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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