To promote social mobility, we need to measure it. To measure it, we need to define it. We need to identify markers of socio-economic background. To put it crudely, we need to work out what makes someone working, middle or upper class.

Over the years, I’ve been directly or indirectly involved in many attempts to come up with a simple, but accurate way to define socio-economic background (SEB) for a variety of social mobility and inclusion initiatives. 

Most obviously for me, this has been about university access, wider participation and career opportunities. For many years, the Office of Fair Access & Participation (now part of the Office for Students) has used POLAR quintiles as its headline indicator. This is the rate of progression to higher education from within a postcode. Obviously, this doesn’t equate directly to class and, if the mission to eliminate access gaps were ever successful, POLAR would becoming increasingly meaningless as the differences between quintiles tended to zero.

More recently, OfS introduced TUNDRA, another chilly acronym to identify cold spots of progression. UCAS uses its own Indicators of Multiple Deprivation. Of course, ‘progression’, ‘deprivation’ and ‘class’ are very different things and it’s important not to confuse them, even though the barriers to social mobility may intersect across them.

I could go on listing the zoo of other measures out there, adopting different approaches based on occupational prestige, access to resources (like education or housing), absolute and relative poverty measures, subjective social status, and more marketing-style typologies like, for example, Experian’s colourful Mosaic tool.

Simple or accurate

Last week, this issue of defining background came up in relation to a new project I’m involved in to build more equity, diversity and inclusion into engineering. So I went back to the first work I did on it back in 2010 when the coalition government were first trying to build a Social Mobility Toolkit for employers, providing a comparative way of recording SEB so performance and improved could be measured and tracked.

The assembled experts (which generously included me) compared notes, shook heads, and generally agreed that it is genuinely impossible to come up with a means of classifying individuals that is both simple and accurate. 

Even if a simple measure were ever possible, I’m pretty convinced that an accurate one isn’t. And the simpler it is, the less accurate it gets.

People’s complex individual stories will always be diminished by being put in boxes. That said, aggregated data that approximates at scale to patterns and trends is better than the historic, condescending approach of three classifications of class, based on vague notions about jobs, income, region and accent. (Note the image from the iconic Class Sketch which featured in The Frost Report in 1966, which is copyright, but used under Fair Use.)

How to record and tracking social mobility

So, if you’re an employer, say, who is looking to be more intentionally proactive about social mobility, what data should you gather?

I was inspired to write this by the ever-brilliant Laura McInerney’s blog on Substack in which she mentions coming across the attempt by the Solicitors’ Qualifying Exam, which clearly elevates simplicity over sophistication.

The best practice, I think, is the Government Statistical Service’s recommended series of questions which it has devised to try to harmonise standards. The Government also published this useful guidance for employers (in the financial and professional services sectors, but it applies more generally).

In 2022, the Social Mobility Commission in partnership with The Bridge Group also came up with a new toolkit, which is the gold standard for employers wanting to take social mobility seriously. It includes guidance on what data to gather and how. The Sutton Trust has a similar toolkit too.

Who knows best?

All this data is important and clearly defined terminology is critical if you want to build a solid evidence base. However, when it comes to socio-economic background – or class, as some might call it – there is something to be said for abandoning more scientific approaches and embracing self-identification.

If you’re going to ask questions about someone’s background in order to allot them to a class, why not just ask them – as well or instead – to say where they think they should be placed?

What class you are may well be best defined by where you feel your ‘belong’.

For some people that will never change: former politicians, enrobed in ermine in the Lords, often insist they are still working class. Meanwhile, a titled aristocrat, bankrupt and scraping a living, may never lose their sense of self as upper class. 

For other people, class is mutable. Social mobility, of course, suggests that it is something that can move – or, at least, even if ‘class’ is fixed, everything that gives that word any useful meaning can be changed.

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I felt (quite literally) honoured recently to receive an invitation from the man who puts the ‘great’ into Paul Greatrix – none other than the Registrar of the University of Nottingham, the blogger, the podcaster and the chronicler of all things higher education. 

He asked me to appear on his podcast My Imaginary University.

If you’re not familiar with it (where have you been?), this is the closest thing the HE sector has to Desert Island Discs. It’s a ingeniously simple format in which Paul interviews someone, invites them to make some seemingly fantastical choices and, in the process, of course, they reveal as much about themselves as they do about the choices they’ve made. 

Rather than picking eight tracks, a book and a luxury, in My Imaginary University the interviewee conjures their fantasy institution using a series of prompt question that Paul emailed me in advance. 

At the start of each show, he explains that he hasn’t a clue what’s coming and, to my surprise, this was literally true. You have to hand it to him: he’s a class act. He conducted the interview slickly, probingly, and genuinely without notice or notes.   

I, on the other hand, did need notes. And I thought, with Paul’s permission, I might share his advance questions with you – as well as some of my own prompts to myself – and the notes that I made since, inevitably, not everything I had thought about made it out of my mouth and into the show. I do hope you’ll also listen to the podcast itself and subscribe (because there are some excellent previous episode by far more worthy and knowledgeable guests than me).

Q: Tell us about your history. Where does your university sit? Are you ancient? Redbrick, plate glass? Post-92? A new challenger? 

I decided to make life easy for myself with my imaginary university, by choosing the well-established and highly prestigious Camford University, which I was delighted to be appointed to lead an unspecified number of years ago. And when I was appointed I was really clear that I wanted to radically change the university so that it meets the priorities of today rather than merely the rather narrow sector of society that it has served so brilliantly for centuries.

Q: Your location: are you a campus uni? Urban? Rural? And what is your specific location? Are you even in the UK or are you perhaps a tiny liberal arts college in New England? Or even a thrusting start-up in Asia.

As you know, Camford is one of the nation’s great and ancient universities, but unlike Oxford and Cambridge, it isn’t in the wealthy southern half of the country. The city of Camford has largely built up around the university over the centuries, but the surrounding region is basically post-industrial and, while traditionally we’ve welcomed some extremely well-heeled students, within 30 miles of the university there some of the country’s most deprived areas. 

So, we’re keeping many of the features that make Camford such a special institution, but we’re turning it into a powerhouse of opportunity for all and a central driver for regional revival. 

There are three parts to this: who studies here, the student experience, and the relationship with the local community and businesses. 

Q: Who studies at your university?

Our access policy is based on potential not attainment. Our admissions policy is based entirely on contextualised offers, with a preference for students from within the region. 

We’re investing heavily in our outreach team and teaming up with some of the excellent third sector organisations working in access. We’re building up these long-term relationships with schools and colleges in the region to play a part in raising attainment, but also to help us recognise which pupils they have who would flourish in the environment we can provide, if only they had the chance. 

We organise teaching days at the university for students from those schools and we bus them in. When they apply here, we send admission staff to them to do what we call ‘interviews’. The point of the interviews though is not solely about us selecting them or them selecting us, it’s about working out with them how best to support their idea of success in life. 

The aim of these – and our whole admissions process – is to search for evidence of the potential to succeed rather than seeing if they can navigate a filtering process that’s designed to exclude. We try to ensure that, even if we can’t accept everyone, we always help them to hone their understanding of what would be the best match for them and also improve their self-presentation. 

Being the best match is really important to us and some of our genius academics from our AI research centre have developed this incredible software that hunts for signals about what kinds of people are most likely to pass various milestones on the path to a good outcome. This is heavily based on comparisons with control data about people with similar backgrounds: we’re not looking to find the people most likely to ‘succeed’ – because that’s likely to be the people with the biggest head start – but rather the people who will go on the longest journey, the people where the kind of education we can offer will add the most value and be most transformative. 

We could take the easy path and simply admit demonstrably brilliant students with loads of social capital, stamp them with a Camford-approved label and send them out into the world. That’s what we’ve been doing for centuries and, to be honest, it’s hard to say that we changed the course of those graduates’ lives greatly. So we’re not doing that any more. Instead, we’re looking at the taxpayers’ investment in higher education and we’re sweating it to maximise the return. Meanwhile we’re doing the same for our students so that their effort and investment gets them the biggest possible return. 

Those returns, by the way, aren’t always financial. Thanks to Camford’s reputation, our graduates do tend to be higher earning on average, but we’ve also seen that our approach tends to turn out graduates who’re very focused on the communities they came from, on lifting others up and on creating things rather than pursuing extrinsic markers of ‘success’. We’re trying to make sure that social mobility in a deprived region doesn’t have to mean geographic mobility.

Q: Tell me about your foundation years

We extended our foundation year programme accordingly and, while most of these courses are integrated into a full degree programme, we’ve also been building up strong partnerships with other universities in the UK and around the world to channel students wherever they feel they’ll be best suited. We’re finding, however, that most do want to stay. 

Q: Are there any novel aspects of the student experience your new recruits should expect?

Our education is radically holistic. On the one hand, you could say it’s based on what makes our graduates employable, but it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about producing rounded people. 

Employability is made up of various ingredients: 

• Firstly, there are skills, both transferable, so-called ‘soft’ skills and more job-specific skills; 
• Then there’s knowledge; 
• Thirdly, there are more character-driven attributes, such as attitudes, values, behaviours and even personality; 

There’s a fourth ingredient that I’ll talk about in a moment. But those first three are what our education is designed to develop. You might call it ’employability’, but back in the 1990s, people used to talk about ‘graduateness’ and it was the same idea. At Camford, we call it ’roundedness’ and we talk about having a unique individual ‘mix’ of these ingredients.

Becoming rounded is something that students hear about from day one… and before. It’s built into everything we say about our courses and the student experience. It runs through our partnerships with schools. We talk about it in interviews as a way of getting applicants to think about whether this is what they want and expect from their student experience. 

Students do self-reflections and appraise themselves at key points to understand what skills, knowledge and attributes they have in their unique mix. Academics are explicit about what different course components are intended to add to students’ mix and students complete reflections afterwards to see if their mix has developed in the way they – and the academics – had hoped and expected. 

This kind of self-appraisal is as important to academic progress as any summative assessments. We do have some exams, but we also have assessment through extended essays, presentations and projects. We have lots of project-based learning, often in teams. These teams are almost always interdisciplinary. As often as we can, they’re driven by practical, real world examples, providing free solutions to business challenges faced by employers, mostly from the region, but sometimes all over the world. They’re assessed by a mix of the external ‘customer’, the academic who facilitates the scheme, and peer assessments by the team. 

Students are also really encouraged to engage in activities that elsewhere would be beyond their studies, but at Camford, through reflection, if you can demonstrate you’ve added to your mix, you can gain credits. So, activities like social action in the community, student representation, sports, even a part-time job can all contribute to academic credits. But you’ve got to be able to demonstrate relevant learning. 

Whenever we can, the university either employs students or sets them projects that support the running of the university. For example, our timetabling every year is a major project undertaken by an interdisciplinary team. And students do most of the work planning and running open days, graduation etc. 

This really helps solve some of the conflicts for students, especially our students from disadvantaged background who might otherwise feel there’s a trade-off between their work, their need to earn money and wanting to make the most of the opportunities of student life. 

I mentioned that there’s a fourth ingredient to employability. That’s social capital, which is often less fair or meritocratic, but we can’t ignore it. Through our fantastic alumni network and the relationships we’re building in employers, we encourage our students to build the connections that help make up for not necessarily having the old school tie networks that Camford used to rely on.

Q: You described the university as a regional hub. Tell me more about what that means.

I’ve already mentioned the way we are partnering with local schools and colleges and the relationships with businesses in project-based learning. In everything we do, as far as possible, the relationship between town and gown – or more particularly county and gown – is less of a divide and more like a constant thoroughfare. 

We have a lot of visiting professors from local businesses and from the public sector in the region. We also regularly do placements or secondment of academics into businesses to help them with specific challenges. There are lots of labour market gaps in the region and we helps to fill those in a flexible way that helps everyone. 

We are of course also one of the great global research institutions and so we can attract funding from all over the world to our corner of the UK. We have specialist research centres in pataphysical genomics and quantum psychology – both very innovative and successful. 

We have a special alumni-backed venture capital fund for research-based spin-outs that set up in the region. 

Q: What’s in your prospectus and and what are some of the more interesting courses you might offer?

Obviously, we’re very lucky that our prospectus and website can show off lots of beautiful pictures of our stunning architecture, but the key messages are about our openness. There are no minimum requirements for any course at Camford, except being able to show the potential to thrive in our environment.

The prospectus also explains our philosophy of roundedness and the huge range of opportunities every student has to develop it. It explains about interdisciplinary ways of working, so may find themselves working on a project with others doing engineering, English, sociology or psychology. We have a fairly traditional and recognisable range of courses, but we do also offer an Interdisciplinary Degree where you can move around different courses and non-course activities collecting credits. 

Q: Where do you sit in the rankings and what you are going to do about it or perhaps you don’t care?

Traditionally, Camford has always done very well in the rankings and when I was appointed I was very clear that we might slip with our new approach, but that it was never going to be a metric for us.

We don’t co-operate with any rankings and we actively use our position to speak out against their misleading and heuristic approach. The fact is that if a university like Camford starts to slide down in a ranking, it will undermine the ranking more than it undermines us. So I think it’s really important that institutions like ours use our position of privilege.  

I’m very fortunate that my governing body are 100% bought in to this approach. 

Q: What kind of VC are you in this university?

My main role is to help keep all my brilliant team together and heading in the same direction. There are always practical challenges, brickbats, and people who don’t get it. It’s my job to take any flak and turn it around by going out and spelling out our vision. I’m the one responsible for helping everyone else stick to our sense of purpose. 

Of course, that means I’m often a spokesperson, a negotiator or a motivator. Most importantly, it’s my role to bring in brilliant people who share the vision. For me VC stands for ‘Vision Captain’ at least as much as ‘Vice Chancellor’.

We have a proctor who is our academic lead and a chief executive who manages the operations side. 

Q: What about the students’ union?

The relationship is so close sometimes it doesn’t feel like the SU is all that separate from the university. As I mentioned, students are employed or involved wherever and whenever possible. Student reps sit on all committees and are partners in designing courses. If we have a major build project, students often represent the university in meetings with architects or contractors. They often earn both money and course credits doing this work.

Q: What is the regulatory regime? Do you even care?

We work quite closely and amicably with the OfS. The advantage of being a university like Camford is that we can have quite a lot of sway with the regulator and support them in being better at their job. 

Q: Do you have a voice on the national stage? Do you have politicians queuing up to speak or open new labs?

We’re in the powerful position of having excellent relationships with politicians and civil servants because, of course, many of them are Camford alumni themselves. That’s a privilege that we use to support colleagues across the sector. We’re trying to offer something unique here that’s appropriate for where we are and who we serve, but we fully recognise that diversity is a key strength of the sector.

Q: Are there any other distinctive features we need to know about your imaginary uni? You might have a great sports team, a notable Chancellor, your own brand of gin or a colourful mascot.

We’ve got many ancient buildings, including the largest castle hall in England – where we stage graduation ceremonies. And being ancient most of our buildings are haunted. In fact, Camford boasts the most haunted university building in the world, which now houses our Centre for Rational Research which debunks superstitious nonsense like the idea of ghosts. In recent years though it’s also become a really important centre for investigating and disproving conspiracy theories. Trump absolutely hates it. 

We’ve got other unique research centres in cutting edge areas, some of which are a little way from the rest of the university. For example the Pataphysical Genomics centre took over the buildings of an old Tate and Lyle factory and is creating new jobs in what had become a run-down small town.

The Chancellor is a student elected by both the students and staff. 

Q: Given that it’s an imaginary university, what are you not allowing?

We’re not in the habit of banning anything that’s within the law and we certainly don’t believe we should treat students like children. Instead we try to give them responsibility and support. That said, we do strongly discourage fixed mindsets. If something seems too difficult, it’s about turning to others for help to learn how to do it. 

Q: Finally, and this is a compulsory question, we need to know what your university song would be?

It was ‘I vow to thee my country’, but we put it to the students and staff and they voted for ‘change’, literally. So now it’s ‘Change’ by Taylor Swift from the Fearless album, which seemed appropriate enough. Personally I voted for ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie, partly because that also seemed appropriate, but also because it’s just about the best song ever written and I thought if I’ve got to listen to it endlessly, I’d rather it’s not something I get bored of.

Thanks again to Paul Greatrix (and Sophie Marshall). Do read his blog at Wonderful Higher Ed, where you can not only find links to the My Imaginary University podcast, but also to his other podcasts and blogs about True Crime on Campus, wacky rankings, and all manner of wonderful and occasionally important HE matters.

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Will emergency measures prove to have been the key to fairer admissions, based on potential more than performance?

A slightly shorter version of this blog originally appeared on Wonkhe as part of its ‘Build Back Higher’ series of short articles about the potential positive impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on UK higher education.   

In the face of the difficult logistics of feeding his troops, Napoleon looked for innovations to ensure his forces could carry supplies that would remain edible over lengthy campaigns. As a result, margarine was developed as a substitute for the more perishable butter and the canning process was invented. Without war, we would not have baked beans.

As the clichés have it, desperate times call for desperate measures and necessity is the mother of invention.

The pandemic has undoubtedly driven a host of inventive approaches to teaching, assessment and much else that we may want to keep. But surely no one will ever hail the exams debacle of 2020 and the centre-assessed grades that followed as a welcome novelty?

Maybe we should. One day, we might look back on this cohort as the experiment we never could have done otherwise. 2020 may be the year in which almost everyone got the grade they had the potential to get, rather than what they scored on the day of an exam, when they were ill or the exam room was too hot, or when they were fine, but their examiner’s dog had just died.

As Denis Sherwood (@nookophile) has shown, almost half of all exam grades in some subjects are wrong and even Ofqual’s head, Dame Glenys Stacey has acknowledged that exam results have a fuzziness of a grade either way.

Meanwhile good teachers know their pupils and understand what they’re capable of at their best. Surely students should be admitted to university based on what they might achieve if given a chance rather than as a prize-giving ceremony for one day’s performance.

I’d like to think that after this year we will revisit Level 3 assessments (that’s A-Level and their equivalents, but it applies to other levels too, for that matter) and ask whether summative exams tell us what we need to know in order to allocate places in higher education fairly. We’ll reconsider the role of continual assessment and, rather than dismiss teachers’ professionalism, we’ll work harder to eliminate any bias in their judgements (because it’s not as if examiners are immune to bias).

As a result of pandemic panic grading, this year’s entry cohort may turn out to be the most diverse yet and if their learning proves to be as successful as other years, it will be hard to argue why student recruitment shouldn’t take more account of context and less of exam results.

For further reading on this topic I recommend Mark Corver‘s brilliant analysis of admissions driven by predicted grades in HEPI’s recent collection of essays Where next for university admissions?

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This slide, presented by UCAS’s Chief Executive Clare Marchant at a recent event hosted by Wonkhe on higher education admissions, shows starkly the correlation between clearing and drop-out that I have been banging on about since the 1990s.

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In my last blog post, I mentioned that I’d got into a correspondence with teacher and author Matt Pinkett about whether young people – especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds – should aspire to university.

Matt suggested that perhaps young people should set their sights on the career they want and, if they can’t make serious progress towards it as they leave school, then they should consider university as a back-up – a ‘failsafe’, as he called it. 

After our previous discussions, he asked what I thought about this. This was my response (with a few edits to make it a blog more than a email to Matt)…

I don’t think I agree with the idea of university as a ‘failsafe’, although I’m still not sure I understand what you intend by the word. So I’m going to use Matt Pinkett’s line: ‘Aim for whatever you want to do, and if you don’t get it, well, at least you can go to university.’ That assumes that whatever you want to do won’t be best achieved by going to uni.

Obviously, university is not the best route for everything or for everyone, but for the vast majority of the best paid and most secure jobs, it is – if not a prerequisite – at least a head start.

The evidence is pretty clear: on average, uni helps everyone regardless of background, earn more in life and have other benefits such as health and happiness. It doesn’t eliminate the social advantages some were born with, but it does narrow the gap a bit.

For many students with disadvantage, higher education is not only transformative, it is almost the only thing that could ever have provided them with that transformation. On average, uni would be the right thing to do, if you are able and so minded. 

However, the sticking point there is ‘on average’. There are some people whom it won’t suit or for whom it further their aspirations. I never try to persuade people to go to uni, but I do try to outline the advantages – and disadvantages – so they can make an informed choice for themselves. You need to consider the individual. All guidance should be ‘Person first’. Or, more to the point, the person should consider their individual needs for themselves.

Rather than ‘aim for what you want to do’, I tend to think about ‘what do you want to be’.

For all of us, the answer to that is that we want to be happy. What happiness means to each of us and what will bring that happiness is different (and changes over time), but it might involve earning a lot (however much ‘a lot’ might be); it might be fame, security, a work:life balance, a family, power, a sense of doing something worthwhile etc. Each of us has a set of rewards we want in life and each career has the potential to deliver a different set of rewards. Finding a career that delivers the set you want is half the journey.

The other half is to be able to offer to that career the skillset that the employer will want. Just as each career offers a different reward set, each one demands a different skillset. If you don’t have the suitable skillset, the job might be a good match for you, but you’re not a good match for it.  

It’s worth unpacking what that skillset actually is. It’s not just skills, but broad ‘employability’. Employability comprises the following in no particular order:

(1) Skills:
(a) Hard skills, ie job specific skills, such as welding if you want to be a welder;
(b) Soft skills, ie transferable skills, such as communication, team work or numeracy, which are all useful in any job, albeit to varying degrees.

(2) Knowledge, some of which is specific to the job (eg. a surgeon’s understanding of anatomy), but much of it is broader (although to some extent, this comes up in (4) below)

(3) Character, which comprises attitude, behaviours and personality (and includes important traits like grit, resilience and a growth mindset, but also determination, politeness and amiability).  

(4) Social capital, or how society perceives your intrinsic value (based on class, age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, height, accent, use of the right fork, etc). This is the often unwelcome component of employability because it explains why Boris Johnson gets to be Prime Minister with a record of being repeatedly sacked when anyone from a disadvantaged background wouldn’t have been given a second chance. We cannot ignore social capital though, if only to recognise that, in order to make it matter less, you need to ensure you have all the other components in overwhelming supply. There are also things that one can do to build social capital – most importantly, the wider knowledge is key to this and not in a bad way.

Although these four components comprise ‘employability’, actually we are talking about something far broader than merely producing career fodder. We’re talking about creating rounded people: someone with a full complement of the four components is well equipped for making a life, not just a living.

What role does university play in any of this? It’s easy to see that disadvantaged students might start out with even more limited employability than more affluent students. University explicitly sets out to build knowledge and often hard skills too. It builds soft skills, although it tends to do this implicitly. It builds social capital through exposure to a wider cross-section of society, establishing networks and broadening horizons. It might also build character, but it is arguable whether it does so better than the ‘university of life’. In any case, research shows that disadvantaged students tend to have a lower propensity to take advantage of many of the character-building opportunities (such as extra-curricular activities) that uni might offer. This is often down to money, circumstances and habits formed in school.

When you look at it like this, you can see how uni builds employability into a quality some researchers have called ‘graduateness’, which is clearly prized by employers.

So, should uni be a failsafe or a first option? As I said, it has to be down to the individual and the gap between their skillset and that required by the career that might fulfil their reward set.

Critical to this is the questions of ‘if not uni, then what?’ Around 50% of school-leavers do not go to university. Most go into jobs (usually just ‘jobs’, rather than ‘careers’). A few go into apprenticeships, training or other non-higher education. Too many become NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training). There’s not a sufficiently good other pathway (although there absolutely should be) and, unless there is a better option, university must surely look attractive to anyone with the grades and willingness to spend longer in education.

Degree apprenticeships are a decent option, but they are few and far between, fairly limited in the choice of jobs, and subject to many of the same prejudices against the disadvantaged that exist at any level of employment.

I haven’t touched here on the fact that uni is an expensive option. It is. And I believe the student/graduate’s contribution to the cost is disproportionate. (In fact, I have proposed an alternative system of funding.) That said, uni is pretty much free at the point of entry and you only pay when you earn a decent wage. In that sense, cost should not be seen as a barrier, although it might be seen as an impediment.

I agreed with Matt Pinkett that he could also publish my comments on his own blog which can be found at All Ears. I’m really grateful to him for what’s been – for me at least – an interesting discussion.

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Back in August, a teacher drew my attention to the following tweet and asked if I might be able to answer it:

Can anybody point me to research regarding outcomes in later life for disadvantaged students who go to university vs. disadvantaged students who don’t? https://t.co/BiYatOdKMh

— Mr Pink (@Positivteacha) August 1, 2019

The tweet was from Matt Pinkett (@PositivTeacha), teacher, blogger and author of Boys don’t try? Rethinking masculinity in schools.

My thread of tweets in response sparked a correspondence between us and, in the end, Matt was kind enough to say I had challenged his whole perspective. He suggested others might be interested too and I should publish some of my thoughts on the topic. 

So, in the first of two blogs (here’s the second), here’s how I responded to his initial question… 

There is plenty of research showing a significant earnings premium on average for graduates regardless of background. Probably the most comprehensive work is the paper by the IFS ‘How English domiciled graduate earnings vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socio-economic background’. The Sutton Trust has also done many excellent studies on different aspects of this question which is actually a lot more complex than it sounds.

Policy Press | The End of Aspiration? – Social Mobility and Our Children’s Fading Prospects, By Duncan Exley

 

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This article first appeared on the Wonkhe website (8th April 2018) under the heading ‘TEF won’t sweeten my rankings rancour’.

Which is the best university? It’s a seductive question to ask, but that doesn’t mean there’s a sensible answer. League tables, aka rankings, is the nonsensical answer you’re likely to get.

They weigh the wrong factors – a very narrow idea of best, based on counting what’s measured rather than measuring what counts. Traditionally, this has led to a dominance of rankings by research-led institutions.

But even if the factors weighed were the right ones, the rankings use poor proxies to measure them – as if research citations, for example, were an unambiguous marker of quality, rather than being hugely dependent on publication in English, in the right journals and in the right disciplines.

But even if they were the right proxies, the data is often of poor quality: out of date, non-comparative, self-reported.

But even if the data were good, what rankers do with it isn’t: aggregating and weighting arbitrarily.

But even if the methodology were sound, the way the results are presented suggests an equal distance between say, first and thirty-first place as between fortieth and seventieth. Anyone who has ever seen a bell curve knows that is misrepresentation.

But even if league tables didn’t make all these mistakes and more, their worst crime is to imagine that there is such a thing as a single best university, rather than many different ways in which universities can be good at different things. Indeed, it is the very diversity of the higher education sector that is its strength. It means the sector as a whole can paint a rainbow of objectives catering to the divergent needs of particular students, communities, employers, economies and societies.

No platform for rankings

You can’t ban league tables, sadly. If we want information about higher education to be transparent, then there are those who will put it in a pop chart. That will attract attention, because offering an answer to that “best university” question is sexy.

The answer might not be to have fewer league tables, but instead to have more: an infinity of rankings so that each person can pick the one that combines just the factors they want, weighted perfectly to their needs. No ranking would be authoritative, because the array would reflect the personal and diverse nature of the question.

THE’s latest rankings product (its Global Impact Ranking) is a step in the direction of infinity in that it adds another league table to the shop window, incrementally diminishing the value of the ever-increasing heap.

However, perhaps we should welcome the desire to rate universities according to criteria such as recycling, fair labour practice and admissions policies, even if the process is as flawed as all the others? After all, the sexiness of rankings does shine a light on issues that might get overlooked (especially when the desire to do well in other rankings distracts universities from considering what else matters).

TEF: just another ranking?

That was explicitly the government’s intention when it introduced its own form of ranking – the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which the then-minister Jo Johnson said would “introduce new incentives for universities to focus on teaching”. The idea was to rank universities’ teaching quality to get them to improve it and to drive student choice based on quality.

The problem is that TEF repeats the mistakes of other rankings. It weighs the wrong factors: the metrics (as was later acknowledged with the change of the name to include student outcomes) have little to do with teaching. It uses poor proxies, such as measuring employment not employability. The data is poor: the NSS component was downgraded after an NUS boycott undermined it. The methodology is arbitrary: for example, benchmarking by disciplines, but not regions.

The list goes on, but TEF is unlike other rankings in at least three respects. First, being the government’s own ranking, TEF bears more responsibility than most. It purports to be a truer truth – an authority that it hasn’t earned.

Second, most league tables – even though they are rarely entirely open about their methodology – do tend to stick to it. TEF, however, recognises the failings of its metric methodology and adds a subjective element: the review panel.  It may be the best part of TEF, but it’s the least transparent and most susceptible to inconsistency.

Third, most league tables’ misrepresentation is a single hierarchical list. TEF retains the hierarchy, but shrinks distinctions to three categories: good (bronze), better (silver) and best (gold). This, of course, creates a cliff edge where a fine judgement between silver and bronze, say, translates into a presentational gulf.

Informing student choice

Interestingly, there is no “mediocre” or “bad” in this hierarchy, but that’s not how students see it. Bronze is no one’s idea of an endorsement. This highlights an absolutely critical issue about rankings – TEF included – which would be the case even if they were more rigorous in their approach: how do they inform student choice?

Human choices are rarely rational. They emerge from a soup of feelings and preconceptions, sprinkled with croutons of information fried in confirmation bias. When it comes to a complex decisions, such as which university to choose, we don’t devise a personal list of criteria, sourcing objective data on each, and then coolly and fairly appraising the options relatively. Instead we latch on to something that provides a basis for beliefs we already hold.

In other words, we use heuristics: rules of thumb that often bear little resemblance to nuanced realities, but which hurt our brains less. This is precisely the quality about league tables that makes them so sexy. They say, don’t you worry your head about the real differences between two institutions that are both good in their own way, we’ve made the whole process simpler. Misleading, but simpler.

The same is true of TEF. Rather than providing information that disrupts misplaced beliefs and encouraging students to examine what kind of educational experience will support their own learning, TEF short-circuits the thinking and provides a yes/no/maybe checklist.

The Government was right to shine a light on teaching (well, on learning), but not the seedy neon beam of TEF. There are other approaches and, as Dame Shirley Pearce proceeds with her review of TEF, I hope she will think boldly about options that promote diversity and innovation rather than aping league tables that suppose there is a single model of “good” and which play blind darts to see who gets closest.

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Read Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (HEPI Policy Note) and, exclusively on this site, Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (full proposal).

What I’d like for Christmas:

1. We should abolish tuition fees.
2. We should fund English universities well enough that they can continue to be among the best in the world.
3. We should match graduates and jobs so that they have the right skills to get jobs they want and succeed in them.
4. We should ensure that the nation’s skills gaps are plugged. 
5. We shouldn’t ask the taxpayer to pay for more than the public benefit of higher education. 

Is that really such a big ask? Over decades of fiddling with the funding system for higher education in England, apparently so. That’s because some of my wishes are seen as mutually exclusive.  

The funding of higher education England has been played like a game in which if one player wins, another must lose. For example, if students win and don’t have to pay so much, then the taxpayer loses and has to fork out more.

More usually over the past 30 years, it’s the student who’s lost: the burden of cost has shifted consistently to the student, first through student loans in 1991, then top-up loans, then fees of £1,000, then top-up fees of £3,000 and then, in 2012, a trebling of fees to £9,000. 

The funding system is under review at the moment by Philip Augar at the behest of the Prime Minister (as she is at the time of writing). Leaks suggest the balance may swing back away from the student, but the cost will fall instead on either the taxpayer or on universities in the form of slashed  funding. 

However, there is another player in the game, keeping his gambit very quiet in the hope of not being noticed: the employers. 

For too long employers have escaped making a fair contribution. They would, of course, argue that they do contribute through corporate tax and through salaries (which, on average, are higher for graduates). 

That’s true, but this approach leaves them without any skin in the game. They’re not making their investment work for them. 

I have written a paper for the HE sector’s think tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute on how employers could and should pay a ‘graduate levy’ instead of graduates paying fees. This needn’t cost the employers more and, critically, it would mean they get what they need from higher education far better than at present. 

In the process, it would also eliminate tuition fee debt. It would improve courses and graduate employability. And sure enough, it would fund universities well while costing the taxpayer less.

It sounds too good to be true, so please make up your own mind by reading the HEPI paper or I have also produced, exclusively for this website, an expanded version of the full proposal which also includes fuller explanations and counter-arguments to some objections that have been raised with me in discussion.   

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Today, The Guardian reported the publication of a report out today from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) with the headline ‘“Less than half’ of tuition fees spent on teaching at English universities‘. 

The headline here is more than a little misleading as the article goes on to report how HEPI’s paper shows how almost all of the tuition fees charged to students at English universities are spent on student-facing costs.

However, to understand this issue, we also need to remember some other stuff about fees.

When fees were tripled to £9k, the intention was that 1/3 of the income over £6k would be spent on access measures (bursaries, outreach, etc). This was never made a specific requirement, but it would amount to 11.7% of what is now a £9,250 fee.

It seems that, while universities do spend a lot on access, there’s a significant underspend compared to this intended level. That’s bad news for access but good news for current students who get more of the the direct value of the fee that is paid on their behalf.

‘Paid on their behalf’ is important here. In the debate about whether students get value for money, we should remember that whatever graduates end up paying, it’s very unlikely to be £9,250.

For some it will be far more. For most it will be far less. The Government reckons about 45% will never be paid by the graduate: the amount they will at some point pay equates to around £5,087 per year of study.

In other words, students pay barely anything more than the direct spend on their teaching and definitely far less than the amount that is spent on things that directly benefit them. That’s good value for money in anyone’s book.

I am not saying that the system of tuition fees is right or fair. Others – taxpayers, employers – get value for money from higher education and the balance of contributions they make may not reflect that equitably.

We should also note that the split of how fees are spent will vary hugely between courses. For an engineering student, the direct cost of teaching will be far higher than for a philosopher. Indeed, some data suggests costs would exceed the whole £9,250 for the engineering course.

That doesn’t mean the philosophy student gets ‘bad’ value though. On average they earn less than engineers, so – if they do – they end up paying less.

It also needs to be pointed out that not all value is measured in money. In fact, what matters most is not.

Two final reflections: I wholeheartedly support the report’s recommendation that ‘student fee’ is more appropriate terminology than ‘tuition fee’ and this paper slam dunks the proof of this.

This level of transparency about how funds are spent is really important. Some of the truths may be awkward, but it’s more awkward to avoid them. The truth here actually turns out to be universities’ friend.

Nick Hillman, Director of HEPI, has argued this last point well in this blog, quoting medieval canon Henry Knighton committing one of history’s worst mixed metaphors when he objected to the translation of the Bible from Latin into English saying, ‘The jewel of the church is turned into the common sport of the people’.

By the way, congratulations on a great piece of work to its authors: Nick Hillman, Jim Dickinson, Alice Rubbra and Zach Klamann.

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BBC Radio 4 reported this morning a leak from the current Augar Review of Post-18 Education Funding. They claimed that a ‘source’ had supported a report in The Times last week that the review would propose that tuition fees should be capped at £6,500 and the “shortfall would be made up by capping student numbers”. 

For starters, the way this is worded makes no sense as capping numbers would only make funding shortfall worse, not better because of loss of economies of scale. I put this down to the BBC’s over-simplified description.

More worryingly, this would be a disaster for any course costing more to run. That’s any STEM courses, specialist courses with a small intake, high-quality courses where the teaching is especially engaged and with low staff-student ratios, courses with lots of students from non-traditional backgrounds, and so on. In order words, it would undermine a damaging proportion of what is best about English higher education. 

Even for arts courses it would place greater pressure on unis to pass course costs to students for materials. The National Union of Students did excellent research in 2012 showing huge hidden costs across many courses, such as thousands of pounds for artists materials, for example.

A £6,500 cap would be a way of incentivising unis only to offer badly taught courses in subjects where the skills shortage is lowest.

To solve the shortfall for STEM subjects, the Government would be forced to top up funding through a teaching grant for particular prescribed subjects. Unless this extra funding is sufficiently generous – i.e. it allows universities to subsidise their overheads – they will still have an incentive not to offer as many of those courses. And even if the top-up were enough, it would still be subject to political control and adequate funding would be impossible to sustain.

These proposals would be a triple whammy for disadvantaged students:

1. The student number cap (which BBC couldn’t confirm with their source) would hit them by limiting places. That means sharp-elbowed, richer or otherwise privileged students get to front of queue.
2. Universities would have no money to support their access activities like outreach, bursaries and other support intended to help non-traditional students into and through higher education.
3. This proposal does nothing to address the main problem of debt for students (as opposed to the Governments financial problems or universities’), which is to do with living costs while studying. This, of course, isn’t just a problem for disadvantaged students, but for almost all students and the reason why student disquiet prompted Theresa May to set up this review in the first place.

I could have said it’s a quadruple whammy for disadvantaged students, because it does nothing to address the collapse of part-time and mature study, which are an especially effective way of opening access to higher education to non-traditional students. However, like student living costs, that’s a wider problem too – one that desperately needs to be solved for sake of students and UK’s skills shortages.

Ultimately, a £6,500 cap doesn’t even help the Government financially anyway. The way student loans are accounted, this would just dump more cost in the deficit, although the imminent (or should I say ‘impending’)  review of accounting arrangements by the Office for National Statistics may change this.

These proposals wouldn’t even be a win politically. The only graduates who would benefit would be those who end up earning most, who might end up paying back less. Most graduates wouldn’t see their repayments change – not the amount, nor how long they make them. This would be a thoroughly anti-progressive approach to the problem.

Even in terms of the political optics, this proposals isn’t sufficiently helpful to students to seem good enough. Indeed, it would just draw attention to how much better Labour’s offer to stop tuition fees altogether appears to be.

Fortunately, this proposal is just a leak and it is unlikely to be much like what finally appears. (The interim report is due in January.) There are too many clever heads on Augar’s team to let this be the true shape of their report (I hope).

I suspect this may be a DfE leak either (a) to prepare the ground for something bad, but less bad, (b) to run ideas up the flagpole, or (c) to create reasons to chuck the Augar Report altogether if they don’t like it.

When I say DfE leak, we may be seeing an internecine battle between HE and FE in the Department. The HE officials may be leaking the worst excesses of mooted proposals in order to goad the HE sector into putting up an opposition, which they’ve been pretty poor at over the last few months. HE officials, right up the the Universities Minister, might well be trying to regain ground versus the effective and worthy campaign that FE sector has waged in support of a better deal for them.

We all (universities, government, students, employers, and the whole of the UK) need much better ideas than this.

With that in mind, I have written a paper with a quite different approach to HE funding that will be published by the Higher Education Policy Institute later this month – watch this space.

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