Yahoo News New, alternative providers are the face of change in higher education
Over the last two decades a change has been creeping over the face of higher education in England and Wales. It began before the introduction of ‘top up fees’ by the Labour government in 1998, but has accelerated since. This is chiefly because the idea that students would pay something towards their higher education made it possible for private and independent institutions to enter the field, offering either the same as publicly-funded universities more cheaply, or something new and different in the structure and content of university courses.
Institutions of higher education which do not receive direct annual public funding are known by the catch-all phrase ‘alternative providers.’ There are currently 115 such institutions in England and Wales, between them educating 52,000 students. This development, together with the much more significant fact that students at publicly-funded universities now pay £9000 annually in tuition fees, has prompted the government to introduce new legislation governing higher education, in the form of the Higher Education and Research Bill.
One of the aims of the Bill is to secure the quality of higher education in the light of the growing presence of alternative providers, while making it possible for them to enter the field with their new ideas and study offerings. At present it is exceedingly difficult for a new independent university to come into existence, especially if it is an aspirational one with high ideals and aiming to be a centre of excellence, such as my own New College of the Humanities.
The greatest problem for such an institution is the expensive, burdensome and slow process, taking a number of years, before it secures its own powers to award degrees, in the meantime having to be ‘validated’ by another university. The Bill addresses this problem while protecting the high standards for which British universities are rightly admired.
The Higher Education Bill: Whats in it for new providers?
It is well worth mentioning that the way the Minister of State for Universities and Science, Jo Johnson, has listened to the great body of university expertise in the House of Lords and amended the Bill accordingly, is a model of responsible government. Concerns about quality and standards, university autonomy, and the controversial ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ (TEF), have been listened to and in the first two instances fully met.
The TEF remains a concern, because it is very hard to quantify teaching skill – that is, measuring it numerically by percentages of degree passes, jobs secured after graduation, and the like – even though everyone can distinguish good teaching from bad just by observation.
But if funding is linked to TEF outcomes, the crude and questionable matter of measuring teaching skill by points and percentages seems inevitable, and that is a concern for university teachers. Most of them recognise that teaching quality in higher education is not always high, and over recent years the introduction of a qualification in university pedagogy, and the Higher Education Academy, has led to changes. One outcome is sure to be a sharper division between teachers and researchers in universities, a move that would run counter to the belief that it is a good thing to be taught at university by people who are active researchers in their fields of study.
Almost all of the new alternative providers are small; only eleven of them have more than a thousand students. The great majority of their students are studying for first degrees in one of just three subject areas: 50 percent of them business and management, 20 percent art and design, and 10 percent law. Three-quarters of them are mature students, and the proportion of students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, and from backgrounds with relatively low previous participation in higher education, is higher than at publicly-funded universities. As this shows, the new providers do not represent competition to the established universities, but extend the range of opportunities for a wider variety of people to study.
Only one new institution has come into existence seeking to be at the very top of the range in academic excellence: New College of the Humanities (NCH). I founded the College in 2011 with the intention of marrying the best of two great traditions of higher education: the Oxford tutorial model, which is the gold standard for study of the humanities, and a version of the American liberal arts model providing a context of breadth for the deep tutorial-based study of an academic discipline.
I see the arrangement as being symbolised by the letter ‘T’: the stem indicating depth, the cross-bar breadth. The logic of the scheme is that in-depth study provides intellectual rigour, the breadth study forges connections and puts the deeper knowledge into perspective. The aim is to foster the development of minds capable of seeing fine detail with great acuity and clarity, while at the same time being able to see the wide horizon of human affairs with equal clarity.
It is easy to see how one-to-one tutorials, based on an essay (from the French ‘essayer,’ to try) which the student discusses in forensic detail with his or her tutor, can provide the centre-piece along with lectures and seminars for that sharpness of understanding which is the objective of a trained mind. In the study of literature, history, philosophy and the other humanities this approach is beautifully paradigmatic – and a rarity in the world of education today. A tutorial with two or more students is a very different experience; though valuable in its own terms, small-group learning is not the same as individual, one-to-one learning. For most of their history Oxford and Cambridge taught their undergraduates in this latter way, and we know with what success.
For the breadth part of what we do at NCH, we think all our students should think about how to think and enquire, and should understand the logic of argument and debate; and they therefore take a compulsory course in logic and critical thinking. Again, we think that any educated mind should have at least an intelligent layperson’s overview of the major areas of science and what they are about; so all our students take a compulsory Science Literacy course, in part taught by distinguished Visiting Professors like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss who are outstandingly talented at explaining their fields to non-specialists.
We take the view that all out students should have thought about the major ethical dilemmas that face our world and each of us individually, and so they take an Applied Ethics course. And we think they should all understand what the world of work is like, and should have an understanding of the concepts, techniques and skills required there: and so they all take LAUNCH, our programme of preparation for their subsequent careers. Because it contains practical projects and working with high-flyers from business and the professions, it is greatly enjoyed by most of the students.
A college of this kind has to be just that – a college: a small highly personalised family of colleagues working and studying together and sharing the experience of enriching their minds. One of my inspirations for NCH was being told by a student at a liberal arts college in America that in the ‘honour code’ shared by the undergraduates, there was an agreement that when a student received an assignment back from her professor, the other students would not ask, ‘What grade did you get?’ but instead, ‘What did you learn?’ I think that is marvellous, and just what students and faculty alike should share as their aim.
Alternative providers are here to stay in the higher education world, in all their variety of size and shape and in what they offer. No doubt most will focus on the vocational and technical subjects currently regarded as essential for entry into the modern workplace. A few, like NCH, will see that the future’s leaders, social entrepreneurs, educators, creative minds and dreamers of dreams who prove to be the greatest innovators in a changing and complicated world, will always place a premium on the highest standards of higher education excellence.
Cost of new providers to the taxpayer?
And like NCH, such institutions will be able to select their students on the basis of potential and promise, not just on the crude mass-measure of examination grades – not always a reliable guide to real ability. Being small and able to interview all promising-looking candidates, to read their work, to talk to the schools they come from, NCH is able to form its own judgment about an individual, on that individual’s own terms. And because we want our student body to be cosmopolitan and diverse, we offer bursaries and scholarships to widen access; and though we are part of UCAS we also accept applications all year round.
In all these ways NCH represents what the very top level of the alternative provider field looks like, setting the standard and leading the way. Although we think that some of what the Higher Education and Research Bill contains was learned from NCH’s early experience in establishing itself, NCH will not be a beneficiary of the Bill when it becomes law, because we will already have completed our arduous journey through the hurdles of the old system. But we will welcome those new entrants to the higher education field who, having benefited from the new arrangements, will aim to be as aspirational and ambitious as NCH has always been.
A.C. Grayling is a philosopher, author and founder of the New College of Humanities, London.
