International comparisons

This issue of Perspectives has five articles which, we hope, will be of great interest to readers who want to learn about changes to higher education (HE) provision in English-speaking countries.

We open with ‘Trends in private higher education in Australia’, an article that refers also to private HE outside Australia. The authors state that ‘with increasing demand for HE worldwide … private tertiary institutions have mushroomed’. This they partially attribute to the continuing decline in government funding of HE, particularly in Anglophone countries. In the UK, government funding has technically declined because direct funding to HE has been replaced by government loans to students. For private higher education in England, the new system of funding teaching introduced in 2012 has certainly been a bonanza. At least 600 ‘alternative’ organisations, many small but some very big, now provide HE in the UK.¹

Although the devolved system of HE in the UK makes long-term comparison somewhat complex, a Universities UK (UUK) report states that income to HE for teaching has risen over recent years, although most funding for teaching is no longer provided by an exchequer grant. In a Parliamentary Briefing, UUK states that ‘after a period of underfunding for teaching in the 1990s and early 2000s, recent funding reforms have seen funding levels per student return to close to historical levels’ (UUK 2018, 6). ‘Funding reforms’ means, essentially, that tuition fees in universities have been set at approximately a full-cost figure for ‘classroom’ subjects and are paid through the loans system. This has increased funding for HE in all parts of the sector including alternative providers.

The growth of the private HE sector in the UK has certainly tested our regulatory systems. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the House of Commons pulled no punches in its February 2015 report. The Summary put the points plainly, stating the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (the Department that was responsible at the time for HE) had not learnt lessons from unsuccessful policies (such as Individual Learning Accounts) and ‘failed to heed warnings from organisations such as the Higher Education Funding Council and University and College Union’. BIS allowed, and perhaps encouraged, the rapid expansion of support for students attending private Higher Education providers.

The Department has been unable to quantify how much money has been lost when it has funded students [from EU countries] who have failed to attend, or failed to complete courses, or were not proficient in the English language, or were not entered for qualifications, or where courses themselves were poorly taught. (PAC 2015, 3)

A 2017 report by John Fielden and Robin Middlehurst, published by HEPI, ‘Alternative providers of higher education: issues for policymakers’, considers how ‘private’ HE presents challenges. Using data from the PAC report they observe (15) that between 2010/11 and 2013/14, the number of students claiming support for courses at alternative providers rose from 7,000 to 53,000. Over the same period, the total amount of public money paid to students at alternative providers, through tuition fee loans and maintenance loans and grants, rose from around £50 million to around £675 million. (15) In 2014, there were nine alternative providers bigger than 5,000 students. (6)

Mahsood Shah, and his colleagues, report turbulence in the growth of Australian private HE and note that in Australia, as in other countries, there are ‘many concerns about the quality and standard of education’. In Australia the number of private providers declined from 170 in 2011 to 123 in 2018. There was some de-registration by TEQSA, the quality and standards regulator for Australian HE, and there were trading issues for some providers leading to closure or take-overs.

The UK’s Higher Education and Research Act (2017), which established the Office for Students (OfS), aims, operating comprehensively, to ensure that privately provided HE in the UK adheres to the same standards as the universities. In their HEPI paper, Fielden and Middlehurst asked whether the legislation would establish effective regulation of alternative providers. They argued that three aspects were vital (47) and raised concerns about how the OfS would be able to become an effective regulator with so many institutions to review:

• students’ investment in higher education must represent value for money;

• providers must not abuse publicly provided funds;

• students’ access to financial support must be a good use of public money.

Clearly, the HE sector must anticipate further change and adjust to the growth of a private sector. The OfS has made clear that it will promote ‘new and faster options for market entry’: providers will

not need to have a track record of delivering higher education to be able to meet the registration requirements and … there will also be a faster route for high quality new providers to gain access to degree awarding powers directly, without the need for a track record. (2018, 23–24)

The OfS started work in 2018 with a set of objectives that are focussed on ensuring that ‘every student … has a fulfilling experience’. In the words of its first Chief Executive, Nicola Dandridge, ‘this focus on students represents a shift; in the past regulation has tended to focus on institutions.’ (2018)

We welcome, in the pages of our journal, discussion of how the new arrangements are impacting on the student experience of HE. We would be very interested to publish work on what the student experience is like for learners in private HE.

HE across the world, of course, is organised and delivered in different ways. In the USA, any suggestion that privately provided HE is ‘alternative’ would be absurd. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, established in 1636 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Harvard website identifies the Harvard Corporation, known formally as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, as the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. Harvard runs businesses and pays tax to the government. It is the richest university in the world in terms of total assets. It is private but certainly not ‘alternative’.

The second article in this issue considers data relating to 21 of the top universities in the USA: selected because they all have a place in the ‘top 50’ in three widely used international league tables. 15 of these institutions are private and 6 are public. The paper is designed as a case study of ‘potential student and graduate experiences’, comparing ‘wealthy private institutions with small minority populations’ and ‘less wealthy publicly funded universities that offer higher acceptance rates and opportunities for minorities’. One of the conclusions is that graduate earnings differ significantly between public institutions and private universities.

Admission to selective universities is a contentious issue everywhere in the world. The Sutton Trust in the UK has campaigned for many years to challenge the sector about its admissions policies. As its founder, Sir Peter Lampl, states in the foreword to a Sutton Trust publication, Earning by Degrees:

not all degrees are created equal; at a time when the average student is graduating with around £44,000 of debt, it is more important than ever to recognise that fact. (de Vries 2014, 4)

In England, with regulated undergraduate fees for British students, tuition costs are no more at a highly selective provider than at a less selective institution that has decided to charge the maximum permitted fee. However, research published by Sutton Trust shows that ‘students who study at Oxford and Cambridge will start on salaries £7,600 – or 42% – higher than graduates from post-1992 universities’ (5) (emphasis added – the effect on lifetime earnings is enormous). According to the report, differences in earnings between graduates of different universities persist even when factors like socio-economic background, previous educational attainment and attendance at a private or state school have been properly considered. Research shows that the earning potential of a UK graduate, like the USA, is significantly influenced by the status of the institution attended.

Socio-economic inequality and environmental degradation, arguably, are now the two most pressing sustainability issues on a global scale. In our second issue of 2018 we published an article by Roger Brown which argued that the way that HE now operates in the UK reinforces, and even produces, social inequality. This is relatively new. HE has traditionally produced social mobility, with the children of a new generation having more opportunity than their parents to acquire a university degree and thereby achieve higher earnings. Now in the UK, and many other countries, those graduating during this decade are unlikely to be more prosperous than those who graduated in the last decade of the last century. With rises in the numbers participating in HE the ‘graduate premium’ is going down and the focus should be, as the Sutton Trust has championed, on the impact of elite universities on social inequality.

Brown quoted Simon Marginson, endorsing his views:

In elite universities, high quality students bring status to the institution, they reproduce its selectivity, and in return receive institutional brand status as graduates, though this brand value varies by field of study. In turn, the educational mission drives the accumulation of revenues needed to sustain research performance in a competitive market; and superior research lifts institutional status with its power to attract top students. (Brown 2018, 38)

The institutions reviewed by Troy Heffernan illustrate this. For example, when these 21 elite institutions are ranked by ‘Acceptance Rate’ (with the hardest to get into at the top of the table), five of the six public institutions are in the bottom half of this ‘premier division’ table: private HE is significantly more selective. In his table showing graduate income (Table 4) all six public institutions are in the bottom half, and the top private institution (MIT) is more than 40% higher than the top public university (Michigan). Despite the care taken by American universities to admit students fairly using ‘blinded applications’, evidence in Heffernan’s paper shows, as he puts it, that ‘inclusion of students from lower socio-economic backgrounds at high-ranking universities is extremely small’. Whilst Heffernan argues that, in certain respects, there are major similarities between elite institutions, whether they are private or not, in some ways the elite private institutions remain distinctive.

British readers of Heffernan’s article, I suggest, will be astonished at just how wealthy are the top US private institutions. His Table 1 gives figures for endowments, both as totals and in per-student terms. The richest Ivy League universities have an endowment above 2 million US dollars per student (Princeton and Yale), with four others (including Harvard) showing a figure of above one million per student.² The richest universities in the UK, Oxford and Cambridge (Cook 2012), do not come close to the richest institutions in the USA. Their wealth is significantly below the wealth of the richest of the state universities in the USA, the University of Michigan. The combined endowment of Oxford and Cambridge, including their colleges, is less than 50% of Harvard’s.³

If we take the combined wealth of the top five (118 billion US dollars) and compare it to all the world’s ‘lower middle income’ countries (World Bank listing: 46 countries including India, Nigeria, Ukraine and Vietnam) we find that the five richest US universities outstrip this group of 46 countries by about 66%⁴ (Lange, Wodon, and Carey 2018). Using definitions of wealth from the report published in January 2018 by the World Bank, Harvard appears to be richer than India.⁵ Oxford and Cambridge, together, are richer than all the Sub-Saharan African countries.⁶

Our third contribution to this issue takes an unusual form, at least for us. Although this journal is titled Perspectives most of our articles can be best described as ‘academic papers’. This one is not: it is described as a ‘Perspective’. Robert Duvivier, an experienced teacher in medical sciences, has given us a paper which argues a position about the organisational consequences to institutions if they wish to integrate new digital technologies into learning and teaching. He argues that successful integration requires the adoption of several imperatives by HE providers:

• include students and teachers as legitimate partners in the design process of learning spaces;

• create spaces that are flexible and can be reconfigured easily to suit different needs thereby allowing for changes in the patterns of use;

• facilitate connections between students and staff;

• integrate different elements of student life and university services;

• allocate sufficient resources to the development and maintenance of a wireless Internet network that is reliable, fast, and easy to connect to;

• deliver information and services in a variety of formats, ensuring students can access course information and library resources from mobile devices and off-campus locations;

• offer opportunities to familiarise students and staff with new technologies.

Duvivier’s advocacy of ‘future proofing’ the University is made by someone with teaching and research experience. Now it would be good to see an AUA colleague, or a team, offer some ideas from the perspective of service delivery. If you have been part of one of the many change management projects in this area, please contact me if you would like to share your views.

In ‘Arguments around weighting the first year in degree classification algorithms’, Michael O’Neill seeks to provoke a discussion about whether ‘to count’ the first year of degree study. He sees the advent of a new regulatory framework in England and Wales as bringing ‘a serious risk of inappropriate algorithms being used in a crude attempt to combat grade inflation’, arguing that the rules for determining class of degree should be a ‘living consideration in designing any degree programme rather than a dead piece of organisational machinery’. Your editors do not, of course, endorse particular positions in a debate which has continued since the adoption of ‘modularisation’ in UK HE, but we hope to show, in publishing this piece, that our pages are available for such a discussion.

The articles published in this issue are completed by a piece on the implications of Brexit for Africa.

About a year ago I wrote an Editorial that used humour to raise some questions about the impact of Brexit on HE. I suggested that the militant wing of ‘leave’ might be seen as a kind of ‘collective Podsnappery’, the reference being to Mr Podsnap in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (Law 2017). Since then I have come across a ‘Bagehot’ article in The Economist, from this summer, about ‘Podsnappery and reverse Podsnappery’, using Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn as representatives of the two tendencies (Bagehot 2018). Perhaps, a few months away from the UK leaving the EU, the time for humour is now over. I will be serious!

We are very focussed, of course, on the future of the UK and how Brexit may impact on all of us. What many colleagues, friends, and fellow citizens do not, I suggest, appreciate is how Brexit may impact on people outside the UK. ‘Brexit: some implications for African higher education’ has something to say about this. The article considers how Brexit may diminish opportunities for academic staff from Africa to acquire experience in British universities. International academic mobility, of all kinds, may well fall significantly following Brexit because agreements with Europe are amended or curtailed. This is something that surely the sector should be concerned about.

Finally, we include some book reviews in this issue written by AUA members. Colleagues who would like to write reviews for the journal should let either Julie Davies or Katrina Swanton (members of the editorial board) know, preferably suggesting a subject. You can do this via the Editorial Assistant in AUA’s Office: [email protected].

Notes on contributor

David Law, formerly PVC (pro vice-chancellor) (Students and External), retired from full-time employment at Edge Hill University in 2012 and then was Director of the Edge Hill Confucius Institute for two years. He has been Principal Editor of Perspectives since 2012. Currently, Dr Law is an Honorary Professor at Keele University and the Managing Director of a Consultancy: IETC Ltd.

Notes

1. The English Office for Students (OfS) publishes information about registered providers. Data is also provided by Fielden and Middlehurst (2017).

2. One of the six, with a high figure per student, is relatively small: CalTech only has 2,000 students. Harvard, Stanford, and MIT make up the top six, with Princeton, Yale, and CalTech. Please note that in Table 1 the final column has an obvious mistake: where there are commas these should be decimal points.

3. It is necessary with ‘Oxbridge’ to consider both the University and the Colleges. Cambridge is generally considered to be richer than Oxford. Chris Cook in Financial Times (March 14, 2012) reported:

The University of Oxford has closed the wealth gap opened up by its traditional rival Cambridge university after raising £1.3bn in a fundraising drive, as the two institutions pull clear from the rest of the English higher education sector in the investment assets stakes.

4. Wealth comparisons, of this kind, are admittedly problematic. I am using wealth (of countries), as opposed to GDP, in the way described and analysed in Lange, Wodon, and Carey (2018). See Table ES.1: ‘Wealth, by Type of Asset and Region, 2014’, 8. The comparison in this piece, between the wealth of universities and the wealth of countries, is ‘for the sake of argument’: the statistical methodologies are very different.

5. Harvard has an endowment of 34.5bn US $, according to Heffernan. India’s wealth in 2014, current dollar value, was 23.588bn. (Lange, Wodon, and Carey 2018, 228).

6. The combined wealth of the two universities is approximately £21bn (c$27bn) according to a May 2018 investigation by Guardian journalists, see: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/may/28/oxford-and-cambridge-university-colleges-hold-21bn-in-riches (accessed 29 September 2018). The wealth of sub-Saharan Africa is c22.168bn US$, and together Nigeria and South Africa account for about 50% (Lange, Wodon, and Carey 2018, 233).