A.C. Grayling has just written a comment piece in The Guardian complaining that more "contact hours" do not equate to a better education. This is the belief apparently held by Peter Mandelson, who in calling for universities to become more commercially responsive to their consumers (i.e. students), has focused on contact time as a prime way in which universities should compete to attract students.

Grayling remarks that Mandelson has misunderstood the nature of a university, especially in Arts and Humanities subjects:

University is emphatically not about spoon-feeding and hand-holding through courses, but the very opposite. It is not about maximising contact hours, but about autonomy in thinking, researching and writing.

This is fundamentally true. The job of a university teacher is not just to deliver the maximum amount of information in the most efficient way (one can imagine this idea might appeal to Mandelson, though) but to encourage students to learn independently. This is why the single most popular career destination for English Literature graduates is business and consultancy. It does not matter to an accountancy or financial firm that a student can recite twelve Keats poems, or tell you the plot of Pride and Prejudice. What matters is that in discussing texts in tutorials, in reading critical material, and in writing essays about literary works, the English student becomes able to summarise information, write accurately, and present confidently. They have also proved that they can study independently in a library, without needing a teacher to look over them and crack a whip.

Giving an arts and humanities student the equivalent number of contact hours as a science student - where the delivery of raw information, which can be applied to a relevant vocation such as engineering, does matter - would entirely negate a key benefit of having a pool of graduates emerging from non-skills based courses. Again, one suspects Mandelson will rather miss this point.

The hard core of Grayling's argument, then, is difficult to dispute, for all that he whimsically recites soft Aristotelian ideals: "We educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of our leisure." However, as I have commented recently on this blog, the leaders of universities - who did not have to pay tuition fees themselves - grossly underestimate the financial hardship of current students, and consistently take the attitude that students are a problem to be minimised, rather than fee-paying consumers. When staff are torn between giving more contact time to students, or researching more, the former invariably gives way.

Whilst universities, especially in the Arts and Humanities, should be concerned with allowing students to learn independently, and contact hours are not the be all and end all of a good education, this does not mean that universities currently give value for money. Indeed, the lifetime earnings of arts and humanities graduates may not beat those of people who leave school aged 16, and so if students are to take a hefty loan burden long into their lifetimes, universities need to ensure that they offer value for money in the broadest possible sense of "value," which may mean providing more teaching for the crucial three years.

Students on a typical Arts and Humanities course may have only around 10 contact hours a week. With current tuition fee levels, that works out at around £40 per student per hour, and considerably more (into three figures) for a body of students in a seminar or lecture. Surely students have the right to feel aggrieved when lecturers remain uncontactable, or unable to offer any more than the minimum, or when other resources do not come up to scratch?

How does it help a student to learn independently when it can take two months for them to get an essay back from a tutor? How does it help students to learn independently when the only comment at the bottom of an essay is "well done"? How does it help students to learn independently when course books are not accessible or even stocked in a university's over-stretched library? How does it help a student to learn independently when a tutor does not have time to offer pastoral support if a student is encountering domestic, personal or financial difficulties beyond their control?

All of these examples are things I have encountered first hand as a student and university tutor. All of these examples speak not of staff who do not care, or of students who expect too much, but of universities and staff stretched on the rack of teaching and research, with the latter currently dominating.

I also teach for the Open University, and the quality of contact and support students have from tutors is astonishing in comparison to traditional universities. Yet the OU is also one of the best institutions educating through independent learning. Universities ought not to aim to maximise contact hours in any quantitative sense; but they have a long way to go before they offer value for money through quality of contact, in the way the OU has done since its inception as a student-centred organisation.

Maximising contact hours would not automatically give students a better education; indeed, for Arts and Humanities graduates who prove their ability to work without supervision, it might even be counter-productive. However, that badge of "contact hours" offers a very useful focal point around which to have the necessary debate about whether fee paying students are really getting the quality of experience they deserve. It should also focus the minds of deans and vice chancellors into realising that you cannot squeeze more out of overworked staff if they must do both teaching and research. If teaching needs to be improved, then more staff need to be employed. This is the simple equation that will, almost certainly, become the outcome of higher tuition fees.

It may not be good for the idea of the university, where those doing the cutting edge research are, currently, also those who provide inspirational teaching; it will almost certainly lead us to follow the American model where graduate teaching assistants do as their name suggests, whilst a few faculty Professors do research full time. However, these consequences are only to be expected when students have become consumers. For student-consumers as they exist now, the quality (and perhaps quantity) of teaching matters, and it is a good thing that Mandelson has raised that "contact hours" spectra, to give students a hook on which to hang their demands, and to give them hard figures to force their universities to respond to their current imbalance in favour of research.

Labels: contact hours, student loans, tuition fees, University Life

In a thinly disguised attempt to prepare the ground ahead of raising the cap on university tuition fees (which seems inevitable no matter whether Labour or the Conservatives win the next general election), the business secretary Peter Mandelson has said that students, as "consumers of the higher education experience," need to demand more from their universities to help them drive up standards and offer better value for money.

On the face of it, you might expect me to agree with him. As I blogged recently, as a university teacher who has a massive student debt himself, I feel that modern universities - led by a generation of deans, vice-chancellors and department heads who merrily strolled through with grants - fail to acknowledge just what a pressured position students find themselves in, and they consequently take student demands for extra or better contact hours as an affront rather than their right. Meanwhile, students do not fully recognise their own value as fee paying customers, and are still in awe of staff who are forced to focus on research rather than teaching, and so students fail to make additional legitimate demands both on their teachers and on universities, who should divert more of their fat fees into teaching resources rather than research.

There is also, admittedly, something of the bemoaned student apathy at work, and it was not surprising that Mandelson invoked the spirit of the radical 1960s to inspire student-consumer pressure:

As students who go into higher education pay more, they will expect more and are entitled to receive more in terms not just of the quality of courses, but the whole experience they receive during their time in the higher education system. If there is a degree of passivity, then I hope that without enjoining our student population to take to the barricades, I hope they will be more picky, demanding and choosy as consumers of the higher education experience.

Putting the onus on students to pull their universities up might, then, seem a positive thing. Yet it misses out one glaringly obvious, horrible trap that lies in wait should the fees be raised again.

At the moment, with lower top-up fees, most universities charge the full amount money, £3 145 in 2008-2009. There is, therefore, not much of a market in Higher Education, and students go where their grades take them, and accept the teaching they are given. But were the fee cap to be lifted, with some muttering about £5000 as a starting point, the marketplace would become more diverse, with some universities charging markedly less in an attempt to attract students. This is what New Labour and the Higher Education sector have clamoured for all along; it has just taken some time for them to incrementally legislate up the tuition fee ladder (or should that be down the slippery slope?).

In this new environment, rather than students pulling university teaching standards up, students would go to the university they can afford, with variable teaching standards attendant on that. It has already been seen that students from the poorest backgrounds are deterred from university, despite promises of substantial grants and bursaries. Charging higher fees would mean that even students who want to go to university in principle, will be more likely to choose those they can most afford. Meanwhile, students from affluent backgrounds, who will also more likely have received better secondary and tertiary educations, will go to universities (often the red bricks) that perhaps need to be less innovative and offer fewer contact hours in teaching, because of the higher standard of student they attract. Such students might well be more apathetic when it comes to making increased demands of their institutions. Meanwhile, students from less positive educational backgrounds, who are more likely to be forced to choose cheaper universities, may worry about the poor quality of the teaching, but will be confronted with that old capitalist equation between peanuts and monkeys. They will be told to shut up like well-behaved consumers, because they got what they paid for.

Whilst his motivating of students was a good thing, Mandelson was misguided in his reasons for doing so. With higher tuition fees looming, the starting point should not be to expect that students will drive standards in the Higher Education market, but to require universities to pull standards up from the top. Higher Education is not a consumer product like a car, or television, or computer. Unlike in the retail sector, a marketplace in Higher Education will not lead to students/consumers to demand more, for less, forcing institutions to compete on teaching quality and value for money. This is because of the massive costs involved, at the early stage of life, which mean that some consumers are automatically going to be forced to aim for a lower priced institution; meanwhile, those who can aim higher are also the least likely to feel that the quality of their education is poor, because they are most likely equipped with the parental support and educational backgrounds to compensate for it. What might at first seem to be Mandelson's concern for a student centred Higher Education, actually revolves round his love affair with the market, and the university's lust for higher tuition fees, whatever the cost to the young.

Labels: Peter Mandelson, student loans, tuition fees, University Life

Now although I regularly talk about my subject or teaching, I do not very often blog about policy at my university. I do not want to end up like Night Jack, the not-so-secret policeman blogger. But having already been made hot under the collar by the CBI's call for student tuition fees to be raised to £5000 and for the government's interest subsidy to be abolished, an experience at my university yesterday finally sent the steam hissing from my ears. I hope you can read this as anger bubbles out of this page. And you especially, student at the back of the class, should sit up and pay special attention, because this post is in your interests.

Yesterday, I was having my annual teaching induction in my department. One of the topics covered was marking - and returning - essays. That "returning" bit is important, because our university is pretty unique in that tutors have fifteen minute, one-on-one sessions with individual students, where we hand back the essay and talk through mistakes and positives with the student. It is the best moment of teaching we do all year, as it both allows tutors to get to know their students, and allows students to really understand how they can learn from their writing and mistakes.

But at the induction, it was let slip that the Dean of Arts has determined that the second of these two sessions is to be abolished. It is, apparently, too inefficient a use of staff time. There was no mention of what the students get out of it which is, if the annual feedback questionnaires are to be believed, a tremendous amount.

The second moment came later, as I sat with a literary theory module convenor. This particular module is content based: students have to learn and understand things, rather than simply being allowed to have opinions on texts. And literary theory being as obscure as it often is, students sometimes have problems with understanding its ideas. So I dared to suggest that, at the start of this year, I would stress to students that they must get in touch via email if there is anything they need additional help with. We could perhaps even arrange to meet one on one.

The phrase "parity of provision" came up in response. Since not all tutors will be so active, or too busy to respond to a plethora of emails, it is not fair of me to offer this to my students.

What makes me so angry is the failure to think of teaching time from the student point of view. Certainly, doing away with a handback session, or refusing to be on email call, will free up staff to do more research. This is the major aspect of universities that students do not often see. Yet what both the Dean and convenor seem to have forgotten is that students pay - yes, pay - to get taught.

This failure to think of the immense burden students are taking on, such that they not only have the need for education but the right to a good value one, is, it seems to me, a generational one. As a graduate of the class of 2003, I have £12 000 of debt at my back, and I am lucky - students leaving today can easily have twice that. Either way, with the inflation adjustment - correction, interest rate - on the loans, we could easily end up paying two or three times that over our lifetimes, something the CBI report seems to neglect in calling for a more commercial interest rate to be applied.

But the generation in charge of universities at the moment had an entirely free ride. At the well-paid level of lecturers and deans and vice-chancellors, the financial hardship students genuinely face both during their time at university, and long after it, must seem very distant. They simply cannot conceptualise the world that they have created, where from the student point of view, teaching is what they pay for at university, and is therefore its raison d'etre. Universities are certainly pulled in two directions - teaching and research - at once. But that is not the students' problem, when they find themselves at the fee-paying centre. What is their problem, though, is the sums; bear with me here - this matters.

At my university, students pay £3, 225 a year for tuition. In my department, they will have 21 hours of lectures times six modules (making 126 hours) plus 24 tutorials for those modules, plus (at the moment), 1.5 hours of essay handbacks across their 6 modules. That is 151.5 hours contact per year, which works out at around £21 per contact hour. That seems quite cheap, but remember that since each tutorial has 8 students, that means that the proportion of the tuition fee allocated to a tutorial contact hour is £168; for a lecture, which may have around 250 students, it is £5250. Of course, the university runs massive overheads to which tuition fees also contribute - such as a large library that students in English use extensively. But even so, in value terms, the university is getting a lot of money per tutorial or lecture, and given what little it pays me as tutor (I get paid £60 to do one hour's preparation plus hold the hour-long tutorial), there ought to be something of a surplus there.

Students today should be pretty upset, then, when tutors, or those in charge of university strategy, say that they should not expect any more contact with teachers. To my mind - the mind of someone who also paid for his education - students should feel very happy to make demands on lecturer's time, to ask questions about material they do not understand, or to have a lecturer go over their essay.

Instead, of course, the mythos surrounding the busy academic remains, making students terrified of approaching tutors. It is absolutely true that tutors or academic staff are extremely overworked because of the requirement to do research. But, to reiterate again, that ought not to be the student's problem. The problem instead lies with universities that will not provide sufficient staff to cover the needs of their - yes, that horrible but correct word - consumers.

It is striking to contrast the attitude of my university, which fails to see students in this light, with that of the Open University, at which I have recently started teaching as an Associate Lecturer (and about which I will blog more extensively later). As an organisation that charged its students from its inception in 1969, the OU has a different culture. For example, although I get paid a reasonable salary at the OU, if I find that I have a student who is making additional demands on my time - for example, they need me to telephone them once a week to help them towards their assignment - I can fill in a form and get paid for doing the extra hours. Clearly, the OU is different to a conventional university, and has fewer infrastructure overheads. Yet the OU sees supporting students as its primary role, understands that students have paid to be supported through their course, and make available the money to allow the tutor to do this. Further, by making that money available, this makes it clear to students that they can call on tutors, and to tutors that they should expect to be called on by students, since the workload of tutors can be expanded depending on the needs of students. This is not the attitude of my other university, despite the fact that students on the OU pay equivalent tuition fees to conventional university students. It is not surprising to find that the OU comes out at or near the top in student satisfaction surveys.

But if students at the OU are satisfied, one of the other problems at conventional universities is that students are not dissatisfied enough; or, rather, that they are not conscious of the gap between what they pay for, and what they actually get. If students are to become more determined in holding their universities to account, to get a fair return on their massive investment, they also need to be aware that they are investors in the first place (something quite evident to Open University students). At the moment, the application for a student loan is one more form a student will complete, along with choosing a halls of residence and ordering that new, branded hoodie. A prospective student - especially one from a privileged parental and educational background - will always aim to go to university, and the loan and tuition fees just seem like one more hoop to be jumped through to get there. Because of the nature of the loan, as one that silently accrues interest in the background but that will not bring the bailiffs knocking if not paid by a deadline, students rarely consider the effect it will have on them after university. Only realising the burden of the loan retrospectively, during their time as students they do not connect the education and contact hours they receive, with the fact that they are the ones who are paying for them. Lecturers, from the student point of view, may seem to be doing them a favour by teaching rather than researching, when in fact teaching is the core part of the "product" which students are buying.

My hope is that this will not last. When top-up fees come in, as is inevitable, or when commercial interest rates are charged on loans, as seems probable, students will really feel themselves consumers from the moment they step through that university door. And deans, or module convenors, will have to demand that more teaching staff are provided, to meet the needs of this new generation of students.

Labels: student loans, tuition fees, University Life

In the credit crunch era, the financial plans of everyone - from large corporations to public amenities to individuals - have to be reassessed. But there seems to have been relatively little in the press about how the recession will impact upon students or recent graduates, other than the obvious issue that jobs will be hard to come by when students leave university. Partly, perhaps, this is due to the fact that the recent Research Assessment Exercise has captured the attention of universities wondering how much they will receive for research, and so universities and press have been less focused on the other side of the research-teaching coin.

So, with the substantial disclaimer that I am by no means an expert on this subject, here are some of my own thoughts on how the recession might affect higher education. Most of these points are particular for England or the United Kingdom, but may apply elsewhere also.

• The first, and most empirically certain thing to note, is that student loans have their interest rates for each year tied to the Retail Price Index as it stands in March. Over recent years, this has hovered around 3 percent. However, as of December 2008, this fell below 1 percent, with the downward trend set to continue. It is likely that come March, interest rates on student loans will be minimal, allowing those students who are in well-paid jobs to repay their loans at a faster rate. However, if RPI falls below zero, so that we have deflation in March, does this mean that the Student Loans Company will start actually paying students loans off? The terms and conditions of the loans state only that "the Government has to keep the value of what is owed in line with the general rate of inflation. They do this by working out the rate of inflation each year as defined by the Retail Prices Index (RPI) and fixing the interest charged to that rate...The new interest rate is based on the Retail Price Index for the previous March." There is no indication of what happens when the RPI falls below zero - something probably not imagined in the heady days of the economic boom when loans were introduced - and there are probably some worried faces running around the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills trying to find a loophole to ensure students repay loans at some positive rate of interest.


• In a recession, one might expect students to hold off from incurring large debts, and favour finding immediate jobs ahead of further study. However, the reverse appears to be the case. With lower-skilled jobs on the decline in a recession (jobs in manufacturing or retail, for example), it is best for students leaving school to head to university in the hopes that economic prospects will have improved in three years, and knowing that at least the student loans offer a guaranteed (if minimal!) level of financial support. The Times Higher Education reports today that the government's restriction on university numbers is limiting the number of places available for increasing numbers of applicants.


• The flip side to this is fewer foreign students will apply to universities abroad. The Higher Education Policy Institute recently warned that if China were to fall into recession, the effect on this vital funding stream would be "cataclysmic." Though the drying up of foreign students will affect universities globally, Britain may oddly see the recession work in its favour to offset the losses, because of the plummet in the value of the pound. However, HEPI suggested that this might mean students opt for one year courses and choose to pay up front, rather than facing the the full three years at uncertain exchange rates.


• More difficult to predict is the effect the recession will have on any plans to lift the cap on top-up fees (set at £3000 plus inflation), and move to a system of full fees. The review on lifting the tution fee cap was due in 2009, but this has now been put off until 2010, after a likely general election. Universities would like the bar to be set at between £6000 to £7000. MP Ian Gibson, former chair of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, has argued against lifting the cap, saying that this would be incompatible with the Prime Minister's plan to ride out the recession by investing in green science research and skills. It would also surely be contradictory for the government to condemn excessive borrowing whilst allowing a new generation of students to start life owing £20 000 for tuition, plus any additional loans they need to support themselves. Furthermore, assuming the system stays the same with the government paying for students up-front, with students then repaying the loans once in work, the government would be required to put a large amount of capital into higher education, without guarantees that it would be paid back quickly, if the economy continues to run slowly. The stalling of tuition fee rises by the recession is, however, only a short term effect; longer term it is quite clear that UK higher education is moving towards the privatised, full-fee model of the United States, and will eventually do so under a Labour or Conservative government.

So there we have it. The layman's thoughts on how the credit crunch will affect current and future students. Clearly, the sector - like all others - faces a rocky and uncertain time, though if the government does see investment in research and technology as the light at the end of the tunnel of recession, universities might ultimately come out well on the research side of things. The people one has to be most worried about are new graduates. Vacancies for graduates have dropped 17 percent in the six months since summer 2008, particularly (and not surprisingly) in the financial sector. As if it were not already competitive as a result of the expansion of higher education, new graduates can expect to struggle for survival in the harshest economic environment in two decades.


Update 13th February 2008

Following the above post, The Guardian Education has just reported a big rise in undergraduate applications. Applications are up 7.8%, with

signs that the recession is affecting people's choice of degree, breeding a new generation of economists and mathematicians. The number of applications for economics degrees increased by 15.7% to a total of 44,750. Applications for maths rose 10.4% and for politics 16.7%.

There has also been an increase in public sector training degrees, hardly surprising since the public sector offers greater job security and, given the present need for investment from the public purse, probably increasing numbers of jobs also:

Applications for nursing rose by 16.7%, education degrees by 10.7% and teacher training by 3.7%. It is thought that people are opting for "safer" jobs outside business and commerce.

Not surprisingly:

There was a 7.6% decline in applications for building degrees as the construction industry slows, though there were modest rises in business degree applicants.

Labels: credit crunch, higher education, Politics, student loans

It is a phrase which no doubt appears in your inbox several times a day, and gets dragged to the junk folder. However, in trying to push through the financial reforms in higher education - under which students would take out loans to pay for their university tuition and living costs, rather than getting grants - the government likewise advertised that these loans would be "interest free." Just as you should never click on a spam email, you should always suspect something is not quite right when a government promises you something-for-nothing. Read the small print in this case, and you will find that the "interest free" loans are tied to the base-rate of inflation, increasing annually by the same amount. But who of us desperate to go to university ever bothered to read the small print? I didn't, and clearly neither has Donald Macleod, who writes on the Education Guardian Blog that:

When tuition fees of £3,000 squeaked through the Commons by five votes keeping student loans to zero real interest rates was obviously a price ministers had to pay.

Students in fact got an outrageously good deal - no fees upfront, interest free loans to cover the cost of tuition and repayment when they were earning as graduates.

Macleod concludes that:

Spending £1bn a year to subsidise graduates who as a rule earn more than the national average seems a waste when there is so much that deserves funding in universities - and even more so in schools.

As one respondent complained of Macleod "You make me sick - tory w@nker!" I agreed with his tone, if not with his vocabulary, so (for all that they will not be read) I added some words of my own, nothing that from my own experience, with inflation running at around 2.5% a year, I graduated owing £10,000 and now five years later I owe around £12,000. Having chosen to do a PhD, and hence defer entry into the job market, you could say that I brought this extra £2000 of debt upon myself.

However, I have friends who went into jobs from graduation, are now on average salaries, and their repayments only just cover the cost of the "interest" on the supposedly interest-free loan; they have yet to pay back a penny of what they originally received from the government. Of course, I also have friends who have yet to find graduate jobs (in spite of having not one but two degrees, the increasingly-necessary postgraduate degree being paid for by further debt through the Career Development Loans scheme), and I also have friends whose salaries (often in the public or voluntary sector) do not track inflation, unlike their loans.

Even so you could argue that many students will ultimately end up in better paid jobs, perhaps working as corporate bankers in London. I agree that students, and not just the average taxpayers of Blair's generation, should put something back into the system. Unfortunately, the way the loans/tution fees scheme was instigated has been unfair on students, unfair on taxpayers who are still owed money by graduates, and unfair in relation to foreign students who can take from the loans pot without being compelled to put back into it.

Nevertheless, I pleaded to Macleod, please don't imply students got the good deal, as if they are scrounging on the society that put them through university. It is this generation of students who, besides, possibly, earning salaries higher than the national average, will be developing the technologies to combat the climate change for which our parent's generation are entirely responsible, and the medicines which will allow them to live longer (and enjoy a longer retirement). They may even do something about spam.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, student loans