Universities: a view of the future

Thank you very much, Paul and Jo, for inviting me to this Education Horizons event and to be a part of the centenary celebrations of the Graduate School of Education here in Bristol. The purpose of today is to make predictions about how education may develop in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Well, predictions can be fun but they also come with three dangers.

First, the danger that you could be wrong and will come to look foolish. I suspect, however, that the true danger here is one of vanity: the idea that one?s words are so interesting that they are actually worth remembering. The next eight minutes will decide upon that!

The second danger is that you predict the worst yet policy makers still manage to go one better ? if better is the right word, and it quite evidently isn?t ? in going beyond even your bleakest imagination. The third was revealed by what I just said: the possibility of being too negative, especially if you tend to see the glass as being half empty which, in truth, I do.

So let me reach for the academic equivalent of camouflage and begin with a reference. It comes from a document published this month by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) entitled ?An Avalanche is Coming: Higher Education and the revolution ahead?, in which the authors say the following:

?Deep, radical and urgent transformation is required in higher education. The biggest risk is that as a result of complacency, caution or anxiety the pace of change is too slow and the nature of change is too incremental. The models of higher education that marched triumphantly across the globe in the second half of the 20^th century are broken (p5).?

Deep, radical and urgent transformation.

It?s perhaps worth nothing at this point that the IPPR is described (on Wikipedia at least) as having a centre-left viewpoint. We might also note that the report?s lead author, Sir Michael Barber, is Pearson?s chief education strategist. Pearson is in the business of education. As a colleague pointed out to me, its share price has risen since the report was published.

In any case, the authors of the IPPR seem clear in their views. Actually, I am sympathetic with their argument although a little more hesitant. As I said earlier, forecasting the future is a risky of business.

I cannot imagine, for example, that three decades ago when the Friedmans published Free to Choose that their prognoses of Chapter 6 ? What?s Wrong with Our Schools? ? would become accepted wisdom. The solutions: markets, choice and competition. Not, I admit, school vouchers, though they have had a limited trial in some parts of the United States. But, for me to even couple the words education and market together without you looking blankly at me or to threaten an all out strike is indicative of quite how far things have changed since Margaret Thatcher was creating more comprehensive schools in the UK than any education minister before or since.

Yet, it is a strange market isn?t it? If I walk into Tesco, or more likely Waitrose, I expect my choice of shampoo to be there on the shelf or at least some suitable alternative. The same is not true when I choose a state-supported school for my children or, more accurately, state a preference. Whether I get my preference is constrained by the choices other people are making. If the demand for a school exceeds its supply of places, allocation criteria are used. Often those privilege geography; that is, people living close to the school. It would be odd if I went to Waitrose and they only served those who lived locally, which, incidentally, I do not. And that, incidentally, is why I shop online.

Choices for Higher Education are constrained too. By A-level grade or equivalent. But also by ability to pay or to make ends meet whilst you are studying. Yes, I know that in principle you take out a loan and pay the costs afterwards. However, the system seems to me deeply inequitable. Why? Because those who enter lower paid jobs pay more for their degrees than higher earners. That?s how interest works ? the quicker you pay it off, the less you pay. Another colleague of mine, Professor Ron Johnston, has done some pretty dispiriting calculations. It is not impossible for the true cost of the repayment for a three-year degree programme to be over one hundred thousand pounds. That?s considerably more than the twenty-seven thousand pounds advertised on the price tag and might in any other industry be reasonably construed as false advertising. Here is a forecast for you: if tuition fees were to keep rising at their current rate of trebling about every six years, then in fifty years? time the annual tuition fee would be ?216,000 per year. Ridiculous? Some would have said the same about a Labour Government introducing tuition fees. I doubt many made that forecast either.

So something has to give. Or, as the IPPR report described it, ?Deep, radical and urgent transformation.?

It has to give because how can you have choice when it is so obviously constrained by the financial ability to exercise that choice? It has to give if you still believe in the possibility of education to be transformative, to enrich the lives of individuals and societies.? And by enrich I do not mean merely the financial, though I note that it is a tendency of academics to regard financial gain as somehow less than desirable, a viewpoint that puts them at distinct odds with many others in society. Especially those with less money.

Here, then, is my prediction. Universities in the UK will lose the form of protectionism that currently is afforded to them, I believe through the Privy Council. Others will be given the right to award degrees. Or, maybe, degrees as we currently understand them will not command quite the same status they do now.

Look for example at the rapid growth of MOOCs ? not cows with a cough but Massive Open Online Courses. Courses offered by institutions like Stanford, Berkeley or Harvard that anyone can subscribe too and often get accreditation for taking. You might reasonably ask what?s in it for the institution. Prestige. Promotion. Maybe a fee for marking assessments. Let?s not pretend the motivations are necessarily philanthropic or charitable. However, they are challenging the idea that you must paid a large upfront fee for a product that you have not trialled and are instead replacing it with a ?pay as you go? or don?t pay at all model that inverts the business practice found in most traditional Universities. And why not allow prospective student to shop online if the academic equivalent of Waitrose, Tesco or Aldi ? you make your choice ? isn?t otherwise geographically accessible?

Or take a look at Udemy, a site that allows anyone to build or take online courses. It?s worth a look just to peruse the most popular courses that today, if you are interested, are Microsoft Excel for beginners, becoming a web developer from scratch, and first steps to building a technology company, each priced at between 99 and 199 dollars.? Is this more about capitalism than education? Well maybe. It may equally be about people making a low risk investment in the hope of bettering their employment prospects.

And then there is the University of the People, described as the world?s first non-profit, degree-granting, tuition-free online university dedicated to opening the gates to higher education for all individuals otherwise constrained. 1,143,956 people like it on Facebook. It?s a cheap shot but I?ll take it anyway: only 6,438 like Bristol.

So my prediction is one of more choice, more competition, and an utter reconfiguration of what it means to deliver ?higher education?.? Being at heart a social conservative and traditionalist, I will probably find myself mumbling darkly into my half full glass, complaining about the intrusion of profit making businesses into the market for degrees, the comodification of knowledge, the outsourcing of support services and the caualisation of the labour market with more part-time paid teachers and assessors of standardised content. Teaching Assistants as they might be known. All part of Global Education Inc.?s production line of integrated yet bespoke education services for the modern and aspiring professional.

Or maybe I will have suppressed my cynicism and embraced increased choice and personalisation.? A vision that higher education should not be a luxury good for the affluent and the privileged but an opportunity widely available for all. Perhaps the temptation to be sniffy about the prospect of low cost or cut-price degrees reveals more about me than it does anything else. Maybe the main challenge ahead lies within myself and what I aspire higher education to be.

Thank you.

Source: http://www.social-statistics.org/?p=1019

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