University Or Just Business As Usual?

Luke Carson investigates the opportunistic entrepreneurs making money out of our higher education.

The last few years have shown real dramatic changes, both social and economic, in higher education, to such an extent that many have wondered whether universities are still the same cornerstones of education they have always been. There are some cynics who favour the idea of a sinister council conspiracy: the zombified, homogenized students streaming out the doors of the institution on conveyor belts, being bought and sold like cheap souvenirs.  But there are others who believe that the increasingly business-like approaches to university management are not really cheapening the experience.

One of the greatest changes is the number of students who attend university.  In 1979 a tiny elite, one in ten young people, made it to higher education; 20 years later this had shot up to one in three.  Needless to say, the most tangible change symptomatic of the surge in student numbers has been the introduction of the top-up fee.  There was concern that student numbers would decline as a result, while further alienating students from working class backgrounds.  Others felt these directly economic relations between students and academies were the natural progression in an educational model that had been growing increasingly consumerist. Emily, a third-year history student, told Student Direct: “The increase in tuition fees did not affect my decision to come to university: I knew the loan would cover it.”

So contrary to initial fears, tuition fees did not dent student numbers.  In fact, Higher Education has been enjoying unprecedented growth in applicants and entrants over the last 10 years.  In addition, international student numbers have shot up exponentially, now accounting for a significant percentage of university income, amalgamating more than £1.7 billion in fees every year.  Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell was pleased with the developments, attributing them to a “world class” education system.  He stated: “All the reputable research, both domestic and international, suggests that we will need a significant increase in the number of graduate level jobs and we need to equip ourselves to meet that level if we are to remain economically competitive.”

The University of Manchester is a key example of these new philosophies.  It is now the largest, as well as one of the most lucrative, institutes in Britain since the merger with UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) in 2004.  There were reportedly 35,655 students registered in the 2005/06 academic year, and 7,000 of those were international students.  The university earns more than £590m annually from various sources, including student fees, grants, and council and research funding.  Continued popularity and success indicate that the University of Manchester is well on its way to become “one of the leading universities in the world by 2015.”

Business is good, it would seem.  And that is certainly not a bad thing.  Reduced government funding has put universities under huge pressure to generate their own capital and this more entrepreneurial approach can prove to be extremely beneficial to higher education.  Universities have always worked closely with industry in order to produce the best graduates possible, says Vice-Chancellor of Brunel University Steven Schwartz: “Why should we not learn from their experience, skills and knowledge gained in other environments?”  At the end of the day, the university without the means or the ambition to innovate and modernize education is doomed to failure.

Success, however, comes with compromises.  The rapid expansion of the University of Manchester under the direction of Vice-Chancellor Alan Gilbert has drawn criticism that the project was overly ambitious, a concern that was more or less confirmed when it was revealed that the merge had landed the institution in £30m of debt.  One particularly controversial solution was to make redundant several hundred staff including feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham and literary critic Terry Eagleton. Professor Rowbotham was able to remain at the University only after new funds were made available, her position reduced to working part-time and for one third of her original wages.  Criticisms also drew upon the discrepancy between the institution’s debt and the £80,000 salary it was paying its Head of Creative Writing, famed novelist Martin Amis.  “Terry Eagleton was one of the big names that attracted me to Manchester in the first place,” said second-year English literature student Lucy Hulme. “It gave me a lot of confidence in the course I wanted to do so I was very disappointed when he left.”

The controversy did not stop there.  Only last year, Student Direct ran a survey into the university’s teaching hours and discovered that enormous cuts had steadily been made over a number of years across many departments.  Some of the lowest contact times meant that some students were paying the equivalent of £34.88 per hour.  This information mirrored existing fears that the quality of teaching was being stifled as a consequence of the huge focus placed on academic research at the university.  French and German language student Craig Fitzsimmons criticised his lack of contact hours and the stretching of learning resources, claiming, “The amount we are paying isn’t really justified.”  He continued, “For languages, we should ideally have the same amount of hours as we did in school.  Right now, I don’t think I’m progressing as I should be.”

There has been no shortage of criticisms of higher education in the recent press either.  Only months ago a memo emailed to Manchester Metropolitan staff members was leaked to the public.  The memo’s contents seemed to suggest that staff members should try to be more lenient when setting assessments so as to indirectly inflate the number of upper-class grades awarded to students.  Part of the memo read, “As a university we do not award as many firsts and 2:1s as other institutions, so there is an understandable desire to increase the proportion of such awards. Please bear this in mind when setting your second and final year assessments, especially the latter. We have never received any external examiner criticism that our ‘standards’ are too low, so there should be quite a lot of leeway available to us all when assessments are set.”

Furthermore, the Kingston University fraud scandal was first revealed on the student news website of Imperial College London earlier this year.  A secret voice-recording was made of a male lecturer who allegedly encouraged his students to exaggerate their scores on the National Student Survey.  He advised them that if they gave the University low scores, the institution’s reputation would suffer and, as a result, their degrees would be viewed as worthless in the eyes of prospective employers.

The arbitrary manipulation of national league tables and the grading system appears to be the common theme in both of these cases.  The report that many international graduates were walking out of British universities with sub-standard English language skills served only to strengthen the implications that British higher education was being dominated by a ‘cash for honours’ mentality.  As high-risk business ventures, universities have the difficult task of maintaining outward standards in order to remain active in an increasingly competitive market, attract potential customers and secure their satisfaction.  Hence, no university seems to want to openly acknowledge the possibility that a student could actually, dare we say it, fail under its roof.

Lucy Hulmes’ response was mainly disgust: “That’s appalling!  That really makes me question the quality of British degrees and also how employers are going to value them.  There are a lot of people who work very hard for their degrees so it seems very unfair that some people will have more of a chance at doing well than others because of economic factors and not academic merit.”  The perpetuation of the “league table culture” has continued to fuel the fears that the methods intended to preserve the reputation of British higher education could actually be its undoing it in the long run, both nationally and internationally.

So is it Dies Irae for British universities?  Perhaps not.  While some stories are certainly alarming, they may refer only to isolated instances and therefore cannot be considered to accurately reflect the reality of British higher education.  Perhaps what these reports do communicate more than anything, however, are the weaknesses that have developed along the lines of interest in the education system.  Craig Fitzsimmons voices his view that the perception of British degrees is likely to change if some of these problems are not addressed: “With such high quality education internationally, it’s very worrying that my degree might not be worth much in the end.”

If further change is indeed on the way, it seems imperative that universities should pull together all their resources to meet these changes, or risk stagnation.  This will surely rely upon the collaboration of both financial and intellectual sectors of universities towards the mutual aim of the survival and rejuvenation of British higher education.  “I may be a romantic,” says Lucy Hulme, “But I still like to think that universities are the high seats of academic learning that they always have been.” The approaching review of tuition fees due in 2010 shows every sign of increasing fees, highlighting more than ever the fact that university degrees are now both educational opportunities and investments; and like all investments, if it is perceived that higher education is not making the returns it should be, British universities may just find students and employers taking their business elsewhere in the future.