Quality | 2009.11.10
Mandelson is playing the altruistic antelope on universities | Zoe Williams
Mandelson\'s vision of the universities of the future looks like old-fashioned spin – to divert attention from the really big issue
Peter Mandelson wants a " consumer revolution " in higher education, with students given far more information on the actual value of their course. The silent driver is that fees have to go up: so much of his document ( Higher Ambitions – the Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy ) stresses the fact that the fat years are over, you don\'t need a degree to see what\'s going on. However, equally obviously, it would be a straight-talking fool (or non-politician) who, with an election looming, spelt out how much they were prepared to raise fees.
I was at university in 1993, when Ofsted did its first inspections of higher education establishments. One lecturer was outraged: they had found him outstanding in every respect, except that he lacked visual aids. But a history lecturer didn\'t need visual aids, he objected: visual aids were for people doing fake subjects such as fashion and science; and, most importantly, the very inadequacy of an Ofsted inspector in the face of a degree-level lecture was the sine qua non of higher education. One hoped, by this point, to be teaching to a level that couldn\'t be instantly assessed by a casual observer, not even with some experience of teaching (most inspectors are ex-teachers), not even an ex-history teacher. This, right here, is the coalface of intellectual experiment. Who is this inspector, this ex-something-or-other, to tell us how well we experiment?
That is the first hurdle to Mandelson\'s plans. When we talk about students as consumers, who should be able to make informed fiscal choices based on data, we assume that the quality of a degree can be broken down into measurable quantities – drop-out rates, unemployment rates among graduates from a course, and face-time with tutors.
But these are fake measures: drop-out rates are more probably influenced by economic pressures on students (nobody leaves a degree because it\'s not challenging; they leave because, as much as they\'d love to loaf about, they can\'t afford to); likewise, postgraduate employment rates are presumably linked to employment rates generally.
Also, not all degrees are vocational; plenty of professors would take umbrage at the idea that anybody planned to use their wisdom in pursuit of an actual job. And face time with tutors is a red herring; it\'s not like primary school, where teacher-student ratios have a huge impact on results. Education at this level has moved beyond crowd control, at least during the week.
Ivory-tower sensibilities can seem a little haughty and nebulous: university lecturers, who spend their lives grading students, sniff at the idea that they themselves could be graded. But then, the criteria the government would use to grade them make no sense.
The Mandelson document also highlights social mobility: how admissions tutors should concentrate more on students\' potential than A-level grades. This rankles with the University and College Union , whose spokesman Daniel Ashley remarked: "We are doing that. With these progressive agendas, many universities are ahead of the government anyway. And they can\'t tell us how to run our admissions policy." (Even if the government has something sensible to say, it is against its terms of engagement with HE to interfere in this area.)
Finally, there\'s an emphasis on a "diverse" student body, comprising not just 18-year-olds but mature students and part-timers. This takes some brass neck from a government that axed ELQ (equivalent or lower qualifications) funding . Previously, if you had a BA but wanted to retrain in a different discipline, you would pay the same fees as the other students – now a former humanities student retraining in medicine, say, could be paying £7,000 a year – while the fees for everyone else are £3,000. Naturally this hits mature students, and ensures that university populations are predominantly either moneyed or 18 (or both).
Much of this seems not just provocative, but deliberately so: you\'d need to be in a very strong position to harangue universities about social mobility, when that is only ever an ancillary aim of theirs, and your own record is hardly flawless. It\'s strange to talk about mature students being neglected by the institutions of higher education, when the ELQ cutback was bitterly, if ineffectually, resisted by educators.
I think this is old-fashioned New Labour spin. The aim is to create fury, a diversionary row between universities and the government. Then, when the fees review doesn\'t deliver in time for anyone to go into the election with a meaningful pledge about fees, opposition to that will just be more academics, moaning again. Mandelson here takes the role of the altruistic antelope, who leads the lions from the herd by making an irritating noise and running in the opposite direction. It makes me feel sad for him, in an affectionate way.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]niversity-tuition-fees-student
