Our
universities are in a first-class mess. |
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| 29th January, 2009 | |
| By Melanie McDonagh | |
The
reassuring thing about university degrees is, by and large, how little
they matter once you've got them. Most of us find that once you're in
a job, hardly anyone will inquire about your qualifications. Indeed, now
that half the population enters third-level education, there's practically
a reverse glamour about not having a degree. Which is not to say that
a university education doesn't count for anything. The three short years
I spent as an undergraduate at Cambridge (actually, more like one and
a half, excluding vacations) transformed me in all sorts of ways – far
more than the time I spent getting a doctorate. |
|
But
since so many people are getting degrees, and quite a lot of effort is
invested in earning them, it would be nice to have some idea what they're
worth. With this in mind, the Commons innovation, universities and skills
committee is investigating the universities. This week, some university
vice-chancellors who appeared before it created a stir by suggesting that
the old system of grading degrees with first, upper and lower seconds
and the gentleman's degree, could be replaced by a kind of glorified end-of-term
report. |
|
Eighteen
universities this year are awarding a Higher Education Achievement Report,
a two-page report card, to their graduates, as well as a degree grade.
By 2012, all universities will do so – regardless of whether directors
of studies know their students well enough to fill in two pages.
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It's
all good for a row between traditionalists and modernists but what really
matters isn't so much the grading system as the worth of the institution
giving the grades. The real reason why the select committee is considering
the question is that there's been an extraordinary amount of grade inflation
in recent years, particularly from the former polytechnics. |
|
As
Phil Woolas MP, chairman of the committee, put it, the UK has "the
most prestigious higher education system in the world, which earns the
country billions of pounds a year … there are serious heads of department
who are concerned that the quality of the degrees they are awarding do
not match the quality of the students". |
|
| In other words, there are dud institutions giving dud degrees to dud students. And that has everything to do with the fact that polytechnics, which used to have a distinct identity, were turned into universities (by the Tories), and vocational subjects have been awarded university degrees (by Labour). | |
| The result, oddly enough, has been to diminish the value of all of them. | |
| But consider Mr Woolas's priorities: universities were once places of learning, teaching and research; now they're about earning the country billions of pounds a year. | |
| In fact, the problem of the universities revolves around money, though it doesn't help that they've been conscripted to advance the Government's equality agenda as well. If you ask heads of department about grade inflation, they complain of being told by management that they either award more good degrees or have their funding cut because they have not kept pace with competing universities. University bureaucracies are supine in the face of government pressure. | |
| To pay for an expanding student body, universities must take in ever greater numbers of overseas students, who pay three times as much as the domestic sort. Some raise the game, but many can hardly write English. They want some bang for their buck, a decent take-home degree – but in terms of tuition and individual attention, they're short-changed. | |
| I said at the start that most degrees matter less than most people think. Just as well really. | |
The
full article is available at: |
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