How can we fix UK universities?
TL;DR: I’m interested in your thoughts about this the current problems in UK higher education, and how they can be fixed.
I recently read an opinion piece in the Guardian about the problems currently faced by UK universities and their students. These problems aren’t new, but they’re getting worse year by year, and Simon articulates them particularly well.
It seems to me that there are three main criticisms of our current university system: that it is too costly for students while failing to fund the universities adequately; that degrees do not provide enough value to students; and that there are too many students attending university, especially (so-called) “low value” degrees, but increasingly also “high value” areas such as STEM.
The main solutions being presented are replacing students loans with a “graduate tax”, shuttering low-quality institutions and degrees, and sending more students to apprenticeships or trade schools rather than universities.
My view on this, as someone who has recently graduated university, and will be returning next year to begin studying for a PhD, is conflicted. I can definitely see that these problems are real, but I’m not convinced by the solutions being offered.
Firstly, I don’t think most people discussing these issues and offering their solutions are addressing the most fundamental problem, which is that universities have forgotten how to, or simply stopped, actually teaching. Many degrees only teach you what you need to know to pass the exams and produce acceptable coursework, which is not the point of a university degree.
This is a very challenging issue, because obviously universities must assess their students. But the purpose of a degree, its value, lies not in the assessment, nor even in the certificate awarded upon its completion (despite what many people believe), but in how you can learn and grow to have a deeper and more rounded understanding of your degree area, and the world at large. A university degree should make you a more curious person and build your critical thinking, enabling you to think through and approach many problems intelligently. But instead universities are continuously lowering the bar necessary to pass, because failing students is too costly for them, and thus also lowering their teaching standards.
The problem, it seems to me, is that the purpose of university is to educate, yet many who graduate university do not display the level of education, understanding and intelligence we would expect them to have achieved after investing at least three years of their life and tens of thousands of pounds in their education. This is not a crisis of too many students, but of a lack of quality in teaching. It seems to me that this has been driven by the funding model, which incentivises universities to grow their cohort size in order to receive more funding. Of course, this makes it harder to teach them all, and thus promotes the lowering of assessment standards so that students of sub-par quality - whether it be their work ethic, prior education, or simply learning at university that lacks - can graduate successfully.
If this is our problem, then I don’t think any of the proposed solutions serve to ameliorate it. This problem is equally common to humanities as it is STEM subjects, so the issue is not in students studying in “low value” degree areas. Whilst an apprenticeship might provide better value to a student in terms of the skills they would acquire, it is addressing a different goal and need to a university education. And while a graduate tax might be fairer than our current loan system (which favour high earners who can pay the loan off faster), it would not solve the currently perverse financial incentives universities are subject to.
The solution to this is obvious, but a hard sell. It is necessary to remove the financial incentive for universities to grow their cohort sizes. It seems to me that we must either fix, or at least cap, the funding universities receive, such that it does not grow with larger student bodies. Perhaps it should instead be linked to some performance metric, or maybe the faculty size - the more lecturers and other teaching staff the university employs, the better its funding. Of course, a complete solution to this will require a lot of thought and nuance, but I think it’s clear that the basic issue is the funding model.
The value to be gained (as a society) from a well educated population is massive, but we are currently selling hopeful high school students up the river with underwhelming university degrees that don’t educate them properly. I believe it’s the wrong answer to say that these students should give up on their dreams of a university education. We need to fix the funding model so that universities are incentivised to provide as high quality teaching as possible, not to provide the lowest level acceptable to as many students as possible.
I graduated with a physics degree in 2015 from a mid-range university, and while I no longer work in that field, my experience of university did do more than teach the test and I still admire physics today. I think my viewpoint is different (and perhaps idealistic) since my choice of degree was based purely on curiosity with no regard for job prospects on the other side (though I knew a technical degree would be helpful somehow).
While this may be true, I don't think this is the root cause of the issue. Like many young people I was sold the idea that going to university would lead to a good job, and there was a parental expectation I would study something. While I'm fortunate it worked out for me, I don't think you can separate the increasingly transactional nature of higher education with it's devaluation as an accomplishment as a result of the job market seeing it as an expectation. At the same time you rightly point out the funding shift from governmental to student loans, both of which dovetail with students' willingness to cheat their coursework (but that's a whole other rabbit-hole).
I believe there fundamentally needs to be more avenues for good job prospects than just having a degree, so the people who are curious about their subject are free to pursue it, while others can opt for apprenticeships etc. and they are still seen as equally valuable. Thus forcing universities to compete on merit again.
Ah, thank you so much for articulating this - it is exactly the right point. The idea that the goal of university is to get a job afterwards is entirely at odds with the nature of these institutions, and when the students and the government believe that that is what a university education is for, the system is riveted by contradiction and bound to collapse.
Designing trade schools and apprenticeships to appeal to those students who only care about the outcome of a job could help that type of student avoid going to university, and fixing the funding system would help universities better serve the sort of student that belongs there.
Absolutely! I'm going a bit off topic here but there's an interesting talk by Jon Blow called Preventing the Collapse of Civilisation. Hyperbolic title aside, he discusses the importance of generational transfer of knowledge and how it's impacted civilisations across history.
Relating it to the UK, our decline of industrial sectors means there are fewer people to pass on that specialist knowledge, which explains why it's been so hard to develop those skills in the younger generations and why they're having to turn to less vocational professions to earn a living.
The more you tug the string it just keeps unravelling through myriad decisions and economic changes made by generations past that got us where we are now.
Very interesting. I’ll have to give that talk a look!
I think a very large part of it is too many students. How many chose to go to university because they were curious and motivated to explore their subject, compared to those who went because a degree certificate (not the education of a degree, just the box-ticking exercise of having one) is a requirement for most jobs? Or because not going to university is seen as some level of failure? Or even just because it’s seen as the default next step and they didn’t question it?
It’s a delicate question bound up in issues of elitism, because going to university is broadly seen as a positive - so anything that makes it more targeted is inherently seen as exclusionary. Actually is exclusionary, given the current approach to employment requirements. Stack that with the fact that we’ve got a millennium of class hierarchy and a modern wealth hierarchy to deal with and it’s fair that people would question how much any targeting actually happened on merit.
But imagine a totally clean slate, imagine no inherent barrier to access and imagine that the only job really requiring a degree is academia itself, in all its underpaid but curiosity-satiating glory. Then take the attitude that it sounds like you largely already have (and that I very strongly have too), which is that university isn’t job training nor qualification, but education for its own sake. How many people choose to go to university in that world? 20%? Maybe 30?
And I think that’s what it boils down to, in my eyes: for university to be a place of education first and foremost it needs to be self-selecting down to the people who actually want that. And I truly don’t think that we navel-gazing, mildly-to-extremely-obsessive, knowledge-for-its-own-sake-even-above-practicality-or-utility types actually make up that big a part of the population.
So, forcing myself to be practical for a second: I don’t think the toothpaste can go back in the tube now. The idea of a lot of people going to university, and university being somewhat necessary as job training, is too ingrained to reverse at this point. We’ve got no choice but to lean into that, implement better funding models, and do so with our eyes open: we’re funding job training and general extended-secondary classes for a plurality or majority of the population, and “university” is now the commonly accepted name for it. It’d be near impossible to create a parallel job training system now without it being seen as less prestigious, even if that were totally unjust, so let’s just allow university to be what it is for most people and stop pretending. Let’s make the access, the funding model, and the structure reflect the purpose it’s actually serving.
What we can create in parallel is something for us weirdos. Something structured for exploration of knowledge and academia-track learning rather than career building. I think that it’d be a lot easier to carve that out into something new than it would be to convince tens of millions of people to change their perception of what university is for and how it relates to their lives.
Or maybe I’ve just spent far too many words reinventing the distinction between a first degree and a PhD, I don’t know. But I stand by the idea that we need to recognise what a first degree actually is to the vast majority, rather than continuing to pretend it’s something it isn’t.