Stop ‘micromanaging’ courses and let students decide – Willetts

Governments should stop trying to “micromanage” higher education provision and concentrate on providing sufficient information so prospective students can make up their own minds about whether a course is “low quality”, according to a former universities minister.

Offering a fresh take on the “are universities worth it?” debate, David Willetts says in a new policy paper that the English sector should be able to operate “with a degree of autonomy from government control”, given the historically low levels of direct public investment made in the system.

“Indeed one of the benefits of going for a predominantly graduate repayment scheme was to keep government away from universities,” Willetts, who, as minister between 2010 and 2014 designed the current tuition fee model, writes in the report published by the Policy Institute at King’s College London on 20 January.

“It is a deep disappointment for me that as we shift away from taxpayer support to graduate repayment, if anything, the problem of government micromanagement gets worse.”

Willetts points out that the Conservative Party fought the last election on a manifesto promise to close courses with high dropout rates and those not seen as delivering good outcomes for students, which would have been a “stark move away from the way liberal democracies treat universities” and “very dangerous in the wrong hands”.

The previous Tory government had already, via its regulator the Office for Students, moved to a system whereby universities must pass certain thresholds in their progression, completion and graduate employment rates – known as “B3” metrics – as conditions of their registration.

While B3 “now appears to be on the way out under the new government”, Willetts writes, the critique that universities do not deliver for their students is “widespread across the media” and Labour ministers “may not be immune to these pressures”.

In her letter to vice-chancellors accompanying the recent tuition fee rise, education secretary Bridget Phillipson highlighted how there were “pockets of provision where standards are unacceptably low” and a “more rigorous approach to improving quality and supporting improvement” is needed.

However, Willetts’ paper shows that the “narrative around universities is far more negative than the evidence justifies”.

When asked, most graduates still view their degrees as worthwhile, their lifetime earnings remain higher than non-graduates’ and the country benefits from increased taxation receipts.

What’s more, Willetts says, the various metrics tend to neglect benefits beyond the wages of a particular person. “If you were a doctor, you would prescribe more education,” he says, given the proven links between going to university and better physical and mental health.

Resisting the “itch to intervene”, the policy response to courses offering seemingly poor outcomes should be to give students the information needed to make informed choices, he says, and see “the risks they are running”.

The former minister, who now sits in the House of Lords and is president of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, suggests there should be “clear metrics of student contact hours, direct personal engagement with academic staff and size of seminars” to help students decide.

His move in government to lay the groundwork for what would become the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset that links HMRC data on earnings to educational background has more often than not been misinterpreted, Willetts says, and is used as a tool to attempt to suppress student choice when instead it should be something that enhances it.

“It is great that the minimum wage has boosted the earnings of people on low incomes, many of them non-graduates,”  Willetts said, launching the report.

“But that does not mean it has ceased to be worth going to university, which massively boosts lifetime earnings especially for young people who were on free school meals. It is one of the most powerful drivers of social mobility and of economic growth we have got.”

Vivienne Stern, the chief executive of Universities UK, said the report provided an “honest, evidence-led conversation about the value of universities to individuals and our wider society”, which was needed “now more than ever”. She said it showed the economic benefits are “so vast they cannot be ignored” but also highlighted the “aspects of the value of university that are too often overlooked”.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com