University hopefuls trepidatiously opening their official A-level emails this morning will on the whole be happier than last year. All the indications are that they are more likely to get a college place, and indeed have a better chance of making their first choice. The reasons for this are complex, but largely boil down to two serendipitous facts. One is the disappearance of the artificial bubble created by Covid, which left universities overfilled and so constricted their scope for new admissions. The other is a drop in foreign applications, due among other things to students being discouraged from bringing their extended family with them, and to the collapse of the currency of Nigeria, from which many overseas students previously came.
The business model of reliance on an ever-increasing foreign intake to balance the books has its limits
All this will certainly please a good many UK teenagers. Is it good news for the country and for higher education?
In one sense it probably is. While the drop in foreign applicants, whose uncapped fees vastly exceed those paid by home-grown students, will give many universities a headache for the immediate future, it may in the long term raise quality. The business model of reliance on an ever-increasing foreign intake to balance the books has its limits. Some of the aura, and for that matter consumer attraction, of a UK education wears off when overseas students find themselves on a course geared to the fact that a large proportion of students are foreign and possibly without very good English. This is especially true if (as happens in a number of universities other than the one I teach in) corners are discreetly cut in the teaching and supervision of courses overwhelmingly patronised by overseas students to maximise the profit margin. Anything that serves to reverse these trends, even if in the end it may cost some government money, probably ought to be welcomed.
But in other ways, the news may be less good.
First, the apparently cheering facts that more applicants will get into their first choice of college than before, and that the lecture halls will remain full, come with a downside. Unless you buy the somewhat unconvincing line that UK school students have been getting remorselessly cleverer, more sophisticated and better educated every year, quality will go down and entry standards fall. This in turn will feed into more demands for remedial teaching and for already demoralised university teachers to spend yet more time instilling the basics into large and sometimes not very interested classes rather than encouraging students to think for themselves.
Secondly, the news that demand for places is now better balanced with their supply will encourage the idea Joanna Williams rightly took aim at in her book Consuming Higher Education: namely, that university, far from being something for which a limited number are suited, is just a rite-of-passage commodity to be distributed among, ideally, as many people as want it. The chief executive of Universities UK, Vivienne Stern, could not have put it better a couple of days ago: having referred to students taking ‘the course that they are passionate about,’ she then rather spoilt it by suggesting as an alternative a course that matched their strengths, or indeed one they had never thought of, which seems to translate as encouraging people to take university courses even if they don’t have any particular interest in them.
Thirdly, we have to fear that this morning’s results will encourage complacency about the way we do higher education.
There is a respectable position, hinted at by Rishi Sunak before the election, that the UK now has a tertiary education system too skewed towards universities. Put bluntly, this suggests that we have too many university students with skills people don’t need, too few apprentices and on-the-job trainees, and (whisper it quietly) possibly too many universities.
One interesting development this year was that, following the squeeze on admissions in the last few sessions, there was actually a rise in the number of those who might have been expected to apply to university but didn’t. This will be regarded by some as cause for worry: but there is a case for seeing it as an entirely wholesome development, born of a realisation that university study isn’t for everyone (and perhaps exposure to increasingly common anecdotal accounts of graduates who have saddled themselves with debts for courses they were pushed to do and now bitterly regret the whole exercise). It would be a pity if this year reversed this trend. We need some serious thought about how we approach higher education, in what ways the system is broken and what we should be doing to repair it. Business as usual may be nice for the higher education establishment: whether it’s good for the people of this country, or for UK Plc, is less clear.
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