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...
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.