Student control numbers, without a doubt, a complex topic embedded a complex landscape. The UK Government is literally attacking the higher ed system on a number of fronts. Some attacks are deliberate and targeted (cf the academic freedom czar), some are collateral (cf May’s anti-migrant “hostile environment”—just the change in student visas had a negative effect), and some incompetence (cf the A-Levels debacle).
This is an unsystematic set of articles,some of which (partly) informed our TL;DR and cover many things we had to ellide to keep it short and focused. It’s certainly possible to read these and come to a different conclusion about SNC than ours!
We’ll try to keep this updated as new discussion emerges. Pointers, corrections, etc. are welcome. Please send to bijan.parsia@manchester.ac.uk
It may be safe to assume that most UCULeft HEC members voted against the motion.
Opposition to this motion did not centre on the impact of the lifting of these caps, but on campaigning for ending marketisation and the fees regime. The role that fees has played in the increase in student recruitment was emphasised.
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There is a definite need for further discussion on this but the motion as it stood was not fit for purpose. It conceded too much ground to the notion that the problem is too many students, rather than the marketised fees regime.
Further discussion would be welcome! But then agenda time is needed or people who opposed this motion need to liaise with supporters to find a good compromise.
One quick point. It ends with:
As the mover of the motion’s own research recognised “the return of caps … may not necessarily be the silver bullet that we are hoping for”
This is literally true of everything! There are no silver bullets. But the particular in context points was that adding SNC without taking into account existing problematic recruitments would be problematic. For example, a SNC regime that just froze the current distribution would not fix the current distributional problems. But that’s the point of the first resolution i.e., to model possible approaches.
(Some pedants might argue that the phrase, “A university manager would argue that less students mean less work for staff to do” should disqualify the whole piece. Tempting…)
The other side of this equation is how students decide both to apply to and accept a place offered by a particular provider for a particular course. There’s been huge amounts of research into these decisions and how they are made – the current best guess is through conversations with friends, family, teachers, and students and staff on a particular course at a particular provider. The vast investment in applicants facing data (and in league tables) doesn’t appear to move the dial, for home undergraduate students at least.
(It would have been nice to link to some of this huge amount of research.)
This is a bit of a mishmash which includes a technical section and should be read in conjunction with the technical accounts b:
The idea of “poaching” suggests a world where an applicant would have chosen a particular course at a particular university had another, more attractive, course/university pairing not been made available to them. Here, for 2020 at least, this appears to be overstated – more than three quarters of 18 year old UCAS entrants went to their “firm” choice of course and provider, a very slightly higher proportion than in the 2019 cycle, but a lower proportion than in 2013. So, around three 18 year old UCAS entrants in every four chose and applied to a course, was given an offer on the course, and accepted that offer every year this decade.
Putting that another way, there’s no evidence (in UCAS data, at least) of widespread “poaching” – which I’m defining as where a student had made a reasonably firm commitment to one course/provider but has ended up at another.
This seems to be a very tendentious notion of “poaching” as it presumes that the only influence on student decision-making that matters happens after students have made their applications. That’s not how recruitment primarily works.
A tolerance band would provide at least a measure of financial sustainability to providers (not allowing income – or tapering income if you prefer – from undergraduate recruitment to change by more than 5 per cent between academic years) and thus remove immediate financial pressures on providers after a poor year of recruitment while discouraging rapid expansion outside of clearly defined exceptions. I’d also want to see it applied at a provider level to ensure senior managers consider the shape of an institution overall rather than leaving individual subject areas as hostages to fortune.
There’s a lot to dislike about this very recent article, esp its relentless focus on the universities with student gluts and not on those starved. There are a lot of problematic “usual actors” quoted. And some of the quotes…
Colin Riordan, the vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, a member of the Russell Group, said his university would take everyone who achieved their offer grades “and find a way of managing”.
…He warned, however: “If you take on new students you have to be careful about staff to student ratios, which means you have to employ enough people, but that often involves a delay.”
And he said it was difficult for universities to make “irreversible” hiring decisions when they did not know whether these increased student numbers would be a lasting trend.
Nick Hillman, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank, argued that staff could be found. “It is a fierce job market for young academics so there will always be young postdocs willing to take on short-term teaching contracts.”
A nice high level overview of the issue in op-ed form by Prof. Catherine Fletcher. It’s from 2020, so doesn’t address the UCU aspects.
University staff are bearing the brunt of the volatility, whether navigating those enormous tutorial groups at one end of the scale, facing redundancy at the other, or stuck in the middle on a fixed-term contract that may or may not be renewed depending on student numbers. It is hardly surprising that the University and College Union is currently in dispute over casualisation and workload – as well as pay and (in the pre-92 universities) pensions. But the implications of this shake-up to the sector go wider. At the Lampeter campus of University of Wales Trinity St David, for example, the number of students has fallen from around 1,500 in the 1990s to fewer than 400 now, with inevitable knock-on effects for the local economy.
Reporting about the temporary student cap, the A-Level debacle, and related matters.
Alistair Jarvis, chief executive of Universities UK said the U-turn meant more students will have the grades that match the offer of their first-choice university. “This will cause challenges at this late stage in the admissions process – capacity, staffing, placements and facilities – particularly with the social distance measures in place,” he explained.
Dr Tim Bradshaw, CEO of the Russell Group – some of whose members are handling up to 1,000 appeals from applicants already – called for “urgent clarification from government” on support available to universities to cope with the ever-changing situation, and its implications for campus accommodation, planning course provision and Covid-19-related health and safety.
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University Business asked the DfE if the risk to sector stability had now passed; the spokesperson rejected the idea the cap was compelled by financial concerns – despite the DfE’s plan from June stating that the cap was required “to ensure a fair, structured distribution of students across providers and will play an essential role in the stabilisation of the admissions system and the financial sustainability of providers.”
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Mr Williamson said during a speech on 9 July that higher education should not continue to expand.
Interesting take from someone inside a university’s leadership. Highlights potentially benefits of an uncontrolled system but also some of the issues that arise in practice:
This does not explain the sudden call for the reintroduction of number controls now. This call is not about controlling the costs of a long run growth forecast, but instead attempts to control a scramble during a predicted shortage of applicants.
For that, we have to look to the behaviour of some universities during this crisis. The rationale for student number controls at this moment in time is with the hope of achieving some ‘stability’ during the COVID-19 outbreak. The Government fears a ‘Wild West’ type scenario, with recruiting institutions incentivised to adopt what it views as bad behaviour, mis-selling, if you like, to attract the numbers it needs from a more limited pool of students, including through an increased use of conditional unconditional offers. The OfS has recently extended its moratorium on unconditional offers until Monday 20 April as it continues to weigh its options in preventing this kind of predicted behaviour.
Dense and important. None of the analysis is simple (our TL;DR simplified enormously) but these two paragraphs give a flavour:
The total number of science students at the 24 Russell Group universities grew from 303,510 (2014–5) to 338,665 (2018–9). This is a growth of 12%, compared to overall sector growth of 9%. The total number of ‘non-science’ students grew from 292,290 (2014–5) to 326,990 (2018–9). This is a growth of 12% again, compared to overall sector growth of 2%. This suggests that Russell Group universities have been ‘stockpiling’ students, particularly in the arts and humanities, at the expense of other institutions.
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The biggest ‘losers’ in the UK Higher Education supermarket have been, unsurprisingly, Post-92 institutions. From 2014–5 to 2018–9, these universities have significantly shrunk in terms of student numbers: London Met (35% decrease; perhaps still suffering from the fallout of having its foreign student licence revoked in 2012–3); Plymouth (24%); Kingston (23%); Cardiff Met (22%); Staffordshire (16%) and Cumbria (16%). But a few pre-92 universities have also really lost out: Aberystwyth (20%), Birkbeck (18%) and Bradford (16%). The situation at Birkbeck may be explained by the downturn in part-time student numbers and the restricted funding for part-time study.
One critical point here is that reintroducing number controls can be done in a way that perpetuates the current instability and distributional problems. So a campaign cannot be just “reimplement number controls” but “implement appropriate number controls”.
[W]hile student number controls (‘caps’) were lifted at English universities by the Coalition government, a cap remained in place at Scottish universities for Scottish and EU students (who pay no tuition fee), but Scottish universities can recruit however many fee-paying students from other UK nations and non-EU countries.
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Once we study the origins of these students, the picture becomes more complicated. Edinburgh ‘stockpiled’ students from England and swept up 2,450 of the 3,205 new English students (out of those 2,450 English students, 73% are fee-paying undergraduates)! The number of Scottish students at Edinburgh actually dropped by 3%. By contrast, 28% of the growth at University of Glasgow came from Scottish students, and 14% from English students. The recruitment of English students fell apart at Dundee (-25%, a loss of 635), although it accepted 1,370 more Scottish students between 2014–5 and 2018–9. The recruitment of Scottish and English students dropped at Aberdeen (-5% and -3% respectively), but Aberdeen has managed to recoup their losses by increasing the number of non-UK students (+32%, up 1,265) — one-third of whom are Chinese (up 420).
Edinburgh also emerged as a ‘winner’ in sweeping up fee-paying students from Wales and Northern Ireland. Stirling and Strathclyde also increased their numbers of Northern Irish students, while Abertay almost lost all of theirs (from 155 to 25).
This research paper (McCaig & Taylor 2015) illustrates a lot of the complexities in the area and highlights that not all SNC regimes are helpful. It highlights the very problematic goals that recent Governments have pursued and the turmoil they’ve created. In particular, a key goal was to drive down the average tuition charged and to stratify the sector based on, well, snobbery. Note that this regime is better conceptualised as partially controlled which brought its own problems:
Ironically, while institutions sought a marketing edge in terms of differentiation, the pressures of the changing landscape since 2012 may be having the effect of reducing the diversity of the sector: when asked which personal characteristics of their student body were most liable to be negatively affected by the new tuition fee and number control regime, 63% of respondents selected age, 48.1% lower socio-economic class and those from LPNs. So, in conditions where differentiation is taken to mean merely moving upwards in the league tables at the expense of other similar institutions, it can actually reduce the diversity of the sector’s student body.
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It is hard not to conclude that Government chose the wrong policy levers because they fundamentally misunderstood the market they were intervening in and especially the strength of the whole sector. The assumption that only a few top universities represented quality and every other institutions would adjust their prices to reflect their place in this hierarchy was simplistic at best, ideological at worst. Government failed also to understand what motivates the ‘best universities’ to be the ‘best’ and to be ‘universities’, in other words the provision of the full breadth of subjects, and the critical importance of institutions’ social missions. Policy-makers also failed to understand what HEFCE’s analysis (HEFCE 2011) had told them at the outset that the distribution of high grades did not completely map on to the distribution of Government’s favoured institutions, nor did the demand from applicants with high grades map neatly on to the distribution of places at desirable institutions. Government took it as axiomatic that all the ‘brightest’ applicants would naturally wish to attend all the ‘best’ universities because everything pre-1992 institutions offered required the highest grades
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However, the wider marketisation trends do continue to threaten the social justice mission of WP, long the raison d’etre of many post-1992 and FE institutions. This is partly because such institutions now feel that they have a different set of policy goals and partly because the drive ‘up-market’ in league table terms has impacted on mature and part-time students due to the shift away from sub-degree and vocational programmes. Paradoxically, the post-1992 sector may become less diverse (in terms of its programme offer and its student body) as a result of a trend to further marketisation rationalised as beneficial differentiation.
It’s worth a read.
A whitepaper from when SNC was abolished. It’s optimistic and some of the challenges it envisions do not line up with what happened. Still, quite interesting.