HE heads caution against sector focus on short-term gains

Policymakers risk undermining universities’ aims of tackling societal challenges if they concentrate on short-term gains such as earnings outcomes and productivity of graduates, higher education leaders have said.

Despite continued calls for more meaningful ways of evaluating the university sector, institutional performance continues to be gauged by metrics that value immediate return on investment, undercutting big-picture aims, participants in the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Summit heard today.

The discussion comes as the UK government mulls plans to cap the number of students in creative arts and other degrees with lower salary returns – provoking the ire of academics who want public funding to support a diversity of fields, which they maintain are valuable.

“There’s a real tension…in what are short- and long-term goals” for education, said Lorraine Dearden, a professor of economics and social statistics at UCL, who argued that critical research does not necessarily produce the visible economic results favoured by politicians.

She said methods for predicting “what is going to be a worthwhile investment now for productivity down the line” are imprecise at best and can even be counterproductive.

“It’s not just about focusing on which subjects have the best private returns and the best taxpayer returns,” Professor Dearden said. “An important point to realise is the incentives for universities and governments are different.”

Panel speakers noted that the UK system, in which student fees are used to subsidise teaching and research, results in diverging goals between universities eager to provide stimulating subject matter and a government keen on students repaying their loans. Currently, graduates pay back into the system once they have sufficient earning power, something that ultimately incentivises courses that prioritise earnings over subject matter, they said.

But a black-and-white system that classifies some subjects – such as mathematics or engineering – as “useful” fails to capture nuance, said Sir Anton Muscatelli, principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow.

“I don’t think it’s helpful because, in reality, what you need is a variety of skills, which are meta-skills and actually aren’t subject-specific,” he said.

Instead, Sir Anton suggested, “if we’re serious, especially in post-Brexit UK”, about thinking about growth, public investment in education must be thought of in the same vein as infrastructure development.

“Whether you’re doing an arts degree or a science degree, you need to get a number of competencies and skills, which are around problem-solving, critical thinking, et cetera,” he said.

But universities will also need to do more heavy lifting to sell their offerings more convincingly to the government in a way that does not lean on immediate gains, said Anna Vignoles, director of the Leverhulme Trust.

“We have to tell a better story,” she said. “When we’re telling a story about what universities do, we…need to engage with the idea that you have to measure it − but also have to suggest that it’s an investment [that] yields the return down the line.

“Otherwise, what is the argument about spending in HE versus spending on bits of society that are far more deprived and underfunded?”

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com