Cash is fungible

Dewi Knight has an interesting post on WonkHE about the developing Welsh approach to HE. As Dewi highlights, part of the mood music which Welsh politicians use to accompany their policy proposals is the decisive rejection of market (and English) models. The Welsh Government even plans to take powers so that it can fund specific universities directly.

One of my occasional themes on this blog is that developments in different parts of the UK are not as different as they appear, and this is a good example. English Ministers emphasise the language of competition and markets, whilst Welsh Ministers use different language, but both are engaged in projects to reshape their respective HE sectors to the needs (as perceived by Ministers) of students and employers. Both are seeking to enhance their regulatory control over their respective sectors.

It is inconceivable that English Ministers could seek powers to fund institutions directly (even if they dared to bring forward an HE Bill at all...), but the pound a Welsh Minister grants to a Welsh institution will have exactly the same purchasing power as the pound an English student pays in state-subsidised fees when the English funding council decides to increase an institution's Student Number Control. Cash is fungible.

Changing Universities

On Friday I attended the Association of University Administrators' open forum Managing Change. This is the third of these annual events and interesting war stories are always exchanged. Unfortunately the Chatham House rule was in operation, so I can't discuss what I heard very freely.


What I will do is to post a link to the group's online resource Changing Universities, and encourage any readers who are involved in managing change in universities to consider getting involved in the group. If nothing else, the meetings provide a level of social support: it gives me reassurance to know that no-one else has completely resolved the issues that I can't resolve either.  

The BPP School of Health

Yesterday's news that BPP is branching out into a new professional area by launching a School of Health provides a good example of the way our HE system continues to evolve only haltingly towards a more open market, and some of the important barriers that still exist to private providers. The specific subjects offered are Psychology, Chiropractic and a little Nursing, as well as entry-level programmes designed for healthcare workers with very limited formal qualifications.

I'll take these in reverse order. As the existing health professions continue to evolve (nurses take on jobs formerly done by doctors, and become an all-graduate profession) there has been increasing emphasis on formal training and development for health care assistants and other support workers. London South Bank, for instance, offers a range of Foundation Degrees aimed at these workers and closely aligned with local NHS Trust. You will see from the materials I linked to that students are either in NHS employment, or offered NHS training contracts before they come on the course. So there's nothing very new in what BPP are offering, and their integration with employers (the key competitive advantage they have in e.g. Accountancy or Law as compared to the established universities) is not all that strong.

Chiropractic is another interesting choice, because it is a profession not regulated by the Health Professions Council. Psychology is regulated by the BPS, but unlike most existing University programmes (including private providers like Buckingham), BPP's programme doesn't seem to have BPS accreditation. No doubt BPP will gain accreditation in time, and develop increasingly strong NHS links, but we also see how the forest of poorly-coordinated regulatory bodies that surrounds the existing HE sector (and are a royal pain from a day-to-day management perspective) make it difficult even for respected providers like BPP to break open new areas.

Why haven't BPP chosen some easier targets? This little table shows you that:

JACS2 Subject Line	Applications	Accepts	Ratio of apps to accs (:1)
A1 - Pre-clinical Medicine	84,598	7,798	10.8
A2 - Pre-clinical Dentistry	12,712	1,196	10.6
B1 - Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology	30,466	3,315	9.2
B7 - Nursing	218,599	24,587	8.9
D1 - Pre-clinical Veterinary Medicine	8,485	971	8.7
B8 - Medical Technology	14,608	1,804	8.1
X1 - Training Teachers	58,374	7,388	7.9
B2 - Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmacy	32,849	4,539	7.2
L5 - Social Work	81,285	11,334	7.2
W4 - Drama	53,942	7,464	7.2
K1 - Architecture	31,062	4,379	7.1
Y Combs of soc studies/law with business	20,293	2,995	6.8
L1 - Economics	51,603	7,800	6.6
C3 - Zoology	9,991	1,544	6.5
B4 - Nutrition	7,139	1,150	6.2
C7 - Molecular Biology, Biophysics & Biochem	17,436	2,872	6.1
Total all subjects	2,847,012	492,030	5.8

Source: UCAS

These are 2011 data on subject areas with many applications, and high application-to-acceptance ratios. In other words the market is here. Drama is in there, where the barrier to entry is capital costs rather than regulation, but for the most part the dominance of health and related subjects is clear.

From David Willetts' perspective there is very little he can do about this, of course. The HPC, the BPS and the NHS don't answer to him.

Understatement

There are some significant differences between the cultures of US and UK journalism, as becomes pretty clear from even a quick scan of the headlines. Usually I think the British headline writers show more verve and humour, but sometimes the American approach wins out, as in this case where the Telegraph's story is reported in the Chronicle under the truly delicious title Foreign Students Said to Get a Leg Up in Admission to British Universities.

Gove lays a trap for the Russell Group

It has long been clear to most observers that Michael Gove is not truly a Conservative, but instead a leftist agent provocateur determined to heighten the contradictions inherent in Conservative educational policy until the whole structure collapses. If anyone had doubted this before, then his proposal to curry favour amongst the Tory grassroots by reversing the Thatcher government's key school reform surely marks the point at which he threw the mask aside.

Another post about Udacity

I posted about Udacity previously. At the time, I couldn't understand how anybody was proposing to make any money out of the project, and I see that more eminent people than me still can't. This reflects our old-economy idea that a business has to have revenue. I have since come to understand that in the internet economy it is far from unusual for businesses to have no revenue, in fact it is normal. The value of a company in this case is the group of users that it can bring to a better-established internet company, or the defensive value that the better-established company can gain by buying an upstart before it becomes a rival. In this context, Udacity (or any other learning provider) can make a fortune for its owners if it establishes a large user base and then sells out to Google or Facebook, even if no-one ever works out a way to cover the costs of the business in the meantime.


Understanding this helps me to place some other things in context too. Drop-out from these kinds of programmes is truly catastrophic if your comparator is a traditional university programme. Inside Higher Ed says that 'generally between 10 and 20 percent' of students make it to the final exam in an individual course, roughly equivalent to a UK module. In currently-existing British universities, by contrast, 86.9% of (Undergraduate) students successfully complete their (3+year) programmes and get an award. If your comparison is other internet experiences, though, getting 10-20% of your users as deeply engaged as to complete an entire course of study probably seems like an outstanding metric.


It follows from this, of course, that the learner is not the customer in this case. That may not be an issue: I don't use Facebook myself, but I do use Google and (obviously) Blogger, so perhaps my choice of illustration for this post shows a certain double standard. Besides, it isn't always clear that the learner is the customer in traditional education models either: this is sharply contested by some.


It also follows from this that Udacity is a bit less interesting than I previously thought. In my last post on the subject I was impressed by the audacity of taking both teaching and assessment out of the University offer, but now that I understand this as just one of many approaches to putting engaging content online so as to grow a significant user community it seems a lot less exciting, and a lot less relevant to my day-to-day work. If the experience is engaging, it will literally never matter if the assessment and certification 'issues' go unresolved; if the experience is not engaging it is also unlikely to matter whether assessment and certification can be resolved. 


So to go back to Paul Greatrix, I think the 'confusion' was probably more in his mind (and mine) than in the minds at Udacity, Coursera and the others. 

An apology to the reporting staff at THE

When I read in the Times Higher that the Campaign for Science and Engineering was explicitly calling for less democracy in our legislature so as to preserve sinecures for professional scientists, I have to confess that my instant assumption was that the THE had misunderstood, and perhaps even deliberately.

But it turns out that really is what CaSE are calling for.

I hope the editorial staff at THE, and Paul Jump in particular, will accept this post by way of an apology.