Market Farces

Shadow trap...

“We are deliberately thinking of higher education as a market, and as a market, it has a number of points of failure. Young people are taking out substantial loans to pay for courses without much effective help and advice, and the institutions concerned are under very little competitive pressure to provide best value. If this was a regulated financial market we would be raising the question of mis-selling. The Department is taking action to address some of these issues, but there is a lot that remains to be done.”
Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, 8 December 2017

It was a vintage morning wake-up session yesterday with BBC Radio 4's Today programme. After a slightly hallucinatory encounter with a spokes-trilobite from the Cambrian, the coverage of a report from the National Audit Office, "The Higher Education Market", had me wide awake and laughing. Which is, admittedly, not a bad way to start the day.

It reminded of the old joke about the patient who complains, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this...", to which the doctor replies, "Then stop doing that!" I mean, really, of course if you think of higher education as a market it all looks a bit dodgy. That's why it's been such a stupid idea all along: higher education is not a market, no matter how long you look at it or fervently wish it was. Neither is it a frying pan, a swimming pool, a fleeting shadow on a sunlit field, or an ancient oriental art of self-defense. Sorry, it just isn't. Although there may be people out there who think otherwise, those people are in need of professional psychiatric help, and should definitely not be occupying positions of influence paid for out of our taxes.

Here are some highlights from the report's press release, with some marginal annotations:

Only 32% of higher education students consider their course offers value for money, and competition between providers to drive improvements on price and quality has yet to prove effective, according to today’s report from the National Audit Office.

I'm not sure what proportion of students gain upper-second or first-class degrees, but I'm suspecting a close correlation with "only 32%" here. There have been many stories about poorly-performing students complaining that they paid good money in good faith, and therefore the university had a duty to steer them to a first, or at least an upper-second. Then there were the courses in "pet grooming and astrology" and the like, developed as money-spinning crowd-pleasers. These all used to be passed on as self-evidently hilarious; now, not so much. But is a middling-to-poor degree "value for money" if you paid considerably less for it, though? And is it OK to offer a piss-poor course if it's the cheapest on the higher-ed "market"? Hey, you get what you pay for!

There is no meaningful price competition in the sector and market incentives for higher education providers to compete for students on course quality are weak. In 2016, 87 of the top 90 English universities charged the maximum permissible fee of £9,000 a year for all courses. The relationship between course quality and providers’ fee income is also weak. The NAO finds that, on average, a provider moving up five places in a league table gains just 0.25% of additional fee income.

 Oh, please. See above. Did the government really expect any institution as complex and as expensive to run as a university to take a voluntary cut in income, in acknowledgment of its abject performance in some dubiously-framed beauty competition? Yes, minister, it seems even the less prestigious universities have to use electricity, pay their staff a decent wage (some of them, anyway, let's not get into that right now), as well as stock their libraries and maintain laboratories and up-to-date computer infrastructure. But have you ever looked at the "market" in academic journal prices, minister? Now there's a rip-off worth investigating.

Students can do little to influence quality once on a course. The sector ombudsman considers that providers have improved their handling of complaints and feedback, with a 25% drop in student complaints referred to it since 2014. However, students are unable to drive quality through switching providers. There is also not yet evidence that more providers entering and exiting the market will improve quality in the sector, and protections for students are untested.

This is the bit that made me laugh.

I love the idea of students driving quality by "switching providers". Imagine the scenario. Student Hugo Entitled-Dicke scrapes three grade C A-levels at some fee-paying crammer, and gets himself onto a politics course at Smalltown Uni. He finds the course (and the all-important "student experience") not up to his elevated expectations, not least in not equipping him for the career in politics he considers to be his manifest destiny. Entitled-Dicke hears that PPE at Oxford is a much better course, with consistently better career outcomes. So, given he is already paying the same fee at Smalltown as those Oxford PPE students, he decides to switch providers. Well, you can fill in the rest of this scenario. That markets can be a two-way thing seems not to have occurred to the National Audit Office.

I was also amused by the idea of students not being able to influence the quality of a course in an imperfect market situation. Oh, really? Now, I have to hold up a hand here. Once, a long time ago, I was part of a small group of dissatisfied students (customers?) of English Language & Literature, who considered our university's course to be disgracefully old-fashioned: Anglo-Saxon was compulsory; the curriculum stopped somewhere around 1940; it completely ignored literary theory (and in particular the continental, feminist, and Marxist theories we were so keen to study); and anything not written in the British Isles was, well, not English. We agitated for change and, a few student generations later, what do you know, change happened. Too late for us, but change nonetheless, change which we had initiated. Without us even threatening to switch our "provider", either! Though we may have threatened to occupy the English Faculty building, my memory is fuzzy on that point. Some of us had certainly occupied both the Examination Schools and an administrative building on separate occasions the previous year, but that's another story*.

In a market-style interpretation of universities I wonder what sort of intervention an occupation is? A hostile takeover, perhaps? Or a stakeholders' revolt? Which reminds me of a saying current in those far-off days of innocence: we don't want a bigger slice of the cake, we want to own the bloody bakery!

Fleeting shadow corral...

* And one well documented and well told in: Thompson, Fiona. Fight for a CSU! Oxford Polytechnic, 1975. A true collector's item.