Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20 - 39)

WEDNESDAY 23 FEBRUARY 2005

PROFESSOR MICHAEL DRISCOLL, PROFESSOR JOHN TARRANT AND PROFESSOR DAVID VINCENT

  Q20  Chairman: Are you part of any other organisation?

  Professor Tarrant: No. We are a member of the largest group of UK universities, the so-called unaligned; in other words, the largest number of universities which are not in any of these groupings—for all sorts of reasons.

  Q21  Chairman: You say you have 4,000 part-time students, how many full-time students do you have?

  Professor Tarrant: We have about 19,000 altogether. 19,000 FTE.

  Q22  Chairman: What sort of courses will the part-timers be on?

  Professor Tarrant: Similar to what has just been said: a very wide range. We have a large number, as it happens, of part-time postgraduate students particularly concerned with teacher training in further education colleges—one of the reasons I want to talk about further education—but we have a wide range of part-time students. Most of them are really on degree programmes spread over a longer time rather than on short courses.

  Q23  Mr Turner: Professor Driscoll said there was not really a market operating because all but one institution are charging the maximum. There are other components of a market, are there not? There is quality. There is the availability to do different courses in different places and part-time/full-time and so on. Do you think students have sufficient information to make the sort of judgments that most people would make in a market?

  Professor Driscoll: I think the short answer to that is no. I think there is a very, very confused picture. What is being created in the run-up to 2006 is an extremely complex arrangement for student funding, for loans and grants and also the bursary arrangements which universities are being encouraged to introduce. If I were a parent or a student looking to go to university in 2006, I would be very, very confused. And it is not just the students and their parents who are confused: we have strong evidence of a very, very substantial lack of understanding of the way in which the system will work amongst school teachers, within colleges and so on—people you might expect to have a more sophisticated understanding -and this is directly related to the complexity of the system. We have urged ministers repeatedly: Do something about this. Ideally the system needs simplifying, but if it is not going to be simplified then there needs to be a major public information campaign on this. Universities are doing their best to try to inform and advise and publicise these arrangements in the schools and colleges they have links with, but there are bound to be gaps. And of course there are adult learners who are not in a school or a college who are trying to find their way through this as well. It is a really serious problem that we do not think the Government have woken up to and have given a commitment to correcting this problem.

  Q24  Mr Turner: Why is it the Government's responsibility? You are the ones who want to fill your places.

  Professor Driscoll: It is the Government's responsibility because it is a national scheme that they have introduced, and, as with any other area of public funding, it is up to them to ensure that the public are aware of the way the system works. Universities are very prepared to play their part. I believe the seriousness of the lack of understanding is such that it requires much more than individual universities in their own locality doing their bit. I think there needs to be a more comprehensive and consistent approach to this.

  Q25  Mr Turner: Professor Driscoll appears to be limiting his answer to the question of fees and bursaries and so on, but there are many other types of information. I do not know if you are familiar with the study on the amalgamation of Guildhall and North London universities which showed that the drop-out rate at one was much higher than the drop-out rate at the other before the amalgamation. Is that information generally available to students? Is information available to students on the value of the courses they are undertaking, their likelihood of securing employment as a result of undertaking those courses?

  Professor Driscoll: There is public information available.

  Q26  Mr Turner: Are universities marketing on that basis?

  Professor Driscoll: Universities are required to make information available publicly about a certain range of indicators. This is part of the requirements under the quality assurance arrangements that we have in this country. That information is there. I think it is inevitable that all institutions in marketing themselves, as with any company, will emphasise the positive rather than the negative.

  Q27  Mr Turner: Perhaps other witnesses might have a view on whether universities are failing to emphasise the quality of their courses and the likelihood of people securing employment as a result of those courses and the drop-out rates and things like that.

  Professor Tarrant: I do not think that last comment is true. If you were to drive into the main entrance of the University of Huddersfield at the moment you would see a poster by the entrance which actually highlights the employment rate at my university. I think we do publicise it and we publicise it as best we can. Of course, when the Cooke recommendations are brought in next year—2006 I think they are due to come in—all the information on the quality surveys, on the retention rates, on employment rates and so on for all universities will be available nationally. Although the information available may be a bit bitty at the moment, we are moving towards a situation where it will be much better.

  Professor Vincent: In the part-time sector, much of what John has just said applies, in that we do make particular play of our teaching assessments which put us in the top five in the country. Where there is a deficiency is in the ways in which the current statistical service, ADESA measure the destination of part-time students. They apply a methodology which actually is devised for full-time students and at the moment we do not have good national data on where part-time students go with their degrees. That is something which needs improving. We have our own internal data at the OU, but it is important, for a sector which is now as large as it is, that there is available nationally and to individual students more consistent information.

  Q28  Mr Turner: I have two pieces of information in mind. One is the study to which I referred which showed that the North London university drop-out rates were much higher. The reason drop-out rates were higher was because they were taking more students without traditional qualifications. The second one is that ministers are very fond of saying and so are people—in fact providers are even more fond of saying it—that higher education is good for you, because everybody earns more as a result of being in higher education, when the fact is that 20 or 30% do not earn more. The problem is that we do not know which 20 or 30% it is. Do you know which 20 or 30% it is who do not earn more as a result of being in higher education?

  Professor Vincent: The information you need to hold on to with part-time education is that not all of our students are 21: most are not. The issue of the lifetime zoning premium for taking a degree works out very differently in the part-time sector. One of the major problems we have found with the whole top-up fee debate is that all the calculations that went into that were based on the figure of the 21-year-old university leaver. We have data which shows that the premium on average for mature students is only a quarter of the premium for 21-year-olds—and for reasons that you can perfectly well work out for yourself: they have less of their lives to lead, they already have a career going of some sort. It is for that reason that, when individual applicants make a decision as to whether to purchase part-time degrees, they have a different set of financial calculations than an 18-year-old will ever have and will be more intimidated by very high fees.

  Q29  Chairman: Perhaps they just want to educate themselves.

  Professor Vincent: Yes, they may, but they have to do their own sums, they have to balance up their family economies, and they will still come but they will not necessarily come if the fees are that much higher.

  Q30  Mr Turner: I accept there are non-financial benefits as well, but what is the point of them coming if the likelihood of them securing a financial benefit is very slim?

  Professor Vincent: It still exists. They will use an Open University degree and a part-time degree as a means of retraining themselves and getting into new careers. The Open University's early success was entirely driven by people wanting to train as teachers at the time. We have now broadened out our curriculum. Very many of our students, most of whom are in their thirties and forties, are using a degree to re-engineer their careers and will get economic benefit from it, but over a lifetime it will be less than to a 21-year-old. There are also, as you said at the beginning of your question, major non-financial benefits from gaining that kind of education.

  Professor Driscoll: Obviously you have to be very careful about how you interpret headline figures. Did you know, for example, that if a student moves from one university to another (for reasons of family move or anything else) they are counted as a drop-out against the university from which they move? Did you know that if a student, for financial reasons, leaves the university after the first semester and returns the following year having earned some money, they are classed as a drop-out? There are problems in the statistics but we also have to remember that in fact our drop-out rates are the envy of other countries in the OECD, with the possible exception of Japan. In answer to your question: Do we know who is going to fail? the answer is no.

  Q31  Mr Turner: I am sorry, I was not talking about failing, I was talking about failing to secure a financial advantage. Contrary to the general assumption, 20 to 30% do not secure a financial advantage as a result of undertaking an undergraduate degree.

  Professor Driscoll: All the evidence is in fact that the financial advantage is increasing and will increase in the future. The very reason for this is that, as a higher proportion of population achieve a higher level of education, those who do not have that level of skill and education will actually find it more difficult in the modern international economy to secure employment. Rather than seeing the returns driven down by participation, we are in a world in which this country needs to drive up participation to make sure that the returns to everyone in this country are as high as they can be and compare favourably with the rest of the international developed world.

  Q32  Mr Turner: Even though some of those will take on debts and incur expenditure and suffer loss of income which will never be replaced for them.

  Professor Driscoll: I am not sure you can say. If you are saying, "Well, you take a graduate . . ." You have to look at their whole lifetime. Many graduates do things in the area of the performing arts, where there is probably next to no chance of them earning the salaries of people in the city but they make enormously valuable contributions to the life of this country, they go into jobs that they enjoy but which are not high-earning. If the only measure of the quality of higher education in this country is the salaries people get, we should not have teachers who are graduates, we should not have nurses who are graduates, we should not have people in the voluntary sector who are graduates. This is a recipe for disaster. We need—

  Q33  Mr Turner: Professor Driscoll, that is not my question.

  Professor Driscoll:—well educated people—

  Q34  Mr Turner: As I think—

  Professor Driscoll:—in all the professions, in all walks of life.

  Mr Turner: That is not my question.

  Chairman: If you both go through the Chairman, we will not get you talking at each other.

  Q35  Mr Turner: That was not my assertion. My question was: Do people who are deciding whether to go to university have sufficient information to establish whether it is financially—and I accepted there were other benefits—worth their investment?

  Professor Driscoll: I believe they do.

  Q36  Mr Turner: Does Professor Tarrant have a view on that?

  Professor Tarrant: I think they have as much information as there is out there. Of course the ultimate test about whether they will benefit or not depends upon their own performance, and you cannot judge that in advance. We cannot imagine that this is somehow a neutral system to the student who is studying. If 20% do not benefit—and I take your word for that statistic, I am not sure of its origins—I would look at it the other way round and say that 80% of my students do, and that is a fantastic record, thank you very much—and there is no way I could recognise in advance who that supposed 20% might be.

  Mr Turner: Thank you very much.

  Q37  Chairman: Could I come back to something you mentioned in relation to an earlier question, and that is complexity. Is it that complex? The new rules involve people deferring payment for their fees until they earn £15,000. We know that parents no longer have any locus here. I still meet parents up and down the country who say, "It's going to be crippling for me when these new rules come in." There is a responsibility not just on the Government and the Department but on yourselves to explain. They are a couple of simple aspects, but they are fundamental, are they not? None of us seems to be getting that over to parents, in particular, but to students as well.

  Professor Driscoll: I accept that and I think I accepted that universities have an important role to play in this. But, in a sense, I think you have answered your own question, because I have the same experience as you, that when you ask people, there are so many in this country who, despite the number of times we think we have told them, still believe that fees are going to be upfront and not deferred. If something as basic as that in the system is not understood, then the other details about grant eligibility and loans and whether they will carry a real interest rate. . . . How many people in the country understand what a real or non-real interest rate is? What does that really mean? What is the interest rate? Then we have the added complexity of arrangements that universities are having to put in place for bursaries as well out of fee income. I think you have a recipe for complete confusion. That is why I think it is going to take more than the efforts of universities on their own to get the message over and to make sure that people really do understand this and can make considered choices. Because there may be a market, in some sense, but the market may well be one of a choice between going to university or not going to university and not a choice between universities. It is the latter issue which is far more important. That is what we are seeking to do in this country: to get more people into higher education to benefit and to participate in the modern world in which they will have to operate in the future.

  Q38  Chairman: Despite all that you have said earlier, the fact of the matter surely is that university applications are going up, are they not?

  Professor Driscoll: Yes.

  Q39  Chairman: Getting more students in. John Tarrant, is that not true?

  Professor Tarrant: It is true for 2005-06. I am not quite sure that it is going to happen in 2006-07 when the new regime comes in in full. This is an intermediate year which is going to be subject to all sorts of doubts about whether people are coming early, whether they are deferring entry. Quite honestly, my own view of the situation is that students from poor backgrounds will be much better off deferring their entry until 2006 because they will get a large maintenance grant as a result. I do not think they understand that yet—and that is going back to your point. It may be that people are rushing in this year, choosing not to take a gap year, for example, because of the complexities of the gap year rules, when they would actually be much better advised to delay entry for a year—certainly a lot of my students. 20% of my students have an assessed income of less than £1,000. I think the Committee needs to hear that. The national figures are out and that is not way off the national figure. The reason for that of course is that they are being assessed on their own income, because they are financially independent and do not have any income, but it is important to remember that a very large number of students at a university like mine have very limited financial resources at home and they would, in my view, be well advised to wait until they get a large maintenance grant, £2,700 or £3,000 a year, to see them through university, bearing in mind that they will only repay the fee if they earn enough to justify it. And the size of their loan will have no effect on their repayments: their monthly repayment stays the same regardless of the size of the loan. That is another area of confusion. We talk about student loans. They are not loans. They are not like any other loan that you or I or any of the rest of us might take. If you earn £20,000 a year, roughly your repayments each month will be £8 a week—and £8 a week is not a lot of money. It does not matter whether you owe £5,000 or £25,000, it will still be £8 a week. What will happen, of course, is that the loan period will be shorter if you have not incurred as large a fee or are going somewhere with a reduced fee. The loan repayment period will be shorter but it will only be one or two years shorter and it will not have any benefit to you for maybe 15 or 16 years. That is just not understood. I think we all share a responsibility for explaining it as hard and as often as we can.

  Chairman: We are getting some useful information. Helen Jones, would you like to come in.


 
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