HE Planning Blog

I Return to the Key Information Set

2012-02-27T08:50:00.002Z

Update: I updated this post at 1:35 on Monday 27 February toi emphasise that the screen shot posted below is work-in-progress.

I haven’t posted much about the Key Information Set. In my last role I was given responsibility for collecting the data, but I left that role before HEFCE published any useful guidance. In my current role I have – hitherto – escaped responsibility but my boss has now asked me to take on the data collation and submission so I have spent a couple of days reviewing the guidance and attending the HESA KIS training event last week at SOAS. Now I have begun to get my head around KIS again.

My overall view of KIS remains pretty negative. I don’t mind doing useless work because I work for money: useless and useful pay the same rate. But I think the work that goes into KIS will be actively harmful. Look at this screen shot and you’ll see that the KIS data will be presented to potential students in a way that makes it virtually impossible to tell the sample sizes from which different data are drawn, so even if they have a strong statistical knowledge, it will be hard to tell whether the difference between 75% and 80% student satisfaction on two different courses is really meaningful. This is still work in progress, so perhaps the final version will be clearer on this issue, but it will be difficult to do much within the constraints of the form.

Moreover, for reasons I’ll discuss further below, the data presented on each ‘course’ will actually be drawn from a range of different sources that don’t marry up so the employment data, for instance, may describe outcomes for a group of students who did the course some years ago when learning, teaching and assessment methods were different or they may relate to a larger group of courses because of the ways that the different data sources are matched up. The KIS will misinform potential applicants by directing their attention to fluctuations in statistical data which are probably meaningless, and away from sources of information (like what they see and feel on their campus visits) that are far more meaningful.

As I say, I don’t mind being useless, but if I wanted to do socially destructive work for money I could be in the arms trade, or big tobacco or some other more lucrative place.

Now let’s look at the data matching issues in more detail. KIS provides data on ‘courses’, and HESA defines a course for this purpose as:

[A] programme of study that a student can apply to either through UCAS or directly to the institution. Thus, if students can apply separately to courses in Physics, Chemistry and Biology each would require a separate KIS, whereas if students could only apply to a course in Science and later choose to specialise, then only a single KIS needs to be produced. The same guidance would apply where courses have optional exit points, if it is possible for a student to apply solely for the lower award then a separate KIS would need to be produced.

You will immediately see that the distinction between separate ‘courses’ in Physics, Chemistry and Biology and a Science course with specialist pathways is unlikely to be matched in institution’s administrative data. Universities usually have two main definitions of ‘courses’. On the one hand there are the approved courses (more usually the word ‘programmes’ is used, probably because it’s longer) that have been validated in accordance with the university’s validation procedures. On the other there are a set of course entities on the student record database that have been created for administrative reasons so we can identify particular cohorts of students. There is likely to be a one-to-many relationship here. For instance a Foundation Degree for Teaching Assistants may be run at a number of partner colleges; in validation terms it is the same programme wherever it is run, but there may well be separate codes on the student record database used for each college, for administrative convenience. Often, universities will market their validated programmes in different ways. So a single validated programme with a single code on the student record system may be marketed and recruited to under more than one UCAS code. An example might be HESA’s Physics, Chemistry and Biology pathways on a single programme, which might well be offered for separate application but the students then managed on a single course code.

So: much scope for confusion. But it gets worse. The KIS relies on a further ‘course’ entity, the HESA Course returned in the HESA Student Record. In the Student Record, HESA defines a course quite differently from the way it is defined in KIS.

A combination of subject and qualification that defines what a student is aiming for.

So two quite different validated programmes of an institution might constitute the same ‘course’ for HESA Student Record purposes. For example BA Fashion Design (a programme with a lot of making in it) and BA Fashion Futures (a programme with very little making, aimed at students with no design background) have the same qualification aim – BA – and in JACS terms the same subject (W230 – clothing/fashion) so they could be represented by the same HESA course. Some institutions will have done so, but others will have forced the creation of two (or even more) HESA Courses in order to structure their HESA Course entities as closely as possible to their own understanding of the course structures in their own administrative data. This obviously helps them make sense of their HESA data if they use it themselves. So in some cases there will be a one-to-many relationship between institutional programmes and HESA courses, but in others it might be the other way around.

At every stage where these ‘course’ entities need to be linked up, there are ambiguities and scope for different outcomes based on the way individual institutions have set up their student record systems years ago, and returned data to HESA in the last couple of years. It seems to me that to call the results ‘guesswork’ is an insult to guesses everywhere.

The frantic speed at which the KIS is being implemented helps to ensure that these issues aren’t fully thought-through and resolved. The current timeline is that HEFCE will publish final guidance on 29 March, the very day that the submission system opens and we are supposed to start providing our data. Full functionality in the submission system is expected on an uncertain date in July, as only then will the data garnered from HESA Courses (employment outcomes and National Student Survey results) become available. All data must be complete, checked, signed off and submitted by 22 August so that HEFCE can publish it on 17 September (for institutional preview) and it can go live on 22 September. HEFCE expect the relevant widgets to go live on institutional websites on this same date, although they have provided until 31 October before they start punishing laggards. Linking the UCAS data requires us to return a field called UCASPROGID (UCAS Programme Identifier), which my admissions colleagues tell me has yet to be published or even specified by UCAS. At the moment I don’t know how many UCASPROGIDs I will have to return, or what provision each one will cover. This means, of course, that I can’t yet quite be sure how many KIS Courses I will need to return.

So you can see that I am not glad to have gained this particular job. It looks like a lot of work, poorly specified and to a timetable with a too many unknowns in it. The end result will probably be worse than useless for prospective students. Did I also mention that it is rather high profile and therefore likely to be noticed if it all goes wrong?

But this blog post is not only an extended whinge. KIS illustrates how the past – HESA definitions used previously for different purposes, student record systems installed by institutions with other objectives in mind – sharply constrains the regulatory framework that the Government can put in place in the here and now. To get a common definition of ‘course’ into all these systems would literally take years and Ministers rarely have the patience for such things. There is a lesson about strategy to be had here, I think.

The outriders of the AAB apocalypse

2012-02-20T08:36:00.000Z

A while back I posted about the UCAS data, identifying the four institutions I consider most at risk from core/margin. They are Surrey, City, Goldsmiths and Aston, institutions which I offended one reader by describing as 'surprisingly posh', although I meant by that only that they are a lot further up the league tables than London Metropolitan. Since then, there has been further confirmation in the press that institutions have over-recruited by a very serious margin in 2011/12. This will cost BIS a lot of money, and make the prospect of moving the AAB boundary even less inviting (it is also, incidentally, a truly shocking example of the challenged competence of certain HE managers. The London Met staff posting on that THE story have, in my view, every right to be angry with senior managers who have let them down badly by managing their admissions so poorly. We have had years to get used to the Student Number Control now). So there is the possibility that the AAB boundary will stay at AAB for many years. What kind of impact would that have on these four outriders of the apocalypse?

Let's assume that the AAB boundary stays where it is for the next three years, and that the institutions at risk can't turn around their loss of applications in the current year. These strike me as rather pessimistic assumptions. I've modelled three scenarios, one in which the institutions lose AABs in proportion to their overall loss of applications, one in which they lose AABs at twice this rate, and one in which they lose all their AABs. This last option is pretty implausible on its face, but something similar could arise if they lose most of the AABs, and also lose further sub-AAB numbers to further rounds of core/margin cuts. In summary, the numbers look like this:

Table 1	Turnover (10/11)	Surplus (10/11)	Scenario 1 Projected Surplus (14/15)	Scenario 2 Projected Surplus (14/15)	Scenario 3 Projected Surplus (14/15)
Aston University	112,248	-94	-3,271	-6,447	-15,590
University of Surrey	211,591	10,793	7,678	4,563	-3,695
City University, London	183,618	-5,979	-8,180	-10,380	-16,167
Goldsmiths' College	81,324	1,959	517	-925	-4,310

2010/11 was an unusually good year, and 11/12 will be worse for most institutions because of the round of HEFCE cuts implemented, so my three scenarios may be a little rosy on that account. On the other hand I should note that City's 10/11 financial data include a large restructuring cost associated with over 100 redundancies, so projecting forwards the numbers might be £6 million better than shown here if those costs were stripped out. And I should also note that the VC at Surrey claims that the loss of applications has been from sub-AABs, not AAB+. If we accept this basis, none of the institutions are seriously financially threatened by scenario 1 and even scenario 3, although painful for all of them, is leading to losses well below 10% of turnover for all except Aston.

Other than Surrey, all these institutions have quite high proportions of staff costs currently.

Table 2	% Staff Costs (10/11)	Scenario 1 % reduction in non-staff costs	Scenario 2 % reduction in non-staff costs	Scenario 3 % reduction in non-staff costs
Aston University	57.70%	16%	20%	35%
University of Surrey	49.90%	10%	11%	16%
City University, London	61.30%	15%	17%	23%
Goldsmiths' College	62.30%	17%	20%	29%

To calculate the % reduction required in non-staff costs for each scenario, I've assumed 2% year-on-year growth in staff costs (the effect of modest pay rises and incremental drift). Clearly 20% reductions in non-staff costs are unlikely to be achievable in institutions that already have over 60% of their costs tied up in staff. This means that the adjustments implied by Table 1, although pretty clearly achievable, could not be achieved without job losses.

Job losses, for better or worse, are hardly a new phenomenon in the sector.

If these institutions are the outriders of the AAB apocalypse, then I think it is clear that this will be a slow-motion apocalypse. It is surely unlikely, on these data, that any institution will go bust in this Parliament but life could get very unpleasant in one or more. I should also re-iterate a point I have made previously. We do not know what will happen in Clearing and institutions like Leeds Metropolitan, doing adequately in the January data, might still have a bad experience in Clearing if Clearing applicants decide that £8,810 is too much to pay for their second-choice university.

So what we can expect in the near term, even if the AAB boundary doesn't move, is perhaps a major impact on particular departments or subject areas in certain universities, but not a life-threatening impact on any whole university.

Judging the OFFA controversy

2012-02-08T16:50:00.000Z

So, the Select Committee has tried to veto Les Ebdon, and Vince Cable has stood by his man. I call this a straight knock-down-drag-out win to Vince and Les. First there is the straightforward matter of the outcome - the Select Committee can't actually prevent Vince from appointing the Director he wants provided the Minister holds his nerve, which clearly he has done in this case. But secondly (and this must have helped the Minister over the last couple of days as this was debated within Government), there is the sheer cack-handedness with which the Committee has acted.

Here are the key phrases from the Committee's report:

While he demonstrated an all-round understanding of widening participation, we were not convinced by Professor Ebdon's descriptions of the root causes of the obstacles to accessing universities. Therefore, we have to question his evidence in respect of two of the criteria for selection, namely "promote the strengths of the arguments in face of opposition" and "communicate persuasively and publicly, with excellent presentational stills". We are unable to endorse the appointment of Professor Ebdon as the Director of OFFA and we recommend that the Department conduct a new recruitment exercise.

And here is the relevant section of the transcript from their evidence session:

Q47 Margot James: You mentioned that there was a lack of a decent evidence base for the barriers to access. I do not know whether you have had a chance to review some of the evidence that was presented to this Committee last year when we reviewed the subject. Based on what you know yourself and what you might have read of our hearings last year, what do you think are the main reasons for the differential between access to Russell Group universities and access to the other universities over the last 10 years?
Professor Ebdon: The biggest difference seems to be the application rate. If students apply to selective universities, admission seems to be independent of their background at that stage. Therefore, the issue is clearly encouraging more students to apply to those universities. From my own personal experience-and I accept it is largely anecdotal from talking to students-they do not see themselves as being part of that community. They do not see those universities as for them, and that seems to me to be the biggest challenge. It may be as simple as, "If you do an interview, make sure you do not do it in a baronial hall; do it in a friendlier atmosphere." Certainly, my mantra is that it is important to make a university feel as welcoming and as friendly as possible to encourage applicants. So I think getting people to consider it a possibility and to aspire to go to such universities is probably their biggest challenge.
Q48 Margot James: Yes, I accept that point, but I am surprised you do not mention schools and the choice of subjects in a lot of comprehensive schools. In fact, only this week I have heard Professor Alison Wolf, who conducted that major report into vocational education last year, confirm that there was an increasing bias towards vocational equivalent subjects at GCSE, the abandonment of foreign languages, and the preference among a lot of comprehensive schools for just taking a single science at GCSE. All of those problems seemed, to a number of witnesses that we heard from last year, to be a major stumbling clock. If children are not taking the sorts of GCSEs that lead to the sorts of A-Levels that the Russell Group accept, surely that is an even more important factor than the one you mentioned, which I do take seriously-that a lot of students from those backgrounds feel that the Russell Group universities are "not for them".
Professor Ebdon: The point is well made and acknowledged. Indeed, the National Council for Educational Excellence, on which I served, does point out the very strong statistical connection between taking three sciences at GCSE and progressing to science subjects at university. Indeed, I gave evidence a couple of weeks ago to another House of Lords inquiry about European Union modernisation in our education, and I drew attention to the challenges from the drop in the number of young people taking languages in schools. So I acknowledge that.
I would also have to say that universities have to deal with the world as it is rather than the world that we would want. Maybe the challenge for universities then is to say, "Given this issue of students coming forward with a different background from the one that maybe we had intended when we set up this course, is there anything we can do to equalise levels?" This was something I was saying came up very strongly in another House of Lords inquiry that I was involved in, and I think it is significant.
I do not think universities can just say, "Oh well, it is because they are doing the wrong GCSEs." We have to say, "Is there anything we can do, as universities, to influence schools and interact with schools?" We should plead guilty to the fact that we have not done enough in terms of saying, "These are the aspects of mathematics that we need to be in the school curriculum." I think we have abdicated from that responsibility and we should take it more seriously. We also need to interact with schools more closely and explain what it is that we are looking for, and just putting it on a website, which most of us do, is not enough. Thirdly, I think we need to explore more to see whether that is really an insuperable barrier or whether we are being insufficiently flexible about entry.
Q49 Margot James:GCSE choices for their later university prospects?
Professor Ebdon: It is very helpful. Clearly, supply chain issues are very serious ones and ones that the Director of OFFA has to take seriously. We will not change things overnight, because we have to work back down the line, and I would very much welcome any action that alerts schools to these issues. Even better, of course, is a dialogue with schools to try to find out why it is they have taken the decisions they have, and I hear responses from the schools that they are influenced by league tables. We really need to find out what it is, because these are major obstacles and you are quite right in identifying them as such.

So the Committee says that students' GCSE and A-level choices are a 'root cause of the obstacle', whereas Les Ebdon says that universities can perfectly well teach that curriculum themselves if they want to. Quite literally, their objection is that Prof Ebdon is better informed than they are.

So a poorly-executed political ambush which seems to have failed in its objectives. Not a great day for the Select Committee.

Speculation about OFFA

2012-02-08T09:01:00.000Z

I speculated that Les Ebdon might not be a popular choice at OFFA, and now the THE are reporting that he may indeed have been nobbled.

Speculation can send soon, though: the Committee Report will be published here at noon today, and put us all out of our misery.

Core and Margin yet again: drawing some connections with the UCAS data

2012-02-06T08:38:00.000Z

There have been a lot of core/margin posts on this blog and they used to be one of the main things that people read. As time goes on, other topics have gotten more popular, but core/margin still matters a lot to me so I'm going to carry on posting.

HEFCE have recently announced the core allocations for all institutions and now the margin allocations have been made (although I can't find the detailed allocations on the HEFCE site yet, hence the BBC link). Something important to note is that of the 20,000 margin places available, 9,500 have been allocated to FE Colleges. Looking at this little table for England and Scotland tells you a couple of important things:

HE Students in HE institutions and FE Colleges 2009/10

	England	Scotland
HEIs
FT	1,345,665	162,955
PT	747,965	57,955
FECs
FT	22,215	30,620
PT	78,240	19,695

(source)

This shows that on the one hand there's no reason why FE colleges cannot deliver a large proportion of the full time HE in England, just as they do in Scotland. But as a matter of current fact they don't. The vast majority of current English HE-in-FE is part time. The additional 9,500 places will represent something like 40% growth in HE-in-FE FT numbers in a single year. Just as with the rest of the sector, however, FE college applications are down year on year (see here). As at 15 January I make it 36,988 applications for HE-level study at English FECs (although I might have stripped out the odd FEC which I mistook for a private provider, so don't hold me to that last 88). Most applicants make more than one application so 36,988 applications won't be enough to fill all the places unless those applicants are all unlucky elsewhere. English applicants are going to have to choose FE colleges in Clearing to an unprecedented level if those places are all to be filled: it isn't impossible but I wouldn't bank on it.

The UCAS data don't enable us to identify where the AABs are, but HEFCE have given us data on where the AABs were last year - the basis they have used for their adjustments to Student Number Control limits. Here are a couple of interesting charts.

Chart 1: Numbers of AAB+ Students

Institutions are ranked by proportion of AAB+ students, so that very small bar next to the axis is the Courtauld Institute of Art, all of whose students were AAB+, the next two are Oxford and Cambridge, 98% AAB+, and the last of all is Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, just 3% AAB+.

I think this chart shows quite clearly that the AABs are strongly concentrated on the left-hand 20 or so institutions. If these collectively were to increase their AAB intakes by 10%, they would need to take nearly a third (31%) of the AAB intake from the next 20, or over half (53%) the AAB intake of institutions 41-60. A big ask.

This chart adds in the below-AAB numbers:

Chart 2: All students

You can see how few institutions there are outside the top 20 with a significant proportion of AABs. Institution number 40 (which is actually Bournemouth) has just 18% AAB+, so even losing a third of these would only be a 6% cut in intake. This would be painful - especially on top of the existing core/margin cuts - but certainly not fatal to the institution.

All of this is to confirm my previously-expressed views that AAB really threatens only a very small group of surprisingly posh universities - Newcastle, SOAS, Leicester - but if we combine it with the UCAS data we can put together our own personal watch-list of institutions in serious danger. These people seem to have a high proportion of AABs and a worrying drop in applications:

	% AAB	Drop in applications
Aston	36	-20.5
Surrey	32	-21.5
City	30	-21.6
Goldsmiths	21	-23

Now 'serious danger' needs to be put into context. Surrey, to take one example, is a tremendously sound institution financially which made an £11 million surplus last year. It will take more than one bad year's worth of home UG recruitment to put a real dent in Surrey as an institution. In fact none of these institutions is going to be knocked over by a single bad year.

So the question becomes: when will the AAB boundary move down? Here, you would have to say, the recent signals are worrying for the affected institutions (reassuring for those of us lower down the food-chain, of course). The HE Bill is being delayed which means that powers to control the growth of numbers in the private sector don't exist yet. At the same time the HEFCE grant letter clearly showed that BIS judge existing
Student Number Controls in the public sector too weak. This is not the context in which a rapid move down through ABB and beyond seems likely.

Colleagues from Goldsmiths took a prominent role in the campaign against the Government's fees policy, so perhaps David Willetts would be happy to seeenjoy the bad publicity much less than any feeling of schadenfreude. So whilst in the short term managing the risks of AAB are an issue for the institutions, in the medium term, there are key risks for the Government here. They cannot afford to delay that HE Bill too long.

UCAS data: some good reporting by the Guardian

2012-02-02T12:43:00.001Z

This story carries some more detail on the UCAS statistics which I mentioned in my previous post and set out what we can really conclude from them - which is to say little or nothing. It is a shame that no correction has been added to the Simon Hughes piece in which the original misleading presentation of these data was made.

Foolish Nonsense

2012-02-02T08:58:00.001Z

Long-term readers of this blog will be aware that this story in the Evening Standard cost the MOD about 1,904 graduates. You may not be aware that the adult population of the Falklands is 2,480. I wonder if the other 576 already have degrees?

Still, at least the Argentinians will be dissuaded from attempting any foolish nonsense...

Les Ebdon to lead OFFA

2012-02-01T08:40:00.001Z

Although the Times Higher had the story a few days ago, BIS only confirmed yesterday that Les Ebdon is (subject to Parliamentary scrutiny at a pre-appointment hearing on Thursday 2 February) to be the next Director of Fair Access.

The last two Directors - Martin Harris and Graeme Davies - were old university VCs of the old school. Les Ebdon is still an ex-VC but his heritage (Bedfordshire and Million+) is a good deal less grand. Compared to earlier reports that the Government wanted someone from outside the sector, I suppose he constitutes a kind of half-way house. Potentially, though, the elite universities might have preferred someone from outside the sector who had not spent the last four years at Million+ diligently (if not always successfully) fighting against their interests.

The appointment is a consequential one because Government proposes to quadruple OFFA's resources (to nearly 12 people...) and, more importantly, consider new statutory powers. The delay to the HE Bill will allow Prof Ebdon to have a greater impact on what those new powers might be. The current OFFA is, by design, pretty much powerless; the White Paper, by contrast, suggested powers that would probably prove contentious if they ever came to be included in a Bill, such as:

the power to instruct an institution to spend a specific amount on access or retention from its additional fee income;
a more flexible range of sanctions; or
to make public an assessment of any institution that the Director feels is not making sufficient progress against its Access Agreement.

It will be interesting to see how this appointment pans out, and perhaps worth watching the Select Committee website to see how things go on Thursday.

More thoughts on UCAS

2012-01-31T12:18:00.006Z

Update: This post has been rewritten on 31/1/12 to clarify the point I was making and remove some inappropriate references to a named UUK colleague.

UUK has posted about the latest UCAS data on the UUK Blog. I posted about these data yesterday and made some similar points. The UUK analysis concentrates mainly on the 18-year old cohort for whom it is true (unlike the other age cohorts) that applications are not down very much. This is fair enough on its own terms, but we need always to remember that 18-year-olds are a minority of all applicants.

The egregious Simon Hughes is clearly relying on this UCAS/UUK analysis as the basis for his wholly untrue and misleading case in the Guardian:

However, a more objective analysis of the data shows a clearer picture. Although applications were down by a significant number, the total number of 18-year-olds in England this year is significantly down as well. If you adjust the figures to take account of changes in demographic, the application rate in England – which is where the changes in higher education policy have the greatest effect – has declined by only 1%. Just as important, the decline is proportionately higher in areas where more people go to university and which tend to be more affluent (where the figure is 2.5%) compared with more deprived areas, which very encouragingly have hardly seen any decline at all (0.2%). Both of these figures compare with a 3.5% population-adjusted decline in applications across England when the Labour government introduced top-up fees for the 2006 academic year.[my emphasis]

The most charitable interpretation is that Simon Highes is completely ignorant about HE admissions and has never looked at any applicant data in his life, in which case it is a shame that analysis from UUK and UCAS has so seriously misled him. Less charitable explanations are possible.

Is the Sutton Trust a force for good?

2012-01-31T09:00:00.002Z

On Friday, the Sutton Trust announced a new, 'independent' commission to review the effect of tuition fee rises in England. I have very mixed feelings about the Sutton Trust. On the one hand I admire the success they have had in shaping the access agenda in HE, on the other I tend to think that the shaping they have done has been pernicious in pretty much every way possible. One of the disciplines I try to set myself on this blog is not to burden it with my political opinions. HE planning, regulation and funding are hardly fascinating subjects in themselves, but at least they have direct impact on students, jobs and other things that do matter. My personal politics don't. I think this post makes substantive points about HE admissions, social mobility and the like but consider this health warning before you read on: it may be a rant.

So consider the Sutton Trust, established by a philanthropist called Sir Peter Lampl with the (avowed) aim of promoting social mobility through education it has spent around £30 million since 1997 and for that very small sum of money - about two months expenditure for a typical university - had an immense impact on policy and discourse about policy. As the trust itself has said quite openly, it has a particular focus on academically talented young people with the potential to study at leading, highly-selective universities. This might be called a grammar school model of social mobility, in which the structures of hierarchy are left in place, but a few (exceptional) individuals are allowed to leave the class they are born to. Now politicians, from the Laura Spence affair onwards, have been eager to grasp this particular framing of the issue. The result is that inequality in the UK continued to grow in the late 90s and 2000s, at best moderated at the bottom end by the tax-and-transfer programmes of the last Government, not by its education policies.

Of course even this very modest approach has been opposed by some, so perhaps it is possible that without the Trust and its work, we would be openly working to embed social inequality rather than pretending to work to combat it.

This new 'commission' provides a study in microcosm of everything that I admire about the Trust and everything I don't admire. There is no substance here at all - no new data, no resources expended, no findings, just a press release. Yet that press release instantly gains high-profile coverage for instance in the BBC and Guardian. When you look at the substance of the work, it amounts to misdirection. The commission will study the effect of fees 'on young people from low and middle income backgrounds', but even passing familiarity with the data will tell you that the effect on old people, or Europeans, or men is much more of an issue because the young are the least-affected group of applicants. Finally consider the membership of the group - Will Hutton, Principal of Hertford College; Stephen Machin, Professor of Economics at University College London and the LSE; Libby Purves, Times chief theatre critic; and Sir Peter Lampl himself. Here, surely, are gathered the best and greatest of the great and the good.

Martin Hall puts it well:

While universities certainly provide life changing opportunities, they also serve as gatekeepers, maintaining differentiation by exclusion and ranking, and contributing to enduring inequalities.

The Sutton Trust, it seems to me, want to maintain both roles - life changing opportunities for a few but gatekeepers for all. A funny way of 'promoting social mobility'.

Yet more UCAS data

2012-01-30T12:50:00.002Z

UCAS have published their data on applications as at the 15 January deadline. This is not the final deadline for all applications: applications continue until June and if institutions are desperate enough they will accept applications even after term has started in September, but it provides a good milestone for us to assess progress.

In my last post 2012 was looking pretty close to 2010. The chart shows that January 2012 was a much less active month than January 2010, so a significant gap has now opened on the 2010 numbers as at this date. Clearly the 'late surge' UCAS were talking about rather ran out of steam. Overall we are now 43,473 applicants down on 2011 - let's say a round dozen medium-sized universities' worth. However there were 208,131 unplaced applicants last year (and HEFCE have cut a further 15,000 places since then), so 43,473 fewer wouldn't of itself be a big issue.

It is worthwhile to look at the composition of the applications, though. Firstly, there has been a big fall off in mature applicants. Young applicants (18 and under) are down just 6,773. There are very sharp falls in 19-year old applicants (as you would expect, really), but also large falls in all age groups aged 20+. There are also large falls in male applicants (already a minority) and applicants from elsewhere in the EU. (non-EU applicants are well up, which will be great news if the UKBA lets them into the country...). Since the young people applying straight from school or college are also the most likely to get their applications in on time for the 15 January deadline, this also implies that the applications received after 15 January are also likely to be lower than in previous years so the 43,473 figure is likely to grow, not shrink. However it would have to grow very substantially for the brute shortage in applicants to become an issue for institutions.

We still do not know how applicants will react during Clearing. People willing to pay £9,000 for their top choice may not accept an institution they perceive as 'second best' even for £7,500 and in particular they may be unwilling to follow the core/margin numbers into FE colleges. In England, unlike Scotland, HE in FE is marginal and, if anything, has been getting increasingly marginal over recent years. Likewise, there may be difficult issues at the AAB margin, where neither institutions nor applicants really know what to expect. So although there are likely to be enough applicants to fill every SNC place in England handily, whether they will consent to be allocated to the institutions that are allowed to take them very much remains to be seen.

The gender issue also bears looking at. Most workers in HE are very conscious that the workforce - especially the senior academic and managerial workforce - is heavily tilted towards white males. The applicants and students are now very different. Fifty seven per cent of applicants are now female. UCAS haven't published an ethnicity breakdown, but unless 2012 is quite different from previous years the 'missing' men will be predominantly white men. Now the social and educational background of these two groups of white men (not to speak of their age) is very different of course. White men of the social background of HE managers and professors are well-represented in the student body.

Some of this imbalance is due to the superior non-HE options enjoyed by white working-class men in comparison with working-class women or men of other ethnicities, so it is not as straightforward a matter of HE-sector inequalities as the awards to black students, say. Nonetheless, there is an increasingly serious equalities issue developing here.

A couple of highlights from yesterday's Times Higher

2012-01-27T09:06:00.000Z

The Times Higher is always a source of amusement. Particular gems this week are Alan Ryan's reporting from a parallel universe where university fees don't seem to exist and discriminating against poor people is laudable ethical practice:

As Stefan Collini of the University of Cambridge once observed, a university place is one of the few things in modern Britain that isn't for sale. Things that weight the odds in an applicant's favour include better schooling, a richer cultural environment, and a home where a child can study in peace. But at the point where an applicant is face to face with an admissions tutor, academic merit is all that counts. I'm not sure such fastidiousness will survive.

Then there is Steve Edwards reporting from a (presumably different) parallel universe in which the problem with UCAS is that it is too responsive to the needs of universities. I think it's fair to say that here on Earth Prime this is not how most of us universities feel about UCAS.

Finally I enjoyed David Shaw's attempt to argue that the fact he can't enter all his articles in the REF is an ethical weakness in the REF process. I think he is arguing that HEFCE is morally obliged to have a policy which favours his interests over those of less productive researchers: it would be really great to see that case made out at greater length.

The HEFCE Grant Letter

2012-01-25T20:17:00.001Z

BIS have published their annual grant letter to HEFCE. This letter sets out not just the sums of money to be distributed by the Council, but also gives (increasingly precise) policy guidance about how those funds should be spent.

There are rarely great surprises in this letter, and this year is no real exception. That doesn't mean that there are no points worth noting. Consider

This letter confirms that our priorities for teaching funding remain unchanged and include:
The additional costs of high-cost subjects at undergraduate and postgraduate levels including, but not limited to, medicine, science, engineering and agriculture;
Those subjects which are strategically important and vulnerable and require support to avoid undesirable reductions in the scale of provision;
The additional costs associated with attracting and retaining students from non-traditional backgrounds, and disabled students, including the funding the Council provides to support widening participation and retention;
The additional costs of high-cost specialist institutions, such as arts institutions, some of which are relatively small;
Services which support the whole higher education sector, such as the Joint Information Systems Committee, the Higher Education Academy and the Quality Assurance Agency;
Costs associated with the transition to the new funding arrangements; and
Funding to support institutions’ knowledge exchange activities and their engagement with business and the community through the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF).

Change in these priorities, especially WP and retention funding, was widely expected.

You should also bear in mind that, for budgetary reasons, the Government does not expect to see any increase in the average length of undergraduate or post-graduate taught courses.

is also surprising. Currently HEFCE has no control over this issue although controls could possibly be put in place. I'm also unclear what impact the average length of postgraduate courses has on the Government's budget (longer UG courses obviously mean more fee loans).

You should continue to take forward funding both for research and for support for the next generation of researchers, by selectively funding on the basis of only internationally excellent research, and protecting funding leveraged from external sources such as the charitable and business sectors.

is another restatement of current policy where a shift to greater concentration of research funding was predicted by many, but it turns out that concentration will be achieved under another name:

On research, you should deliver efficiency savings from Quality Related (QR) recurrent research funding of £45 million in 2012-13, £73 million in 2013-14 and £104 million in 2014-15 to be reinvested within QR....In achieving these efficiencies you should encourage HEIs to collaborate for example through greater sharing of research equipment and infrastructure.

I will lay money that these efficiency savings will be achieved neither (a) by allocating more funding to the institutions with the best proportion of QR to research grant and contract nor (b) by allocating funds to 'spoke' institutions so that they can procure appropriate services from 'hubs'.

Due to over-recruitment HEFCE is being given a budget cut of £62 million, taken partly from unallocated voluntary giving match (which no-one will miss), and partly from Access to Learning Fund, which will be missed by many.

The 12/13 Student Number Control will be reduced by a further 5,000 as HEFCE have already announced.

David Willetts has just missed another opportunity to deny that the HE Bill has been delayed so it is worth stressing that the HEFCE budget remains very substantial: £5,402 million of recurrent grant in 2012/13 and £4,456 (provisional) in 2013/14. HEFCE can continue to control the institutions for a while yet - and HEFCE can keep control of the research-led ones indefinitely, even with current powers. My view is that the private providers are not coming into the market in any quantity, perhaps due to the continued regulatory uncertainty (it can't be for lack of profits given the average fees in England now). The Government can afford to delay the Bill for a while.

Dropping the HE Bill?

2012-01-24T08:29:00.002Z

Via Mark Leach I discover that the Telegraph is reporting that the HE Bill is to be dropped. These kinds of rumours always circulate, but if Willetts is quoted as saying “There’s going to be a further discussion in Cabinet in the next couple of weeks. There’s no final decision either way yet.” then clearly there is something to this one.

Currently we are still being regulated by HEFCE under existing powers. This works for two reasons (1) because the non-public actors (whom HEFCE can't currently regulate) are such a minor part of the picture and (2) because we all still have very substantial HEFCE grant. HEFCE's only power is the power to set conditions on grants. As the grants diminish, so does the power. Currently, new entrants are not really clamouring to get in to the English sector so a delay in legislation will not be fatal, but the day is not far off (in fact it is a couple of years away) when a significant group of universities are not in receipt of enough HEFCE grant to make it worth their while to obey Student Number Control limits.When that happens, BIS will lose control of the HE budget.

So whatever discussions may happen in Cabinet, the Bill is coming and will have to come before too long. They can run, but they can't hide.

Update Guardian also now covering this story. If the Guardian and the Telegraph agree it must have legs...

Udacity

2012-01-23T15:23:00.001Z

Via Felix Salmon I discover the launch of a new online learning provider, Udacity. This is a project of Sebastian Thrun and others, based on Thrun's Artificial Intelligence experience at Stanford.

I can't see much information about the Udacity course on building a search engine, which is the only one they seem to have released so far. I doubt I have the pre-requisites for that (although the site isn't even clear on that to be frank - fair to say that the website is at an early stage of development). The AI programme used a mix of video content with online quizzes and exams. Students could discuss issues with each other via a bulletin board. What seems innovative about this model is primarily how much that might seem basic to the whole university experience has been edited out, as you can see from this FAQ:

Can online students interact with the professors?
Yes, but not directly. Students can submit questions to discussion page, which will be ranked and the top questions will be addressed by Professor Thrun and Professor Norvig weekly.
Will students receive a Stanford certificate or grade for completing the course?
Only students enrolled at Stanford and admitted to the course can receive Stanford credit. Online students will receive a statement of accomplishment signed by the instructors with their name and rank within the online class. See the course information for more details.

If you take out the teaching and the certification, there isn't all that much of the traditional university offer left, but equally the marginal cost of delivery approaches zero. It isn't clear to me what the Udacity business model is. Somehow or another the staff are going to have to get paid. Perhaps a philanthropic funding source is out there for a relatively small-scale project, but since Udacity is offering stock options as part of the benefits package, that probably isn't the route they have in mind...

So two models leap to mind. One is the University of London International Programme where, as with Udacity, actual teaching is not part of the offer - you get a syllabus and examinations and you can pay others to help you learn if you want to. However accreditation is a key part of the offer here, which doesn't seem to be the case with Udacity, and fees amount to several hundred pounds a year.

My other mental model for this - one Udacity seems closer to - is the private training market, offering short, essentially unaccredited learning opportunities in specific skills areas. If that is the case, Udacity isn't really anywhere close to the existing HE market, but in carefully selected areas it could significantly undercut the current hotel-trainer-and-flipchart model that is still in pretty widespread use. What is less clear, though, is how this model really differs from a teach-yourself book.

So I conclude this development has little relevance to the future of Higher Education. Perhaps if I could see the business plan my lack of imagination would be cruelly exposed, but I suspect commercial confidentiality will spare my blushes for a little longer.

Core/Margin again: here is the core

2012-01-20T18:10:00.000Z

Caroline Charlton at HEFCE emailed my Vice Chancellor this afternoon with a spreadsheet and covering letter setting out the core element of our core/margin Student Number Control. Anything we have won from the margin will be announced separately in a few days' time. Caroline is a former colleague of mine and a truly charming individual whom I wouldn't wish to offend, but I can't see any embargo or other restriction she has placed on her letter so I shall give you the highlights.

HEFCE has not yet had its letter of grant/guidance from BIS but felt constrained to issue SNC numbers now because of the stage the UCAS cycle has reached, so the numbers are provisional;
We expected a 20,000-place cut to create the margin, but HEFCE have imposed an additional 5,000 place cut (25,000 in all). The extra 5,000 places are simply to reduce the risk to Treasury if all institutions exactly hit their SNC limits;
Further reductions beyond this 5,000 may be required by Government when the HEFCE grant letter is published;
Institutions who have exceeded their SNC in 2011/12 (I have no idea who these might be) will have to reduce their recruitment of non-AABs in 2012/13 to avoid further grant adjustments/fines for over-recruitment, so if there are any institutions who have over-recruited this year and have significant AAB populations they will face a very challenging position come confirmation and clearing this August. In an extreme case, an institution which has greatly over-recruited and has many AABs could be required to reduce its non-AAB intake by more than its SNC which would only be possible by recruiting negative numbers of students.... HEFCE's reason for this is that if institution A reduces its AAB population then institution B can just recruit those AABs, so there is no saving to the public purse.

Looking at my own institution's data, it seems that HEFCE have been reasonably lenient in the view they formed of the proportion of students with unknown or incomplete entry qualifications who may be AAB+. That is a great relief and means that (after our expected margin allocation has been made) we can hope for a tiny element of growth in our Home FTUG intake. The extra 5,000 places cut are a shame, but overall not a bad result.

Parents are failing to keep up with their children's scientific knowledge

2012-01-20T08:40:00.000Z

Says the BBC. Doubtless this spells the death-knell for that hoary old chestnut the grade-inflation story.

HESA and the private providers (again)

2012-01-18T17:37:00.000Z

I posted many months ago about HESA and the private providers, predicting an unsightly mess:

the UK Border Agency is obliging all private providers to be regulated by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), which in turn is likely to mean in future that they will all have to return data to HESA. However HESA's idea of who is 'registering' the students is very different from UKBA's idea of who is 'sponsoring' the visa.... These technicalities are therefore likely to lead to an almighty brawl in the not-too-distant future simply because there isn't capacity for everyone to meet their obligations with the precision required to make the data add up

If you have been closely monitoring the news, you will have noted that this prediction of mine has (ahem) yet to come to pass. However I was at a HESA event yesterday where I learnt from colleagues that the first wave of private providers -about half a dozen institutions - are in very active discussions with HESA but have yet to make much progress because no-one has taken any decisions about what exactly they will be required to do. It seems cruel and inhumane to make them return the full dataset when many of the most challenging fields relate to HEFCE funding which they will never receive, but I suppose that no-one wants to set a precedent by asking for less either. The issue is not primarily one for HESA but for the statutory customers which - in England - really means HEFCE.

Apart from giving me a straw to clutch whilst I continue to believe that I'm not wrong on this issue (I just haven't been proven right yet), I also think it demonstrates the concern I have expressed before that HEFCE is struggling to come to terms with its new remit over private providers. The longer this drags on, the more abruptly it will have to be resolved when the time comes, and the more that will hurt.

Those who have experience of the breed will know that this ability to interpret any datum as fitting our pre-conceptions is very common amongst middle-to-senior managers in universities, and will reach for an appropriately-sized pinch of salt.

Is it open season for AABs?

2012-01-16T18:46:00.000Z

Kim Catchside in the Guardian likens the AABs to Grouse on the Glorious 12th. Not, I confess, quite the language I would have used since -hopefully - being eagerly pursued by many prestigious HEIs will be more fun for the AABs than grouse shooting is for the grouse.

Kim makes a couple of mistakes in the piece. One isn't important in the context of her argument, but could confuse people thinking in a different context. She says:

The only reason that the Treasury allowed David Willetts to make AAB students off quota at a time of deficit reduction was that there are very few other qualifications that are equivalent to A-level performance at that level, so the bean counters could be fairly confident that the numbers wouldn't go above the 65,000 budgeted for.

This isn't correct. HEFCE have defined the AAB equivalencies for this purpose out of whole cloth, not relating in any way to existing standards such as the UCAS Tariff. The issue is rather that at the very high qualification levels, almost everyone already goes straight into HE. There isn't scope for students who currently decide to go straight into the workforce to be tempted into HE instead, nor are there many mid-30 year old AABs who might fancy a degree and haven't got one yet. As you go lower down the grade scale, there are more and more people who opt - or have opted in the past - out of HE and might therefore be tempted back, thus costing the Treasury extra money.

This is a minor issue, though, because it doesn't really affect Kim's argument. Much more important is her judgement about who is at risk of having their AABs nicked.

The institutions most at risk of losing students who've done best in their A-levels are those in the bottom quarter of the league table for academic entry. They often have a hundred or more AAB students each year. These are often students who've actively rejected more elite universities for reasons of culture, geography or course, but this surely will be the richest hunting ground for academic expansionists touting generous merit-based bursaries.

This is completely wrong, and to understand why you need to know that some of the 'AAB equivalent' qualifications are things such as degrees. In consequence a minority of these 'AAB' students are completely unlike the rest. There is essentially no chance that someone with an existing English degree looking to retrain as a social worker will be tempted to do so at Cambridge. The real risk - as I have been saying since my SOAS post at least - is to some really pretty prestigious institutions which have many AAB+ students, but also many sub-AAB.

This in turn tells you something about the dynamic in the AAB system. If the rules were going to strip a few hundred students away from each or the bottom-25 institutions in the league tables, no-one (I mean no-one who counts at Westminster) would much mind that. If it rips many hundreds of students away from a small group of really rather well-regarded places which Ministers' children might be likely to attend, that will be a different issue. The AAB threshold cannot stay where it is. It either has to come down, so that the institutions currently cut in half at AAB can be entirely above the line, and start putting effective pressure on those below them, or the whole policy will have to be abandoned.

But if the AAB threshold comes down, then there is a big risk to the Government funding and Kim's other mistake becomes relevant again. This isn't an issue of equivalencies which could be subject to some technical fix. This is why the evidence that Government has started to move the level of the average fee was so important. If that comes down, then the AAB threshold can come down too, and - for good or ill - the current dispensation stands a chance of lasting. If not, then not.

Cambridge Admissions: Bureaucracy in action.

2012-01-11T12:58:00.000Z

The Guardian published a piece on Cambridge admissions yesterday. It is tempting to do no more than poke fun. This, in particular, reaches a remarkably high standard of naivety:

Although a candidate's ethnicity is generally evident from his or her name and the photograph in their file, there is never any overt discussion of race. This seems surprising when both Oxford and Cambridge have been accused of being racially as well as socially exclusive.

But just this once, I can resist that temptation because what really strikes me about this piece is the immense power of bureaucracy as an organisational form, and the way it shields the bureaucrats from feeling responsibility for their decisions. Consideration is given to a candidate of obvious ability from a disadvantaged background.

The rapid pace of Cambridge would "kill her", one of the academics says. Another agrees: "I would really like to give her a place, but for her own sanity, she's much better going to one of the other redbrick, Russell Group universities, and just taking her time."
Partington says: "If we gave her a chance she would do what everybody else would do, and think: 'I'll probably be all right' and she will probably be wrong."
There is a despairing consensus around the table that the university cannot repair the gaps in this candidate's knowledge. A damning line from the school's reference – which lays bare its inability to teach the candidate – is read aloud by a tutor who raises outstretched hands in exasperation. The candidate's file goes back into the trolley with a clang.

Why is there a consensus amongst this group that Cambridge - one of the best resourced educational institutions in the world - 'cannot' fill the gaps in this candidate's knowledge? The reason is that Cambridge has chosen not to when it decided to structure its programme in a particular way. The programme could take longer, or start slower and speed up later, or an optional additional year could be tacked on the front. But the beauty of bureaucracy is that when the programme is designed and validated, that happens in a different room at a different time - perhaps even some of the people are different. By the time any individual admissions case comes up for consideration, the design and structure of the course - chosen by Cambridge - has become a hard constraint in the face of which fair-minded individuals are helpless. A group of bureaucrats get to sit in Cambridge perpetuating systems of inequality, and feeling like decent people while they do it.

More UCAS data

2012-01-05T16:57:00.000Z

UCAS published data on applications as at 19 December earlier this week. This time, the spin is about a 'late surge', although I can't see much surging in this chart myself.

nor in this one.

Instead, what seems to have happened is that the gap which had opened the previous month of about 20,000 applicants year-on-year has remained fairly constant, meaning that as total application numbers rise the percentage difference between the two years gets smaller.

As at 19 December there were about 270,000 Home/EU applicants to English universities, and the total number of places (based on the population subject to SNC or likely to be AAB+) is about 350,000. That means that with even a moderately active month from December 19 there will again be more applicants than places in the system. But as I've said before, this does not mean every place will be filled. I'm a bit of a doomsayer by nature, but for all that there is still a genuine possibility of uncomfortable outcomes for certain institutions.

Consider the case of the applicant who just misses the AAB threshold. Prestigious institutions which have had many of their AABs hijacked by even more prestigious ones (maybe SOAS) and would therefore like to have this person, may not be able to accept such students at Confirmation or in Clearing, because they will be constrained by the SNC; so there may well be a population of applicants too proud to accept the institutions able to accept them. Even students well short of AAB may not be willing to go to certain institutions in Clearing. Once London Metropolitan is full at £6k or less, will applicants be willing to pay £9k to go to UEL or will they decide that at that price it is better to miss out on HE? We don't know.

The November data weren't that bad. The December data aren't that great. Most institutions should be reasonably secure, but the small group at the cusp of the AAB/ABB boundary, and (I suspect to a lesser extent) low prestige/high fee institutions will still need to stay awake. The proof of the pudding will be in the Clearing.

An even newer University Challenge

2012-01-05T08:24:00.000Z

You may have seen via the BBC that David Willetts has announced a Government ambition to create more universities. The text of his speech is here, and the critical paragraphs are these ones:

Globalisation is still at its early stages when it comes to Higher Education. The next round of new institutions may well link existing British universities with international partners. The surge in international investment in science and technology would make this a key part of the mission of a new foundation. It might be that today’s institutions propose a new campus or a new international partnership. Or it might be new providers wanting to enter with different models. Today I can announce therefore that the Coalition is inviting proposals for a new type of university with a focus on science and technology and on postgraduates. Local economic partnerships, universities, businesses and international partners can come together to put forward proposals for new institutions.

There will be no additional Government funding. This time we will be looking to private finance and perhaps sponsorship from some of the businesses that are keen to recruit more British graduates. For example, we will not be diverting funding from support for undergraduate students. It is an opportunity to seize the new freedoms which we proposed in our White Paper last year. We already have a lot of interest and we want to move this to the next level. As proposals are developed we will be able to identify any specific obstacles that need to be removed including by legislation where necessary. A major city might wish to offer a site as Mayor Bloomberg has just done so successfully with his competition for a new graduate school in New York. We will be discussing with the interested organisations how best to carry this initiative forward. I am confident that with ingenuity we can grow our research base and our universities even when times are tough.

As the Minister himself acknowledges, there have been a lot of these new university initiatives in the past - although he namechecks only the older ones up to and including the polytechnics. Some of the more recent efforts have been less than successful. One thinks of the last Government's New University Challenge, which petered out for lack of funding, or the Mayor of London's plan for an Olympic Park university, which never even got that far. Clearly, though, the Minister's reference to 'interested organisations' must refer to specific parties so he must expect responses to the invitation when it is published. I'll make three points about this.

Firstly, I don't believe that major research universities anywhere in the world are sustained without a great deal of Government funding. If funds are not to be diverted from support for Undergraduate students, these new institutions must be a threat to the existing research institutions who stand to see Research Council or HEFCE R funds diverted. Sure enough the Russell Group has already responded less than warmly to the idea.

Secondly, as I've said previously here and here, the private sector just doesn't seem to be very interested in the White Paper's original vision of competition in the FT undergraduate market. The Minister may talk about the new freedoms in the White Paper but I can't really see any connection between a White Paper that said nothing about either research or postgraduates and a new initiative apparently to be devoted to both.

Thirdly, if legislation is really going to be necessary for the partnership the Minister has in mind, the scope to get these new institutions up and running within this Parliament must be limited.

There was one other item in the Minister's speech relating to our top-ranked universities. I'll try to blog on that shortly. The rest was mostly science-policy stuff which I will leave to others more expert.

Citation metrics

2012-01-01T20:31:00.000Z

Here in the UK, we are sometimes inclined to blame the RAE for setting off fierce competition between universities for research 'stars' and their citations. I suppose it is normal and natural for the British to see themselves as the centres of the universe, and therefore to ascribe international outcomes to national causes, but it isn't very well informed.

More Christmas Spirit

2011-12-22T16:40:00.000Z

When a Russell Group Vice Chancellor calls for funding to be taken away from universities that teach poor people, and given instead to universities that teach science, it is easy to see that as just another example of the Christian spirit of generosity that comes over all of us (to a greater or lesser extent) at Christmas. The way David Eastwood lavishes praise on the Browne Review whilst modestly avoiding any mention of his own role in the review is also, surely, praiseworthy.

Reporting in the Higher suggests that at least some of the less posh fear he is pushing at a half-open door as Treasury wants to withdraw the Widening Participation funding as a cost-saving measure. There are a number of funding streams associated with WP. For 2011/12 they break down as follows:

Widening Participation £141,630,239 (allocated on the basis of postcode data to identify students from low-participation areas, and Disabled Students Allowance data to identify disabled students);
Teaching Enhancement and Student Success £263,856,011 (allocated primarily on the basis of students' age and entry qualifications);
Other targeted allocations £203,550,592 (a grab-bag not all of which is WP-related, but including support for part time, accelerated and Foundation Degree programmes).

The WP and TESS funding goes primarily to new Universities. Leeds gets £1,106,592 and £1,141,339 respectively, which are non-trivial sums even in an overall HEFCE grant of £134,237,874 (1.7% of grant), but Leeds Met gets £1,679,582 for WP and £4,437,660 for TESS out of £63,460,810 (9.6%).

You can see how it would be painful and difficult for the coalition to withdraw this funding, however, because it directly supports the supposed Government priority of fair access for all. David Eastwood is formidably well-connected, but I wouldn't bet on him having a hotline to Santa this time.

Christmas comes early

2011-12-19T10:59:00.003Z

I wasn't previously aware of Choose Humanities - a project of the New College of the Humanities, but I'm glad I've come across it now when I am in a festive mood and able to enjoy it properly. There are so many things to love:

The Universities tab lists posh universities but excludes not just the ex-polys, but even respectable old universities like Hull. After all, the humanities are all about the shameless recreation of hierarchies of status, aren't they?
The Research tab takes you to a press release telling you that '60% of the UK's leaders have humanities, social science or arts degrees'. UK Leaders, for this purpose, seem to be defined as Russell Group VCs, MPs and FTSE100 chief execs. Here we handily have deference to power to go with our recreation of status hierarchies.
The Blog is also a treasure. I know I'm in a weak position to criticise anyone's writing, but I don't believe I've ever managed anything quite as bad as this:

CH.org argue that you should not be forced to believe what is taught but allowed to openly investigate why things such as faith and science are considered by some to be so-called ‘absolutes’, and, if necessary, to use critical thinking to non-violently, and with intellectual rigour, challenge and pick holes in arguments. The question is not to be taught what to think so much as how to think. This is what a good course in a humanities subject should do.

So there you have the Grayling vision of the humanities in all its fullness: hierarchy, deference, cliche and the run-on sentence.

Satire fails

2011-12-19T10:15:00.000Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/dec/18/black-students-oxford-university-rises

Replacing Sir Martin Harris

2011-12-15T18:40:00.000Z

The last time the Government had to replace Sir Martin as Director of OFFA, it reached for the most reassuring candidate available: a safe pair of hands not just from inside the sector, but well-acquainted with its more prestigious institutions.

This time, apparently, a more challenging candidate is being sought. Interesting, if true.

HEFCE Announcements on the student number control

2011-12-09T17:38:00.009Z

HEFCE recently published an important Circular Letter setting out some new policy on student number controls. I'm a little late to blogging about this because of the HESES deadline, which was on Friday 9 December, but now that is past I have time to catch up.

So the key points are:

Specialist institutions in the performing and creative arts that recruit primarily on the basis of audition or portfolio will be able to opt out of the AAB+ and core/margin system. This is a victory for some effective lobbying.
Disregard. As you may well have read, institutions (mostly FECs) charging £6k or less are now going to lose core places along with everyone else, however the first 50 places will be protected, so FECs with very small HE provision won't be forced to bid for a half dozen numbers every year. FECs with substantial provision, however, will be very unhappy.
E&D. HEFCE will ensure each institution’s student number control limit for 2012-13 is at least 20 per cent of their limit prior to the removal of AAB+ students, so that they can continue to provide fair access to those entering with EU qualifications and to meet their access agreement targets. This is a genuine issue which I've highlighted before (as have others), but of course there is irony in the way that HEFCE have managed the E&D issue by giving rewards to those institutions with the least diverse student bodies...
SIVS will be protected. No surprise there: they always are.
Under-recruitment: HEFCE say 'Should it be desirable to reduce future student number control limits for under-recruitment in 2012-13, we would normally expect not to do so where the level of under recruitment is not more than 5 per cent of an institution’s student number control or 25 students, whichever is the greater.' so they are not yet introducing a policy of clawing back unfilled numbers, but are setting out what it is likely to be. Since many of us have been expecting such a policy, this clarity is a really welcome development.

I would also recommend Annex B of the letter if you are a fan of bureaucratic cynicism. When HEFCE do these consultations the response is usually an immense amount of special pleading, mixed in with some complete misunderstandings of the issues. I particularly enjoyed the bids for additional funding to Price Group C subjects:

many respondents were...concerned about price group C funding, taking the view that this could not be adequately supported through income from fees alone. Again, there was a concern that this might have an impact on SIVS, in this instance modern languages. Other responses named certain subjects as being more expensive to deliver than the rest of price group C. The range of subjects mentioned was extremely broad, however: the only price group C subjects not to be characterised as exceptional were archaeology, and catering and hospitality management.

It makes me feel proud to work in a sector dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of truth.

Foreign students are 'damaging' economy

2011-12-07T10:28:00.002Z

I've had spit-out-the-cornflakes moments with my Metro before, but seeing this headline in my paper yesterday was certainly another. The story related to a 'study' by the think tank Civitas which found (surprise!) that there are many Overseas students in engineering and related disciplines, that (apart from those which are average or below average) engineering and related disciplines have above-average starting salaries, and overseas students are more likely to leave the UK after they graduate than the British, therefore 'damaging' the British economy by taking heir skills elsewhere.

It is surprising how often you find people speaking and writing as if there was a fixed supply of university 'places', and 'places' filled by overseas students were being denied to British applicants. That may be true of specific courses at specific institutions in any one year, but at a sector level it is self-evidently nonsense, or we wouldn't have these continuous ructions about closing departments. But Civitas take a pride in their brand of pointless contrarianism, and by their standards this was really a pretty mild bit of nonsense.

What I did find quite interesting about this piece was my own reaction to it. I actually spent some time thinking whether the Civitas report merited a response. It seems to have gained very little press exposure - I can't even find that Metro put it into the web edition, but if I have concerns that a mention on my tiny weblog is going to give undue prominence to a think tank - even one as flaky as Civitas - I think it is fair to say I am having delusions of grandeur. Does anyone know a cure for those which doesn't involve invading Russia?

The updated Access Agreements

2011-12-02T22:18:00.000Z

I've already posted on the institutions which have revised their Access Agreements. OFFA have now published additional details, including the names of the institutions in question. The list isn't a very surprising one. What interests me is the mix of the changes implemented.

an increase of £37.4m in fee waivers;
a reduction of £13.8m in bursaries and scholarships;
a reduction of £2.1m in outreach and retention measures; and
a reduction of £16.3m in headline fees.

These figures show quite clearly that reducing the price to Government - fees less waivers - has been the key driver here. A £53.7 million saving for the Government has been funded partly from £15.9 million less in outreach, scholarships and bursaries. In other words nearly a third of the saving has been taken straight out of students' pockets. The rest will have to be made up of larger class sizes and the like.

It may be that the market will prefer these slightly cheaper offerings. Leeds Trinity may now seem better value than Leeds Met, likewise London South Bank may seem better value than East London. But this is sheer speculation: there is no actual market process at work here. This is a point made earlier today by William Cullerne Browne, but (and I say this entirely without false modesty) six months ago by me.

VAT on shared services

2011-12-01T10:37:00.005Z

This story in the Higher barely counts as news, given that the intention to make this change was clearly signalled in the White Paper. Pretty much from the off, though, I have felt that it was in fact big news. And I still do.

The scope for economies of scale in sharing back-office functions is large. Given the sector's mixed history of outsourcing, the scope for services to deteriorate in the process, or even for outright disasters, is also large. Without anything major necessarily changing overnight, I would expect shared services to be a big issue for those of us who work in the back offices of universities over the next few years.

UCAS data

2011-11-30T16:36:00.000Z

A couple of days ago UCAS released their year-to-date data for 2012 entry. Mark Leach has already pointed out that the year-on-year falls reported by certain media mainly tell us how strong applications were last year. The point is actually made very clearly by a couple of graphs from the UCAS release:

2012 looks different to 2011, but pretty similar to 2010.

So it is clearly too early to panic, but at the same time it is too early to relax either. Applications at this point in the year are no guide to applications at the end of the process. Even if (and it is an if) we have reason from these data to think that applicants think their first-choice universities are worth the new, much higher, fees that tells us little about how they may value second choice universities and therefore what may happen in Clearing.

Although people sometimes talk of 'selecting' and 'recruiting' institutions, almost all universities are active in Clearing to one extent or another, and plenty depend on Clearing to fill courses which would not otherwise be viable.

So I agree with Mark's stated conclusion that the 'data can not offer us any serious conclusions about why people are/are not applying for university', but perhaps I'd put greater emphasis on the remaining downside risks. That's the kind of fun guy I am.

UCL Moves East

2011-11-25T10:12:00.002Z

The news that they might have to move out to Stratford has been greeted by at least some UCL staff with predictable dismay. Even with Westfield, Stratford isn't quite Bloomsbury. Colleagues at UEL probably aren't so happy either.

If this project matures (and there are some significant obstacles) it will be an interesting test of how much things are really changing in the sector. We once had clear rules and expectations for these kinds of project. HEFCE would be touched up for capital and revenue funding. In consequence of HEFCE's love of collaboration and hatred of all kinds of unseemly fuss, local institutions would be brought into the fold - preferably across the HE/FE divide. Thus we got Birkbeck Stratford (on a rather smaller scale than UCL are planning), and the New University Challenge. Now, HEFCE may no longer have the capital funding to make any real difference to what UCL want to do, and may not have much revenue funding either (although they still have control over student numbers up to a point). UCL may simply ignore the presence of Birkbeck and UEL in Straford (not to mention Newham College).

William Cullerne Browne sets out the alternative hypothesis, that it is precisely the new funding regime that will make this kind of deal a possibility. We'll see, I suppose.

The College of Law again

2011-11-24T18:11:00.000Z

Education Investor reports that there are 8 potential bidders now interested in the College of Law (although not naming Duke Street as one of them).

It is interesting that the numbers suggested, ranging from £175-£250 million are all well short of the £300 million which Apollo paid for BPP back in 2009. By 2009 the whole global collapse thing was already well established so it isn't as if that bid was made during a period of irrational exuberance akin to the dot com boom. The College of Law is at least as good a business as BPP. These numbers suggest that the reality of what Government is actually doing to liberalise HE and let in private sector players is much less appealing to the private sector in 2011, than the thought of what Government might do was in 2009. So whilst the speculations in my Duke Street post haven't held up all that well, the point I made here that the private sector doesn't really seem to be up for this revolution still seems to me to stand.

Core/Margin: Implementation

2011-11-15T17:14:00.000Z

Many things have happened during my intermission from blogging. This post is about the developments specifically in core/margin. Twenty seven institutions re-negotiated their Access Agreements with OFFA, and 201 universities and colleges (mostly FECs of course) have now bid for 35,811 margin places. There are 20,000 places available and HEFCE have announced that they will allocate places to eligible bidders pro-rata to their bid numbers.

Compared to my expectations, this must constitute a considerable success for the Government's agenda. Few or none of the twenty seven will see advantage to themselves or their students from their lower fees.

For the institution, 4,000 entrants at £8,500 are worth a much revenue as 4,500 at £7,500 but cost more to teach, so to wind up ahead financially the thirty-odd HEIs bidding for places would have to win almost all the 20,000 places available (unless they are very small HEIs on average). If bids are pared down pro-rata, that is unlikely to happen. Even if it does happen this year, it is going to have to keep happening year after year as further core/margin adjustments are made. Most institutions would do better financially to tough it out at a higher fee level.

Some of the institutions may have brought their numbers down primarily by switching student bursary support into fee waivers, which gives the student lower debt repayments in the distant future (or perhaps a smaller sum written off at the end of the loan) but takes actual cash out of their pockets now.That isn't a good deal for students.

It therefore seems likely that most of the twenty seven are looking ahead to a possible future in which continued cuts from the core would put them out of business. There is an element of the prisoners' dilemma here because if the Government's policies drive a few universities into bankruptcy that is a problem for those universities; if almost all the existing universities are bankrupted, that is a problem for the Government. Because a significant group of universities have moved, and the margin numbers have been substantially overbid, Government will be emboldened to keep pushing, and institutions above £7,500 (and below AAB) will begin to feel more threatened. We can expect to see a further wave of fee reductions next year.

The upshot of this seems to me to be that the chances that the current fee regime will form a sustainable, long-term regulatory and funding basis for English HE is significantly higher than it seemed when I was last blogging about a month ago. Whether you view that as good news or bad depends largely, I imagine, on your political stance.

Service resumed

2011-11-14T08:55:00.000Z

Just a short note to say that, following a slightly longer intermission than expected, my new employer has given me permission to continue blogging so I shall probably start up again shortly.

My new role is a little broader than 'planning', but although Phil Ward has been unkind about it, I like the title I've given this blog, so it won't change.

The Interim Regulatory Partnership Group Meets

2011-10-14T16:24:00.000+01:00

And the papers are here. Pretty thin, to be frank, although how much of that is down to a desire not to put sensitive matters on paper I can't say for certain.

Duke Street

2011-10-13T16:17:00.000+01:00

Education Investor reports that the private equity firm Duke Street are seeking to enter the UKHE market. Duke Street already have investments in the private post-secondary sector in Europe through EduServices, but their portfolio in the UK does not yet include such a company.

So clearly I have to concede something to Andrew McGettigan. This is a specific report of someone specifically looking to invest, it is more than mere noise and rumour. What kind of HEI might fit into Duke Street's range of 'enterprise value up to €300 million (£260 million)'?

Enterprise value is a technical term relating to the market value of a company plus its outstanding debts, so no existing HEI can have an 'enterprise value' by definition. There are a number of other ways one could value a business, though. This isn't my expertise, but let's apply a couple of methodologies to the College of Law (plucking this example, I emphasise, entirely at random), and see if we come out at the right order of magnitude.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBIDTA) is a measure used to assess the cash generated by an organisation. An investor puts cash in in the hope of getting cash back out later, so you can see the sense in this. The value of the business on this model would be some multiple of EBIDTA, with the multiple depending on issues like future prospects for growth at the time of sale. My (rather limited) understanding is that 10xEBIDTA would be a typical price for a strong business. The College of Law generated cash of £7.1 million in the year (£4.1 million in 2009) from operating activities. Tax plays a small role and investment income is more important than interest payments (in fact, as far as I can see, the bulk of creditors carried on the accounts relate to accruals and fees, subscriptions, etc. received in advance). There is a finance lease interest payment of £392,000 and deprecation of £1,547,000 so the EBIDTA is (roughly) the College income of £60.642 million minus expenditure of £53.164 (thus ignoring income/expenditure from investments), plus these two adjustments: £9.417 million.

Alternately, we could look at the balance sheet which shows net assets of £86.925 million. A business ought to be worth more than the sum of its assets, just as you expect to pay more for an actual piece of furniture than you do for a box of parts from Ikea. On the other hand, not all the assets would necessarily be privatised in a privatisation. Investments might be retained in the charity, and fixed assets such as buildings could also be retained in charitable ownership and then leased out to the profit-making business.

So neither of my two methodologies gives you a good sense of 'what might I have to pay for the College of Law?', but I think they do give you an answer to the question 'is the College of Law within Duke Street's range?' and that answer is 'comfortably'. In fact, you could do two deals that size to build a bigger business (which, it seems, is more or less what happened with EduServices). The College of Law is on the small side compared to a public university, but not tiny.

However we shouldn't forget that private businesses already exist in both FE and HE. Even if a deal goes ahead, it may be simpler to invest in an existing private post-16 business than to run the risks associated with novel corporate forms, TUPE, and perhaps staff resistance to entering the private sector. Many of these businesses are tiny, but not all. Private equity could offer a business in this class the financial backing (and management support) to grow explosively if the right regulatory framework is put in place from 2013. I would still rather bet on an outcome like this than a wholsale privatisation of an existing public provider.

The University of Wales: more parallels with London

2011-10-12T13:59:00.000+01:00

I posted a few days ago about the strong position which Leighton Andrews currently enjoys in relation to the future of the University of Wales. Clearly he knows that as well as I do, for he has now called for the resignation of the Chair of Council something over which - technically - he has no control whatsoever. A minister can no more arrange the resignation of a member of a chartered university's Council than he can fire a local scoutmaster.

Here, rather than Wales providing a precedent for London, London provides a precedent for Wales in the form of the London Metropolitan controversy. In that case HEFCE were put to immense difficulty to secure the resignation of the VC and Board, despite the clear case that public funds had been misallocated, the very severe consequent financial and reputational harm done to London Met, and the very strong leverage HEFCE had through control of future grant flows. In this case, the Minister controls little direct grant to the University of Wales as is (£704,000 in 2009/10), but rather more if you add the two other merger partners into the mix. Moreover whilst at London Met Governors and VC stood together, here Leighton Andrews is clearly seeking to separate them and side with the new VC as part of a new regime.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Even at the time, the resistance of the London Met governors seemed astonishing to me, but here the personal responsibility of the Chair of Council is obscure at best. In England there was very strong institutional resistance to allowing the London Met case to form a precedent, but perhaps in Wales institutional leaders are going to be fired with enthusiasm?

The public university: what is there to defend?

2011-10-11T16:08:00.001+01:00

I haven't previously commented on the alternative White Paper A defence of public higher education. At least as I understand it, the alternative White Paper and the associated campaign aren't really intended to have a near-term impact on the workaday business of funding and regulating Higher Education. For instance if you search for the phrase 'student numbers' you'll only find it twice, both times in the context of descriptions of the Government's plans and intentions. I understand this as a campaign with a longer-term view aimed at developing a political narrative that challenges the market-oriented perspective that has informed recent HE policy making by pretty much all parties. (Of course market-oriented narratives don't always lead to free market policies. As the alternative WP notes, the current Government's policy is certainly not a free market policy).

It feels slightly absurd to criticise a political movement for organising itself around the defence of something that doesn't really exist: to the extent that politics are not nakedly about competing interest groups, they are about ideals; and even interest groups need ideals around which their political interests can cohere. Nonetheless the gap between the public university being defended and the actual existing universities was really brought home to me by this HEFCE report and this Guardian comment piece.

Look at the HEFCE report first. It assesses the extent to which English institutions were able to meet their obligation under current legislation to report on the public benefits which they deliver in their capacity as charities (and for which they gain significant tax and other financial benefits). You might reasonably be sceptical that an assessment of compliance with bureaucratic requirements would really tell you anything about how well universities are delivering actual public benefits, and indeed if you look at the set of criteria used in the report, it is clear that there are some largely formal elements in the mix:

a. Did the trustees confirm that they had "had regard‟ to the Charity Commission's guidance on public benefit?
b. Did the report clearly identify the HEI‟s constitutional charitable objects, as distinct from, but not precluding, coverage of its vision, mission, values and/or strategic priorities?
c. How clearly did the report identify the beneficiaries of the HEI‟s charitable objects?
d. How clearly did the report describe the main activities that the HEI had carried out for the public benefit?
e. How clearly did the report explain how those activities delivered public benefit?
f. To what extent did the report discuss activities relative to the HEI‟s targets?
g. To what extent did the report describe future activities that would enhance or increase the public benefit of the HEI‟s activities?
h. Did the report discuss possible harm or detriment that might arise (or others might consider to arise) through the HEI‟s work?
i. To what extent did the report discuss barriers, particularly price, that might restrict access to the HEI's services, and what measures did it have in place to reduce those barriers?
j. Did the report discuss the potential conflict between private and public benefit arising from the HEI‟s activities?
k. Taking all factors into account, what overall rating seemed justifiable?

However if you look at the detail of the report, it is clear enough that it was these formal elements with which institutions mostly complied. 79 per cent of institutions clearly stated that they 'had regard' to the Charity Commissioner's guidance, 39 per cent clearly identified the beneficiaries of their charitable activities, 22 per cent could explain how their activities benefited their beneficiaries, and just 10 per cent could relate those activities to targets. Only 8 per cent of institutions even mentioned the conflict between public and private interests. So the further you get from mere formal reporting to something which represents a real understanding of the challenges of delivering real public benefit, the weaker institutions' performance was.

The Guardian piece I linked to provides a more direct insight into the hopelessly confused view of just one institutional leader about what 'public benefit' might mean. I think the HEFCE study gives good grounds for thinking that Mary Stuart's views are not untypical when she views public benefit arising primarily from deals with big business, with maybe a little volunteering on the side. Certainly this isn't the public university which the alternative White Paper sets out to defend.

The cynic might remark that universities do many things which their senior managers do not fully understand, and I am never knowingly undersold when it comes to cynicism. But I simply don't think that is the case here. Rather I want to draw attention to the passage about social inequality in the alternative White Paper.

3.22       An additional assumption that underpinned the expansion of higher education was that a ‘knowledge economy’ would be associated with a general amelioration of inequality, in terms of a general decline in the range of inequalities. This was broadly true until the 1980s, when the situation began to reverse. Britain is now a highly unequal country, with the top ten per cent having wealth around 100 times greater than the bottom tenth, and where someone just in the top ten per cent of wage-earners has earnings around four times higher than someone in the lowest ten per cent (NEP 2010). This level of earnings inequality, as well as the incidence of low pay, is high by international standards (OECD 2011). At the start of the 21^st century, inequality of incomes in Britain is greater than at any time in the last 40 years.

3.23        Trends at the very top have been striking. Atkinson and Salverda

3.24        This pattern of inequality is a product of government policy (initially by Conservative and Labour governments since the 1980s and continued by the present coalition government). Now universities are being asked to reinforce it.

This presentation - as if universities have somehow played no role in the increasing stratification and decreasing mobility of our society over recent decades - is astonishing on its face. But my point in quoting it isn't to speculate about the motives or understanding of the writers, rather my point is that institutions' contribution to this increasing inequality has been driven by managers as well as workers - pressing for admissions policies (and indeed academic portfolio decisions) to achieve higher UCAS tariff in order to drive up league table performance is one obvious and direct route through which increased social stratification has been delivered at many institutions. The OFFA agenda provides another example of a means by which university leaders and regulators have worked together to prevent progressive social change.

So I think don't agree that universities aren't delivering outstanding public benefits despite the cluelessness of their senior managers. I don't think they are delivering much public benefit at all, and their managers - at least many of them - are actively working to limit the public benefit delivered.

To come back to where I began, of course, I recognise that the alternative White Paper is trying to defend an ideal of what the university might be rather than the grimy reality of what it is. Defending that ideal is part of a political project which you may find politically attractive: this blog doesn't exist to defend my politics. All I am saying is that this emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

More adventures in Wales

2011-10-07T15:26:00.000+01:00

The situation in Wales continues to provide interesting illustrations of the intersection between university autonomy, regulation and pure politics.

Firstly, let's consider the clarification issued by the University itself. Whilst validation of other providers' courses will cease, franchising will continue. Terminology in this area is not always used consistently, but broadly a validation arrangement is where the university has not designed the course and does not deliver it itself: it merely provides a quality assurance service on courses designed and delivered by others. In franchising, however, an existing on-campus programme is delivered wholesale and (theoretically) unchanged by another provider on another site. Clearly, the number of programmes you have on your own site sets the limit for the number of programmes you can franchise, whereas you can validate as many programmes as you like, regardless of what you do on your own site. Given that the new University of Wales will have rather few on-campus programmes, simply because it will be rather a small university, the idea that the franchise provision will be bigger than the current validation business is a a little far-fetched.

Secondly, consider the challenge by other Welsh institutions to the continuing use of the University of Wales name:

Prof Richard B. Davies, Swansea University vice-chancellor, said it welcomed the merger of UoW with Trinity Saint David and Swansea Metropolitan University, which was announced on Monday.

"However, this new institution cannot and should not be called the University of Wales," he said.
"It does not represent higher education in Wales, it does not represent Welsh higher education abroad, and it will comprise of only two relatively small institutions in the Swansea hinterland.
The vice-chancellors of Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff, Glamorgan and Swansea, who are known as the St David's Day Group, said: "The changes announced this week by the University of Wales represent a fundamental change to the university's mission and the institution now needs a new title which reflects this considerably changed role - we are no longer able to accept it as the University of Wales."

You can see their point, really. The analogy would be if the University of West London were to merge with the University of London, sell off Senate House, and carry on calling itself 'The University of London'. Leighton Andrews, the Minister, has almost complete personal power here. If he dissolves Swansea Metropolitan University and the University of Wales Trinity St David (as currently planned) then the surviving institution will have no power to call itself anything but 'The University of Wales' unless he lets it. On the other hand the institutions cannot merge at all unless he merges them, as they have no power to dissolve themselves. He therefore has it in his power to thwart either party completely.

In mergers I have been involved in myself, the name of the merged institution has been resolved in the infamous smoke-filled room, and some odd compromises have emerged in consequence. I shall make no predictions about how this one ends.

The University of Wales

2011-10-05T09:46:00.000+01:00

Like many English people, to my shame I am only intermittently aware of Wales. My reaction on reading that the University of Wales was to get out of the validation business was therefore one of bewilderment. What else does it do? This is on a par with Apple getting out of the consumer electronics business. You can see from the accounts that over £10 million of the 9/10 revenue (which was only just over £15 million in total) came from this source - more if you count the federal support grants from University of Wales member institutions and the Funding Council grants that presumably relate mostly to this function.

Had I paid as much attention to events in Welsh HE as their importance deserves, I would have understood already that the real picture here is a merger between the University of Wales, Swansea Metropolitan University and the University of Wales: Trinity Saint David. The new VC of the University of Wales was, last week, VC of The University of Wales: Trinity Saint David. Whilst the University of Wales will provide the title and the constitutional shell of the merged institution, the actual organisation that currently goes by that name will virtually cease to exist. This kind of reverse takeover is particularly a Welsh speciality: the University of Cardiff is the seminal example.

For us Londoners, the continued saga of the University of London provides an interesting parallel. When I worked at an institution within the federal university of London structure, the sense was that a break-up of the University would favour the largest colleges - especially UCL. This Welsh example shows that it needn't necessarily be so - Trinity and Swansea Met are two of the smallest institutions in Wales - even put together they are smaller than Aberystwyth. With the VC of the University of London having recently resigned - apparently because the job was too much like hard work - all kinds of possibilities are thrown open.

The Interim Regulatory Partnership Group

2011-10-01T12:00:00.005+01:00

HEFCE and the SLC have established an Interim Regulatory Partnership Group. The role of the group is to manage the transition to the brave new world of regulation.

HEFCE's website tells us that

at the first meeting the group agreed the following programme of work:
to map the current higher education system, so that there is a clear understanding of the contribution made by all the organisations and how they interact with universities, colleges and individual students
to review the way that data is collected and used at present.

Two points are of interest to me about this group.

Firstly, consider the membership in terms of the individuals involved. I think only Alison Allden can claim any recent hands-on experience of 'the way that data is collected and used at present', given her time overseeing student administration at Bristol - but she was pretty high up at the time. her background is more in IT. Anthony McClaren spent about three years about fifteen years ago at a similar level of responsibility, before he became a quangocrat.

Now I have nothing against quangocrats. I have that on my CV too. But from this perspective the quangos, not the institutions, are the ivory towers. Life looks very different to those of us in the gutter, and the group doesn't seem to have given itself membership with the experience to do the job it has set itself.

Secondly, consider the membership in terms of the sector experience and background they represent. When the HEFCE Board was last refreshed, I commented that the chance to strengthen its experience of regulating private sector organisations had been missed. Now the chance to bring that perspective on board has been missed again.

There are two key transitions towards the marketised HE sector which the Government envisaged but which are not coming about. One is that new market entrants are not coming forward - not at all as far as I can see but certainly not at the rate that existing private providers are going out of business. The other is that HEFCE is not managing the transformation needed in its own role as shown not only here and in the Board issue I blogged about earlier, but also in the way it is taking forward a more interventionist approach to data management even as we speak (I got my first set of queries from HEFCE under this policy earlier today, as it happens).

There would be a neat irony if these two failures cancelled each other out, but much as I love irony I can't quite see it. There are still going to be quite a few private providers who will survive the UKBA well enough to enter the new world and fall under HEFCE regulation. The regulatory system is going to have to adapt. The longer we take to start making this transition, the more abrupt and painful it will be.

The financial health of the HE sector

2011-09-29T08:00:00.000+01:00

Grant Thornton presumably published this study primarily for marketing purposes. It serves to keep their name in front of potential clients. Whether it is a great advertisement, I rather doubt.

For a start there are some startling errors (GT claim the sector employs just 130,000 people, which would be less than 1,000 per university. HESA has a rather more believable figure of 387,430). Secondly there's the rather grab-bag assortment of contents: a bit about 2009-10 accounts, a bit about the impact of the new fee and repayment system on the 'representative' graduates, a bit of handwaving about the future of the sector, and a very vague sketch of how universities could outsource everything except the academics. The devil would be in the detail if only there was any detail there.

One thing that strikes me in the analysis of 2009-10 accounts is that this is broken down by mission group which, to me, makes little sense. As you'll see from these charts, there's very little difference between Million+ and the Russells in key financial indicators like proportion of staff costs and % surplus. Given that they differ so much in other ways, this is perhaps surprising.

In practice, all the mission groups contain a mix of financially sound and less-sound institutions, so the average by mission group isn't very revealing. This is a reminder (and reminders are constantly needed) that not everything about UK HE can be understood by locating each HEI's place in the institutional hierarchy.

In which the regulators of English HE do not appear to advantage

2011-09-29T00:01:00.002+01:00

In principle, I am sympathetic to the plight of the quangocrat. I was one myself once, and it isn't always easy to balance the interests of your many stakeholders. I've posted before about my appreciation for the precisely-tuned prose which results when these matters are handled with sufficient delicacy.

In the case of OFFA, it is vital to remember that OFFA was created for the single and sole purpose of providing political cover for fee increases. It has no powers whatsoever to compel any university to widen access or admit fairly. The two powers the Director does have are to refuse an Access Agreement or to administer small fines. The one is to extreme to be used, the other too petty to bother talking about.

Nonetheless there are cases when the plates stop spinning, and the whole farrago collapses in confusion. OFFA's joint report with HEFCE on Access Agreement and Widening Participation Strategic Assessments for 2009/10 is one of those. From this report you cannot tell

if access to any university has become fairer or less fair in 2009/10;
if participation has been widened in any way in 2009/10;
which universities (if any) have made progress or failed to make progress against which targets

We are quite literally offered the finding that:

In 2009-10, 190 institutions set statistical targets relating to applicants and entrants. 76.8 per cent of institutions reported they had either exceeded or met all or most of their statistical targets, and 23.2 per cent had not yet met targets but had made some positive progress

based on institutions self-reporting from a drop-down menu. It is no wonder that less dispassionate observers than me sometimes get annoyed about the sheer pointlessness of OFFA when it is so nakedly displayed.

If this was a successful attempt to cover the offences of certain elite institutions that haven't widened access very aggressively, or admitted very fairly over recent years then one could perhaps understand that this kind of shady practice with the public sometimes falls to the lot of the quangocrat. But of course the data needed to show how is doing what are mostly in the public domain, and where OFFA have data from their monitoring that is not in the public domain, under FoI they cannot fail to release it. Hence it is that a day after OFFA circulate my advanced copy of the report, I get the following email:

Dear OFFA contact,

OFFA has received a freedom of information request from a journalist for full details of progress made by institutions against their access milestones in each year since 2006-07. This includes performance data for each institution, including whether they have met milestones, missed them or otherwise.

As you are an institution who has submitted annual monitoring returns to OFFA, I am writing to tell you how we intend to respond to this request and to seek your views.

Under section 1(1) of the FOIA, requesters are usually entitled to be told whether we hold any information that falls within the scope of their request and, if we do, to have that information provided to them except where it is covered by an exemption. In cases where access to information is refused by OFFA in reliance on an exemption from disclosure, OFFA has a duty to give reasons for that refusal. Further information about the FOIA can be found here: http://www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/freedom_of_information.aspx .

Having reviewed the monitoring returns and performance data, our initial view is that there is a public interest in disclosing this information and therefore it should be released under the Act. We are preparing the documents for release by the deadline of 7 October. We have made it clear in each of our monitoring guidance documents that, should we receive an FOI request, individual monitoring returns are unlikely to be treated as confidential except in very particular circumstances.

So OFFA and HEFCE will gain the opprobrium of publishing a patently useless report, without even protecting the blushes of those institutions that they are trying to protect. All in all, not a good day for the regulators

Judging the debate on Labour's £6,000 fee

2011-09-28T08:00:00.003+01:00

On the once-bitten-twice-shy principle, this blog has policy of not linking to anything written by Tim Leunig. Here, then is a link to the THE reporting disagreements between Leunig and Labour about whether the £6,000 fee policy is progressive or not. If you want to read the CentreForum analysis itself, then I direct you to Google.

Leunig's analysis is a bit of a hatchet job - in fact it reads like a rather rushed hatchet job. For instance he reports that the winners are disproportionately old which is absurd in a cohort study - both winners and losers will be the same age. What he means is that the winners will collect their winnings late in the life course because the effect of lower fees cashes out in an earlier end to repayments, not in lower repayments. He also reports that the Government is the main gainer from the proposal (because the amount of loan written off after 30 years is, on average, less), whilst simultaneously claiming that the Government will be paying out £3,000 more per student upfront (which, if I calculated correctly yesterday, isn't true). These can't both be correct statements, and in fact since the Government's 'expenditure' is the RAB charge assessed at the time the loan is made, then any write-off at the end of 30 years isn't even a paper transaction as far as Government is concerned.

Meanwhile Gareth Thomas in the THE refers to a House of Commons study which I can't find (I think this is the appropriate link, but there's nothing there) which finds 16% savings for the lowest earners. I have no idea where these come from, so for all my scepticism about Leunig I think it is too early to call this against him. Despite the title of my post, I'm not going to reach a judgement on the debate yet - if ever.

My judgement on the policy, though, is increasingly negative. It looks as if it will reduce spending on HE (at least relative to the 2012 baseline, if not the 2011 baseline) without bringing any significant benefit to students or graduates (since debts will remain extraordinarily high if everyone is charging £6k). However that judgement is subject to change if I can substantiate this 16% saving for the poorest graduates. We'll see.

Degree Awarding Powers

2011-09-27T08:00:00.002+01:00

I was speaking yesterday to a colleague who works in quality assurance, and she reacted with scepticism to my view, often expressed on this blog, that the White Paper will make little difference to private providers and in particular is not resulting in new private providers entering the sector.

On further discussion, I understood that her view was that many existing providers will no longer need universities to validate their provision. As for UKBA purposes they have to be overseen by QAA anyway, they might as well go the whole hog and get their own degree awarding powers. This will have a big impact on her work, and a non-trivial impact our mutual employer's validation income.

On reflection, I think what i have published on this blog agrees with this view, but has tended to trivialise it as an issue. My thoughts have been far more focused on the impact of Core/Margin, because that is closer to my own professional area - Planning. Of course these providers for the most part already exist, but people such as BITE or LSBF becoming degree awarding institutions in their own right is not a completely trivial matter, and I have not given this issue enough prominence in the past.

The £6,000 fee cap

2011-09-26T14:42:00.000+01:00

A few thoughts about the £6,000 fees cap policy announced by Labour over the weekend, and already covered in depth here, here, here and many other places.

Firstly, the policy is 'fully costed' at £750 million to be sourced from higher corporate taxes and higher repayments by very wealthy graduates. I think institutions will find this disappointing. According to OFFA (who ought to know) the average post-waiver fee is currently £8,161. Cutting this to £6,000 will save the taxpayer the RAB charge (about £650 per student). The £750 million then needs to be split across all 1,226,950 FT Home and EU undergraduate students to make about £611 more. £6,000+£611+£648=£7,259 so, even with a generous rounding margin, this isn't enough to restore the fee income institutions are hoping for. It may be enough to restore historic funding levels.

Secondly I follow William Cullerne Brown in seeing this as likely to be one stage on the journey towards a formal abandonment of the graduate tax policy. Pure graduate taxes are, in my view, unworkable in English HE which is why politicians tend to move away from them as they approach power. However I can't find any clear statement about the future of the student number cap. John Denham is quoted as wanting to move away from the 'pernicious' core/margin model, but doesn't specify what he is moving towards - an end to numbers control, or just an end to moving the numbers about? From an institutional perspective, the numbers cap issue is really the more important one.

Since Ed Miliband has already indicated that this policy will be changed before the next election, it isn't likely to have much direct impact on anything. In one sense, as a concrete step bringing Labour policy closer to current Government policy, it should reduce uncertainty for institutions. I'm not sure that's how it will feel for us on the ground.

Comparing English and American HE

2011-09-23T08:25:00.001+01:00

I’ve posted before about the Education Trust’s survey of US Universities that found only a tiny number of institutions with low fees, decent graduation rates, and above-average proportions of poor students. In this post I’ve excerpted a key graph from that report, and produced a companion graph of English universities by cost, graduation rate and proportion of students from lower socio-economic groups. The data definitions don’t tally up precisely (for which see below), but this provides, I think, three really powerful and interesting messages.

The US (Education Trust data)

England (HESA and OFFA data)

Firstly, diversity in English HE is very tightly constrained. Admittedly I’ve left out HE in FE and private providers for lack of data, but both are pretty small. I do include many small and specialist HEIs. The English providers occupy only a tiny fraction of the landscape that the Americans cover – if both the cost scales were comparable, then the English institutions would sit in a very tight phalanx indeed, in the top-right quadrant of the American landscape.

Secondly, England’s second and third-tier institutions are of astonishingly high quality. Whilst American and English elite institutions may be pretty similar (the English tending to be cheaper, of course), the bulk of unfashionable institutions are in completely different places. Many public and private institutions in the States have graduation rates well below 50%. Not one English HEI does.

Thirdly, England’s second and third tier institutions are (from 2012) astonishingly expensive: much more expensive than the average US public institution. Of course the student loan systems are very different so the English institutions may, in practice, be just as accessible. This is true in theory, but whether it is true in practice remains to be seen, I think.

Footnotes

1. The cost scales for England and America are different, as the US graph uses a log scale. The English values are too close together for this to make any sense at all. I think that the US ‘cost of attendance’ is tuition plus fees – usually billed separately in America, but all covered under the single OFFA-regulated fee in England. However not being an expert on US practice, I may be wrong about this.

2. The costs for English institutions are average costs calculated by OFFA. Costs for low-income students would hopefully be lower because they would hopefully get more of the OFFA-countable support. However I don’t have the data to hand to demonstrate this.

3. The graduation rate for the US institutions is after 6 years, and for English after 15. Obviously this makes the English data more favourable, but in practice very few students graduate in years 7-15 so the difference in methodology certainly does not explain the huge variance in graduation rates. I have excluded those English students who transfer to another institution or successfully achieve a lower award as I believe these are excluded from the US graduation rate calculation.

4. US Pell grant data and English NS_SEC classifications are obviously not directly comparable. In both graphs there’s a tendency for the biggest bubbles (i.e. highest concentrations of poor people) to be at the left hand (low graduation) end, but that will hardly be news to anyone.

Venture Capital

2011-09-22T15:50:00.000+01:00

In comments on this post, Andrew McGettigan points me to an Education Investor story about venture capital.

Speaking to EducationInvestor, Glynne Stanfield, partner at law firm Eversheds, said he was aware of five instances where “big private equity firms” are looking at buying part or even all of a UK university.

I have to confess this makes no sense whatsoever to me. Best as I understand venture capitalists, they seek to buy or invest in businesses which can be aggressively grown in value and then sold on. Quietly taking a steady profit on a steady business is not really the VC line (or so I thought), so buying a university in heavily-regulated England makes no sense to me.

I suspect some overselling by EI. The currently-ubiquitous Matt Robb makes more sense when he says:

there are “legally acceptable routes by which universities and investors can enter into partnerships that retain the best of both worlds”

Partnership around research commercialisation - where there is high risk and a potential IPO or sale to allow the VC to cash out in the medium term makes sense and if we see anything emerge I suspect it will be this.

Condé Nast

2011-09-21T14:39:00.002+01:00

Via Registrarism, I discover that Condé Nast is launching a fashion college in London. This isn't exactly unprecedented. Sotheby's for instance have an education arm which leverages the exclusivity and access offered by the Sotheby's brand. To quote the Sotheby's site:

Sotheby's auction house provides students with privileged access to pre-sale viewings, talks by experts, and handling sessions. In addition, students visit the many commercial galleries, artists' studios and museums available in London. Such knowledge prepares students for a variety of careers in the art world.

As you may have garnered from this post, I don't consider myself much of a looker and don't have much interest in fashion. I am interested to see from the BBC site, which makes this clearest, that there are no plans to offer undergraduate degrees.

I've been watching for any new private providers to announce an intention to open in the UK undergraduate market since the White Paper. So far I've seen none. Only those providers - Kaplan and BPP primarily - already committed before the White Paper seem to be coming forward. I strongly suspect that the student number cap is the biggest single issue here.

When does absence of evidence become evidence of absence?

Continuing a conversation with Andrew McGettigan

2011-09-20T12:40:00.001+01:00

When people come to my blog, it’s generally to do one of two things. Either they are searching on Google for something to do with core/margin, or they have come to read this post, which I published in response to an earlier piece of Andrew McGettigan’s about the White Paper. Andrew has now published a further article looking in detail at the case of Middlesex University, and as that piece is now on the public web, I’m going to post a response to it in the hope that it will also be useful.

I am taking the same approach as I did before, not wishing to comment on Andrew’s political commitments or values, which are in any case less prominent in the Middlesex piece. I want to offer data and a pragmatic, practitioner perspective on the issues that Andrew raises. I think in a few cases Andrew’s rhetoric in this piece is slightly overblown, but I understand that he is writing in a particular genre for a particular effect so hopefully when I comment on those examples I will manage to avoid any tone of condescension or superiority. If I fail to achieve that, I should honestly acknowledge that it is probably because ~~the photo of Andrew that I ripped off his academic.edu profile (with that prominent nose and full head of hair)~~ [Update: Photo removed at Andrew's request] reminds me of myself when I was younger. I do still have the nose, but as I am now just a few weeks shy of forty the hair is an increasingly painful thing to be reminded of.

The Research Fortnight editorial identifies three revolutions in English Higher Education. These are (1) the shift from grants to institutions to fees and loans as the main source of funding (2) the introduction of a competitive market for students and (3)changes to the constitutional form of universities, possibly including outright privatisation. I agree that (1) is a significant matter, particularly for the students affected but also to an extent for some of the institutions. (2) is rather an odd one at the moment. For certain institutions, such as SOAS, the competitive market in AAB students is likely to be a very material issue. For others (Middlesex would be an example) the reality is that centrally-imposed quotas which add up to much less than the overall demand for HE mean that the market for student recruitment has never been less competitive, but (2) is not the focus of the piece. The focus is (3), constitutional change to the universities themselves. The RF editorial describes this leading to:

Degrees without universities – the end of a thousand years of history and the principle that a university is defined by a self-critical community of scholars

Now I confess that the ‘thousand years of history’ line pushes one of my own little buttons as an ex-medievalist, because of course medieval ideas of the university have very little to do with the self-governing community of scholars. Oxford and Cambridge adopted this model in the 1850s following state intervention. Likewise the redbricks were forced to adopt this model by the state – the University Grants Committee went so far as to refuse grant to certain institutions until they emasculated the lay role on their Boards, and the first university to formally establish its own academic staff as ‘supreme’ in academic matters was Durham, not when it was founded in the nineteenth century, but when the charter and statutes were revised in 1937. (See Mike Shattock for more on this). Even as recently as the 1980s we still had the CNAA awarding degrees in the Polytechnics without being a university before the British state – again – broke up this model and established the Polytechnics as HECs. So the history of the ‘self-governing community of scholars’ idea needs to be understood as part of the history of centralisation in the British state more broadly, not romanticised as some medieval survival which – in England at least – it patently isn’t.

But really that is a distraction. Whether we are overturning a thousand years of history or only twenty, a fundamental constitutional change in English universities could still qualify as a revolution. Research Fortnight uses Andrew's detailed case-study of Middlesex to paint a picture of the pressures that might push a university towards privatisation, and the way such a process might take shape. In my response I want to demonstrate (a) that Middlesex is not really all that exceptional as London new universities go (b) that it is under no very immediate financial threat (for all that the VC and/or Finance Director might be motivated to do a bit of shroud-waving to hold costs down) and (c) that the path to privatisation which Andrew sketches is so long, intricate, risky and expensive that any sane entrepreneur with the money and connections to make it happen could make a lot more money more quickly by going another route.

Let’s start with (A). Andrew identifies Middlesex as unusual in its post-2012 fees, degree of internationalisation, level of borrowing, extent of provision in Band C, and redundancy scheme. Middlesex is certainly an international university with some borrowings and much of its provision in Band C, but it is hardly exceptional on any of those lines. Let’s look at some data.

Top ten London institutions by estimated average cost per student after allowance for financial support (OFFA)

	£
Royal College of Music	8,829
Courtauld Institute of Art	8,760
City University, London	8,728
Central School of Speech and Drama	8,711
Guildhall School of Music & Drama	8,689
Middlesex University	8,602
University of East London	8,560
Rose Bruford College	8,543
University of the Arts London	8,541

Clearly Middlesex doesn't stand out from the crowd here.

HE Student FTE by fee status (2009/10 HESA Data)

	Home	Overseas
The University of East London	81%	19%
London Metropolitan University	83%	17%
London South Bank University	89%	11%
Middlesex University	82%	18%
The University of West London	88%	12%
The University of Westminster	86%	14%

These data exclude students studying offshore, which I don’t have to hand. It is true that Middlesex (like Nottingham and unlike most other universities) has an offshore strategy which involves actual campuses overseas rather than just partnership arrangements but the serious money (and the current UKBA risk) is in these onshore overseas students. There’s nothing very exceptional in Middlesex’s numbers here.

Borrowing limits are set by HEFCE. For long-term loans, HEFCE require institutions to seek authorisation when the servicing costs will be more than 4% of turnover. In the 2009/10 accounts, interest payable was £6.093 million – 3.6% of income – so well short. Nor would HEFCE necessarily refuse permission for borrowing above this threshold if it were reached in future. If you think how much of your own income goes on paying the mortgage and the credit card, I think you’d agree that 4% is an extraordinarily low level, so the idea that Middlesex is deeply indebted is highly misleading.

HE Student FTE by HEFCE Price Band (2009/10 HESA Data)

	A	B	C	D	Media	Sport
The University of East London	0%	12%	40%	40%	7%	2%
London Metropolitan University	0%	11%	27%	56%	5%	1%
London South Bank University	0%	16%	43%	38%	2%	1%
Middlesex University	0%	8%	44%	43%	3%	2%
The University of West London	0%	3%	70%	20%	7%	0%
The University of Westminster	0%	9%	41%	43%	6%	0%

Media and sports science are funded at institution-specific rates, but in most cases average pretty close to Band C. You can see clearly that Middlesex is in the normal range alongside UEL, Southbank and Westminster. West London (TVU as was) is the exceptional university here.

As for redundancies, see here, here, here or here for the constant drumbeat of those in the sector recently. They prove nothing except that managers like to reduce costs.

Now if Middlesex is a fairly run-of-the-mill London new university, perhaps that only proves that Andrew did too little to show that the risks extend to many institutions, not just one. So my second task is to show that Middlesex is under no very immediate financial threat. For the sake of shortening a post which is already fairly long, I’m only going to look at Middlesex here, and not UEL, LSBU, Westminster or West London (for the avoidance of doubt, London Met is under imminent threat of financial dissolution, but for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with current Government policy or the White Paper)

Ultimately, institutional sustainability is about cash. As of the 2009/10 accounts, Middlesex had £27.238 million in cash at bank and in hand, plus £17,495 million owed by its debtors, and falling due within the next year. The university’s operations generated £6.994 million more in cash than they consumed. Let’s assume that half the overseas student fee income (i.e. £15 million) were to be wiped out overnight, and the university took no measures to restore this income or reduce costs. It would then be losing cash at the rate of £8 million a year, instead of making £7 million a year as currently. In consequence (and if no further borrowing, asset sales or other remedial measures were taken) the cash would run out in about three and a half years. But in reality even unsuccessful cost-cutting or revenue generating projects would stretch things out further than that. In the worst case, where revenues collapse and the university responds incompetently, insolvency is realistically possible about five years off. Hardly teetering on a cliff edge.

So now, my third task is to persuade that the path to privatisation is too long, tortuous and risky to make any sense. To go down this road, you will need a lot of time, cash and political support. If you have enough time, cash and support to take Middlesex private, then frankly you have more profitable investment opportunities open to you than a second-hand university in the unfashionable end of London.

For the deed to be done, you need means, motive and opportunity. The constitutional means will arguably be provided by the Government’s new legislation, but as Andrew identifies, the property of a HEC can’t simply be given away. The private company would have either to lease the university’s assets or buy them. If they were bought, then the Exchequer interest would have to be repaid to HEFCE. Of course the Government might be persuaded to wink at payment for assets below market rates, and in an extreme case HEFCE can waive the Exchequer interest but this will take delicate negotiation if it can even be achieved. So even once the legislation is passed, someone very rich and well-connected is going to have to want to buy Middlesex very badly before privatisation can happen. Other than the physical assets (which could in principle be sold tomorrow under existing legislation) Middlesex’s assets are current revenue streams, quota places within the HEFCE cap, and degree awarding powers. Of these (a) of the current revenue streams can support the business, then you can’t have a forced sale, (b) the quota places are certainly valuable because the core/margin limits the number of places that a new entrant can hope for any other way, but they are a wasting asset as continued operation of the core/margin policy will strip them away. Moreover the kind of very rich, very well-connected person who could take Middlesex private could equally well prevail on BIS and/or HEFCE to assign margin places to a new start-up institution, and (since HEFCE staff are, of course, not personally corrupt) not have to pay for the privilege. (C) the DAP issue I have dealt with before.

This leaves the option of an unforced sale – where Middlesex’s (or whoever else’s) current management wish to go private and work together with an investor to achieve a management buy-out of some kind. In practice, however, I think this differs from the forced sale in degree, not kind. The Governors of the institution in question are going to have to be convinced that the institution’s prospects are so awful that the management buy-out makes sense despite the potential for large financial gains to managers. Then HEFCE and BIS are going to have to be convinced too. There have been plenty of cases in the past where Governors have been too cosy with management and winked at large rewards to them, so clearly this could happen, but the crisis couldn’t be made up out of whole cloth.

The only other inducement Andrew suggests for Middlesex to want to move into the private sector is for access to capital. Frankly, in my view, this is absurd. Banks are always keen to lend to universities at favourable rates. Why wouldn’t they be? No English university has ever defaulted on its debts in living memory. Lending to universities is risk-free profit. The tax advantages of being in the public sector are pretty significant and the HEFCE grant income is going to remain significant for many years to come. Complete privatisation would bring very significant costs for marginal or illusory gains.

In conclusion, then: Middlesex, and by extension the other London new universities (London Met excepted) are large, well-financed and stable institutions. There is certainly scope for things to go badly for them, but insolvency or crisis is, in the near-to-medium term, almost unthinkable. If you are a good mate of David Willetts’ and have a couple of hundred million looking for a good home, then you can find far better, surer investments than waiting for a distressed sale of one of these institutions. If you are an enemy of David Willetts’ and want to oppose the Government’s agenda for HE then there are other wolves nearer the sledge. If a few HECs become companies limited by guarantee in the next few years, then I predict that that will make no difference whatsoever to the staff or student experience, just as it makes no difference now that Greenwich is a CLbG and UEL on the far side of the river is a HEC. Student number controls and the UKBA are the factors that are going to prevent students realising their ambitions and drive job-losses in the sector over the next few years.

Defence and Higher Education

2011-09-15T13:16:00.000+01:00

Judging by the response to Tuesday's post, pictures of battleships are the way forward for this blog so here is HMS Warspite, the hardest-fighting battleship in two world wars, pictured on shore-bombardment duty off Normandy in 1944.

To make some tentative connection to the original subject of this blog, I'm accompanying her with a post comparing the UK Defence and Higher Education industries from an exports and jobs perspective.

British HE had 125,045 non-UK EU and 280,760 non-EU students enrolled in 2009/10 (the last year for which HESA data are available), At a rough estimate their fees would have come to £400 million and £2.8 billion respectively. In addition, £741,435 of research grants and contracts were from non-UK sources, for a total of around £4 billion in HE export earnings. The HE sector also employed 387,430 staff over this period. UK Government funding was £9,043,115 in funding body grants and £2,364,920 in research grant and contract to total rather less than £12 billion.

The MOD's defence statistics factsheet shows that UK defence exports in 2009 were £7,251 million; although the numbers have varied from year to year this is also fairly close to the average so let's take it as a good guidance figure. The total value of MOD contracts placed (i.e. excluding direct expenditure such as soldiers' wages) was £18,831 million. It looks as if both exports and the ratio of exports to UK Government spending in the defence industry is more better than in HE. MOD don't give data for employment in the industry, but an ADS survey gives it as just 109,675 (the ADS survey also gives a much higher figure for 2010 exports than the MOD figure for 2009, but I haven't used it because I'm not sure it is collected on a comparable basis).

However we need to consider some other factors. In the education industry, those 405,805 non-UK students must have spent at least £2 billion in the UK economy on housing, food and other essential services. Whilst some of this will have been earned in the UK through part-time work, much of it will not, so there's at least a further £1 billion of 'export' earnings for the UK.

By contrast, in the defence data, we need to consider the cost of imports. If a British company sells a jet plane to India, then the whole cost of the jet plane is shown as exports, but in reality many of the components might have been manufactured outside the UK. This is an acknowledged issue with all manufacturing export statistics. The data I can find don't allow me a complete view of this, but the MOD do list £3,619 million of defence-related service imports. There will be more than this in manufacturing, but in fairness to the defence industry I should note that many of the costs in the MOD link will be related to running an army in Afghanistan rather than the defence industry itself.

So the final balance comes out like this:

Industry	Defence	HE
Direct Government support	£18.8 billion	£11.4 billion
Direct exports	£7.25 billion	£4 billion
Adjustment	-£3.6 billion	£1 billion
Adjusted exports	£3.65 billion	£5 billion
Jobs	109,675	387,430
Cost to UK Government per £ of exports	£5.15	£2.28
Cost to UK Government per job	£171,416	£29,425

Now perhaps you think that the 71 warships, 650 combat helicopters and aircraft, and 357 tanks which the MOD can maintain because of this spending (remembering that none of these data include soldiers' or civil servants' wages) are worth more than the 716,940 students who qualified from UKHE in the year in question. I've said before that this blog doesn't exist to promote any particular political views I happen to hold. From a purely financial perspective, though, it's clear that HE is by far the better investment for the country.

Government accounting

2011-09-13T13:28:00.000+01:00

HMS Dauntless is currently parked in the dock at the foot of the University of East London's Docklands campus. She's been there since Friday, either protecting London from inappropriate celebrations of 9/11, or perhaps protecting UEL's First Week celebrations from anyone throwing cricket balls at Mach 3.

By my calculations, UEL gets about £55 million a year of UK Government funding (overwhelmingly HEFCE grant), whilst Dauntless cost a little over £1 billion (including her share of class development costs). In other words just building the ship, before any running costs, has set the British taxpayer back about 19.5 UEL-years.

Over those 19.5 years, UEL can be expected to graduate 63,653 FT students from first degree programmes (using the data in HESA Table T5 as a guide), in addition to PT and postgraduate students. There may even be some useful research into health, or maybe the Olympics if that's more to your taste. By contrast, the Type 42 destroyers that Dauntless is replacing shot down 7 Argentine aircraft and 1 Iraqi missile in total across a class of 14 over a period of 36 years. This gives us a rough statement 1 enemy aircraft=127,306 friendly graduates, although if we factor in 19.5 years of Dauntless' running costs, its more like 1 aircraft=150,000 graduates.

Heartwarming, eh?

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia, entirely without permission...

The College of Law

2011-09-09T17:24:00.000+01:00

The College of Law is a 'private provider' because it is not HEFCE-funded. However it not only has Degree Awarding Powers and charitable status, but is also incorporated by Royal Charter like the old universities. With a turnover of £73 million and 7,131 students, it is rather smaller than most HEIs, but not small by most other standards. Delivery is from 8 sites across England and Wales.

The College decided to enter the undergraduate LLB market in January 2011 with a two-year accelerated programme. This turned out, of course, to be a bit of a miscalculation as the fees regime announced in the White Paper is not very supportive of this kind of arrangement, and the core/margin criteria even less so. The College's chief executive is accordingly complaining about the White Paper in the press.

With a clear orientation towards the UK market (so that the UKBA is less of a threat), strong employer connections and a sound financial position, the College of Law looks well placed to benefit from the White Paper so the news that they are considering privatisation is very interesting. As I understand it, the trustees of the charity would sell the business, and could then devote the proceeds of that sale to their charitable purposes whilst freeing the business to expand - potentially in areas outside law.

So this is interesting in two ways:

By comparison with the Leeds College of Music case, it suggests that an intermediary step towards privatisation isn't really needed - although of course LCM was a HEC, not a chartered institution. I see this as confirming my view (in contrast with Andrew McGettigan) about the LCM case.
However if privatisation does materialise, then it will provide a very interesting precedent for other institutions which may want to spin out business, art or law departments to manage their own core/margin problems.

I'm not sure how much real benefit the College could gain by privatising itself, so perhaps this will come to nothing. Still: it bears watching.

Twelve Universities Look to Cut Their Tuition Fees (allegedly)

2011-09-09T09:22:00.000+01:00

As I read my morning paper on the train, this wasn't exactly a choke-on-the-cornflakes moment, but pretty close. Without any clear source, it was difficult to make sense of Metro's story.

Fortunately I had my iPad to hand to check the Times Higher site, and they carry a more informative version (dated yesterday, but I didn't see it in the magazine). Twelve is the number of universities which have asked OFFA what the process for changing fees is. This is a pretty low bar for 'considering', so it is likely that most of these universities will do nothing.

Of course nothing prevents a university from offering more fee waivers than it promised to OFFA, so certain universities could come down below the £7,500 level without changing their Access Agreements. Others may have been too slow off the mark to ask OFFA what the process before OFFA published guidance. However for the most part the sums simply won't add up, as the chance of a few additional numbers won't be worth the reduced price on all core and margin numbers.

So one reassuring conclusion - there's no evidence here that many universities will actually change their fees, still less anyone come down from £9k to £7.5k - and one surprising conclusion - the HE coverage in the Higher is sometimes better than Metro.

Bloat and the profit motive

2011-09-08T08:00:00.003+01:00

Here is a link to the US, where things are a bit different, but this illustrates another example of a perennial issue at the root of bloated costs: the lack of a profit motive. If units (in this case a law School) are not held to account for their profits, then the institutional pressure to maximise the resources they control is unconstrained. It is sheer benefit to the Law School to have another tenured post and nonsensical to turn a post down when it is available. In the UK it is a little different, but not very: posts are not tenured as such but they tend to be permanent all the same. Other resources, such as space, IT equipment or library holdings may not even be carried on the budget of the unit that uses them.

In the UK context, most academic units will at least be under pressure to break even, although it is rare to set more demanding targets than that. Non-academic units simply have to operate within agreed budgets, so if you can get agreement to increase your budget, why wouldn't you?

Now, of course, giving profit targets (and incentives to exceed them) to middle managers in universities would clearly create some risks and issues itself, so this post isn't a call for action so much as a comment that preserving certain cultures and practices has consequences.

Blackboard

2011-09-07T13:30:00.001+01:00

An interesting article about Blackboard, the major provider of learning management systems. As a previous WebCT user, my own institution has become a Blackboard customer by default, and subsequently become involved with Moodle, so we fit well into the general picture drawn. I have little direct knowledge of learning management systems, but I do know something about student data systems, and there you see some of the same issues with a lack of innovation in products, but seemingly insufficient profit available (and/or insufficient risk tolerance amongst institutions) to tempt in new providers and disrupt the position of the incumbents.

Procurement people have a saying that you get the suppliers you deserve, and I think one of the important contributors to bloat is precisely our inability to procure and then benefit from really good IT. This has something to do with universities being professional bureaucracies, so it is likely to be difficult to change.

In praise of HESA

2011-09-05T15:12:00.000+01:00

When I read stories like this one about dubious practices in published destinations data, I am reminded just how valuable the Higher Education Statistics Agency is in ensuring that we have consistently collected, reliable and auditable data collected and permanently held about all HE institutions in the UK. Not only held, but made available to all.

From the perspective of the individual on the ground, struggling to resolve data quality issues in the time and resource budget allowed, it is easy to focus on the negative. I'm very conscious of the weaknesses in my own institution's data, and I have seen plenty of examples of still greater weakness in others'.

But still, HESA ensure that no institution can redefine 'unemployment' for private advantage, or withhold the breakdown of graduate and non-graduate jobs from publication. If you wanted to test some aspect of the published data, there'd be no question of looking at your own institution's handful of forms, as Paul Campos seems to have done, you could get as much data from HESA as you needed to draw statistically valid conclusions (or, indeed, much more than that if you wanted to).

So for all its flaws, the regulatory system in the UK does deliver this one very significant achievement.

The newspapers of the future

2011-09-03T08:00:00.001+01:00

Matt Yglesias bravely predicts that universities are the new newspapers - by which he means that their business model is about to be undermined by technological change which is making it cheaper and cheaper for people to find information on line. My first reaction was 'how absurd'. Its pretty clear that the specific curriculum learned at university is one of the least valuable parts of the process - even in highly specific vocational fields like medicine most of that curriculum gets forgotten once you are in the job.

But on reflection I see that there is more to it than that. After all, information about what happened yesterday is only a part of the value proposition in a newspaper too. Specifically for students on professional programmes with professional accreditation requirements to meet, curriculum content is important - at least until the accreditation is achieved. New institutions like Western Governors can offer a route to that accreditation more cheaply than the traditional ones. So maybe there is a future where new entrants can undercut (some of) the functions of the traditional university sufficiently to undermine the viability of traditional business models for some or many established universities.

But I don't want to push that too far. I've had some experience of distance and online learning, and it seems to me that the model can easily be one of a few delighted students, but many more drop-outs. This is pretty much the picture at the Open University, where those students who survive to the end of the programme are amongst the most satisfied in the country, but also a minority of those who start. This makes me suspicious of the kind of journalism I linked to in the paragraph above. The positive stories of successful students are only part of the overall picture.

So maybe universities will be the next newspapers, but I think probably not. At any rate, I'm not revising my career plan yet.

The University of Stirling is losing the fight against scientific openness

2011-09-02T08:00:00.002+01:00

I read this story with disbelief. How can we have gotten into the situation where an established British University is fighting against a tobacco multinational on issues of scientific openness and freedom of information and Philip Morris is in the right? If you review the Information Commissioner's decision notice you will see that the facts are:

The university undertook public health research at its Centre for Tobacco Control Research
Philip Morris used Freedom of Information legislation to seek underlying data about the sampling and data collection (in other words, the data needed to conduct a scientific assessment of the research in question), but did so through its solicitors
The university refused to provide all the data requested
Philip Morris complained to the Commissioner that it had not received the data requested, but the Commissioner refused to act on the basis of a technicality (because the original request was made anonymously via a solicitor)
So Philip Morris asked again, in their own name
The university wilfully misinterpreted Philip Morris' second request, and responded with a spurious request for additional clarification (which was, itself, out of time). When the requested clarification was received, they declared Philip Morris' request to be vexatious (i.e. manifestly unreasonable or disproportionate) and refused to provide data. International tobacco companies are not, I would think, being manifestly unreasonable in showing an interest in research about tobacco.
So Philip Morris has complained to the Commissioner again, and this time the Commissioner has found in their favour.

In submissions to the Commissioner about the case, the university claimed that it would cost them £2,908.75 to collate the data requested. The Commissioner is careful not to comment on this directly, but simply quotes Philip Morris:

if a disproportionate amount of time were required in order to produce the response to their request, this would suggest that the survey had not been carried out in an orderly manner, or that the material used to prepare the Report had not been methodically collected and analysed.

And as I am not a Scottish government official, I can say openly that I heartily agree. How can any scientific institution seek to prevent access to taxpayer-funded data on technicalities, and then again on entirely spurious legal grounds, and then finally with a straight face claim that they cannot provide their data at a reasonable cost? This amounts to excusing your mendacity on the grounds of your incompetence.

The University of Stirling, and the Centre for Tobacco Control Research in particular, should be ashamed of themselves.

Leeds College of Music

2011-09-01T09:25:00.000+01:00

Research Fortnight published yesterday a story about the merger between Leeds College of Music and Leeds City College. I haven't seen this reported elsewhere so I guess it counts as a scoop, although LCM published a press release a month ago and the matter was also included in the published papers of the HEFCE Board meeting in July (I linked to this very paper myself here without commenting on the LCM issue so I certainly can't claim it...).

Unusually, the assets and liabilities of the dissolved college are not simply being handed to LCC, but are placed in a wholly-owned subsidiary company. Accordingly, LCM is still a separate going concern with managers and staff still in place as they were before the dissolution. This strikes me as a far better outcome for them than the pure merger which so often leads to asset stripping (see, e.g. Bretton Hall). Research Fortnight says that the company will also control LCM's degree awarding powers, so at first I thought that perhaps it is these powers that explain LCM's unusually effective bargaining, but it seems that LCM doesn't have degree awarding powers and awards Bradford degrees. So perhaps it was just the £6.6 million of SDF funding that LCM brought into the merger that did the trick. Or maybe LCC's senior managers are just very nice people.

Andrew McGettigan comments further on this story here, placing it very firmly in the context of privatisation. I've commented on his blog post and hope he'll explain his view more because on the face of it this seems implausible. As a charitable private company limited by guarantee, the new Leeds College of Music Ltd cannot have share capital or distribute profits which, to quote Wikipedia, 'makes this type of company unsuitable for commercial enterprises'.

Wrong but Romantic

2011-09-01T08:00:00.003+01:00

I was looking for wrong but romantic, and the Free University of Liverpool seems to fit the bill.

Who couldn't love a project that sets out to fight back against the privatisation and deregulation of Higher Education by setting up a private HE provider outside the apparatus of state regulation? (or indeed, that uses higher education as a means to fight back against the instrumentalisation of higher education?)

I confess some of the other jokes go over my head slightly (or perhaps more than slightly). I'm not sure why the 'Foundation Degree' is six months, when the 'BA' is the standard three years. But then I'm hardly the target market either for the programme or the protest. And people as square as me don't get coverage in the Guardian on the basis of no more than a couple of blog posts.

A Manifesto for Higher Education

2011-08-31T10:05:00.000+01:00

My heart warmed to Des Freedman when I read that he hoped to 'inspire debate in staff rooms, offices and tutorials'. Perhaps at Goldsmiths they still have staff rooms and tutorials, but in the rest of the sector even the office (at least the sole-occupant office in which one could have a good debate without unduly disturbing one's colleagues) is well on the way out. We dour (and, of course, bloated) roundhead administrators like to have a Wrong and Romantic cavalier come along to lighten our lives every now and again

But the mainfesto itself was a terrible disappointment. A certain level of flabbiness is inevitable in these kinds of things, but when you can't even achieve precision in what you want abolished ('Scrapping of the National Student Survey and other forms of evaluation which perpetuate cultures of ‘customer satisfaction’ and quality control') then there isn't much hope for your positive programme. And if you are going to be Romantic in your wrongness, it also helps if fewer than half of your demands are for people to give you more money and better benefits.

Administrative bloat in universities

2011-08-30T14:28:00.001+01:00

Via Matthew Yglesias, I've read Benjamin Ginsberg's shorter-version diatribe about the bloated administrative costs of US universities. Ginsberg has already upset Paul Greatrix by publishing an extract from his book in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I think Yglesias' main point is a sharp one. Ginsberg seems to assume that the purpose of universities is to spend money on their professors (UK: academics). But universities respond to their incentives and the 'best' and 'most succesful' universities are usually judged to be those with the best-qualified entrants. Even in Yglesias' alternate reality where universities are judged by their success in supporting student learning, of course, it is less than obvious that student learning is maximised by increasing investment in professors (academics) at the expense of, say, IT and library staff, or student services professionals.

I'm less inclined to echo Yglesias' praise of the Ginsberg piece. On the contrary, with its leaden sarcasm, blinding non-sequiturs, and spectacularly tendentious use of anecdote (some university administrators have been guilty of fraud, therefore university administration is a fraudulent activity?) I think it is pretty shocking that a professor at a world-famous institution such as Johns Hopkins could have written such a thing. Administrative bloat is a real issue, and deserves much better treatment than this.

In no particular order, the issues I would identify are:

empire building. In my experience, executive PVCs are the best empire-builders. Most of these are 'academics' in UK terminology but 'administrators' in American language, so Ginsberg and I agree that this is an issue. However I also see plenty of empire-building in academic units so I am not completely convinced that this factor explains a secular shift from academic to admin across the whole sector (and in both countries). Constant empire building across all institutions ought to lead to a kind of brownian motion depending on where the most effective organisational politicians wind up in each university unless there are other factors at work.
Ineffective boards. Another issue where Ginsberg and I agree, but whilst ineffective boards may have failed to constrain change, they can't hardly have caused it.
technological change. Clearly the average university uses IT more extensively now than it did 20 years ago. We would expect to see a relative shift of costs into IT (and related staffing). In the UK we have seen a decline in the cost differentials between subjects as you can now do all (or almost all) of the computing on your UG science programme on the same machine that the historians are using to write their essays, suggesting that technological change is genuinely making a difference to costs in universities so this will be a material issue.
scope creep. In the UK we now have things like knowledge transfer organisations in almost all universities that were almost unknown 20 years ago. Administrative jobs have been created because government funding was created for them, and associated new demands placed on the universities. I am certain that this is a material issue, although I lack for stats to prove it.
legislative change. Given that one constantly hears senior administrators complain about the rather mild and wholesome example of Freedom of Information, I suspect that this may be less of an issue than you might think. However it is closely aligned to some broader issues of professionalisation - legal risks that would once have been cheerfully accepted (e.g. bias on the part of an admissions tutor) no longer seem acceptable leading to professionalisation of many academic administrative tasks.
blended professionalism. Celia Whitchurch's term of art (if you haven't come across it before) describes the development of new kinds of roles which are neither wholly back office/admin (like my role as a planner) nor straightforwardly academic. Blended professionals include dyslexia advisers, study skills tutors and many others who contribute directly to student learning, but are not usually on academic staff contracts. The creation of these kinds of roles (and there are certainly many people like this in every university I have ever worked in) means that we can't be sure that increased 'administrative' spending isn't going hand-in-hand with increased 'front-line' spending, as the nature of the roles on the front line changes.

Ginsberg's solution to administrative bloat is to return to the good old days when faculty (UK:academics) did the administration themselves on a volunteer, part-time basis. This deserves as much respect as any other 'good old days' solution. As I've tried to indicate, I see some forms of admin bloat as a solution themselves not a problem, for instance when specialists provide study skills support or personal advice and guidance. But there are still real problems of inefficiency in UK universities which must (given the relative costs) be far worse still in the US. Data transparency and professional management (or rather the lack of both) seem to me - and this is sheer prejudice now so every bit as bad as the Ginsberg piece - to be the key issues.

Having descended to personal prejudice I had better stop writing now, but I think this is a key issue that I will return to again if I can.

New members of the HEFCE Board

2011-08-27T08:00:00.002+01:00

Three new members have joined the HEFCE Board. Two of them have NHS backgrounds and the third a private business background. Sir Alan Langlands, the HEFCE Chief Exec, also has an NHS background, so this significantly strengthens that voice on the HEFCE Board.

In one sense, this isn't surprising. HEFCE has a great deal of money tied up in training medics and other health professionals, and in undertaking health research in universities. The NHS too has a great deal of resource tied up in providing clinical placements to universities so there has always been a strong need for co-ordination. The person spec for these Board positions identified health sector experience as one of the key selection criteria.

What is more interesting is that BIS seems to have missed an opportunity to strengthen the Board with respect to its new role regulating the private sector in HE. This is an area where HEFCE's existing corporate culture and existing staff can expect to be challenged by the demands of the post-White Paper environment. Bringing in experience at Board level from another BIS quango with more relevant experience - maybe the OFT - would have seemed like an obvious move.

Restrictions on AAB equivalent qualifications 'may not be legal'

2011-08-26T13:16:00.000+01:00

Reading my Higher, I see that they have caught up with the views I expressed nearly three months ago, and reported that the application of the AAB+ policy may result in unlawful discrimination. What the Higher still doesn't communicate very clearly, though, is that it is difficult to amend the policy to meet this problem. Even if HEFCE could devise a pan-European AAB+ equivalency matrix (which would hardly be straightforward in the time allowed - we are talking about Christmas 2011) the HESA codes do not exist to report qualifications such as the Arbitur to the level of detail required. If you haven't got the data, you can't operate the policy.

Of course if HEFCE had ample time, we could create new HESA codes, require institutions to amend their data collection systems to meet the new requirement and start collecting the data they want for the policy they have. But if you announced those codes now, institutions could use them for 2012 entry at the earliest. The resulting data would be reported to HESA in October 2013 and HEFCE could use it to inform student number caps for 2014/15. I don't think that is Mr Willetts' timetable.

David Willetts lobbying universities

2011-08-25T10:01:00.000+01:00

David Willetts has written to a number of universities to lobby for the admission of his constituents. This strikes me as highly irregular in every possible way.

Firstly, the universities are autonomous charities not Government departments ultimately answerable to Parliament. Any MP has as much business writing on behalf of constituents to his(her) local university as he(she) does writing to the local Rotary club. Second, the admission of students is explicitly protected by law from political interference, so this is a particularly inappropriate matter on which to lobby. And thirdly it cannot be right for a Minister to act as a constituency MP within his(her) own departmental area as if he or she held no Ministerial responsibility. Ministers must avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

Finally, how could this have done any good? There is no way a university could lawfully take account of the ministers' letter in its admissions process so there is no way that the constituents could have been benefitted without breaking the law.

Its difficult to avoid the conclusion that Willetts was either wholly ignorant of the principles which ought to govern his (and the universities') conduct, or wholly reckless of the consequences when he wrote those letters, and 'wholly reckless of the consequences' are not comforting words to write about a powerful man.

Headline writing

2011-08-24T14:34:00.000+01:00

So the headline says a fifth of graduate workers earn less than school-leavers, but the story says:

Analysis shows the median hourly pay for employees educated up to around GCSE or equivalent level was £8.68, for those at A-level or equivalent £10, up to higher education but below degree level £12.60, and for those with a degree £16.10.

Have I mentioned before that I don't understand news values?

More about HEFCE's approach to deregulation

2011-08-23T13:14:00.000+01:00

I posted on Friday about HEFCE's new approach to working with institutions on their data returns. Essentially, they are shifting from an approach where we report data to them, and they audit it if it looks suspicious towards an approach where they will review our draft data as soon as we begin to test it (which we traditionally do using the online tools HESA provide), and commence an informal audit process straight away if they see cause for concern. There is also a shift away from the idea that HEFCE works through bodies such as HESA (and the QAA is another such) which are - in theory at least - owned by the sector towards the direct management of the sector by HEFCE.

In this first phase there are three specific areas where HEFCE are directing their attention:
·       Entry qualifications and the student number control
·       Research degree student numbers
·       Numbers that may inform WP and TESS allocations.

The first of these relates to the AAB numbers in the White Paper. HEFCE will be setting student number caps for non-AAB students recruited in 2012/13 on the basis of numbers of non-AAB students reported by institutions in 2010/11. These data are due to be reported by institutions to HESA in October 2011 and then by HESA to HEFCE (following various checking processes) probably in early December 2011. This means that the earliest HEFCE could provide student number caps to the institutions would be January 2012. The UCAS deadline is 15 January, so there clearly isn't that much slack in this system.

HEFCE's problem with the AABs is that historically, the quality of entry qualifications data for mature and non-traditional students is poor. See this spreadsheet for evidence of that. Now in October 2011, institutions will have a strong incentive to under-report their AABs in order to maximise their capped numbers (then in 2012 they will fully report, so that the AABs do not count against the cap), so HEFCE could use old and poor quality data, or they could use new data where cheating has been incentivised. They have chosen to use the newest data possible which, because of the established timetable, creates major risks for them. They then manage those risks by unprecedentedly early intervention in institutions data returns.

The next two bullets show how quickly we have slid down the slippery slope this represents. For research degree student numbers, HEFCE have recently decided to do away with the separate Research Activity Survey return and just rely on the HESA data. This was their own decision, allegedly to reduce burden on institutions, but now that they are looking at the HESA data anyway, they may as well check that we are getting this one 'right'. With the WP(widening participation) and TESS(teaching enhancement and student success - also effectively widening participation) allocations there isn't even any change of policy of data use this year.

HEFCE will argue that the earlier they spot a problem, the less cost and trouble to put it right, and of course this is true. But equally, shifting from the periodic audit we have at the moment to continuous audit of live data is going to create cost and trouble.

What I think will be interesting will be to see how this more interventionist HEFCE that is emerging will relate to the private providers it will have to regulate in future. Will private providers be as submissive as the existing institutions are? Unlike the universities, who still have funding to lose, HEFCE will have weaker control over the private providers. I see more cost and more trouble down the line.

Deregulation in action

2011-08-19T17:15:00.000+01:00

HESA and HEFCE recently sent all institutions the following guidance:

Changes to validation and data checking arrangements
We are writing to you to set out details of changes to validation and HEFCE’s involvement in data quality work during the current student collection cycle. The primary responsibility for data quality remains with institutions and heads of institutions will still be required to sign off that the data are fit for purpose.
HEFCE are increasingly using HESA data to drive funding allocations and allocate student number controls. In particular the following HEFCE publications have signalled changes in the way HESA data will be used:
·       HEFCE circular 2011/20 ‘Teaching funding and student number controls: Consultation on changes to be implemented in 2012-13’
·       HEFCE circular letter 19/2011 ‘Discontinuation of the Research Activity Survey and future arrangements for data collection’.
In addition paragraph 7 of HEFCE circular letter 21/2011 ‘HESA funding and monitoring data 2010-11: web facility’ states that HEFCE may not in future incorporate post collection amendments into its funding allocations. This change means that it is now more important than ever that the data submitted to the HESA collections are correct. In order to support this, HEFCE also made it clear in paragraph 20 of circular letter 21/2011 that they would increasingly scrutinise institutions’ outputs from the IRIS system during the data collection period. HEFCE do not intend to scrutinise the outputs produced via their web-facility or through IRIS as the result of a test commit as they recognise that institutions often use these systems with partial data. HEFCE will scrutinise data from the IRIS system for both ‘committed’ and ‘Commit passed, HIN failed’ statuses in three areas:
·       Entry qualifications and the student number control
·       Research degree student numbers
·       Numbers that may inform WP and TESS allocations.
Where HEFCE have queries on any of these areas they will raise these directly with institutions. HEFCE recognises that data submitted to HESA goes through a cycle of quality enhancement meaning that there are often significant changes to data between initial commit and final sign-off. While HEFCE will compare data between submissions in order to ensure data quality is improved or maintained HEFCE do not intend to retain copies of submissions beyond the collection cycle or use them in any audit work. HEFCE do not intend to retain copies of submissions beyond the collection cycle or use knowledge gained through the in-cycle checking to inform future audit work. We encourage institutions to continue to interact with HESA’s data collection systems in the same way as in previous years to ensure that the final data are submitted on time and are of the highest quality. HEFCE expect to be able to provide further details of the process for data scrutiny during September.
In addition to the scrutiny that HEFCE will be applying to these data, HEFCE have also asked HESA to enhance the validation of qualification on entry information as these data are likely to be critical in setting the student number control for 2012-13. Details of the enhanced validation are given in annex A. HESA expects to implement these new checks in August. HEFCE plan to announce provisional student number control limits for 2012-13 in January 2012 to help institutions to plan their recruitment. Therefore, there will be no opportunity to further correct, or enhance, data between final submission of files on 31 October 2011 and the setting of provisional control numbers. The enhanced validation and checking will focus on ensuring that the qualification on entry data are complete, as missing data are likely to have a material impact on HEFCE’s ability to control overall student numbers.
By giving notice now of the detail of these changes to validation and data checking arrangements it is expected that the existing HESA student record data collection schedule will be maintained.

If that is mostly Greek to you, what it means in practice is that HEFCE will now be monitoring our early drafts of data submissions to see what they can learn from them, and potentially intervening if they see something that makes them concerned and/or suspicious. Those of us who work in this area are exceedingly busy right now preparing for the initial data return in September - this kind of work doesn't even stop for Clearing.

In the past, we have used HESA's validation tools to check and improve our data. This means we don't have to have the same functionality as part of our own student record systems, and therefore it saves us cost and effort.

If HEFCE are looking at our draft data - even though I am sure they wish only to be helpful to institutions - we will be obliged to develop ways of emulating the HESA functionality without putting our draft data anywhere where HEFCE might see it. After all, policies change, data are not always used for the purposes for which they were collected, millions of pounds are at stake and HEFCE have been carefully only to specify their 'intentions' not to limit what they might ultimately do with these draft data. Right here you can see additional costs coming down the line for institutions as a result of the White Paper, and HEFCE taking ever more control of the sector.

Morrisons and the University of Bradford

2011-08-15T15:36:00.001+01:00

According to the Guardian, Morrisons is planning to fund 1,000 students onto a retail studies degree. They already have 20 students a year on BSc Business and management at the University of Bradford, although there is a link on their recruitment site currently telling me that no vacancies are available on this programme.

The funding level in the Guardian story - £4,000 per head - makes no sense to me as a full-fee level even for a Foundation Degree. However Bradford had a significant award from HEFCE's co-funded employer engagement programme and the project website lists the previous Morrisons programme as one of their success stories. HEFCE would be allocating about £1,500 per Price Group D co-funded FTE in business. I don't have the details to hand, but 2011-12 is likely to be their last opportunity to fill places funded through this route, so a knock-down price might be better than giving the grant money back to HEFCE. If the places are filled in 2011/12, then HEFCE funding will continue to flow for the next few years under the planned transitional arrangements. It is therefore possibke that Morrisons managed to get this outstanding deal because Bradford were under time pressure to reach any kind of deal at all.

So rather than the shape of things to come, I think we may be seeing the last gasp of the previous Government's policy approach playing out here.

Foundation Degree Awarding Powers for FE Colleges

2011-08-09T17:08:00.000+01:00

Degree awarding powers come in three flavours - taught degrees (TDAP), research degrees (RDAP) and Foundation Degrees (FDAP - in effect, a subset of taught degrees). The Higher reports that two colleges have now been awarded FDAP.

I have limited direct experience of the FE sector, having worked in HE institutions that received LSC funding in previous roles. From my perspective there seem to be two broad classes of FE Colleges which want to develop and grow major HE operations. Of these, the clearest and most straightforward are the specialist institutions - primarily in Art & Design. A steady trickle of specialist FE Colleges makes the transition into the HE sector by growing their HE activity until it is more than half the total. At least one of these, the Surrey Institute of Art & Design, is now a university in its own right. The reasons for growing the HE activity are not hard to seek - HE is better funded than FE - and the additional step into the HE sector also makes very clear sense - HEFCE, with its tradition of hands-off respect for institutional management and (at least up to now) its block grant funding principle, is clearly a much better body to work for than ever the LSC was. Reading the HEFCE Board papers will show you that these transitions are still continuing.

The two institutions gaining FDAP are quite different, as they are large (in the case of NCG very large) generalist FE colleges. Other Colleges seeking FDAP that I know of, such as Havering, also fit this mould. Here there seems little chance that HE can ever be the majority activity: at Havering it is about 1,000 students out of 7,000, at NCG 3,500 out of 40,000 (and NCG is growing at the FE end), and at New College Durham it is 16% (about 1,800 out of 11,500 learners). Havering primarily has validation through the Open University, New College Durham (I think) through Leeds and Sunderland, and NCP don't seem too keen to publish their partner names, but do mention UCLan in their annual report. Newcastle College (a subsidiary of NCG) has £11,089,410 of direct HEFCE funding in 2011-12, Havering £4,351,560 and Durham £3,725,762 (which, incidentally, is just outside the top ten for HEFCE funding of FE colleges). In other words none of them is in any sense in a 'Feudal' relationship with a local university, at least as far as I can see.

Whilst Framwellgate Moor lacks a pre-existing vocational HE provider, you could hardly say the same for either Newcastle or east London. So seeking FDAP can't necessarily be taken to be either an attempt to fill a market gap or part of a strategy of institutional transformation (as in the case of the specialist colleges). I understand it as part of a strategy to protect an established revenue stream in a relatively small group of FE Colleges.

Fraud in the HE sector

2011-08-08T10:22:00.000+01:00

I was reading this report on fraud prevention in the HE sector on the train into work this morning. It suggests that up to £1 billion could be lost to UKHE through fraud each year, and that institutions typically have limited technical capability and a weak culture of fraud prevention. The Higher covered it here, and Paul Greatrix has some rather sniffy comment here (which kind of demonstrates what they were saying about a weak culture of fraud prevention, given that Paul is a very senior manager at a very large and prestigious university, and therefore represents the absolute cutting edge in HE management thinking).

There are obvious reasons to be sniffy. The report is a pretty basic piece of work unashamedly produced by anti-fraud professionals to drum up business. Even they don't really believe the £1 billion figure - notice how it is prominent in the press release, but not actually in the report at all...

But considered as an upper bound, I don't find the figure particularly incredible. I've now worked in four institutions, and come across fraudulent practices in all of them. If you look not just at departmental administrators dipping their fingers in the petty cash, but also at student loan fraud, research grants, fraudulent data returns to HEFCE, and all the other kinds of fraud out there then you can see that the number will start to add up. Then there are those more questionable things - I've personally seen many examples of university (middle and senior) managers procuring goods and services from their friends and business contacts without even the most basic market testing required by Financial Regulations. I've no reason to think that there was out-and-out corruption involved, but sometimes the excessive price paid does make you wonder.

Of course not all these frauds cost individual universities money - and some may even gain money for the institutions that don't get caught. You can see why it is hard for institutional leaders to have a really strong anti-fraud approach when they are more-or-less consciously cheating HEFCE on their data returns.

Things have improved. When I worked at HEFCE, we always ascribed financial irregularities on the part of institutions to incompetence, whatever the evidence might indicate to the contrary. That isn't the case any longer and HEFCE at least now undertakes more rigorous audit. Still, I think there is a lot of room to improve. If I were a senior leader, I would stick my hand in my pocket for the £4,450 (plus VAT) for my fraud resilience check - at least after I had tested this price against the market, I would.