Tuition fee and student visa policies are creating dangerous uncertainty, a lecturer argues
“I work for the business school at a Russell Group university; it’s my job to produce research, and to teach undergraduate, masters and doctoral students. It’s an excellent university – but that’s not unusual: our universities have been improving for years, and their staff are motivated and professional. It’s very important they remain that good, particularly given the growing international competition for foreign students.
Of course, good universities need good students. And over the last decade, I’ve noticed that students have become less able to cope with learning at university: critical thinking skills and the ability to formulate strong, scientific arguments have declined. These days I need to spend much more time teaching people how to write consistent arguments. While relatively few deliberately plagiarise, carefully attributing sources is a skill that’s generally lacking when students arrive at university, and there’s a worrying over-reliance on questionable internet rather than academic sources. On the positive side, in terms of ability, I couldn’t tell you which of my students come from state and which from private schools; the better state schools educate people just as well as most private ones.
Our university does work to broaden our student intake – and the new fee regime will help fund this work – but there are structural obstacles. One is the system under which universities base the offers they make to A-level students on their predicted grades, rather than their real results. The fact is, good students in some schools may be given predictions that undervalue them, or they can lack the confidence to apply to the top universities. If we could select students on the basis of real A-level results, we’d get a more diverse student body.
Looking at current policy, one concern I have is the signals from government about clamping down on student visas. Foreign students are very important to us because they enable us to invest, and competition for them is increasing fast. My understanding is that we shouldn’t have any problems with student visas, but I’m worried about our image around the globe: will our brand be damaged by these changes? I noticed that Cameron was publicly asked about student visas on a recent overseas trip; he was reassuring, but the fact that people are asking the question sounds alarm bells. Last year we saw a worrying fall in the number of high-quality, accepted students getting visas for a master’s programme. I hope this is not indicative of a future trend.
Meanwhile, the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees may also lead to a drop in applications from UK students; we just don’t know how elastic the market is. And academics have another concern about rising fees: that students are increasingly seeing themselves as customers of the university. If you’re purchasing a service you expect high standards; and it is reasonable for students to expect to be given everything needed to get a good grade. But alongside this there’s been a growing expectation that they just need to show up to class to get these high grades, rather than putting the hours in at the library and doing the research. This mismatch of expectations has made developing a learning environment increasingly difficult. The fear is that a combination of rising fees, pressure to ensure good grades, and the effect that students’ own appraisals can have on academics’ careers and universities’ reputations could lead to unintended grade inflation.
This government’s fees policy seems to create a halfway house towards privatisation, but one that preserves the drawbacks of both public and private higher education systems: we’ve raised the financial entry bar to university, but investment in our universities is declining. Personally, I think that university should be free for all, but this halfway point does nobody any favours: we should either be able to charge what we need to compete internationally, or be entirely publicly funded.
Furthermore, both the fees policy and the visas situation creates uncertainty over our future income – and that’s restricting our investment in new research and staff. The danger here is that we’ll fall down the world research rankings, and that will make us less attractive to overseas students.
It’s a bit early to say what the impact of visa changes and £9,000 fees will be; however, I can’t see how the new fees system will enable us to improve the quality of our university. Right now, investment in universities is growing around the world, while in the UK we’re making cuts. I know there’s a financial crisis; but the government wants us to be a knowledge economy, and that demands investment in knowledge. What else are we going to do: compete with China on manufacturing? We in Britain are lucky to have world-class universities; and if we want to create the best possible chances for strong economic growth, we need them to stay that way.”