When you hear of universities rewarding their vice-chancellors fat salaries – they averaged £277,000 last year, up 5 per cent on the previous year – it would be easy to think that they have evolved into businesses, driven by a great spirit of enterprise. When universities minister Jo Johnson made the proposal for two year degrees, however, it didn’t take long for the nation’s academics to retreat beneath the comfort blanket of wanting universities to be a monolithic state provider of education.
‘Accelerated degrees risk undermining the well-rounded education upon which our universities’ reputation is based’, complained Sally Hunt, general secretary of the Universities and College Union. ‘As well as placing a huge burden on staff, these new degrees would only be available to students who could study all year round. Our universities must remain places of learning, not academic sweatshops and the government needs to resist the pile ’em high and teach ’em cheap approach to students’ education’.
She is behaving like one of these rail union bosses trying to make out that it is unsafe to allow trains to run without guards, even though the evidence points in the other direction. No-one in government is telling universities that they cannot continue to offer three year degrees, if they think that is what is appropriate. Johnson is simply giving them the freedom to innovate. The three year degree course has been sacred cow for many academics for many years, but why? It isn’t for students’ benefit that they are given an enforced four months’ break every summer. Shortening degrees would help them keep their minds on their studies and greatly reduce the costs of taking a degree. Even if there was little difference in tuition fees –Johnson proposes to allow universities to charge £13,000 a year for a two year degree, compared with £9000 a year for a three year one, it would mean students having to pay for only two year’s accommodation. Moreover, it would mean them being able to get started in their careers a year earlier.
As for students who think it important to have four months’ leave to travel the world, they will continue to have the option of spreading their studies over three years. It is the academics who don’t want anyone to have the option of shorter, more intense courses. They worry it will mean, shock, horror, competition from private universities. Moreover, they fear they will no longer have a long summer vacation to bum around the world at conferences or to spend on research – an enormous amount of which, I remember from my days as a geography undergraduate, seemed to take place in exotic locations. It was all about measuring glaciers in Switzerland or studying vineyards in the Loire Valley, while the geography of Scunthorpe went unstudied.
The best university research is of course of huge benefit to the country and to the world, and is not threatened by proposals for shorter degrees. But there is also an awful lot of third rate research which grew out of John Major’s ill thought-out reforms in the 1990s, which transformed pure teaching institutions – polytechnics – overnight into all singing, all dancing universities.
The new proposals merely allow those institutions – should they want to – to return to doing what they had previously done: concentrating on teaching without having to justify their existence by publishing studies which count buses or snails. Academics should stop being frightened of innovation and embrace it.
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