I know of one student…” anecdotes.

For Bennett, “universities are not places in which to unpick the stitches of historical injustice”.

But if those stitches need unpicking, where better to start?

Student Loans for Sale: killing confidence in the system?

A couple of weeks ago, The Guardian leaked a confidential, Whitehall-commissioned report, written by Rothschild investment bank and piss-takingly dubbed ‘Project Hero’.

‘Project Hero’ proposed redrawing the terms of student loans taken out over the past 15 years to make them more expensive for borrowers and therefore more attractive to potential purchasers.

Danny Alexander (Chief Secretary to the Treasury) later confirmed that the student loan book will indeed be privatised to raise £10bn, but offered no further details about the ‘sweeteners’ involved.

Among the first to respond was Martin Lewis, head of the Independent Student Finance Taskforce. Lewis has succeeded in explaining higher fees to the younger generation better than any politician or university, so it’s interesting that he went off-message and took a strong stand against the suggested fire-sale, tweeting:

“To hike past students loan interest [would] betray every democratic principle and kill confidence in loan system.”

Lewis’s point is a very good one. It’s an act of faith for anybody to attend university in the higher fees era. Trust in the loan system is vital. Any suspicion that graduates will be fleeced by the state is likely to have serious consequences, especially for the most debt-sensitive of young people.

Writing in The New Statesman, Alex Hern has been excellent at explaining the economic ramification of the sell-off, first describing the idea as “terrible financial management” and then noting that:

“Our government is twisting itself in contortions, discussing student loan debt as though it’s a pile of newspapers sat at the back of the treasury, which they mustn’t be “compulsive hoarders” of, in order to sell at a discount an asset which is significantly more valuable in public hands than private. It’s politically driven economic illiteracy.”

Finally, Tim Whitmarsh, a Professor of Ancient Literatures at Oxford University, makes important points about social justice:

“The situation is deeply troubling. Higher education is the primary driver of social mobility in the UK. Huge fees are already a deterrent to many, but at least when they came in we were promised a benevolent, progressive loans structure. The involvement of the private sector in student financing can only damage that. Private companies want profits, and profits have to come from somewhere.”

Professor Whitmarsh has set up an online petition against loans privatisation, which already has over one thousand signatures. It can be found here.

All three of the arguments above are very persuasive. Nothing will undo Lewis’s work in promoting the new system faster than potential university students losing confidence in those from whom they must borrow. Hern is also right to point out the mindless economic short-termism of the proposal. And Whitmarsh’s concerns about interfering with the ‘safety net’ of a relatively progressive clawback mechanism are entirely justified if participation rates, particularly among those from less well off backgrounds, aren’t to be damaged.

As Martin McQuillan says, this is a “trainwreck” of an idea.

For an overview of the counter-arguments to this position, see Andrew McGettigan’s patient summary of a sell-off’s ‘quick wins’. However, note that McGettigan’s conclusion – that selling the loan book “without consent or consultation and without a parliamentary vote” is not on – is entirely consistent with the views expressed above.

The terms of students’ participation ‘bet’ must always be honoured. If you back a winner at 3-1, you don’t expect the bookie to ‘retroactively’ cut your odds to 5-2.

You can’t change the price of a degree once the student has graduated.

The 2013 Sunday Times Wellington College Festival of Education

I’m just home from this year’s Festival of Education, at which I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak.

The experience was a very positive one, and I met many new people with terrific new ideas about the future of education. It felt strange to be giving a presentation about young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in the grand setting of the College’s Old Hall, but the audience response was among the most favourable I’ve ever had.

Some of the other talks were outstanding, as blogged here, here and here. Of the politicians, it was interesting to hear Lord Adonis note that private schools “do well by the taxpayer”, but I wasn’t too convinced by his idea that stay-at-home students should get half-price degrees. Tristram Hunt did his best to outline a Labour alternative to the coalition agenda, and criticised government dismissiveness towards teachers and educational professionals. David Laws pushed for schools to be graded according to their success in closing the disadvantage gap, putting up a strong defence of the pupil premium. And I was pleased to hear Michael Gove acknowledge the role that social capital plays in university admissions processes.

The only session I didn’t enjoy fully was a panel entitled “What do we want our children to know?”. Anastasia de Waal and Mark Thompson were excellent, making a series of observations that were measured, constructive and engaging. But Toby Young was provocative for no good reason (as is his wont), referring to child-centred learning as “balls” despite appearing not to understand what it actually involves.

The fourth panelist, Lindsay Johns, was amusing in his views about “dead white men” in the curriculum (have more of them!) and refreshingly honest about how teachers should relate to pupils (stop listening to them!). I was reminded of his controversial take on Oxford University’s decision to admit only one student of Caribbean origin in 2009.

But then Johns started condemning what he calls “ghetto grammar” (the symptoms of which include “vacuous words such as ‘innit’ and wilful distortions like ‘arks’ for ‘ask’,” according to an earlier piece in the Evening Standard). As a time-served linguist, I felt obliged to raise my hand at the end. The dangers of stigmatizing ‘street slang’ have been compellingly outlined elsewhere, and Lester Holloway has flagged up broader problems with Johns’ position. So all I did was point out that the way a young person speaks is often inextricably tied up with their personal identity. Rather than correct non-standard usage, I suggested, a more productive alternative might be to have pupils reflect on all that’s grammatically and phonetically distinctive about their own dialect. That way they learn about the conventions of Standard English without being made to feel inadequate for speaking a non-standard, though often equally systematic, variety.

This was my only grumble about an otherwise fascinating event. At Wellington College, I learnt much about the key debates within Education, and often found my preconceptions challenged and values tested. The Festival brings together people with all kinds of perspectives and covers a range of important issues. A few more state school teachers need adding to the mix, and a third day of events would make the journey more worthwhile, but I couldn’t help but be impressed by the originality of the thinking and the commitment to the cause.

Does the ‘Attainment Gap’ get Russell Group universities off the hook?

In the UK, Russell Group universities are the posh ones: institutions with the highest entry grade requirements, the highest graduate salaries and the most prestige. There’s 24 of them, and the group take its name from the Hotel Russell, which currently ranks 455th of 1,079 hotels in London by Trip Advisor (“bathroom not hygienic,” says Jan from Ghent, “there was some brown substance in the corner of the window”).

The question of who gets into Russell Group university is, for obvious reasons, an important one. According the UCAS application figures for 2013/14, “18-year-olds from the most advantaged areas are three times more likely to apply to higher education than those from the most disadvantaged areas, and entry rates to institutions that require high grades are typically six to nine times greater for applicants from advantaged areas.”

‘Six to nine times greater’ sounds an awful lot. However, the Russell Group do have an explanation: “The main problem is that students who come from low-income backgrounds and/or who have attended comprehensive schools are much less likely to achieve the highest grades than those who are from more advantaged backgrounds and who have been to independent or grammar schools,” explains Wendy Piatt, Director General of the Group. And she’s right: go to a private school and you’re four times more likely to get AAA in your A-levels than you would be at a comprehensive. “Universities simply cannot solve these problems alone,” says Dr Piatt.

Among the research supporting the ‘attainment gap’ is a paper by Haroon Chowdry and colleagues at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It’s  a fascinating study, following two groups of English pupils from the age of 11, and noting how their academic performance at each stage of school testing affects their likelihood of participation. Findings suggest that differences in participation rates across the social classes “are substantially reduced once prior achievement is included”. They add that:

“Poor achievement in secondary schools is more important in explaining lower HE participation rates among pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds than barriers arising at the point of entry to HE. These findings are consistent with the need for earlier policy intervention to raise HE participation rates among pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds.”

Few would argue with the second point. What’s most helpful for children of low socio-economic status is intervention at an early age. You can’t correct for years of educational disadvantage as a UCAS deadline is approaching. The first point is also true – low attainment is undoubtedly the UK’s biggest barrier to participation. However, there is a tendency for Chowdry and Co to gloss over the differences that still remain at the point of entry.

Take this finding: once all prior attainment is taken into account, girls from the lowest socioeconomic quintile are 5.3% less likely to enter HE than girls from the highest socioeconomic quintile. Boys are 4.1% less likely. If you want a place at a Russell Group university, your odds are reduced by 4.3% and 2.5% respectively. Similar findings were reported earlier this week by Vikki Boliver for equal-attainment applicants in a survey of UCAS applicants from 1996 to 2006. Applicants from lower class backgrounds and from state schools were less likely to be offered a place at Russell Group universities than their comparably qualified counterparts from higher class backgrounds and private schools (even when ‘facilitating’ subjects were controlled for, despite the spin put on the research by some).

For Chowdry and his fellows authors, the point-of-entry gap between applicants of different socioeconomic status is “modest”. Encouraging less well-off students to apply to university at the age of 18 is therefore “unlikely to have a major impact” on participation. In relative terms, of course, this is perfectly true – improving attainment for all young people of lower socioeconomic status would make a bigger difference than focusing on the small proportion who defy the odds and get good grades.

But doesn’t this line of thinking get HE off the hook a little too easily? What of the thousands of high-achieving young people who aren’t making it to a top university each year? Jonathan Portes makes the same points about Chris Cook’s interpretation of the Oxford University data. He also uses the graph below to show that, if these young people did participate, they’d probably outperform students from more privileged backgrounds.

“We cannot offer places to those who do not apply,” says Dr Piatt. True. But there’s a growing body of research that suggests those who do apply to Russell Group universities are not always treated equally. The ‘attainment gap’ certainly isn’t to blame for that.

Not another Widening Participation blog?

The title of my blog refers to a 2004 Sutton Trust report which suggested that, every year, 3,000 disadvantaged young people in the UK don’t attend a top university despite having good enough grades to do so. The figures, based on benchmarks by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), showed that 45% of independent school students who obtain ABB+ (or equivalent) go to a leading university, but only 26% of state school pupils obtaining the same grades do so. ‘Leading’ universities are defined as the 13 highest-ranking UK institutions, and they’re the ones associated with greater prestige, better facilities and higher salaries. The consequences for social mobility are obvious.

Much has changed since 2004, of course. On one hand, a tripling of student fees and the abolition of AimHigher and the Educational Maintenance Allowance may make participation even trickier for some disadvantaged young people. On the other hand, the latest figures from UCAS actually show applications from the poorest 20% of the population at a record high.

The point of this blog is to help make sense of the (often contradictory) stats and the (often controversial) policies, with a view to finding out whether 3,000 young people still go ‘missing’ every year. I also want to shed some critical light on debates about Higher Education (HE). By ‘critical’, I mean asking questions like:

• Is being ‘missing’ from a top university the same as ‘missing out’?

• Does Widening Participation (WP) still matter? How wide must participation be? Can the WP battle ever be won?

• What makes a young person ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘non-traditional’? Which are the over–represented groups in HE?

• What assumptions are encoded in the language and discourse of WP? Why do we frame the debate in terms of ‘barriers’ to participation?

The Sutton Trust’s ‘Missing 3,000’ suggests that high-achieving working class youngsters may be deterred by the prestige associated with top universities, by the prospect of moving away from home, and by the cultural and social distance they perceive university to be from their own lives. Lots of other published research in the field (by Diane Reay and Penny Jane Burke, among others) find similar factors at play, and recent data I’ve collected in low-participation Manchester secondary schools suggest that these problems persist.

Despite the modest gains in WP over the last ten years, recent quantitative studies by Vikki Boliver and Chris Cook find alarming disparities. According to Boliver, state school applicants are only 4/5ths as likely to receive an offer from a Russell Group university as private school applicants, even when their  grades are the same  (although that statistic doesn’t control for predicted grades, subject choice or applicants being either under- or over-ambitious in their selections).

Clearly, debates in this area are complex and sensitive. But since dipping a toe in the field of HE (my academic background is in Linguistics), I’ve found the research to be stimulating and the debates fascinating. University participation is a topic about which everyone holds a view. Some of those views are well-informed, evidence-based and insightful. Others aren’t. This blog is simply one scholar’s attempt to help distinguish between the two.