Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
DEPARTMENT FOR
INNOVATION, UNIVERSITIES
AND SKILLS
& HIGHER EDUCATION
FUNDING COUNCIL
FOR ENGLAND
29 OCTOBER 2007
Q60 Mr Mitchell: It is important
to know that, isn't it? Otherwise, you are offering the parents
or people who are paying foreign students' fees an inadequate
deal. If they are losing more en route, they are wasting their
money.
Professor Eastwood: As you rightly
say, international students are full-fee-paying students and do
not attract public funding from us on behalf of the Government.
The incentive is on institutions themselves to ensure a high-quality
experience for international students and high levels of student
satisfaction and completion. If you were to talk to leaders across
the sector, you would find them well aware that they must provide
the service that you are implying in the highly competitive market
for international students.
Q61 Mr Mitchell: Do they provide
them with more support, such as language teaching or special custodial
arrangements? I remember that, in New Zealand, there was a threat
to the virginity of Chinese girl students, who were therefore
almost chaperoned around campuses. Do international students have
special support?
Professor Eastwood: Yes. All universities
with a significant number of international students have an international
students support office of some kind, and almost all enrol them
on appropriate pre-session programmes about language, culture
and other issues.
Q62 Mr Mitchell: Okay. Do you have
any statistics on the possible correlations that spring to mind?
Is there a correlation between the bigger, more impersonal scale
of a university and retention rates? Do the bigger ones lose more
students?
Professor Eastwood: There is no
direct correlation to size of institution.
Q63 Mr Mitchell: Is there any indication
whether living at home leads to a higher or lower retention rate?
Professor Eastwood: The institutions
that have higher proportions of students living at home tend to
have lower completion rates, but if you look at the benchmarks,
you will see that those institutions have a student body for which
there is a lower propensity to complete. In other words, the residential
universities tend to be the older Russell Group or 1994 group
types.
Q64 Mr Mitchell: In other words,
the elite ones?
Professor Eastwood: I said "older".
Q65 Mr Mitchell: Do you have an explanation
for the wide variations that emerge when we look at table 29 of
the Report? Harper Adams University College has the highest change
and continuation rates. I have never heard of it, nor do I know
where it is, but its rate is astronomical. What do they put in
the water? What are they doing to achieve such a rate?
Professor Eastwood: Harper Adams
University College focuses on land based studies and has been
remarkably successful in the recent past, so I am not surprised
at those data.
Q66 Mr Mitchell: Do you have an explanation
for the depressing fall in retention rates at the University of
London—they are down an astronomical 13.4%? I was intrigued
by Rose Bruford College—its rate is down 5.8%. What is Rose
Bruford College and what is it doing to put its students off?
Professor Eastwood: On the University
of London, the figure relates to some 60 students who are registered
through the central University, and not to the main colleges of
the University. You would expect high volatility in such a small
number of students. Rose Bruford College focuses on the dramatic
arts.
Q67 Mr Mitchell: And what is up with
it?
Professor Eastwood: The College
has undergone relocation and partial restructuring, which might
be part of the explanation.
Q68 Mr Mitchell: Table 33 shows that
the most depressing retention rates are in business studies, combined
subjects, engineering, non-European languages and related—whatever
that means—and mathematical and computer science. The rates
for all those subjects are down. There seems to be a pattern,
namely, that institutions make those courses easier for kids to
get on to, because we need to attract students to those studies.
Is the decline in the rate a consequence of the lowering of standards
for admission to study those courses?
Professor Eastwood: Table 33 measures
application trends rather than completion rates. Nationally, there
has been a substantial fall in applications to study computer
science, which is related to the increasing technical literacy
of young people. The Committee should not think that the fall
in applications for mathematics is on anything like the scale
shown in the table, so the aggregation of mathematical and computer
science in the table is unhelpful.
We have seen some notable falls in applications
by subject. The fall in applications to engineering courses has
been of concern, and the council has successfully invested heavily
to reverse the trend—applications to engineering have stabilised.
We sent the Committee the most recent Universities and Colleges
Admissions Service data, which were published last Wednesday,
and which therefore supersede the data in table 33.[5]
Q69 Mr Mitchell: In terms of retention,
do you circulate best practice? If there is a problem, what do
you do to support students? I would have thought, just from a
common-sense point of view, that that would involve human factors
such as contact with tutors, help in courses and a personal touch,
which University staff tend not to have enough slack or spare
time for. Do you circulate best practice, and how do you finance
the kind of human contact that leads to higher retention rates?
Professor Eastwood: On the first
point, we have through the Higher Education Academy a network
of subject centres for all the major disciplines. Subject centres
are charged, among other things, with looking at those issues
and promoting best practice in exactly the way that you described.
One of the things that we will do in consequence of the Report
is, where there are particular subject issues, to go back to the
subject centres and ask them to do precisely the work to which
you alluded.
As far as funding is concerned, additional
funds are flowing into universities as a result of the move towards
variable fees. That is giving institutions an additional resource
to invest at their discretion, but it is quite clear from students'
responses to us that they would like to see a significant portion
of that additional fee income invested in enhancing contact between
students and tutors.
Q70 Mr Mitchell: But you do not earmark
it for that?
Professor Eastwood: The additional
fee income is not earmarked.
Q71 Dr Pugh: When I read the Report,
I was curiously unenlightened. Obviously, it is a serious subject—we
want to find out why students give up at University. When I came
to paragraph 17, I came across these words: "Students leave
their courses early for a range of reasons ... there is rarely
one single reason why a student gives up their course (Appendix
3)." When I turned with some excitement to appendix 3, I
found that every conceivable reason known to man short of abduction
by aliens had been given. I still was not enlightened. Then I
thought, "Whose fault is it ultimately?" I formed the
impression that maybe the universities themselves do not really
know very much about why their students fail to continue their
courses, or do not record enough. Do you think that universities
record enough the reasons why students give up the courses on
which they set out?
Professor Eastwood: That is an
interesting comment. I think that universities routinely seek
an exit interview with a student who is not continuing. That is
not always possible, for some of the reasons set down in table
35, but where possible they will do it, often on the kind of intimate,
one-to-one basis that we just talked about. Usually, they tick
a number of boxes, and there is very often no single explanation,
but we would expect that atypical trends in a particular department,
programme or University would be logged, identified, analysed
and responded to.
Q72 Dr Pugh: But the information
is not as full as we would wish in terms of analysing the problem.
Professor Eastwood: We would see
the individual higher education institute as the appropriate place
to address those issues. It is therefore important that HEIs have
the right Reporting procedures and the right sorts of feedback
routes. What we are seeing—some of it is picked up in the
Report—is that best practice does indeed log that information,
analyse it and act on it where appropriate.
Q73 Dr Pugh: I wrote to a large number
of UK universities quite recently. I was primarily interested
in the issue of mental health and what part it plays in student
withdrawal from a course. I asked most of the universities how
many students withdraw for reasons of mental health. What sort
of answer do you think I got?
Professor Eastwood: I think you
would have got a varied response.
Q74 Dr Pugh: The fact of the matter
is that most universities do not know whether students withdraw
for mental health reasons, because it is not recorded separately.
I thought that, prima facie, students are in a stressful environment,
they are changing relationships and are under academic pressure,
and therefore that would be quite a trait. However, I was a little
distressed to find, when the answers came back to me, that not
only did the Government Department, the Department for Innovation,
Universities and Skills, not have that information—presumably
you do not have it either—but the universities themselves
do not seem to have it. Is that not a matter of concern?
Professor Eastwood: I think that
that would be of concern. However, I think that universities work
closely with their counselling services and quite often, where
it is appropriate, with the general practitioners who service
the universities. So there is information on issues such as mental
health; it might not be Reported in the form that you were referring
to, but nevertheless it is something that universities take seriously.
Certainly when I was a Vice-Chancellor, I would have had an annual
report from my University's counselling service on precisely that
issue.
Q75 Dr Pugh: To be fair, one cannot
extrapolate from one's own experience because universities vary.
One thing that my research showed me is that the pastoral systems
and counselling systems in universities varied quite appreciably,
in terms of what they offered for individual students. I think
that what the Chairman was trying to get at earlier—I do
not think that we did get clear about it—is whether you
know if there is any correlation between good, effective pastoral
systems and counselling systems and pupils continuing, or failing
to continue, with their courses.
Professor Eastwood: I think that
all the evidence that we have, obtained directly and through our
regional teams, which work with institutions, shows that the better
that the student support systems in an institution are, the more
likely the institution is to have strong performance in terms
of progression.
Q76 Dr Pugh: My worry is that there
is no systematic collection of the information and that, within
departments and within universities, the information may vary
in all sorts of ways. Those who have been to good universities,
which have good pastoral systems, will have an opinion of what
they think that the rest of the University world is like, but
it may not be like that. We simply do not know, do we?
Professor Eastwood: We do not.
You are quite right that we do not require universities to report
against those criteria. What we seek to do is to ensure that universities
invest appropriately in student support. In a competitive environment,
where universities are competing for students and funding—
Q77 Dr Pugh: I would like to pick
up on that point. You say that you try to ensure that universities
invest in proper student support. I think that London South Bank
University some time ago cashiered its counselling section, and
basically referred students to the local NHS. I do not think that
I am maligning the University there; I think that that happened.
Did you do something then?
Professor Eastwood: I could not
comment on that particular instance.
Q78 Dr Pugh: Right. Can I change
tack a little? Looking at the University courses and the drop-out
rates, the diagram—not table 33, but the earlier diagram
on page 21—shows something that is quite surprising, indeed
almost counter-intuitive. You would suppose, looking at medicine
and dentistry as the most well supported subjects, or those with
the lowest drop-out rates, that the more vocational a subject—the
more, therefore, that the student would have a good reason, including
probably a good financial reason, to study—the greater the
impetus for the student to stay the course. However, you do not
find that, do you? There is no strict relationship between the
course being vocational, or purely academic, and students staying
on.
Professor Eastwood: I think that
that is right. The pattern here is a complicated one; you are
right to infer that.
Q79 Dr Pugh: For example, I notice
that history and philosophical studies comes after medicine and
dentistry. Could you explain that? Is it that students are particularly
well taught, or are they very philosophical about what they are
getting?
Professor Eastwood: If you look
at the data in figure 15, on page 21, there is a danger of us
over-interpreting quite small differences. That is to say that,
if you go from, say, education through to historical and philosophical
subjects, you are talking about a 4% difference. So, whilst the
differences are discernible, I do not think that we should erect
too strong an explanatory framework on the basis of those small
differences. What I think that we can say, in a number of subject
areas, is that we see students who are well motivated and who
have been well prepared.
5 Note by witness: The most recent UCAS data
referred to by Professor Eastwood was not sent to the Committee
before the hearing following further advice received. A particular
concern was that the latest UCAS figures are provisional and include
overseas students so they are not directly comparable with those
included in Table 33 in the Report. Back
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