Bloat and the profit motive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.