Transforming University Education: A Manifesto 9781350157248, 9781350157231, 9781350157279, 9781350157262

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Transforming University Education: A Manifesto

Also available from Bloomsbury Analysing Teaching-Learning Interactions in Higher Education, Paul Ashwin Exploring Consensual Leadership in Higher Education, Edited by Lynne Gornall, Brychan Thomas, Lucy Sweetman Leadership for Sustainability in Higher Education, Janet Haddock-Fraser, Peter Rands, Stephen Scoffham Locating Social Justice in Higher Education Research, Edited by Paul Ashwin Reflective Teaching in Higher Education (second edition), Edited by Paul Ashwin Socially Just Pedagogies: Edited by Rosi Braidotti, Vivienne Bozalek, Tamara Shefer, Michalinos Zembylas

Transforming University Education: A Manifesto PAUL ASHWIN

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Paul Ashwin Paul Ashwin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Tjaša Krivec Gold texture © Katsumi Murouchi / Getty Images University logo © Smalllike / thenounproject All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-5724-8 PB: 978-1-3501-5723-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-5726-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-5725-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In memory of Lewis Elton and David Watson, two greatly missed advocates for the transformative power of university education who demanded that arguments for its potential be underpinned by systematic evidence and rigorous thinking rather than special pleading.

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Contents List of Figure  viii Acknowledgements ix

1 Introduction: Not another book about the higher

education crisis!  1

PART ONE Challenging myths about university education 2 Challenging myths about the purposes of university

education  15 3 Challenging myths about the key elements of university education  29 4 Challenging myths measuring the quality of university education  45

PART TWO  A case for university education 5 The purposes of university education  65 6 The key elements of university education  81 7 Measuring the quality of university education  97 8 Transforming and sustaining university education  113 Appendix 1: Lewis Elton: A personal reflection  128 Appendix 2: David Watson’s scholarly legacy: Towards a conscience for higher education research  130 Notes 134 References 144 Index 156

Figure 1 The transformational relationships of a university

education  69

Acknowledgements The argument in this book has developed over a number of years and through discussions with a great many people about the nature of a university education. Those who have contributed to these discussions are too numerous to mention but there are a smaller number of people who have made a significant contribution that I would like to thank here. I thank my colleagues in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, for all of the thoughtful conversations about higher education. I also want to thank Lancaster University for a year of sabbatical leave and supporting me to use part of it to write this book. I am privileged to be part of the ESRC and OFSRE-funded Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) and have benefitted greatly from working with researchers in CGHE. Particular thanks go to Simon Marginson, Claire Callender and Gareth Parry for many sustained conversations about the nature of university education. The CGHE Pathways to the Public Good project (funded by ESRC and NRF), which I led with Jenni Case involved critically engaged colleagues from South Africa, the UK and beyond who were very influential in helping me to see beyond the UK higher education system. This book also grew out of my work on Reflective Teaching in Higher Education. It has been brilliant to work with a large international multiauthor team to bring together what is known about teaching and learning in higher education. Thanks to all of the contributing authors to the first two editions of this book and particularly to Andrew Pollard for providing such a supportive environment as the editor of the Reflective Teaching Series. Special thanks to Alison Baker at Bloomsbury for both her support for Reflective Teaching in Higher Education and her enthusiasm for, and excellent advice on, the development of this book. The anonymous reviewers of the proposal for this book helped to shift the focus from the nonsense of teaching excellence to transforming university education, which was incredibly helpful.

x

Acknowledgements

Another important underpinning element of this book has been the research tracking students through their undergraduate degrees in Sociology in the UK, with Monica McLean and Andrea Abbas. More recently I have been researching undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in the UK, South Africa and the United States through a CGHE project with Ashish Agrawal, Mags Blackie, Jenni Case, Janja Kolmjenovic, Jan McArthur, Nicole Pitterson, Kayleigh Rosewell and Rene Smit. Whilst this latter project is still ongoing, both of these studies have contributed significantly to my understanding of the nature of university education. Both project teams have been a delight to work with. Other people with whom I have had important conversations that have informed this work include Helen Bråten, Rosemary Deem, Didi Griffioen, Carolyn Jackson, Murray Saunders, Karen Smith and Rachel Sweetman. I particularly thank Derek Heim and Paul Trowler who read and provided insightful comments on a full draft of this text. Both helped me overcome moments of doubt and uncertainty about the direction and argument in the book. Finally, I want to thank Emma, Rosa and Jonathan, for putting up with my preoccupation whilst finishing this book and for being the very best part of my life. Of course, all of the errors and misjudgements in the book are mine alone. Paul Ashwin

1 Introduction: Not another book about the higher education crisis!

T

alk of crisis is everywhere in higher education. There are so many different crises: crises of funding,1 crises of leadership,2 mission3 and governance,4 crises of access and inclusion,5 the student debt and graduate employment crises,6 crises of the humanities and social sciences,7 and even crises of morality.8 These crises are not usually linked to the education that is offered by universities but, when they are, it is more about universities failing to produce employable graduates9 or students failing to learn much from their time at university10 rather than a careful examination of the educational role of university education.11 However, despite the almost-overwhelming sense of crisis that characterizes popular literature on universities, the title of this introductory chapter is meant literally: this is not another book about the crises of higher education.12 My argument is not that universities face an educational crisis or are completely failing their students. There are many students who gain a great deal from their time at university and are transformed by their experiences. Instead, my argument is that we need to refocus our attention on the educational purposes of studying for an undergraduate degree rather than becoming fixated by the economic value of such a degree. Economic considerations of the value of higher education have over-reached themselves and have begun to distort debates about the educational value of university

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TRANSFORMING UNIVERSITY EDUCATION: A MANIFESTO

education. To be clear, this does not mean that the economic value is not important, it is just that it does not help us to develop a sense of what a high-quality university education looks like.

Why has this happened? As global demand for and participation in higher education have risen, so have the costs involved in providing this education.13 In this situation, it is clearly right that debates about how to fund higher education have come to the fore, with different countries taking different positions on the extent to which this is funded by governments and the extent it is funded by students through loans and support from their families.14 However, what is problematic is the way in which the issues surrounding the funding of higher education have come to dominate debates about the quality of higher education. This has largely been led by societies in which students are expected to make a significant contribution to the costs of their higher education, such as the United States and England.15 The rationale for students meeting these costs is that they will end up earning more than if they had not studied for a degree and therefore the investment in higher education is worth making.16 This is often presented as an argument for social justice: given that a much greater proportion of socially and economically privileged people tend to access higher education then why should poorer people fund the education of the rich through their taxes which are used by governments to fund higher education?17 It is not the intention of this book to consider these arguments about funding indepth, although it is worth noting that these arguments often ignore the ways in which having a greater number of graduates in society who act as nurses, social workers, doctors, engineers and perhaps even academics, politicians and policy makers benefit everyone in society. What does concern this book is the way in which economic arguments have come to be the dominant voice in debates about the quality of education provided by universities. What has happened is that the economic justification for students paying for more of

Introduction

3

their higher education has morphed into an argument for measuring the quality of higher education. Justifying engagement in higher education as a sound economic investment has led to a sense that the higher the quality of your higher education, the greater the amount of money you will earn after you graduate. These arguments have not just become common in societies in which students pay the costs of their education. Even in countries where there are no tuition fees and students receive generous living allowances from their government, the amount that governments pay for higher education is often justified in terms of the ways in which higher education prepares the future workforce for the benefit of individual graduates and wider society.18 The argument in this book is that the educational purpose of a university education is not to prepare someone for their role in the future workforce. Rather, the educational purpose of a higher education is to bring students into a transformational relationship to knowledge that changes their sense of who they are and what they can do in the world. This undoubtedly prepares them to make a contribution to society, including through their contribution to the labour market but this is a by-product of the central educational purpose of a higher education rather than its driving force. This book will show the mess we get into when we lose this clear sense of the educational purpose of higher education and suggest how we can put these purposes back into the centre of thinking about university education.

What is wrong with understanding the value of a degree in purely economic terms? If we only understand the value of a degree in economic terms then we tend to focus on the extent to which those who have graduated from university earn more than those who have not. A position is created in which those who earn the most are assumed to be the most able and the institutions that produce the highest earning graduates are seen as the highest quality. The problem with this is that it ignores how much, around the world, educational and employment outcomes are strongly

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TRANSFORMING UNIVERSITY EDUCATION: A MANIFESTO

shaped by social privilege.19 This creates a vicious circle in which social privilege is mistaken for ability. Those with the most privileged access to education unsurprisingly tend to perform the best academically and are labelled as the most able. They then tend to choose to attend the most socially prestigious universities not primarily because of the quality of the education that they offer but because of the prestige associated with attending such institutions. This privilege and prestige then help the graduates and the universities to have excellent employment outcomes. In this way, we end up in a situation in which social privilege is mistaken for academic ability and institutional prestige is mistaken for educational quality.20 This argument  needs to be handled carefully. The argument is neither that the socially privileged students lack ability nor that prestigious institutions do not offer a high-quality higher education. It is simply that social privilege does not tell us anything positive or negative about students’ abilities and that institutional prestige does not tell us anything useful about educational quality. It is like judging the quality of a wristwatch by the colour of its strap. Social privilege and institutional prestige do not tell us anything useful about the ability of students or the quality of degree programmes, in the same way that the colour of a watchstrap tells us nothing useful about the quality of the watch. If social privilege is mistaken for academic ability and institutional prestige is mistaken for educational quality, then this creates a situation in which it is assumed that there is nothing educationally important that happens at university. As I explain through the course of this book, this matters because it ends up undermining the raison d’être of university education and instead positions it as merely a form of social selection.

Why does a commitment to university education matter? There are many grandiose claims for the importance of a university education. Sometimes, for example, higher education is seen as the way to transform society.21 However, higher education is far more likely to reflect and reproduce inequalities in society than it is

Introduction

5

to transform them.22 Too often it appears that there is a belief that if we can get a few poor students into some elite institutions then we are well on the way to transforming society.23 To be clear, this can be hugely personally transformative for these students and their families and it can also be deeply alienating.24 However, changing the life trajectories of a few individuals will not transform inequalities in society. This is because universities are not separate from society but are an integral part of it. The best we can hope for is that higher education plays a role, in partnership with other societal institutions, to help to mitigate some of the unfairness in societies. If this is to happen, then we need to be clear about what it is about the education offered by universities that can contribute to these kinds of changes. There also need to be far more partnerships between universities and other social institutions to support graduates to use their education to play a transformative role in society.25 It is important to be clear that none of these matters are all or nothing. Higher education is never wholly reproductive or wholly transformative: it is always reproductive in some ways and transformative in others. We can move between considering the reproductive and transformative effects of a university education in order to get a sense of whether higher education’s reproductive or transformative effects appear to be most dominant at a particular point in time. The focus in this book is on what kind of university education is most likely to contribute to a fairer world whilst recognizing there will always be a tension between the reproductive and transformative impact of university education. A similar kind of tension can be found in our thinking about the different actors involved in higher education. We can move between heroic and villainous narratives about the impact of what they do. Policy makers can be positioned as either heroically trying to ensure that universities take their educational responsibilities seriously or villainously trying to create a marketized higher education system in which universities endlessly compete with each other for money and prestige. University leaders can be positioned as heroically producing and sharing knowledge with society in the face of the unreasonable demands of policy makers or positioned as villainously seeking to create self-interested and self-aggrandizing narratives of the wonders of their institutions that bear little relationship to reality.

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TRANSFORMING UNIVERSITY EDUCATION: A MANIFESTO

Academics can be positioned as heroically fighting the demands of the commercially orientated university in precarious conditions of employment or villainously pursuing their personal academic brand by over-publishing and not taking their teaching seriously. Students can be positioned as heroically facing financial hardship to pursue their love of knowledge or villainously insisting on their absolute right to be spoon-fed knowledge and protected from any intellectual challenge. Commercial university rankers can be positioned as heroically telling students the truth about the quality of different degree programmes in the face of unresponsive universities or villainously creating meaningless measures by combining incommensurable and misleading sources of data. Such narratives are beguiling and you will even find some of them in this book. Whilst they clearly over simplify complex reality, they usefully reflect the tensions in the ways that the different actors undertake their roles. In this way, they can be helpful in thinking about what we are trying to achieve and what we are trying to avoid. In this book, the intention is to try to contribute to the development of a vision of an inclusive, transformational higher education system rather than an elitist, reproductive one. It is important to be clear that this is not a task that can be completed by one book or one writer. It is something that needs to be argued over by those committed to university education. It is a long-term collective project that moves through many iterations of hope and despair. The important thing is to argue over the educational purposes of university education so that we can have a clearer sense of what we are trying to achieve and how this might be accomplished.

Who is this book for? As the preceding discussion illustrates, this book is for anyone who has an interest in higher education, how it educates students and the impact these students have on the world once they graduate. In the final chapter, I consider the implications of the book’s argument for university leaders, those who work in universities, students and policy makers. However, the book could also be of interest to family

Introduction

7

members of those involved in higher education who want to think about what university education could be. The key point here is that the book does not assume that the reader has an academic interest in higher education but simply that they have an interest in thinking about how university degrees contribute to the education of students. An important and related question is: to which of the many global higher education systems is this book relevant? It is important to be clear that the argument has developed in relation to my own experiences of examining what counts as a high-quality university education particularly in the UK, as well as other countries in Europe and South Africa. However, the literature drawn upon to support the argument is from many different countries and includes internationally comparative studies. All of the literature was published in English and this undoubtedly limits its scope given the significant literatures on higher education that are published in other languages. My sense, based on discussing the nature of a university education with researchers and reading research from around the world, is that the issues highlighted resonate in many countries across the world and are of global significance. However, the ways in which these issues play out will vary between higher education systems with different elements in the foreground at any particular time. Two examples are helpful in making potential differences clear. First, for simplicity, the focus is on undergraduate education. Clearly universities offer other forms of education and the relative importance of undergraduate education differs between higher education systems. The broad educational principles are relevant to all these forms of higher education but how they play out in practice will vary between educational settings. Second, commercial university rankings are far less significant in some countries than in the United States and the UK and, similarly, not all higher education systems have clear institutional hierarchies. However, there is also evidence that stratification between types of university is an identifiable element across all higher education systems in which over half of young people access tertiary education including those typically considered more egalitarian such as Norway and Finland.26 It is for the individual reader to decide which elements of this book seem relevant to their own context and which elements need to be adapted or ignored. However, my argument is that the central concern with

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TRANSFORMING UNIVERSITY EDUCATION: A MANIFESTO

the educational purposes of university education, the key elements of that education and how we can measure the quality of that education are relevant to all systems and all levels of higher education.

How this book is written This book is not written as an academic book. As its title suggests, it is written as a manifesto for university education.27 It attempts to identify the current problems with the way we think about the education that is offered by universities and propose some alternative ways of thinking about this education. The intention is to contribute to the reinvigoration of debates about the educational purposes of higher education. In order to support this approach, the book uses brief footnotes to provide access to the evidence that underpins the argument of the book. The footnotes provide the interested reader with key sources of evidence that can be seen as sources of further reading. However, the book is deliberately written so that it can be read without consulting the footnotes. The book is evidence-informed, rather than evidenceled or evidence-driven because making an argument always involves judgement and interpretation. The same evidence can be interpreted differently and with integrity by different people.

Some funny terminology Whilst this book is written for all of those who are interested in higher education, there is some strange looking terminology that is used throughout the book. For example, I write about what is needed for ‘a university education’ or ‘a higher education’. Most students, graduates and people who work in or are familiar with universities do not tend to refer to undergraduate degrees in this way. This terminology is adopted largely for rhetorical reasons. It is intended to highlight universities’ role in providing a higher form of education. This is understood in this book as an education that is personally transformative for the students concerned.28 Personally

Introduction

9

transformative because it changes who they are, their understanding of the world, and their ability to change the world. This book argues that the central educational purpose of an undergraduate degree is to transform students in this way. For this reason, the terminology of ‘a university education’ is used as a reminder of this transformative purpose of a higher education.

The book’s overall argument This book argues that economic arguments now dominate our thinking about the purpose and nature of a higher education. We have lost a sense of the educational purposes of an undergraduate degree and have lost a clear sense of going to university as giving access to a higher education. The first part of the book challenges a series of myths related to the purposes, educational processes and measuring the quality of an undergraduate education that have underpinned the current misunderstanding of the educational aspects of higher education. The second part of the book examines what is needed in order to reinvigorate our understanding of a higher education. The ambiguous meaning of the title of this book, ‘Transforming University Education’, is deliberate. This book is about the ways in which a university education can contribute to transformation of students and society; it is also about how we can change university education to make this transformation more likely. An important commitment that is reflected in the book’s structure is that whilst critique of current dominant ways of understanding university education is important, this can only ever be a starting point. It is of value only if it leads to alternative ways of approaching university education. As highlighted earlier, the point of arguing for these alternatives is not that they are expected to be adopted wholesale by policy makers but rather to contribute to collective discussions and collective ways of approaching the purposes of higher education. The argument in this book is intended to provoke reactions and counterarguments. The measure of its success is not how many people agree with it but how many people use it to inform further ideas about how we think about university education.

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Structure of the book The first part of the book seeks to challenge a series of myths about university education. These myths need to be addressed because they get in the way of developing a clear vision for an inclusive and transformative university education, which is the central intention of this book. Chapter 2 of this book is focused on ‘Challenging Myths about the Purposes of University Education’. This chapter examines how an economic rationale has come to dominate understandings of the purposes of going to university. The chapter discusses two myths that underpin the economic view of the purposes of a higher education: the myth of graduate premiums and the myth of generic skills. The chapter shows how these two myths combine to support a view that the purpose of higher education is to ‘signal’ that graduates are worth employing. The signalling approach undermines higher education as an educational endeavour because it implies there is nothing special about the knowledge, educational processes or institutional settings offered by higher education. The challenging of these myths highlights the central role that knowledge plays in shaping the meaning of what students gain from their university experiences. If we take the knowledge out, then we end up with empty accounts of students’ educational experiences, which tell us little that is meaningful about the quality of their educational experiences. Chapter 3 is focused on ‘Challenging Myths about the Key Elements of University Education’ and builds on the argument in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, I argue that there are seven myths about the key elements of university education that need to be challenged in order to make a case for a higher education that is focused on the transformational relationships that students develop to knowledge. These myths are the myth of the inspirational teacher, the myth of the naturally brilliant teacher, the myth of the perfect teaching method, the myth of studentcentredness, the myth of the assessment of students’ work as a transparent measurement, the myth of the naturally gifted student, and the myth of the conservative and instrumental student. Through challenging these myths the chapter establishes six principles for high-quality educational processes, which are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.

Introduction

11

Chapter 4 focuses on ‘Challenging Myths about Measuring the Quality of University Education’. It examines three sets of measurement myths: the myths of commercial university rankings, the myth of big data and the myth of the silver bullet. The chapter explains why challenging these myths is important in terms of the impact of institutional gaming on these measures of educational quality and the costs of creating valid measures of educational quality. The chapter argues for six principles that should inform valid measures of educational quality, which are examined further in Chapter 7. Part II of the book moves on from challenging myths to making a case for transforming university education. This is intended to provide an alternative way of thinking about the purposes, educational processes and quality of university education. These chapters follow a common structure. Initially a case is made for a way of understanding an aspect of university education. This is followed by the considerations of some awkward questions about this way of understanding. The responses to these questions are intended to provide the reader with a richer sense of the way of understanding and its potential strengths and weaknesses. Chapter 5 makes a case for ‘the purposes of university education’. Based on the ideas discussed in Chapter 2, it makes an argument for understanding the purposes of an undergraduate degree in terms of students developing transformational relationships with disciplinary and/or professional knowledge. The chapter explains what these relationships look like in a range of disciplines and discusses the implications of this way of thinking about the purposes of an undergraduate degree. These implications are related to the need to have expert teachers and institutions that are committed to furthering understanding of these bodies of knowledge. The chapter then examines six awkward questions about this way of understanding the purposes of a higher education. Chapter 6 makes a case for a particular way of understanding ‘the key elements of university education’. The chapter outlines a view of the educational processes involved in higher education that are aligned with the six principles developed in Chapter 3. The view of the educational processes is elaborated by discussing how it aligns with each of the principles. The chapter then explores eight

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TRANSFORMING UNIVERSITY EDUCATION: A MANIFESTO

awkward questions about this way of understanding high-quality educational processes. Chapter 7 makes a case for a way of ‘measuring the quality of university education’. This chapter outlines a view of how to measure the quality of a higher education based on the seven principles outlined in Chapter 4. It does this first from the perspective of an individual choosing a degree programme. The chapter then considers what a system for measuring the quality of degree programmes that is aligned with the principles would look like. The chapter then discusses four awkward questions about this way of measuring the quality of degree programmes. Chapter 8 is focused on ‘transforming and sustaining university education’. It sets out the vision of university education that has been developed through the book. It then outlines a manifesto for transforming university education. To support this, it sets out a theory of change to underpin this manifesto before setting out what can be done by institutional leaders, those who work in universities, students and policy makers to contribute to transforming university education.

Conclusion This book offers a manifesto for transforming university education. It challenges unhelpful myths that distort our understanding of the educational potential of a university education and sets out an alternative vision for university education. This is important if we are to work towards university education that consistently enables students to transform their sense of who they are and what they can do in the world. It is this kind of education that will prepare them to work with others to make a contribution to the transformation of society and to meet the undoubted challenges that face the world in the future.

PART ONE

Challenging myths about university education

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2 Challenging myths about the purposes of university education

A

round the world, participation in higher education is on the rise. More than a third of the world’s higher education systems enrol over 50 per cent of young people after they complete secondary school.1 Why do so many people go to university? What are the benefits for individuals and societies? Our responses to these kinds of questions reveal what we understand to be the purposes of a university education. In this chapter I argue that debates about these purposes have been overly dominated by economic arguments about the purposes of higher education. This has been at the expense of an understanding of the educational purposes of an undergraduate degree. As a result of their lack of engagement with the educational purposes of an undergraduate degree, the dominance of these economic arguments has led to the development of pernicious myths about the purposes of university education. These myths are pernicious because, as I will show in this chapter, their effect is to undermine an undergraduate degree as an educational endeavour. In this chapter, I first examine the myths that have distorted our understanding of the purposes of undergraduate higher education. These myths relate to the relationship between higher education and employment. It is understandable that as the number of societies with high levels of participation in higher education has

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TRANSFORMING UNIVERSITY EDUCATION: A MANIFESTO

increased, questions have been asked about why societies should fund this expansion of higher education. The answer that is normally arrived at is that what higher education does is to prepare people for employment.2 In this chapter, I argue that whilst universities clearly play a role in preparing graduates for employment, this is not their primary educational purpose. Understanding the educational purposes in purely economic terms leads to two dominant myths about the purpose of a higher education. I first examine these myths and show how they combine to undermine a commitment to higher education. I then offer an alternative way of understanding the purposes of higher education that includes a consideration of how a degree prepares students for employment but that does not position this as the primary educational purpose of an undergraduate higher education. In this chapter, I simply introduce this way of understanding the purposes of an undergraduate degree and then explore it further in Chapter 5.

Two myths of the purposes of higher education There are two main myths that currently dominate thinking about the purposes of higher education and both are related to the relationship between higher education and employment. These are the myth of graduate premiums and the myth of generic skills.

The myth of graduate premiums In countries where students pay tuition fees, politicians and university leaders are often asked whether ‘investing’ in university education is worth it. At some point, and normally at the first moment, they will talk about how the ‘investment’ is worthwhile because of how much more university graduates earn than those who have not been to university. This is often referred to as ‘the graduate premium’. Let’s ignore for the moment the vexed question of causation here (although it is not at all clear to what extent these higher earnings are mainly

MYTHS ABOUT PURPOSES OF UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

17

due to the holding of a degree) and just think about the underpinning basis of this claim. It is essentially an instrumental argument for the purposes of higher education: it is worth spending money on higher education because it leads to something (higher earnings for some) rather than because there is something intrinsically valuable about higher education itself. The first thing to note about this argument is that because it is instrumental if graduates did not earn more than non-graduates then it would not be worth investing in higher education. It is bizarre that people who claim to believe in higher education can choose to defend it on this basis. It lends implicit support to the idea that there is nothing intrinsic that happens as part of the educational process which makes that education valuable. Instead, this way of justifying a higher education implies that it is simply the salary, which you can exchange your degree certificate for in the job market once you graduate, that makes it worth engaging in a university education. Anyone who, for whatever reason, does not get a certificate has completely wasted their time and anyone who gains their certificate through nefarious means has made at least as good investment as those who completed the work for their degree in an honourable manner. In fact, in these terms cheating appears an even better investment if it has fewer costs than actually studying for a degree. The second thing to note is that this argument for the purposes of an undergraduate degree can lead to a sense of moral panic if graduates are seen to end up taking non-graduate jobs. This sense of panic comes from the instrumental nature of this justification of the purposes of higher education. If a degree is justified in terms of an increased graduate salary and graduates end up in jobs that did not require a degree then this is a shameful waste of money. It is important to be clear about the relationship between the reasons for valuing a degree and the sense of moral panic here. If a degree was justified in different terms, such as producing critical citizens, then the sense of moral outrage of this state of affairs would disappear. This helps to highlight an implicit snobbery involved in this position, a distaste for someone in a non-graduate job being ‘over-educated’. Whilst some will argue this is simply a ‘technical description’, the language we use sends important messages about our thinking

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TRANSFORMING UNIVERSITY EDUCATION: A MANIFESTO

and not all of them are intentional. The idea of being ‘over-educated’ also draws on ideas that for some people in some roles access to knowledge is not a good thing. If we consider who these ‘some people’ are, it is usually people who are seen as lacking the power and means to fight against such a description and are considered not able to make their own decisions about the kinds of knowledge that is useful for them to access. The third thing to note is that these claims about graduate premiums are often made in relation to particular national contexts. If we start to think about graduate premiums on a global scale then the ridiculousness of thinking that they should be at the heart of the  purposes of higher education becomes apparent. This is because if we think about a global graduate premium then it quickly becomes clear that a graduate premium is a measure of economic inequality. The countries with the highest graduate premiums are those with the highest gaps in earnings between those who have had access to higher education and those who have not.3 What this means is that countries with the highest level of economic inequality have the highest level of graduate premiums. Again the question of causation is important here. Do high levels of inequality lead to higher graduate premiums or do higher graduate premiums lead to greater levels of inequality? If we argue that these inequalities are due to the wonders of an undergraduate education, then we are in effect arguing that higher education should play a role in increasing  inequalities between graduates and non-graduates. Is this really the basis on which we want to make a stand for the value of higher education? Is our justification for the value of a degree that will make you more wealthy than those who didn’t bother? If we think about the kind of society we would like to live in, would we rather live in a society with the highest or lowest levels of inequality? As my tone would suggest, this is not a justification for higher education that I think is worth making and it is certainly not one that any self-respecting leader of a university should be seen to make. One response to the kinds of criticisms that I have outlined is to say that they miss the point. That it is not the difference between the salaries of graduates and that of non-graduates that is important, it is that a degree makes you employable for a graduate job. So we

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can put aside a focus on graduate premiums and instead focus on the way that an undergraduate degree prepares you to take on an important role in society, a role that might well lead you to help to reduce inequality or indeed to make it worse. And what enables you to take on this role are the graduate attributes or skills that you have gained through your degree. This brings us onto the second myth related to the purposes of an undergraduate education – the myth of generic skills.

The myth of generic skills The myth of generic skills, rather than focusing on the premium that is paid in graduate salaries, instead argues that the key purpose of higher education is to provide students with the ‘transferable’ skills that employers value, which will support individual prosperity and economic development. In this version of the purposes of higher education, it is what you can do as a graduate that matters rather than what you earn (even though the former is likely to help the latter). However, crucially, what you can do is described in generic terms rather than specific terms. So it is about the ways in which higher education produces problem solvers and communicators rather than about the ways in which higher education develops engineers or chemists. Whilst, at first glance just like with graduate premiums, seeing the purpose of undergraduate education in terms of the enhancing of generic skills might seem convincing, it once again falls apart when we examine what this means in relation to specific skills. The issue here is that just because we can describe any process generically, it does not mean that what is a stake in this process is meaningfully generic. In other words being able to describe an event in terms of a particular skill is not evidence that the skill was demonstrated in that event. After all, we can describe any social interaction in terms of as many generic skills as we have the imagination to construct. For example, if I am preparing a meal then I can describe this in terms of planning the meal, preparing the work surfaces, chopping the vegetables, preparing the sauce, turning on the oven or even, if I choose to, holding the knife. My ability to come up with ever new sets of descriptions for the situation in terms of different skills

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is the only limit on the number of skills that I can describe as being involved in making this meal. However, if I come up with more sets of these descriptions of skills, then it does not mean that the number of skills I have demonstrated in my cooking has increased. The only skill it demonstrates is my skill at coming up with descriptions. The madness of this way of thinking is highlighted because it would mean whoever came up with the most ways of describing their cooking in terms of skills would appear to be the most skilled cook regardless of the quality of the meal that they produced or even if they managed to produce a meal at all. Indeed, it is easy to imagine heroic descriptions of culinary failure that offer even more opportunities to attach descriptions of skills from the scraping of burnt toast to the scouring of burnt pans. At this point, it is probably useful to leave the kitchen and head back to the kinds of generic skills or graduate attributes that are more commonly identified by universities as the kinds of things that their students can do in the world. The kinds of generic employability skills that are identified include things such as:4 ●●

working effectively with others;

●●

communicating effectively;

●●

self-awareness;

●●

thinking critically;

●●

analysing data and using technology;

●●

problem solving;

●●

developing initiative and enterprise;

●●

self-management;

●●

social responsibility and accountability.

Again, it is quite possible to imagine a single social process in which the practices of a graduate can be described in terms of all nine of these generic skills. For example, we could describe the process of writing a shopping list for a household’s food for a week in terms of these skills quite easily, as is demonstrated by the table below:

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Generic skill

Skills checklist for the writing of a shopping list for a household’s food for a week

Working effectively with others

Did I talk to my housemates/family about what food they needed?

Communicating effectively

Did I let my housemates know that I was going to buy some food so that they didn’t buy the same things? Did I write the list clearly so that I would be able to read it later?

Self-awareness

Do I have a realistic sense of the food I might want to eat over the next few days? Do I know how much food I will be able to comfortably carry home?

Thinking critically

Have I carefully considered the way in which the food I will buy has been produced? Have I considered the impact of marketing campaigns on the food I have put on my list?

Analysing data and using technology

Did I check what food we already have in to avoid the duplication of items? Did I successfully use a pen and paper or electronic device to compile the list?

Problem solving

Did I consider how much food is needed for the number of people in the house based on the likely date of the next shopping trip? Did I work out whether I had enough money to pay for this amount of food?

Developing initiative and enterprise

Did I consider whether there were shops with special offers available that would reduce the cost of the food I wish to buy?

Self-management

Did I write the list in a timely manner? Have I ensured I have enough time to buy all of the food on the list?

Social responsibility and accountability

Have I considered the environmental impact of the food that I am buying? Have I prioritized the purchase of fair-trade items?

However if we compile such a list, it does not necessarily mean that anyone successfully completing this checklist when making a list of food to buy will have meaningfully demonstrated these nine generic skills. The problem with the language of generic skills highlighted by both the cooking and shopping list examples

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is that being able to describe particular practices in terms of particular generic skills is not the same as actually demonstrating these skills. A category error has been made in which a generic description of a practice has been mistaken for the demonstration of a generic skill. An obvious objection to the use of these examples is that they wilfully take us away from the kinds of activities that characterize an undergraduate degree. It could be argued that it is the choice of the mundane examples that undermines the language of skills rather than a deeper problem with arguing for the development of generic skills as the primary purpose of an undergraduate education. To address this potential objection, let’s look at two of these skills in the context of higher education: communication skills and problemsolving skills. In relation to communication skills, we can describe the practices of a student in terms of how well they can communicate in different situations, at different times and in different locations. However, it does not follow that if a student is good at communicating in English, then they will also be good at communicating in Chinese because communication skills are empty unless they are combined with knowledge of the language and culture in which the act of communication is taking place. Once again our defender of generic skills might object that this is just a feature of communicative acts, and once again the example has been selectively chosen. However, the same is true of problem solving. If a student can solve a problem in chemistry, then it does not mean that they can solve a sociological problem. This is because skilful acts of communication or problem solving require knowledge about the subject matter that is the focus of the act, knowledge of the situation the student is in and knowledge of the people with whom the student is acting. Without such knowledge, these skills are simply empty descriptions of practices. This highlights that the knowledge that students are engaged with and their understandings of this knowledge are central to any educational understanding of their university experiences. As well as oversimplifying and distorting the educational purposes of higher education, the myth of generic skills has two further problems. First, if the purpose of higher education is to enhance students’ generic skills, it is by no means obvious that universities

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are the best institutions to do this. The problem is that there seems nothing in the history or wider activities of many universities that relates to the development of generic skills. Whereas there are plenty of other educational institutions that have a long history of working with employers to develop people to work with them.5 Second, and related to this, the available evidence suggests that higher education is not particularly effective at enhancing such skills. Studies of how students’ generic skills change over the course of their undergraduate degrees have often shown little or no improvement in these skills.6 So even if we accept that the development of generic skills should be the purpose of higher education, it is not at all clear that this would be something that societies trust to the care of universities.

The mess that these myths make So far I have argued that thinking about the purposes of higher education in terms of producing employable graduates is based on two myths related to graduate premiums and generic skills. I have questioned whether graduate premiums should really be considered as a success and I have questioned whether generic skills provide meaningful accounts of what students gain from higher education. I have also argued that if producing employable workers is the main purpose of higher education, then it is not at all clear that we would entrust this role to universities. However, the damage done by this way of thinking about the purposes of higher education goes further than this. It ends up undermining a commitment to higher education. The way in which this happens can be seen in the responses to the evidence that graduates do not appear to improve their employability skills through their engagement with higher education. A particularly pernicious response is to argue that the major role of undergraduate degrees is to ‘signal’ to employers that graduates are worth employing.7 The signalling approach argues that there is nothing that is intrinsic to the educational process that comes from students engaging in undergraduate degrees. Rather, if a student can gain the qualifications and personal attributes needed to be

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admitted to an elite institution and can stay the course for three or four years and complete their degree, then they demonstrate the personal qualities that an employer is looking for. Notice the view here is not that engagement changes students it is rather that by gaining admittance to university and completing their degree, a student shows what kind of person they are and that this is the kind of person employers want. The stench of class snobbery is already overpowering but we need to hold our noses a little longer to see the full horror of the entitled nonsense that underpins this argument. Under this view, as more and more people attend universities, we are simply throwing good money after bad because mass higher education doesn’t actually change students in any way. It simply leads to a situation in which jobs that used to be done by non-graduates are now done by graduates without any increase in the quality or productivity of the work undertaken. This view of the purposes of undergraduate education ends up undermining a commitment to the educational role of undergraduate degrees. It does this by taking the position that there is nothing special about the knowledge that students engage with in higher education and nothing important about the educational process that allows them to gain an understanding of this knowledge. This means that knowledge can just as easily be accessed through the internet as it can from a university. The fact that people would rather use the internet for entertainment than for educating themselves is taken as evidence that they are simply not that interested in gaining access to this knowledge.8 Under this view there is nothing educational that is needed to make sense of this knowledge. There is no need for a teacher who thinks carefully about how to enable students to achieve an understanding of ideas. Rather people are either interested and learn or they are not interested and they do not learn. Any failure to learn can be put down to an individual’s lack of brightness or distaste for hard work. It is also worth noting that under the signalling view the quality of the education offered is simply not an issue. It doesn’t matter whether the degree you studied was brilliantly designed or gobbledygook, providing the right signal is sent to the employer. In this impoverished way of thinking about education, educational institutions may even be demonized because they get in the way of the ‘natural’ process of learning.9

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So seeing the purposes of higher education in terms of the employability of graduates gets us in a right mess. It implies that the content of what students learn is less important than the prestige of the institution at which they study and it can end up suggesting that there is nothing educationally important about students’ engagement with higher education. It is also important to be clear, as I will discuss further in Chapter 4, that if we judge the quality of higher education in terms of labour market outcomes then we end up reinforcing institutional prestige. The simplified accounts of the educational process offered by generic skills and the signalling view distort how we understand the definition and measurement of quality. They both imply that we can measure the quality of education by the labour market outcomes of graduates. This is despite clear evidence that these are structured by institutional prestige and the background of the students,10 neither of which tells us anything about educational quality. In this way, a focus on labour market outcomes reinforces the dominance of elite higher education and, because access to these institutions is stratified by students’ backgrounds, the role of higher education in reproducing social and economic inequalities.

How else could we think about the purposes of higher education? Given the problems with understanding the primary educational purpose of higher education in terms of preparing students for employment, how else might we understand the educational purpose of higher education? It is important to note that the focus here is on the primary educational purpose of undergraduate higher education. So there is no suggestion that higher education should not sully itself by thinking about what students will do once they graduate. The argument is more that if we understand the primary purposes of a higher education in these terms then we end up undermining the very education that we are seeking to promote. In considering alternative ways of thinking about higher education, there are a number of things that have arisen in our analysis to date. First, any justification needs to make sense of what higher education

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more generally is attempting to do. Second, any justification needs to make sense of the educational processes that students engage with through higher education. In this book, the argument is that the purposes of undergraduate higher education should be understood as being to help students to  gain an understanding of knowledge that can change their sense of who they are, what the world is and what they can do in the world. This justification starts from the overall purposes of universities as looking after knowledge for society. For this reason, it can seem blindingly obvious and almost tautological. However, I have tried to show in this chapter the mess we get into when we forget this central purpose of an undergraduate degree. It is important to be clear that the view of knowledge underpinning this argument is very different from the gobbets of knowledge that can be downloaded from the internet that informed the signalling perspective we examined earlier. The view of knowledge is about collective bodies of knowledge rather than isolated, individual facts. These bodies of knowledge have a structure that has been constructed over centuries by many different people. The different aspects of this knowledge  gain their meaning from their position in the structure of knowledge and so cannot be considered as standalone facts. This means that what students gain from engaging with this knowledge are new ways of seeing and interacting with the world rather than, say, twenty fun facts about any particular phenomenon.11 This means that students are fundamentally changed by their engagement with this knowledge rather than adding additional information to an already fully formed identity. It requires hard work and humility on the part of the student to gain this kind of relationship to knowledge. As well as commitment from the student, these ways of seeing also require a carefully designed educational process, in which those with expertise about this knowledge consider how best to enable students to understand these interconnected bodies of ideas. This design process is not based on helping a generic or ideal student to gain understanding; it is rather about helping the actual students who are studying the programme to develop this understanding. So as well as knowledge about the subject matter, teachers need to have

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knowledge about who their students are and what they currently understand. They then bring these understandings together to design a programme that will give students the best chance of developing this powerful way of seeing. Another important aspect of this way of thinking about the purposes of an undergraduate higher education is that it involves teachers knowing about why the knowledge they are giving students access to is important, how it will change students and what it will enable them to do that they could not do before. This means they need to have a clear sense of the educational process that they are inviting students into. This view of teaching is out of step with many current ways of understanding teaching, and in the next chapter we will explore myths about teaching in more detail. Finally, this way of thinking about the purposes of an undergraduate education requires universities as institutions to provide a space in which teachers can come together to design curricula and students can come to explore, engage with, and be changed by this knowledge. This could be a physical or virtual institution, but an institution is needed to bring these elements together in a meaningful way. Without such institutions, there is nowhere in which this academic and educational knowledge can be maintained, enhanced and shared with wider society.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to challenge myths about the purposes of higher education. I have argued that in justifying undergraduate higher education in terms of the jobs that students will get when they graduate ends up undermining the value of the very education that is being justified. I have offered another way of seeing purposes of higher education that will be discussed further in Part II. However, before I can do this, there are two other groups of myths that I first need to deal with. The first set are a series of myths about the educational process that I will explore in Chapter 3. The second set are a series of myths about the measurement of the quality of the educational process that I consider in Chapter 4.

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3 Challenging myths about the key elements of university education

I

n the last chapter, I examined myths around the purposes of higher education and argued that rather than focusing on the economic purposes of an undergraduate degree, we need to focus on its educational purposes. Towards the end of the chapter, I began to develop an argument for a particular way of understanding those educational purposes that focused on the ways in which students are transformed by their engagement with knowledge. In this chapter, I focus on the key elements of the educational processes involved in higher education. There are a number of myths about these educational processes that need to be addressed because the ways in which we often think about teaching and learning in higher education can distort our understanding of these processes. In this chapter, I consider dominant myths about the educational process that can obscure a full understanding about what is involved in students’ engaging with disciplinary and/or professional knowledge in higher education. I first examine myths about the nature of teaching in higher education before considering myths about the nature of learning in higher education. I then examine an alternative way of thinking about educational processes in higher education that is aligned with the way of thinking about the purposes of higher education developed in the previous chapter.

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Seven myths about the key elements of a university education The educational processes involved in higher education are complex and elusive as well as challenging and rewarding for all of those involved in them. This makes these processes a rich territory for the creation of myths that offer a damaging view of a university education – myths that are often supported by the ways in which teaching and learning in universities are presented, evaluated and rewarded. I will examine seven of these: the myth of the inspirational teacher, the myth of the naturally brilliant teacher, the myth of the perfect teaching method, the myth of student-centredness, the myth of the assessment of students’ work as a transparent measurement, the myth of the naturally gifted student, and the myth of the conservative and instrumental student. Together these myths distort our understanding of what is involved in high-quality educational processes and encourage us to ask the wrong kinds of questions about the nature of a high-quality university education.

The myth of the inspirational teacher The vision of the brilliant individual who enchants their students and changes their lives forever is at the heart of many popular images of the university teachers, including many awards for university teaching.1 It is deeply unhelpful because good teaching is a profoundly collective activity. The curriculum of any degree programme in higher education draws on collective bodies of knowledge; these curricula are designed by groups of academics in discussion with their colleagues, students, institutions and relevant professional bodies; and different aspects of a single programme are taught by different academics. Degree programmes need to include a range of activities that help students to achieve personal engagement with knowledge. Whilst captivating lectures are a part of this, they are only one element of good teaching and need to be carefully related to the overall aims and other elements of the programme. To be clear, there are some exceptional teachers who can inspire students and make them feel like they have been changed. It is rather that having these kinds of teachers, on its own,

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is not the basis for a high-quality university education. It is also not uncommon for the impact of these teachers to be overestimated. Many popular examples of inspirational teachers had a bigger impact on their colleagues’ understanding of their disciplines than they did on their students.2 The myth of the inspirational teacher is closely related to our next myth, which focuses on the natural brilliance of teachers.

The myth of the naturally brilliant teacher The myth that education should be focused on natural brilliance also distorts our understanding of what it means to be a successful university teacher. This myth separates teachers into two groups: the inspirational teachers discussed in the previous myth and the remaining teachers who are uninspiring and dull.3 Essentially the view is that you are born to either teach or not and it is misleading on two counts. First, all teachers have experiences of teaching that are fairly disastrous. What is important is to learn from these by thinking and talking to others about what went wrong. Second, this myth implies that there is only one way to teach, whereas a key element of learning to teach is finding out what works for you. These misconceptions are reinforced by the mirage of ‘best practice’, which again suggests that there is one, best way of teaching. Students benefit from a variety of approaches to teaching rather than something that is artificially standardized. One of the hardest elements of teaching is to recognize how to develop your own voice in teaching, which helps students to understand the way in which you relate to the knowledge you are seeking to give students access to. This will be different for different teachers and collectively this variety provides students with a multidimensional account of this knowledge which makes it easier to understand in a rich and meaningful way.

The myth of the perfect teaching method Alongside myth of the naturally brilliant teacher lies the myth of the perfect teaching method. The idea is that if we can only find the right way of teaching something then all of our educational worries will

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be over. For example, many educationalists spend their time seeking to decry the use of lectures and argue for alternative methods of teaching.4 There are two major problems with this. First, it is not the individual method that matters but rather how it fits into the overall design of a degree programme. This means we should be considering what role lectures are expected to play in a programme and whether they do this effectively rather than simply seeing them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.5 Second, what exactly is a lecture? What is the difference between a small lecture and a large seminar group? When you examine teachers’ and students’ understanding of teaching methods then you find that different people understand the same teaching methods in very different ways. Some people will understand a very small group tutorial as an intimate exchange of ideas in which both the student and the tutor learn, while others will see them as involving the transfer of information from the tutor to the student: the standard view of a lecture.6 In this way, teachers and students reinterpret teaching methods to fit with their idea of what they are trying to achieve. It is not the method that determines what students learn but the teachers’ and students’ understandings of the purpose of their interaction.7 The problem of focusing on methods is that it stops us from thinking about the purpose of the educational processes. Instead the temptation is to follow the recipe of a particular method and if that recipe does not work then it is because it has not been followed properly. It is worth remembering that the long history of educational innovations is that they often work well in generously funded pilots and with the original group of innovators but that as they are extended to more groups of people they tend to lose their effectiveness.8 Often this is put down to a lack of funding and to a lack of purity in the way that the innovation has been introduced. The later followers are seen to have not followed the recipe correctly because of either a lack of resources or a lack of understanding. However, a better explanation of this repeated failure is that the originators and followers are actually engaged in different kinds of tasks. The originators of the innovative method are trying to solve an educational problem based on their understanding of a particular situation whereas those who follow later are trying to follow a method to replicate the success

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of the originators. Unreflective use of any method will not lead to good teaching and learning because good teaching is based on a clear understanding of the aspects of knowledge students are expected to learn and a rich sense of how to make this knowledge accessible to students.9

The myth of student-centredness Another pervasive educational myth is that the most important aspect of teaching is that it is centred on the students. For many, the educational ills faced by higher education institutions are due to focusing on teaching rather than on students’ learning. For example, many argue that higher education focuses far too much on the number of modules or credits that a student has completed rather than how much they have learnt.10 This has led to a situation in which students can complete their degrees having learnt very little. The proposed solution to this problem is to focus on what students have actually learnt. In dealing with this myth, it is important to be clear that the focus on student-centred teaching is an important corrective to teacher-focused teaching.11 Teaching-focused teaching assumes that whatever the teacher teaches, the students learn rather than seeking to understand students’ experiences of that teaching or recognizing that different students can experience the same teaching in very different ways. Education always needs to start from students’ current level of understanding to be worthy of the name. However, whilst focusing on the students is an important corrective, on its own it does not provide the basis on which to build an education. Education also needs to focus on the knowledge that students are being given access to. This is because the purpose of education is to lead to intentional changes in students’ understanding of particular forms of knowledge. So, taking students into account is a key element, but student-centredness without knowledge is process without substance. If teachers do not possess a rich understanding of their discipline that they can make accessible to students, then it is not clear what they have to offer students, and students would be right to question the nature of their teachers’ expertise.

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The focus on student-centred learning has resulted in too great a focus on learning processes and the experiences of the individual learner rather than an understanding of the relationships between knowledge, teachers and students. Without a focus on these relationships, there is a tendency to focus on the learning process without any sense of the purpose of that learning. This encourages us to focus on students’ learning but not what they are learning for. There are three consequences of this myth.12 First, it implies that the responsibility for whether students have learnt something or not is largely down to the student. Student-centred learning can be seen to suggest that, providing that students are active enough and the teacher does not place any obstacles in their way, they will be successful regardless of other factors. This gives student-centred learning an almost-oppressive character with any failure in learning being due to the student being the wrong kind of learner or the teacher being the wrong kind of teacher.13 Second, the positioning of the teacher as a facilitator of learning, whose main job is not to get in the way of learning, undermines the importance of the subject knowledge expertise of the teacher and de-professionalizes them. In particular it loses a sense of the teachers’ knowledge of how to make particular kinds of academic knowledge accessible to particular students.14 A focus on this kind of knowledge highlights that, whilst teaching can be usefully understood in terms of designing an environment for students, this environment has an educational intention within it. It is about designing ways in which particular students can develop an understanding of particular bodies of disciplinary and/or professional knowledge15 and involves creating an environment in which students relate their identities to their disciplines/professions and the world and see themselves implicated in knowledge. Third, as well as underestimating teaching expertise, a focus on student-centredness puts the importance of educational institutions into the background. This is because it positions institutions in opposition to the natural process of learning. Rather than being understood as providing students with a thoughtfully designed context in which they can establish powerful relationships to knowledge, educational institutions are instead positioned as an authoritarian imposition which simply gets in the way of students be able to meet

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their needs as learners.16 This can lead to educators and institutions being caught in a trap where if they resist changes towards studentcentred learning, then this is taken as further evidence of their inflexibility and how they distort the ‘natural’ process of learning.17 Any resistance to the idea of student-centred learning is read as a signal of an even greater need for a shift to student-centredness rather than as a principled concern about a distortion of the educational process.

The myth of the assessment of students’ work as a transparent measurement The assessment of students’ work is a site of much misunderstanding in relation to higher education. It is often presented as if it gives a transparent indication of what students have learnt. However, it is a process that is informed by the expert judgement of teachers, which needs to be shaped by the way in which the course is designed.18 The ways in which students are assessed send clear messages to students about what is expected. Some argue that if students learn deeply they should be able to tackle any assessment – without knowing what it will be. Otherwise, the argument goes, all we have done is prepare students for the test without them having achieved any genuine understanding. This is sometimes used as an argument for separating the role of teaching and providing credit for student learning by setting up national examinations that are not connected to particular university degree programmes.19 But students will always think about what they need to do with what they are learning – it is an element of the way in which they achieve understanding. And ‘teaching to the test’ is only a problem if those designing the course have chosen the wrong assessment. This is more likely to happen if course designers do not have any control over how students are assessed because they become focused on the demands of the external examination rather than designing assessment that is focused on assessing students’ understanding. If the assessment requires students to show genuine understanding of what they have learned, then students can be introduced to the assessment from the first day of a course to show them where they are going, and how they will be supported to get there.

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A related element of this myth is the current moral panic in many higher education systems about grade inflation.20 This is the concern that a far greater proportion of students are receiving good results in their degrees than used to be the case. The sense of moral panic arises from concerns that students and academics have entered a Faustian pact in which the student will give positive feedback on teaching, providing they are not challenged too much and are given a good grade at the end of the module and programme.21 Higher education institutions further encourage this appalling situation because they look better in university rankings if students perform well in their degrees. This creates a situation in which students are offered a dumbed-down degree while universities proclaim that they have worked educational wonders. This is a characterization of the situation that demands that action is taken as quickly as possible to prevent this scandalous situation and to address the duplicity of academics and universities. In responding to this myth, it is important to be clear that the evidence for grade inflation in many higher education systems is compelling.22 The situation has not been helped by some responding to the sense of panic by arguing that the improvement in students’ grades demonstrates how the quality of education has increased over time and is something that should be celebrated. This does not help because, in some higher education systems, grades have risen everywhere and so do not appear to be linked to the quality of education. However before we proclaim this an educational scandal, we need to have a sense of the causes of grade inflation. There are a number of plausible reasons for grade inflation. First, it is certainly the case that how students perform in their degrees has become more important for both students and higher education institutions. When a lower proportion of the working population had a degree, it used to be that simply having a degree helped graduates to get a job. It is now the case that the outcome of the degree is increasingly important. Universities are equally more accountable for how students perform in their degrees. Together this means that there is more pressure for students to do well and more incentive for institutions to carefully consider whether they have fully recognized students’ educational achievements. This will lead to some increase in grades awarded but not by deception. A related trend has been

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for degree programmes to be far more explicit about the levels of performance that are expected to receive good grades. This is for educationally sound reasons. It is fair and just that students know on what basis their performance will be assessed and what counts as a high-quality performance. However, it is also true that making things explicit in this way makes it more likely that students will perform well. If assessment criteria are shrouded in secrecy then it is fairly obvious that fewer students will do well and students with the greatest familiarity with the educational context will be best placed to work out what is expected of them. However, assessing students on implicit criteria does not provide a purer measure of students’ ability and understanding and, as those most familiar with the educational context are likely to be the most privileged, largely serves to reinforce social inequalities. The problem with grade inflation is that too many politicians, employers, parents and students expect educational assessment to be able to give a fine-grained assessment of a person rather than a more limited assessment of how students have performed on a particular task. This suggests that the moral panic comes from an unreasonable expectation of the power of assessment. It is seen as a high precision measurement instrument, whereas in reality it is a relatively blunt tool. It is also worth considering the alternative to grade inflation. This is to limit the proportion of students who can be awarded each grade, which is also known as ‘grading on the curve’.23 Whilst this can be done with apparently amazing accuracy and the quoting of lots of impressive numbers, it is educational nonsense. It is only justifiable if we make the assumption that in any class there will be the same proportion of people who do well, averagely and badly regardless of the educational experience they have. It basically assumes that education has no effect! So the answer to grade inflation is for degree programmes to be clearer about what their assessment judgements mean. They need to ensure that they have designed rigorous assessments that examine the extent of students’ understanding and to make sure they properly moderate and validate their assessment judgements. Those who use the outcomes of degree programmes to select employees need to recognize the fallible and blunt judgements involved in assessment

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and not expect them to provide a rounded assessment of the whole person. It is worth noting that the current trend of universities producing glamorous lists of the attributes supposedly displayed by their graduates pushes in completely the opposite direction than the one that is argued for here. This kind of marketing masquerading as a careful assessment judgement is likely to further fuel the public concern over grade inflation.

The myth of the naturally gifted student Just as there is a myth that teaching should be about naturally brilliant teachers, there is a myth that the main focus of university education should be the nurturing of innately brilliant students.24 The others can come along for the ride if they choose but their success or failure is something that they simply need to take responsibility for themselves. Once again, it is important to be clear that there are some brilliant students. However, there are three key problems with this way of thinking. First, the idea that education should be designed around this very small number of students suggests that higher education is not there to educate students but rather to confirm brilliance where it finds it. In contrast, the argument here is that we should not design systems around exceptional talent but should instead focus on supporting all students. Second, the problem with this belief in the need to nurture the already brilliant is that this kind of ability is usually a synonym for privilege. In many countries, those students who have had access to the greatest educational resources before university are by far the most likely to have the opportunity to develop their brilliance25 as this process starts very early in childhood. This means that we end up putting our educational effort into those who have already benefitted the most from their previous educational experiences. Third, this is based on a view of the potential of students being fixed. Either you have ability or you don’t. This view seems to be increasingly dominant across some education systems, in which children’s educational performance is repeatedly measured from very young ages in the apparent belief that this will ensure that teachers take their jobs seriously and that it will provide an insight into how these children

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will do later in life. This is nonsense. People develop at different rates and at different stages in their lives. It also misses the point of an education, as if academic performance was the only thing that matters in becoming a fulfilled human being. This lie is damaging to those who do well as well as to those who it writes off as failures. Those who do well tend to underestimate the abilities of people who have performed less well and overestimate their own abilities. Some who do well academically can wonder why they feel unfulfilled in the rest of their lives when they were told that doing well educationally was the key to their success. However, far greater damage is done to those who experience challenges early in their lives and are written off as educational failures. The point of an education is to engage all potential students and support them to learn. Clearly this can only happen if students put in the effort, but to focus the greatest resources in an education system on the ‘brilliant’ simply creates a system that further benefits the already privileged. Wherever systems of elite education are created and celebrated, there will be great competition to access them. It is no surprise that those whose families have the greatest resources are most likely to be successful in these elite systems but we should not compound this injustice by mistaking this success for a sign that they are much more talented than those with fewer resources who do not succeed.

The myth of the conservative and instrumental student A myth that draws on the same kind of loss of innocence narrative as the moral panic of grade inflation is the view that students are simply not what they used to be. It is argued that students today do not want to be challenged by going to university.26 They simply expect to be spoon-fed and mollycoddled. These students, we are told, need an urgent wake-up call and to understand that university is not school. They should not expect carefully planned courses or their lecturers to take account of what they already know. Instead students should expect to take responsibility for their own learning and intellectual exploration and, above all, stop moaning about how much it all costs.

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However persuasive these ideas seem at first glance, it is worth noting that they are not new and that every new generation is portrayed as depressingly instrumental by the generations who went before them. In this golden-age conservatism dressed up as radicalism, the past is always more heavenly than it was and the present always a tiny tiptoe away from hell. More worryingly, there are also a number of false dichotomies at work here, which seek to imply that statements of the obvious provide incontrovertible proof for statements of the deeply dubious. As one example, just because students are not simply consumers of higher education, this does not mean that there are no aspects of their experiences that can be helpfully understood in these terms. Given governments, students and their families are investing large amounts of money in higher education, why should they not have access to information about the quality of courses? Clearly there are debates to be had about which forms of information are the most meaningful but it is very strange to suggest that anyone wanting to know about the quality of university courses thinks that higher education is nothing more than the latest entrant into the luxury goods market. As a second example, whilst it is clearly students’ responsibility to engage with the subject matter of their degrees and to follow these ideas beyond the curriculum, this does not imply that university teachers have no responsibility for making this knowledge accessible to students. Rather a key element of university teachers’ responsibilities is to design curricula and learning experiences that give students the best chance of engaging meaningfully with disciplinary knowledge. This is intellectually demanding work in which academics need to draw on their understanding of their disciplines and on their understanding of their students in order to find ways of opening up the path to understanding. Further, it is part of academics’ duty as public intellectuals to make their disciplines and fields of study accessible to anyone who is interested in learning about them and, in doing so, to show why higher education plays such an important role in society. Obviously, no one can make students, or anyone else for that matter, learn. Students need to engage thoughtfully and honestly with the ideas and concepts that they encounter in their courses. However, there is no evidence that students are any more reluctant

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to do this than they have ever been. In fact there is plenty of evidence that students are aware that they need to actively engage in their educational experiences.27 Students across all kinds of higher education institutions want to be stretched by what they study and expect to work hard. Indeed it is often the difficult nature of what they are learning that leads to the chief benefits of participating in higher education: being transformed by the knowledge that they are studying, and thereby changing their understanding of themselves and the world. As a whole, these seven myths underpin a distorted view of the key elements of a university education, by presenting it in terms of the brilliance of individual teachers, the efficiency of particular teaching methods for supporting the processes of students’ learning and in which students are assessed in highly precise ways despite their innate passivity and conservatism. It is important to be clear that whilst some elements of this view are educationally important, such as the focus on students’ learning processes, as a whole, it does not provide a rich enough picture of the educational processes that underpin a university education. We need to base the approach to these educational processes on a more complete picture of the overall educational intention.

How else can we think about the key elements of a university education? As I discussed in the previous chapter, an alternative way of thinking about the educational process in higher education is to focus on the design of curricula that provide students with access to knowledge that will transform their sense of who they are and what they can do in the world. To do this, university teachers need to have a clear sense of who their students are, how the knowledge they will give them access to be powerful and who this knowledge will enable students to become in the wider lives as well as in their careers. It is clear that students might change in ways that their university teachers do not expect but their teachers should have a sense of what they are intending to achieve by giving students access

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to this knowledge. In other words, they have a responsibility as educators to know how they think students will benefit by studying with them. It is also important to be clear that this is demanding work  – it does not always work and teachers need to continually collect, analyse, discuss and reflect on evidence with their colleagues about how well  their approaches to curriculum design and teaching are working.28 If we understand the educational role of undergraduate degrees in this way, then this will have an impact on how we measure the quality of these degrees. Rather than graduate labour market outcomes, we would focus on how degree programmes are designed to give students access to powerful knowledge, the extent to which they are successful in providing students access to this knowledge and what students gain from their engagement with this knowledge. It is worth noting that this is far more demanding of degree programmes and universities than measuring labour market outcomes. It would also provide students with much more useful information about the quality of education offered by different degree programmes. Six principles underpin this way of understanding educational processes in higher education. These principles offer a condensed view of a number of sets of educational principles that have been developed internationally over many years. What is remarkable about these sets of principles is that, whilst they vary in the number of principles and their precise focus, the core view of education that underpins them has remained consistent over more than thirty years.29 This suggests that they have identified something fundamental about the educational processes involved in higher education. The six principles used here seek to focus on the core view of education from across these sets of principles. These core principles are that a high-quality university education: 1 Starts from an understanding of who the students are; 2 Is based on a deep understanding of the knowledge being taught and how to make this accessible to students; 3 Is designed as a coherent set of experiences that will enable particular students to develop an understanding of particular bodies of knowledge;

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4 Is based on a clear sense of how students are expected to change through their engagement with these experiences; 5 Evaluates students’ learning in terms of their understanding of these bodies of knowledge; 6 Is collectively produced. I discuss these principles in detail in Chapter 5. For now, I give a brief overview of how they characterize the educational process involved in a high-quality university education. The first principle is to start educational processes from an understanding of who the students are. As I argued earlier, whilst students should not be the only focus of the educational process, in order for any process to be meaningfully educational it needs to start from students’ current levels of understanding. Otherwise, students end up being blamed for their lack of understanding even though this is the result of poor educational design. It is important that if we are going to encourage more people to engage with education in a meaningful way, then we should never be dismissive of, or amused by, someone who does not know or understand something but is trying to learn. This is just snobbery. A key part of any educational process is to understand the starting point of students and where we would like them to get to, and then to design an educational experience that we judge will allow them to achieve the intended understanding.30 The second principle highlights that to design this kind of educational experience requires a rich and three-dimensional understanding of this knowledge and how different students can come to understand its significance and meaning. The third principle shows that this design process should result in a degree programme that is built around a coherent set of experiences that will help students to achieve this kind of understanding. The focus of the fourth principle is that as students work their ways through this programme, those teaching it should have a clear sense of how they expect students to change their understanding over the course of this programme. There should be a clear sense of how the different elements of the programme contribute to this development of understanding. The fifth principle is that this understanding should then be assessed in ways that examine how students have achieved a meaningful relationship

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to the bodies of knowledge they have gained access to on their degree programme. Assessment needs to be not only demanding of students but also fair in what it asks them to do. This final principle highlights the way in which any form of teaching is collective. Even if a teacher is working on their own then they are giving students access to collective bodies of knowledge that have been generated by many people over many years. They are also part of programmes that are taught by a number of different people and in order for students to be given a coherent educational experience, these different parts need to relate to each other with a clear idea of how they work together as a whole.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined seven myths about the educational processes involved in higher education. Based on the challenging of these myths, I have outlined six principles that high-quality educational processes in higher education should be aligned to. In Chapter 6, I examine what an educational process that aligned to these principles would look like. However, the idea of high-quality educational processes raises questions about how we measure the quality of educational processes. When considering how to measure quality, there are, once again, a number of myths that need to be dealt with. In the next chapter, I look at this final set of myths.

4 Challenging myths measuring the quality of university education

I

n the previous chapter, I examined myths about the key elements of the education offered by universities. However, there are also myths about how we can measure and understand the quality of this education that I will focus on in this chapter. I examine how current approaches to the measurement of educational quality distort our understanding of a high-quality university education. The first part of the chapter examines three key sets of measurement myths that dominate debates about educational quality. Based on the discussion of these myths, the second part of this chapter outlines seven characteristics that would be required of any approach for measuring the quality of a university education. It is first worth considering why the measurement of educational quality is important enough to warrant its own chapter. Across the world there are increasingly discussions of how students choose the degree courses that they will study and on how employers select graduates based on the degree courses that they have studied.1 This means that gaining a rich sense of the quality of different degree programmes is very important. However, as I have argued in Chapters 2 and 3, too often notions of quality are based on the prestige of higher education institutions rather than the actual quality of the degree programmes that they offer. A problem with this is that it reinforces inequalities. This is because more prestigious institutions

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take a higher proportion of privileged students2 and already privileged students are further privileged by the appearance that their degrees are worth more than those of other students. This appearance is equally seductive to students, academics, institutions, employers and wider societies. However, if we are to have a fairer sense of educational quality, then establishing more just ways of measuring educational quality is very important. It is for this reason that this chapter focuses on the measurement of educational quality.

Measurement myths In the first part of this chapter, I examine three sets of myths around the measurement of the quality of a university education. The most common way that people think about the quality of degree courses is university rankings. I first examine how these are built round a series of myths that distort out understandings of quality before exploring two underpinning myths of the measurement process that also unhelpfully distort understanding of what valid measurement of educational quality would look like. These are: the myth of big data and the myth of the silver bullet.

The myths of commercial rankings At first glance having a chapter dedicated to the measurement of educational quality might seem self-indulgent. Surely we have all the information we need provided by the proliferation of university rankings that are available? Is it not simply academic nitpicking to question these independent, transparent and rigorous measures of the quality of degree programmes? It is important to recognize that, for many, commercial university rankings appear to offer a widely trusted and easily comprehensible measure of the quality of universities. These rankings can travel across a number of contexts and audiences. They make apparent sense to universities, to students, to policy makers and to employers, who feel that they know what is meant by being a top 10 university nationally or a top 100 university internationally. Universities around the world use these rankings as a

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way of encouraging prospective students to join them and to measure their success as an institution and the performance of their staff. They cover their websites and the windows of their buildings in loud proclamations about their performance in these rankings. Surely they wouldn’t do this if they thought the rankings were nonsense. Equally universities are full of academics who are trained in dissecting false claims, and no flawed ranking would survive the intensity of their critical gaze. Given all of this, how can they not be a valid measure? Unfortunately, universities engage in ‘doublethink’3 in respect of university rankings: they know they are nonsense but they still ‘celebrate’ their success in them as if they say something meaningful. For institutions whose central role is to take care of knowledge for society, it is chilling how they consciously deceive themselves and others by claiming that their performance in commercial rankings provides valid information about the quality of their education. Much of the harm that has been done by university rankings is the fault of universities for the ways in which they have incorporated them into their marketing and their measures of staff and institutional performance without any sustained critique of their measures by university leaders. The defeatist attitude is that, given their popularity, university rankings are here to stay and therefore there is nothing left for university leaders to do but highlight tables where they do well and ignore those in which they do badly. The losers are the university staff who are entreated to put the chasing of these largely meaningless measures at the centre of their work and the prospective students who are misled into thinking that these rankings tell them something useful about educational quality. They do not. In explaining the problems with commercial rankings, the first thing to address is their appearance as transparent measurements of educational quality.4 It is important to be clear that their purpose is not primarily to measure the quality of education; it is to sell things.5 Commercial rankings, for example, allow their producers to sell advertising to the universities they are claiming to measure. Many universities pay for such advertising to raise their profiles with the hope of improving their position in the rankings. Producers of rankings also organize expensive conferences to launch their results and host discussions about the meanings of their rankings. They offer consultancy services to universities who wish to improve their

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standings in the rankings. Some producers of commercial rankings use their data to produce many different rankings so that they further increase these money-making opportunities. More rankings mean more advertising, more conferences, more consultancy opportunities and more revenue. Universities pay more and more to improve their position in these meaningless measures in order to increase student enrolments and generate more income. In the end, it is student tuition fees, whether paid by governments or students, that fund this bubble. So this is why rankings are so popular with rankers but what about the claim that they are meaningless measures? First university rankings tend to involve unrelated and incomparable measures that are then aggregated into a single score. This incomparability makes this single score essentially meaningless. The rankings that are then produced are based on differences on these meaningless scores that can make very small differences in the scores look very large by separating institutions with similar scores by many places in the ranking.6 Second, university rankings tend to use measures and ways of combining measures that favour higher status institutions. The reason for this is fairly obvious. Most of the audiences for university rankings already have a strong sense of which universities they think are high quality. If a university ranking does not have the universities that ‘everyone knows’ are the best at the top, then there is something wrong with that ranking. This means that the compliers of university rankings need to be careful to ensure the credibility of their rankings by having most of the socially prestigious universities near the top of their ranking.7 Whilst it is possible to have a few surprises with less prestigious universities doing particularly well or some prestigious universities doing badly, and indeed this can give the appearance of even greater rigour, too many of these surprises start to undermine the credibility of the ranking. When considering university rankings as measures of educational quality, it is also worth considering the factors that are used to generate these judgements of quality. University rankings tend to have little or no metrics which directly relate to the quality of teaching in universities. The measures they use as proxies, such as staffstudent ratios, entry requirements, number of PhD students and

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reputation surveys, do not tell us anything about the quality about the education on offer but do tell us about the level of prestige and resources of an institution.8 Reputation surveys provide a useful example of the problems with the kind of measures used. These are often heralded as providing important data. A rigorously selected group of academics and employers are presented as being asked to give their considered judgement about which are the top institutions in a particular disciplinary or professional area. On the face of it, this looks very impressive. Who better to comment on the quality of different institutions than those who work in them or those who employ graduates from those institutions? However, the actual working of these reputation surveys is so much less than it first appears. Essentially, academics and employers are simply asked to list the institutions they think are the best in a particular area. They are not asked for any evidence or what underpins their thinking. So it is not at all clear what their judgement is based on. The most likely basis is that it is the prestige of the institutions, which simply reinforces the ways in which rankings are based on prestige. Most academics and employers do not have an insight into the quality of the degree programmes that different institutions offer unless they have directly worked with them and so it is not at all obvious that their opinions of these institutions are worth listening to when thinking about the quality of degree programmes. Of course, the existence of reputation surveys acts as a further incentive for universities to spend money on advertising their existence to those who complete these surveys in the hope that they are remembered when individuals are compiling their lists. Many universities encourage their staff to email their colleagues from around the world when reputation surveys are being completed, in order to remind them of their institution’s existence. This is in the hope that the name might stick in their minds long enough to be added to the list of excellent institutions when they complete the survey. The result of all of these processes is that most university rankings tend to be relatively stable, with the most prestigious institutions grouped towards the top of the ranking.These higher status institutions tend to enrol a much greater proportion of privileged students.9 This means that rankings tend to reinforce privilege because, whilst they contain very little or no valid data on the quality of university teaching,

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they strongly suggest that students who attend these universities have experienced a higher quality education than other students.

The myth of big data Whilst the popularity of university rankings is based on a cluster of myths and misunderstandings, there are other myths that inform the ways that we think about the measurement of educational quality. The myth of big data is the belief that measurement will be improved if we increase the points of measurement across students’ experiences of higher education and combine them.10 This myth shares some characteristics with the myths underpinning university rankings but the idea here is that if only we have enough data points, we will be fully able to understand the factors that lead to the creation of highquality educational interactions. This kind of way of thinking about the measurement of quality initially developed in relation to online settings through learning analytics that could track many aspects of students’ educational journeys: how often they log on, for how long, whom they interact with and how often they post. These can be tracked and related to their academic performance on modules.11 The problem with this way of thinking is that it misunderstands what these kinds of data can tell us. There are two aspects to this misunderstanding. First, it fails to take account of the ways in which these measures are taken out of the educational context. Whilst many aspects of the educational context can be examined, they need to be converted into numbers to become part of big data. As they are converted into numbers, the temptation is to assume that these measures can be combined and related in an unproblematic manner.12 In this way measures that are unrelated to each other can be combined to produce an aggregate score that looks highly precise but is in fact lacking in any useful meaning. A second problem with big data is that it encourages us to focus on what data are available rather than on what data are actually important measures of educational quality. If we go back to the use of learning analytics in online courses, they can tell us about what students do online that leaves a trace but they cannot tell us about what students are thinking or how that thinking is changed

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by the ways in which they have interacted online. The response to these limitations is to use proxies such as self-reported measure of skill development, competencies, content knowledge and personal growth to gain a precise insight into the nature of educational quality. However, this treats these different measures as if they are precise and independent ways of measuring the quality of the educational process. In reality, they have the precision of a sledgehammer. For example, where do skills end and competencies begin? What is the difference between growing personally and gaining new knowledge? These measures overlap in a myriad of ways because they are different ways of describing the same educational processes, rather than separate aspects of an educational experience. The level of overlap means that they cannot be combined into a precise account of students’ experiences and any attempt to do so is doomed to failure.13 Overall, the idea that if only we had more sources of data then we could establish better measures of the quality of education is a chimera. The complex and messy nature of educational processes, and most importantly the way in which humans respond to being measured, means that they cannot be measured in the same precise way that we measure non-conscious material objects. This is not because measurement in the social science lags behind the physical sciences, it is because the nature of the things that are being measured is different and requires different kinds of approaches to produce valid measures of their properties.

The myth of the silver bullet Once the realization sets in that the promises of big data for measuring educational quality are largely mythic, a common response is to fall back on the myth of the silver bullet. This accepts that there is no meaningful way to combine different measures. Instead, it looks for one single measure that is often related to a high-quality outcome, though it does not capture everything about quality.14 The problem with this is that any silver bullet will ricochet against Goodhart’s Law,15 that is, once a measure becomes a performance indicator it ceases to be a good measure. In other words, once institutions know they

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are going to be assessed on a measure, they change their practices in order to maximize their performance on this measure. This means that whilst a factor may have co-varied with overall quality in the past, the moment it becomes a high-stakes performance measure, it loses its previous close relationship with quality. Even more worryingly, the changes in practices of the institutions as they chase this new measure can lead to an overall reduction in quality. One way of addressing this problem is to focus on measures of processes as well as outcomes.16 This is because this creates a situation where the simplest way to ‘fix’ the system is to actually engage in processes that will enhance the quality of teaching and learning. This is not to argue that we should not include outcome measures but rather that these need to be underpinned by measures that provide evidence about how these outcomes have been achieved. The kinds of problems that are produced by selecting the wrong kinds of performance measures can be illustrated through the example of contact hours, the number of hours teaching a student gets on their course, as a measure of teaching quality. Many argue that contact hours are self-evidently a measure of how much care an institution takes with their teaching.17 Surely more teaching hours mean that a course is of higher quality? However it depends on what is done in these hours. In fact measuring teaching quality by the number of teaching hours is like judging the quality of a novel by its number of pages, which if adopted as a measure would mean that EL James’s 50 Shades of Grey is twice as good as Toni Morrison’s Beloved. These are two completely different novels that it makes very little sense to compare but the act of putting them on a common measurement scale obscures the differences between them. The same thing happens when we compare different degree programmes by their number of contact hours. Whilst this comparison may at first seem fanciful, considering it in more detail is instructive. Producing a high-quality degree programme involves designing a range of experiences that allow students to achieve an understanding of the knowledge they are engaging with, just as writing a novel involves designing a narrative that draws readers in and invites them to make meaning from what they are reading. Clearly a certain number of hours are necessary for a course to be considered a degree course, just as a certain number of pages

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are necessary for a story to be considered a novel. However, adding more contact hours to an already well-designed degree programme will not improve its quality, any more than adding pages to a good novel will make it even better. The other striking parallel is that both of these purported measures of quality are incredibly easy to rig. If the quality of novels was measured by the number of pages, then publishers would doubtlessly reduce page sizes, increase font sizes or include longer blurbs and biographies. Similarly, faced with a measure of contact hours, universities would redefine what counts as a contact hour. Suddenly it would include academics’ office hours, regardless of whether any students turned up. And what about throwing in those staff-student social events? There was definitely some informal feedback provided there. While the regulators would react by attempting to control what is counted as a page or a contact hour, there would always be space to finesse each new definition. So why are contact hours so often seen to be such a good measure of quality? Partly it is because this approach appeals to a common sense notion of what students should be entitled to. However, it is one thing to insist on a university applicant’s right to know how many contact hours they will receive on particular programmes. It is quite another to propose that figure as a valid measures of the quality of those programmes. Like university rankings and big data, the apparent promise of ‘silver bullets’ to solve our measurement problem disappears when we examine it in detail. In the next section, I outline some further issues that face us when we attempt to establish valid measures of educational quality.

Why poor measurement of quality matters At the start of this chapter, I examined the reasons that measurement mattered in terms of avoiding a situation where quality is defined in terms of institutional prestige rather than by the quality of the education offered by particular degree programmes. In addition to

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a sense of creating fair assessments of educational quality, there are also a number of unintended but predictable outcomes of measurement systems that can only be addressed if a robust system of quality assessment is established.18

Gaming As we saw in the example of measuring the quality of degree programmes by their contact hours, institutions will often look for the simplest way of improving their performance on any measure. Some see this as duplicitous behaviour on the part of universities19 but this is not usually the case. It is rather that if you are in a leadership position in an institution, then you have a responsibility to ensure that your institution performs as well as possible on any measure of quality. The success of the institution, the job security of those who work at the institution and the value of your students’ degrees will all be affected by how your institution performs. In these circumstances, it makes complete sense to ensure that you use any advantage possible, particularly if you know that other institutions will do the same. However, whilst it makes sense, it also undermines the validity of a measure of quality that is compromised by institutional gaming in this way. If a system for measuring quality allows institutions to game the system, then this is a problem with the measurement system rather than with the lack of morals of the institutions concerned. Rather than blame the institutions involved, we need to create robust measures of quality measurement that do not allow institutions to game the system.

The costs of measurement Another issue with the ways in which many systems of measurement are presented as transparent ways of assessing quality is that it tends to conceal the costs of such measurement. This raises a more general challenge about assessing university quality: there is a risk of chasing more and more specific and complex indicators, leading to immensely complex, costly and unwieldly processes.20 While the cure of ‘transparency’21 is offered as simplifying and clarifying, it

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can lead to sustained calls for ever more fine-grained specifications and complex measures. This contradiction is typical of attempts to make expert systems transparent; in chasing simple, clear facts, we see a proliferation of measures and data.22 This is because there is a difference between a full, rich account of processes that can be developed within a single institution and simplified measures that are used to compare processes between institutions. The expectation that quality systems can provide this kind of full, rich description mistakes what is possible within a single institution for what is possible in making comparisons across a system. This is exactly the same issue that we face when considering the meaning of students’ degree outcomes. Within an institution, these outcomes are based on many assessments of their work by disciplinary experts, comparing them to their immediate peers and an experience-based sense of the ‘expected’ level of learning for a given programme. However, when we compare degree outcomes across a higher education system, the costs of making this fine-grained information meaningful are prohibitively expensive, and if it is offered, it is too confusing for those who are trying to use it. Attempts to give employers and society a better sense of the meaning of degree results run into this problem. This is the reason that, as I argued in the previous chapter, the response to concern about grade inflation should be to explain the kind of judgement that is offered by these grades rather than to appear to accept that fine-grained, precise comparisons are possible.

Characteristics of an alternative approach to measuring the quality of university education In identifying measures of quality that put teaching and learning at the heart of what is measured, the pitfalls identified in discussing dominant myths of measurement can be drawn upon to develop criteria that an alternative approach would need to meet. Based on these, a valid measure would need to have the following characteristics23:

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1 Reflect the purposes of higher education; 2 Examine quality at the level of the particular degree rather than the institution; 3 Measure the quality of teaching offered rather than reputation or prestige; 4 Draw on a variety of measures that tell us about quality from different perspectives; 5 As a whole, are based on a coherent, research-informed vision of the educational process; 6 Require improvements in educational practices in order to improve performance on the measures; 7 Provide a relatively simple comparison of educational quality.

1. Reflect the purposes of higher education The first principle is that any measure of educational quality needs to reflect the purposes of higher education. The idea here is that any notion of educational quality gains its meaning from the purpose that informs the judgement of quality. A screwdriver has a high quality for removing screws but less quality when used to hammer nails into a wall. There a number of consequences of this principle. First, it means that we would have different measures of quality for different purposes of higher education. Part of the appeal of university rankings is that they seem to stand for a general notion of quality but this appeal is entirely misleading because any institution will have strengths in some areas and not in others. Second, if we are to measure the quality of an educational process then there needs to be discussion about the purpose of that educational process. For something as important as undergraduate degrees, we should expect disagreements over this because defining purposes in this way is not a technical exercise but something that speaks to our underpinning sense of what education is for. As I argued in Chapter 2, too often the purposes of higher education have been positioned in instrumental, economic terms rather than in terms of what is the

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educational purpose of studying a degree. Across Chapters 2 and 3, I made an argument for understanding this in terms of the role that higher education plays in bringing students into a transformational relationship to knowledge that transforms their sense of who they are and what they can do in the world. In Chapter 6, I outline an approach to measuring the quality of educational processes in higher education that reflects this way of understanding the purposes of higher education.

2. Examine quality at the level of the particular degree rather than the institution The second principle is that any measure of education needs to be focused on the particular degree that students will study rather than the overall institution. There is plenty of evidence that the quality of degree programmes varies within a single institution.24 This is important because if prospective students and employers want to use a measure of quality to inform whether they should study a particular degree or employ a particular graduate then they need to know about the particular degree programme concerned rather than simply about the institution.

3. Measure the quality of teaching offered rather than reputation or prestige The third principle is related to the second. This is because it is often when we consider quality at the level of the institution that reputation or prestige becomes mistaken for quality. However, this can also happen at the level of a particular programme where accounts of who has studied the programme previously or the names of the illustrious academics who are teaching on the programme are taken as indicators of the educational quality of the programme. To be clear, these factors send some useful information about the kinds of networks that studying the programme may give students access to but they do not tell prospective students or employers anything about the educational quality of the programme. As I argued in Chapter 3, in order to gain a sense of the quality of educational processes we

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need to have access to information about how the programme has been designed to work as a whole. In Chapter 7, I discuss ideas about how to measure the quality of undergraduate degrees in a way that provides evidence about the quality of the educational design of the programme.

4. Draw on a variety of measures that tell us about quality from different perspectives The fourth principle is that to gain a sense of the educational quality of a degree programme we need to know about it from different perspectives. We need to have a sense of what students studying the programmes think of it; we need to know what students go onto do after they have graduated (all students rather than famous individuals). Crucially, if we are to avoid the gaming of the outcomes of the quality assessment process, then we need to have measures of both the educational process and the outcomes of the educational process. When quality measures focus only on outcomes then they are far more likely to be gamed by the institutions concerned. Adding in the right kind of measures of the educational process, that give a sense of how the outcomes were achieved, can make it much more difficult to game the system.

5. As a whole, are based on a coherent, research-informed vision of the educational process The eagle-eyed reader will have pounced like a hawk on the weasel words in the final sentence considering the previous principle. What on earth can be meant by ‘the right kind of measure’? Is this not just a tautology that basically asserts that ‘a good measure’ will provide ‘good measurement’? It is the fifth principle that takes us beyond this circular argument because it offers a definition of what the right kinds of measures are. These are measures that are based on a coherent, research-informed vision of the educational process. This is one of the key problems with university rankings and many system-wide attempts to measure educational quality. They rely on

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the data that is available rather than first defining the nature of a highquality education. The crucial thing here is to realize that the process of measurement plays a key role in defining quality. What we choose to measure defines quality because institutions, in just the same ways as students, will respond to the ways in which they are assessed. We need to have convincing reasons for selecting the measures we use. The argument here is that these measures need to be built around a coherent vision of educational processes that is based on what we know about educational processes. In Chapter 6, I produce this kind of account and, in Chapter 7, I use this account to support an argument for how we should judge the quality of university degree programmes.

6. Require improvements in educational practices in order to improve performance on the measures The sixth principle takes the issue of the gaming of performance measures head-on. This principle means that we should only use measures of quality that require institutions to improve their educational practices in order to improve their performance on the measure. It is worth noting that in systems of quality measurement that are focused on comparing institutions, including university rankings, this is not usually the case. This is because such comparisons do not require that institutions improve their educational practices to improve their performance. All that is required is that they do better than other institutions. If the performance of all other institutions drops then an institution will see its position in the rankings rise if its performance remains the same or even if its performance falls less than the others. Similarly, institutions can fall in the rankings if they improve but at a lower rate than their rivals. In effect the requirement that performance improvement is directly linked to educational quality involves ensuring that the most cost-effective way of improving an institutions’ performance on the measurement of quality is to improve its educational practices. Otherwise, institutions will also take the cheaper option of gaming the system. This is difficult to achieve and is completely dependent on higher education institutions assigning a high value to their performance on the measure of quality.

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7. Provide a relatively simple comparison of educational quality This last principle emphasizes the need for relatively simple measures of educational quality. The idea of ‘relative simplicity’ rather than simply ‘simplicity’ gives a sense of uncertainty about the value of simplicity. This uncertainty comes from the tension between how useful simple comparisons appear to be for making choices between things and the extent to which these simple comparisons distort our understanding of quality and lead us to make poorly informed choices. The desirability of simplicity is best illustrated by the popularity of university rankings. Part of this popularity is founded on the way in which they make sense to a wide variety of users without the need for lengthy explanations of what they mean. However, it is precisely this simplicity that makes them so misleading. Whilst we cannot wish the attraction of simplicity away, we also cannot undermine the importance of establishing valid measures of educational quality. The principle is that we need to have the simplest possible measures of educational quality that also provide valid assessments of educational quality.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have explained how a series of myths about the measurement of educational quality have distorted our understanding of the comparative quality of university degrees. In response, I argued for seven criteria that any valid measure of educational quality would need to meet. It is important to be clear that these criteria function as a whole rather than individual criterion standing alone. In the first part of this book, I have explored a series of myths about the purposes of undergraduate education, the nature of the educational process it involves and ways of measuring its quality. In other words, the first part of the book has been focused on critiquing current arrangements. This is an important start but, on its own, is not enough. Too often academics stop at critique without achieving a sense of how things can be different than they are. In Part Two of the

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book, I develop an account of alternative approaches to understanding the purposes, educational processes and measurement of quality in undergraduate degrees. It is important to be clear that the purpose of this account is not for it to be considered definitive but for it to be part of a wider debate about these issues. It is only through this kind of collective debate and argument that we can develop robust and workable ways of thinking about university education.

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PART TWO

A case for university education

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5 The purposes of university education

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n Chapter 1, I argued that economic considerations inappropriately dominate public debates about the purposes of undergraduate higher education. I argued that focusing on increased earnings and life chances as the reasons that people should engage in higher education runs the risk of undermining educational reasons for higher education and the educational enterprise itself. In this chapter, I offer an alternative argument for the purposes of university education. This is focused on the ways in which engagement in undergraduate education transforms students’ sense of who they are and what they can do in the world. I first outline this view of the purposes of undergraduate higher education before examining a number of awkward questions about this way of understanding the purposes of higher education. In Chapter 6, I then examine the implications of this view for how we think about educational processes and, in Chapter 7, implications for how we measure the quality of these educational processes.

An alternative argument for the purposes of higher education In Chapter 1, I argued that economic justifications have overly dominated public discussions of the purposes of higher education.

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I argued that focusing solely on the role of higher education in supporting elevated salaries for graduates ends up undermining the educational purposes of higher education and ultimately higher education as an educational endeavour. I then introduced an alternative argument for the purposes of undergraduate education that is the focus of this book. This argument is that the purpose of undergraduate higher education is to help students to achieve an understanding of knowledge that can change their sense of who they are, what the world is and what they can do in the world. There are three aspects of this argument that are worth noting before I discuss the underpinning of this argument in more detail. First, this is a future-oriented argument that is focused on what students will be able to do in the future. It is about developing new ways of seeing the world that allow them to experience the world and understand themselves in new ways and to do new things in the future. Second, rather than seeing knowledge as list of facts, this way of thinking emphasizes the interrelated structure of a body knowledge. It is about systems of knowledge that have been built over millennia and through the contributions of many thousands of people. Third, to understand these systems of knowledge requires commitment on the part of students, and the engagement that comes from this commitment ends up changing who the student is. This highlights how knowledge is important in understanding what students have gained from higher education; knowledge also plays a crucial role in changing students’ understanding of themselves and the world.

What is meant by students developing transformational relations to knowledge? Whilst it takes only a few words to define the educational purpose of higher education in terms of helping students to achieve an understanding of knowledge that can change their sense of who they are, what the world is and what they can do in the world, it is not at all obvious about what this actually means. The danger is that this is taken to be vague educational waffle, so in this section I provide examples to illustrate its meaning. The simplest way of expressing what is meant by a transformative higher education is to say that it is an education that helps students

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to see the world differently. It is not an education that is about giving students access to facts but rather an education that changes the way in which they see the world.1 It does this by giving access to a body of knowledge that changes their understanding of the world. This body of knowledge clearly does include access to some facts but it is the way of seeing the world that is offered by this body of knowledge which is critical. As the body of knowledge grows, the meaning of particular facts within that body of knowledge may change but they are still underpinned by a way of understanding the world. The educational purpose of higher education is to introduce students to these bodies of knowledge so that they can achieve these ways of seeing. For example, in sociology,2 students can often start their degree by seeing that the study of sociology is about having strong opinions on contemporary social issues and arguing about these with their peers. As they engage in their studies, this can shift to understanding sociology in terms of the study of society and then seeing how their understanding of sociology changes how they see themselves as members of society. This is a complex process in which students can not only value their hard-won way of seeing but also feel a sense of loss as they realize they are an integral part and often benefit from the social systems they want to critique. Overall, students’ understanding of sociology shifts from a focus on the external appearance of sociology (it is about arguing about social issues) to a focus on the structure of the knowledge of sociology (the study of society), to a focus on how the student is implicated by this knowledge. A similar process can be found amongst law3 and accountancy4 students. In law, initially there is a focus on the content of the law and the sense that the legal profession’s job is to make the correct interpretation of laws; similarly in accountancy, there is a focus on the routine work of accountancy and its functions of recording and reporting. In law, students then shift to focus on the dynamic structure of the law and to understand the changing relationships between the legal system and society whereas accountancy students shift to a focus on accountancy as meaningful work that needs to be communicated to others. This is the moment where law and accountancy students are focused on the body of knowledge that underpins their degrees. As with sociology, some law and

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accountancy students then shift to consider their personal stance in relation to system, the moral dimensions of their work and how they might change the system rather than simply interpreting it. These changes are not limited to social sciences and professional disciplines. For example, in mathematics,5 students have similar shifts in their understanding of their subject from seeing mathematics as numbers, to mathematics as providing models and abstract structures, to mathematics as a way of life. In geography6 and geoscience7 there is a different shift. This moves from focusing on a general account of the world to understanding how the world is structured into parts, to understanding interactions between those parts. The difference here is that rather than starting with a focus on the particular as was the case with the processes discussed earlier, these accounts start focusing more generally. Crucially this then shifts to focusing on a structured whole. It is the ways that higher education gives students access to these bodies of knowledge that is important. This happens in different ways in different disciplines and professions. There are different starting and end points but what all these examples have in common is that they lead to students gaining a sense of the interrelated structure of knowledge that has been built in their discipline or professional area. It is this that enables students to see themselves and the world in new ways. It is this that is the defining feature of a university education and what makes that education transformational. These shifts in students’ understanding of their degree subjects give an insight into how engaging with knowledge at university changes students’ understanding of their disciplines, the world and themselves. This is a process that is so much more than the development of generic skills or the gaining of information. It is a process that fundamentally changes who students are and what they can achieve in the world. The diagram below attempts to illustrate how students are transformed by their engagement with structured bodies of knowledge at university. Their engagement with a body of knowledge changes their sense of who they are, their understanding of the world, and their understanding of what they can do in the world. The arrow between students and the world highlights that the experience of being at university can change students in ways that are not related to the structured bodies of knowledge that they are

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FIGURE 1 The transformational relationships of a university education. studying. These are the changes that happen through meeting new people and coming into contact with new ways of living at university. It is also worth noting that their experience of university can also change students in ways that are not mediated by knowledge. For example, some students report that what they gain from university is about how to present themselves in new social situations that are unrelated to the degree subjects they are studying.8 Many students meet new kinds of people at university that they have never engaged with before and this experience of diversity is an important element of their transformative experience which can be unrelated to their engagement with knowledge.

What are the implications of thinking about the purposes in this way? This way of thinking about the purposes of higher education is important because it highlights the ways in which an undergraduate education is about students gaining access to powerful bodies

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of knowledge.9 This way of understanding the purposes of an undergraduate higher education emphasizes the role of a university education in providing students with access to structured bodies of knowledge. This is an educational process and is underpinned by the educational intentions of the academics and institutions that are offering these degree programmes. This means that they have an educational responsibility to know why the knowledge they are offering students access to is powerful and what it will enable to students to do in the world. I will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 6 but there are two implications of this that should be noted at this point. First, the importance of students being offered access to structured bodies of knowledge highlights the need to have teachers who have a rich understanding of these bodies of knowledge. This requires that these teachers have a scholarly understanding of this knowledge and a personal relationship to it that supports them in understanding how to make it accessible to students. Second, this requires these teachers to be located in institutions that have a commitment to the stewardship of these bodies of knowledge. I will examine these implications in more detail in the next chapter when I discuss the nature of high-quality educational processes in higher education. Overall, this way of understanding the purposes of higher education highlights that undergraduate degrees are about providing students with access to structured bodies of knowledge that allow them to change the ways in which they understand the world and themselves. Their engagement with these bodies of knowledge transforms the ways in which they see and interact with the world. Through this transformation they develop understandings of the world and themselves that are useful in employment and their wider lives but it is important to be clear that this is a result of their engagement with academic knowledge rather than something that is separate or additional to this purpose. It is also important to be clear that it is the ways of seeing that are important rather than the knowledge itself. Clearly over time the knowledge will change but the ways of seeing are fundamental and allow them to make sense of this new knowledge. It is also important to be clear that this educational justification of undergraduate higher education highlights that it is of value regardless of what graduates go onto do in their later lives. This transformational

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process has value for the individual and societies regardless of how much graduates earn in the future. This educational justification of higher education is focused on the ways in which students are educated as part of their experience of higher education. Whilst this prepares for the future, it is the value of this educational process that is the basis for this argument rather than the outcomes that it leads to. This involves a commitment to a particular kind of undergraduate education that will be the focus of Chapter 6. In Chapter 7, I examine ways of measuring this kind of university education.

Awkward questions about this way of understanding the purposes of university education Having set out an argument for the educational purposes of higher education, I now examine a series of awkward questions about this way of thinking about these purposes. These questions focus on whether these are the only purposes of higher education, what this means for the kinds of programmes that are considered to be part of higher education, whether this is a self-interested argument that simply seeks to justify the current approaches of universities and whether this way of thinking about the purposes of higher education serves only to mislead potential students about what matters in choosing a degree programme at a particular institution.

Is this the only purpose of university education? What about higher education’s role in preparing the future workforce? The first awkward question about this way of thinking about the purposes of higher education is whether the transformation of students through their engagement with knowledge is the only purpose of higher education. Many governments around the world see higher education as a way of developing a highly skilled workforce.10 Many prospective students and their families see higher education as a route to a well-paid job and a fulfilling career. This could be seen to

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suggest that the argument presented means that these are mistaken and inappropriate aims for higher education. The response to this awkward question is that these instrumental aims for university education are legitimate and inform the decision to fund higher education degrees made by individuals and governments. However, they are neither educational aims nor necessary aims for higher education.This means that it is possible to have an undergraduate higher education that is not intended to lead to better employment prospects. However, it is not possible to have a university education that is not focused on engaging students with structured bodies of knowledge. This would not be higher education in any meaningful way. It is clear that changing students through their engagement with knowledge is likely to contribute to making them more employable but this is as a result of engaging with these bodies of knowledge not something that is separate. So if higher education fulfils its educational purpose of engaging students with structured bodies of knowledge, then it can clearly lead to more employable graduates but this does not mean that producing employable graduates is the primary educational purpose of a higher education. There are two important implications of this response. First, it means that the description of ‘university education’ should be limited to those programmes that are designed to bring students into a transformational relationship with a structured body of knowledge. Second, if governments are focused on increasing employability it is not entirely clear that higher education will always be the solution to this policy aim. The ways in which universities have over-claimed their potential for producing employment-ready graduates have played a key role in the misunderstanding of the nature of higher education and the undermining of the educational role of universities. It is important to be clear that this doesn’t mean that higher education can’t produce employment-ready graduates, it is just that it is not its central educational aim. If universities are to claim to produce employment-ready graduates then this would need to be underpinned by sustained work with employers to work out what this means in relation to particular degrees and particular career paths, as many universities have done. However, where universities have not done this work then they need to stop making unfounded assertions about the links between studying for a degree and graduates’ employment outcomes.

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Does this mean that only single disciplines offer a real university education? The second awkward question follows on from the first. Given the argument that undergraduate higher education is about students being introduced to structured bodies of knowledge, does this mean that only single disciplines are included in this definition of higher education? This would lead to many degrees currently included as part of higher education lying outside of this definition of a university education. The response is that this is not a correct interpretation of the argument. Many degrees whether they are professional and/or interdisciplinary bring together insights from a range of bodies of knowledge. The argument here is that for a university education, those designing degrees that draw on a number of different bodies of knowledge need to have a sense of the ways in which they come together to form a whole and what ways of seeing the world this offers to students. How this works in particular cases is beyond the scope of this book because it cannot be defined in isolation from the particular bodies of knowledge concerned. It is something that is created through people working together to design degree programmes that bring students into relationship to powerful knowledge. How different disciplines and professional bodies of knowledge are brought together is something that is explored during the design process and revisited based on the experiences of students who have studied the programmes. This is discussed in more detail in the next chapter. What is necessary is that an explicit design process takes place that is focused on creating a coherent educational experience for students but how this happens is something that is shaped within the processes of design for particular programmes.

Does this mean that degree programmes cannot be put together by students selecting from a collection of modules? Related to the previous question, this awkward question asks whether degree programmes need to be the coherent programmes of study in the way that has been outlined here. What about degrees in which students can choose any modules and build credit to produce their own degree?

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Under the argument here, these would not count as higher education if they lacked a coherent sense of the structured bodies of knowledge that students are being given access to and what new understandings these would lead to for students. The argument here is that it is the responsibility of higher education educators and institutions to have a sense of how students will benefit from studying their courses. In order to do this, they need to know the ways in which these programmes are designed in order to enable students to develop new ways of seeing the world through engagement with a structured body of knowledge rather than leaving it to the student to select their own courses. This is not an argument against optional modules or different pathways through degree subjects but academics and institutions would need to have sense of where the different directions that these options and pathways take students. As with the previous question, whilst there needs to be an explicit process of design with a clear educational intention, this design process can lead in many different directions depending on the bodies of knowledge and educational intentions of the designers. To give one example, in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s there was a movement for degrees by independent study.11 In these degrees students designed and followed their own questions throughout their degree. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I would see these as examples of the kind of higher education degree I have been arguing for in this chapter. This is because they had explicit educational intentions and were designed to meet these intentions. The bodies of knowledge they were based on were related to introducing students to the processes of independent learning, and these degrees were hugely personally transformative to the students studying them. This is an instructive example because it illustrates that there are many ambitious and creative ways of thinking about how students can be introduced to structured bodies of knowledge that can change their sense of who they are and what they can do in the world.

Does this mean that universities do not need to change? Another awkward question is whether this is just a defence for universities as they are. In making an argument about the importance of access to systematic bodies of knowledge, is this just

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a defence of the status quo? The answer to the previous question should indicate that this is not the case. As I will discuss further in the next chapter, there are many degree programmes that are not carefully designed to give students access to systematic bodies of knowledge. There are degree courses that are little more than collections of modules that have no overall design and no overall educational intention. It should not be underestimated how much of a change would be involved in universities taking their educational responsibilities more seriously. This is not to say that there are not also a great many carefully designed degree programmes across global higher education. It is more that generally these are the result of work on individual programmes rather than universities as institutions working to consistently design such programmes across all of their provision. Whilst there are many examples of excellent degree programmes, there are also examples of programmes where students feel frustrated by the ways in which knowledge is presented as about facts rather than as about ways of seeing and engaging with the world. Similarly, the ways in which students are assessed at university can leave them feeling that rather than being assessed on their understandings of structured bodies of knowledge, they are subjected to memory tests or simply learning to answer examination questions at the expense of their deeper engagement with their subject.12 The argument made here would mean that this should not be the case in universities that offer a higher education. It would involve a significant change in the ways that we think about the educational purposes of higher education and would lead to different questions being asked by prospective students. Instead of focusing on the prestige of the institutions they are applying to or the potential salary they might expect to earn, they would examine the educational quality of the degrees and consider how carefully the programmes have been designed. A simple rule for prospective applicants would be that if the degrees they are applying to cannot explain why they are designed in a particular way, why the knowledge that is focused on in the programme is important and what students will gain from engaging with this knowledge in an easily accessible manner then they are probably not well-designed programmes. I will discuss this further in the Chapter 7.

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Does this way of understanding the purposes of university education mislead students? The issue of students applying to universities leads us onto the next awkward question. This is whether this view of higher education is misleading to potential students because it underplays the extent to which higher education plays a signalling function rather than an educational one. This is the idea that the role of higher education is to provide graduates with a signal for employers that they are worth employing rather than the content or quality of that education in itself being important. The argument underpinning this question is that given that prestigious programmes at prestigious universities lead to better salaries for students, then there is something dishonest about encouraging students to think about the quality of the education they receive rather than the value they can gain from studying at the most prestigious institution possible. This argument can go further and suggest that the applicants who are most likely to be misled are those who are least familiar with higher education. It could lead to a situation where privileged students focus on prestige and gain the highest graduate premiums whilst working-class students focus on educational quality and end up gaining the least from higher education. I will discuss aspects of this in more detail in the next chapter. However, it is worth noting how this kind of questioning throws into sharp relief the ways in which the economic purposes of higher education have dominated and distorted our understanding of the educational purposes of undertaking an undergraduate degree. The ease with which we can slip into to telling students not to worry about the educational quality of their degrees but instead to focus on the signal that degree will send in the labour market gives a clear sense of the ways in which we have lost the plot about the purposes of university education. Given the costs involved in students going to university, whether paid for by tax payers or through tuition fees, if the signalling view is right then it is clearly a waste of money for any students to go to university because as more students graduate the return on this investment will be lower and lower. We are faced with the stark

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choice of either accepting that there is something educationally valuable about a higher education or undermining the whole higher education enterprise. If the educational value of higher education is accepted then being clear about what counts as a high-quality university education in a way that is not distorted by institutional prestige becomes very important. The argument in this chapter lays the foundation for the development of a view of the educational processes involved in high-quality university education, which will be examined in more detail in Chapter 6.

Does this way of understanding the purposes of university education mean that it needs to be provided by active researchers? The final awkward question is whether the argument for the educational purposes of higher education limits the kind of institution that can be seen to offer higher education. Does the focus on offering students access to structured bodies of knowledge mean that this education needs to be provided by active researchers and thus imply that only research-intensive universities can offer genuine university education? The response to this question is that it does limit the kinds of institutions that can offer genuinely higher education to undergraduates but the key aspect of this is not related to whether institutions have active researchers or not. It is rather limited to institutions that employ staff who have scholarship of the relevant bodies of disciplinary or professional knowledge as a key aspect of their role.13 This scholarship could be around researching their subject, it could be about researching teaching and learning in their subject, or it could be about how the knowledge of their subject has impact in wider society. What is key is that teaching staff have a living relationship with the bodies of knowledge they are giving students access to. It is this living relationship that allows them to work out how to give their students meaningful access to the subject. Similarly, when I argued that this view of the purposes of higher education needed to be located in institutions that are committed to the stewardship of this knowledge, this does not mean that research is the only way of contributing to the development

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of this knowledge. It is one important way but so is working with others in society to create an understanding of the implications of this knowledge for the world beyond higher education whether this is through engagement activities or partnerships with businesses, charities or community organizations. What this does mean, however, is that higher education degrees which consist of externally defined curricula and teachers who do not have a living relationship to the subject are not considered higher education. I will discuss these issues in more detail in the next chapter but again this awkward question is helpful in highlighting what is involved in a genuinely higher education. It is about carefully designed programmes that bring students into a transformational relation to structured bodies of knowledge and are taught by people who similarly have a living relationships to these bodies of knowledge. It is these attributes that make an undergraduate degree a higher education and that are central to the ways in which higher education can have a transformational impact on students. It is important that we do not allow the definition of higher education to become so stretched that programmes with externally shaped curricula and underqualified teachers are presented to students as if they offer genuine experiences of higher education.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that the educational purposes of university education are related to students being introduced to structured bodies of knowledge that transform their sense of who they are and what they can do in the world. The ways of thinking that these bodies of knowledge offer students allow them to understand and engage in the world in new ways. This kind of education requires that undergraduate degrees are taught by those who have a living relationship to this knowledge and in institutions that are committed to the long-term sustainability of these bodies of knowledge whether through research, community partnerships or other forms of engagement activities.

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Having argued for a particular way of understanding the educational purposes of higher education, in the next chapter I consider what an education that met these purposes would be like. This informs the discussion in Chapter 7 about how we measure the quality of education offered by universities.

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6 The key elements of university education

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n the previous chapter, I examined the educational purposes of undergraduate higher education and argued that these should be focused around the ways in which students are transformed by their engagement with structured bodies of knowledge in higher education. In this chapter, I examine what a high-quality university education that achieved these purposes would look like. I develop this argument by exploring the criteria for a high-quality undergraduate education that were generated in Chapter 3. I then respond to some awkward questions about this way of thinking about the nature of a high-quality undergraduate education as a way of seeking to clarify my overall argument. In making this argument there are a number of key ideas that I want to make clear from the outset. First, this approach to understanding highquality university education is focused around the design of curricula that take seriously who students are and the nature of the knowledge they are studying. Rather than being student-centred or knowledge-centred, it is focused on the relations between students and knowledge. Second, part of this design is to have a sense of who students will become through their engagement with this knowledge, how they will benefit from this engagement and what they will be able to contribute to society. This includes what they might do in employment but is not limited to it. It also includes

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other contributions they can make to the positive development of society. Third, this design process is evidence-informed based on understandings and evidence about the educational process but will ultimately rely on the judgement of those who are designing the curricula. This is a flawed process that will always involve human error rather than kind of perfect process that is misleading suggested by notions such as ‘best practices’ or ‘teaching excellence’. Finally, as I argued in Chapter 5, this process relies on the expertise of teachers who make judgements and educational institutions that support them in doing so.

Making a case for high-quality university education In the first part of this chapter, I return to the principles for a high-quality university education that were outlined in Chapter 3.1 I use these principles to outline the characteristics of high-quality educational processes. This does not seek to describe best educational practices but rather to give a sense of the kinds of considerations and commitments that underpin high-quality educational processes. This thinking is always shaped by the students who are studying and the knowledge that is being studied, as well as the expertise of the teachers involved and the institutional context in which the degree programme is located. Responding to the principles does not provide a complete picture of what high-quality processes look like but a sense of the kind of features one would expect to find in a welldesigned and implemented degree programme. These principles were that a high-quality university education: 1 Starts from an understanding of who the students are; 2 Is based on a deep understanding of the knowledge being taught and how to make this accessible to students; 3 Is designed as a coherent set of experiences that will enable particular students to develop an understanding of particular bodies of knowledge;

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4 Is based on a clear sense of how students are expected to change through their engagement with these experiences; 5 Evaluates students’ learning in terms of their understanding of these bodies of knowledge; 6 Is collectively produced. In exploring these principles, it is important to be clear that work together as a whole rather than providing a menu that can be selected from. The different principles support each other and together give a holistic sense of high-quality educational processes.

1. A high-quality university education starts from an understanding of who the students are Whilst throughout this book I argue for a clear focus on the knowledge that students will engage with in their educational degrees, any degree programme needs to start from students’ current level of knowledge and understanding.2 It is important to be clear that this needs to be based on what students who are entering the programme actually understand rather than what universities and academics feel they should understand. It is about what real students understand rather than a projection of an ideal student. Otherwise, academics end up demanding that students should start from where universities think they should be. This leads to an all–too-familiar chain of blame in which universities blame secondary schools for not teaching those about to enter university properly. The secondary schools shrug their shoulders and patiently explain that it is the primary schools who are not sending them students who are ready for secondary education. The primary schools are clear that they are hamstrung by the nurseries that their pupils attend before joining them and the nurseries point to the parents. Eventually all of the blame is laid at the door of the individual student, their upbringing or their parents. Rather than entering this chain, it is better that universities take responsibility for understanding where their students start from. This involves spending time talking to their current applicants and students and understanding their backgrounds and previous experiences.

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2. A high-quality university education is based on a deep understanding of the knowledge being taught and how to make this accessible to students As well as understanding students, high-quality educational processes are based on a deep understanding of the knowledge that is being taught. This involves having higher education teachers who have expertise in the knowledge that is offered in degree programmes. There are two important aspects of this knowledge. First, there is an understanding of the knowledge itself. This is a necessary part of the educational process. However, it is not sufficient. Higher education teachers also need to have an understanding of how to make this knowledge accessible to students. They need to have a sense of the aspects of this knowledge that students find difficult and strategies for helping students to overcome these difficulties.3 Second, in this way, higher education teachers have a duty to act as stewards of their disciplines and professional areas, to understand and contribute to the knowledge that makes up their degree programmes. Their role is to introduce students to these bodies of knowledge and to allow them to understand what is powerful about this knowledge and how it can change the ways in which students understand the world. This is a vocational and professional activity rather than a technical one. It is about educating students rather than simply offering opportunities to learn.

3. A high-quality university education is designed as a coherent set of experiences that will enable particular students to develop an understanding of particular bodies of knowledge The first two principles come together in the third principle, which is that high-quality educational processes are carefully designed as a coherent set of experiences that will enable students to achieve an understanding of particular bodies of knowledge. It is important to be clear that this is not something that can be done by an individual teacher. It is a collective exercise that involves all of those who

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are involved in a degree programme. This includes not only the teachers of particular modules but also educational technologists, lab technicians, instructors, educational and academic developers. In professional programmes, it is also likely to involve employers who offer placements to students. It also needs to be an evidenceinformed process in which the experiences of previous students are examined in order to understand how the design of the programme can be improved.4 These experiences can be captured in a range of ways, including an examination of their assignments, surveys about their experiences and, most importantly, including students in the review of degree programmes. All of these contributors have expertise to share but it is important to be clear that they have different kinds of expertise. For example, higher education teachers will be expert in the knowledge that makes up the curriculum, whereas students have expertise in what it is like to study this curriculum. These different forms of expertise need to be recognized and respected rather than pretending that all contributors are experts in the same ways and in relation to the same kinds of knowledge. It can be tempting for university teachers to downplay their expertise, partly because it is common for them to learn as much from these processes as their students. However, unless university teachers and their institutions are clear that they have the expertise that their students lack then their legitimacy as educators is undermined.

4. A high-quality university education is based on a clear sense of how students are expected to change through their engagement with these experiences This collective process of design also involves being clear about how students are expected to change as a result of engaging with these bodies of knowledge.5 This means that there should be a clear sense of how different parts of the degree programme relate to each other and the ways in which these parts should be ordered. As we saw in the previous chapter, this way of thinking about the nature of higher education means that high-quality degree programmes cannot be

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collections of modules that are put together by teachers without a sense of the relations between them or by students choosing from a large menu of modules. There needs to be an educational intention that is focused on how students are expected to change through engaging with knowledge and orders educational experiences in such a way as to make these changes most likely to happen. This places great responsibility on higher education teachers and institutions to take the design of these programme and their educational responsibilities seriously. In inviting students to study their degree programmes they are offering students a new way of seeing and being in the world. This educational enterprise is a serious and lifechanging affair.

5. A high-quality university education evaluates students’ learning in terms of their understanding of these bodies of knowledge A key element of the design process is how students’ understanding will be assessed. It is an important principle that this should be understood as an integral part of the students’ educational experience rather than assessment being understood as taking place outside of this experience and focusing on what has been gained from it. Assessment is such an important aspect of this design because it sends clear messages to students about what is valued and expected on the degree programme. It is depressingly common for degree programmes to have prospectuses that give rich descriptions of the life-changing educational experiences that they offer but in which students are assessed in ways that in no way reflect these educational intentions. If the values and educational commitments of a degree programme are not reflected in the ways that students are assessed then they are unlikely to be experienced by students. This is another example of a chain of blame that often occurs in higher education. In this case, students are blamed for being overly focused on assessment and being too instrumental in their approaches to studying. This is only a problem if a degree programme has forms of assessment that reward instrumental behaviour. There is

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little point in lecturing students about the importance of a deep and personal relationship to knowledge and then assessing this through multiple-choice examinations because these are a time-efficient way of assessing students. There is strong evidence that students learn more from assessment than any other part of the educational experience and how students perform on assessment can provide essential evidence about the success of the design of a programme.6 If assessment is designed in an educationally meaningful way, then it is an opportunity for students to produce their own contribution to their field and then to have feedback on how to improve this contribution by someone who is expert in the field. If it is done in a meaningless way, then it can undermine the whole educational process.

6. A high-quality university education is collectively produced The final principle highlights the way in which any educational process is collectively produced. This has already been emphasized in discussing the other principles but it is important to highlight because popular images of high-quality teaching are so dominated by visions of the inspirational individual teacher. Even if a teacher is working on their own then they are giving students access to collective bodies of knowledge that have been generated over centuries by many different contributors. It is important to acknowledge and respect the production of knowledge and the production of educational experiences as a collective human endeavour rather than an individual one. Degree programmes are taught by a number of academics with contrasting perspectives that enrich the curriculum and in order for students to be given a coherent educational experience, these different parts need to relate to each other with a clear idea of how they work together as a whole.

How do these principles work together? As I indicated earlier, these principles form a collective whole to provide an account of the educational processes that underpin a high-quality higher education. They highlight that in order to design

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curricula that are focused on providing students with access to powerful knowledge, academics and universities need to have a clear sense of who their students are, how the knowledge they will give these students access to is powerful and who it will enable these students to become through their engagement with this knowledge. It is clear that students might change in ways that academics and universities do not expect but they should have a sense of what they are intending to achieve by giving students access to this knowledge. It is also important to be clear that this is demanding work – it does not always work, and academics and universities need to continually collect, analyse and discuss evidence about how well their approaches to curriculum design and teaching are working. It is worth noting that these principles do not involve discussion of many of the issues that have dominated public discourse about the quality of higher education. There is no stipulation of the required number of hours, class sizes, teaching methods or approaches to assessment that characterize a high-quality degree programme. This is because high-quality educational processes are based on a design process that is informed by the students who are studying and the knowledge that they are being given access to. Whether seminars are better than lectures or problem-based learning is the key to student success depends on what the programme is trying to achieve and the prior experiences and knowledge of the students studying it.

Awkward questions about the case for high-quality educational processes Having set out a case for high-quality educational processes, I now consider some awkward questions that can be levelled at this case. These questions focus on whether this way of thinking about educational quality offers a dumbed-down higher education that removes students’ responsibilities for learning and their freedom to learn, underestimates the importance of the inspirational teacher, makes unrealistic demands of educators, and offers an elitist view of higher education.

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Does this view of high-quality educational processes lead to the dumbing down of higher education? One objection to the argument made in this chapter is that the idea that degree programmes should be designed for the actual students who will be studying them leads to a situation in which the ideas focused on a degree programme will be dumbed down. This objection would suggest that rather than designing degree programmes that fit with the students who want to study them, universities should be free to accept the students who are ready to study the programme. The response to this objection focuses on the role of higher education institutions in society. These institutions have a responsibility to look after this knowledge for society and to make it accessible to those who wish to study it. It is not dumbing down to spend time working out how best to make this knowledge accessible, but it is part of what universities are for. Crucially, this is not about the outcomes or the standards of the degree programmes being lowered but is about considering how to take students from where they are to where they are expected to be at the end of the degree programme. It is about universities taking their educational role seriously and working out how to help students to achieve a high level of understanding of the knowledge that makes up their degree programmes.

What about students’ responsibility for learning? Is this just spoon-feeding? A related awkward question raises an important point about students’ responsibilities for achieving their understanding of discipline and professional knowledge. It highlights that students need to play an active role in the educational processes and that spoon-feeding them knowledge is not appropriate in higher education.7 However, this question is based on a misunderstanding of the case made here. The careful design of a degree programme does not mean that students’ active engagement is not necessary. Whilst educators need to have a sense of where the programme can lead students, this is only possible if students commit to the educational process and

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undertake the work needed. A careful design is about identifying the work that students need to do in order to establish a transformational relationship to knowledge. It does not do the work for the students but rather signposts clearly what they need to do in order to create their understanding. Too often, a rejection of spoon-feeding students is simply an excuse for poor educational design which leaves students with little sense of how they can achieve an understanding of the knowledge that makes up their degree programmes.

What about students’ freedom to learn? Does this set limits on what they can achieve? A third related awkward question is whether focusing on higher education institutions’ responsibilities for being clear about the understandings that they will help students to achieve restricts students’ opportunities to develop insights or attributes that are not anticipated by the designers of their programmes.8 The response to this awkward question is that opportunities for unanticipated learning outcomes will exist in any educational situation. However, precisely because they are unanticipated outcomes, they cannot be planned for. The argument is not that educators should limit what students can achieve but rather that they need to have a sense of what they expect students to gain from engaging in a degree programme. Leaving this entirely open places all of the responsibility for learning on the student and leaves the educator rescinding their responsibility for their students’ education. Students will have unexpected insights and outcomes from studying and will sometimes not gain what is expected but those offering a programme should be able to explain what they think students will gain from studying the programme.

Is teaching really nothing to do with performance? What about the inspirational teacher? In focusing on the collective design of educational experiences, it could be argued that the argument underplays the importance of the inspirational teacher. In a way this is correct. The argument is that inspirational performances are less important than carefully designed

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programmes that have a clear sense of how students’ understanding will be achieved over time through a series of experiences. Within a careful design, inspirational teaching performances can play an important role in motivating students and helping them to create exciting insights into the knowledge they are studying. However, on their own, inspirational performances do not provide an education for students. The case made here does not deny the potential contribution of inspirational teachers; it rather suggests that their power is enhanced by being part of an overall programme that is carefully planned and that has coherence between the different parts of the programme.

Is this the triumph of bland teaching? Related to the previous awkward question, this question suggests that focusing on carefully planned programmes prioritizes the bland over the inspirational. A related sentiment is that this represents the death of genius in educational processes. There are three key aspects of the response to this view. First, genius is by its very nature exceptional. We should not be designing systems for exceptions. Genius is claimed far more often than it actually exists and there is no particular reason why genius should be any more idiosyncratic than other human attributes. Second, a carefully planned programme can be seen as a secure base on which a variety of approaches to teaching can flourish. If there is collective agreement about what a programme is aiming to achieve and how each element fits within this, then different teachers have the opportunity to develop their individual approaches within this wider system. Rather than all teachers attempting to teach in the same way, it provides the opportunity for different teachers to give students an insight into their personal relationships to knowledge. Third, carefully designed curricula do not lead to blandness. They offer a greater opportunity for an exciting variety of approaches within a coherent overall framework for the programme. Too often claims of individual genius and related claims of academic freedom can be used as excuses for poor educational design and a lack of consideration of the experiences of students. To be clear, academic

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freedom is very important. In fact, it is far too important to be used as an excuse for individualistic or slapdash approaches to teaching. There are times and places where academics are not allowed to research or teach knowledge that is considered dangerous and have their lives threatened if they try to do so. To treat the need to give careful thought to the design of degree programmes as somehow analogous to these oppressive situations displays a lack of understanding of what the restriction of academic freedom involves.

How can educators be expected to know these things? This awkward question focuses on whether the argument is based on a hopelessly optimistic idea of what we can know about who students are and how they will be changed by their engagement with knowledge at university. This question essentially asks how it is possible for academics to know the impact of their programmes. There are three elements of a response to this awkward question. First, academics and universities frequently make these kinds of claims when they argue that they prepare students for work and life after graduation. These claims tend to be just vague clichés but they do show that there is a sense of what students are expected to gain by engaging with degree programmes. It seems odd that academics and institutions are willing to make general claims about the power of the education they offer but are not able to be specific about the kinds of changes they expect. If they do not know the specific changes their programmes lead to, on what basis do they make these more general claims? Second, if academics and universities do not know how students will be affected by their engagement with knowledge, on what basis are their degree programmes put together? On what basis are the different elements of the degree programme selected? On what basis is the assessment for these programmes designed if they do not know what students will have learned through studying at university? Third, if they do not know how they expect students to change through studying at university, why do they ask students to spend three or four years of their lives studying at their institution?

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Why do academics and universities expect students and taxpayers to finance degrees if they do not have a sense of where they will take students and how students and society will benefit? To be clear, this does not mean that what students will gain from studying a degree is obvious or easy to discern. Achieving this kind of understanding is a difficult element of the educational role of academics and higher education institutions. However, whilst it is difficult, it is still a key element of their role as educators and something that needs to be given far more careful consideration than is often the case.

Can only active researchers be higher education teachers? This awkward question echoes one from the previous chapter. Whilst in that case it was focused on the purposes of higher education, in this case it picks up on the claims made in this chapter about the relationship to knowledge that teachers in higher education are expected to have in order to design high-quality educational experiences. This question is important for a number of reasons. It highlights the question of who can legitimately be considered a teacher in higher education. If only active researchers can be considered legitimate teachers in higher education, then this would mean that many who currently teach will not be considered legitimate teachers. This potential problem is exacerbated by the ways in which more prestigious universities are more likely to have active researchers employed as higher education teachers.9 This could be taken to mean that more prestigious institutions offer a more legitimate higher education than other institutions. However, whilst higher education teachers need to have an ongoing and dynamic personal relationship to knowledge, research into the discipline or professional area is only one way of establishing such a relationship.10 Many academics engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning, which provides another way of having a dynamic relationship to this knowledge. Similarly, other academics focus on making knowledge accessible to wider society by focusing on research impact or knowledge transfer activities. These are all examples of ways in which academics can have a scholarly relationship to knowledge and there will be others.

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This scholarly relationship is important but as should be clear from this chapter it is not on its own sufficient. As well as having a living relationship with the knowledge they are giving students access to, higher education teachers also need to think about how to make this knowledge accessible to students. Having active researchers involved in higher education on its own is not a good thing if they are not interested or focused on how to make this knowledge accessible to others.

Is this an argument for an elitist higher education? This question builds on the previous one but is focused on the kinds of students who gain access to higher education. This question is informed by the idea that in focusing on knowledge rather than vocational skills, the approach outlined in this chapter is an avowedly academic argument for higher education. This question is important because it highlights the importance of separating an academic education from an elitist education. There is nothing elitist about focusing on giving all students access to powerful knowledge. There is nothing elitist about arguing that the purpose of a higher education is to provide students with access to this knowledge and so all degree programmes should be designed in such ways that this is at the heart of what they are trying to achieve. There is nothing elitist about an education that is designed for the students who will actually study it. The whole point is that those who are designing degree programmes should think about how to take all of their students on an educational journey rather than simply thinking about the most able or most privileged. It involves designing an inclusive curriculum that invites students into powerful relationship to knowledge. This is at the heart of the educational responsibilities of universities and higher education institutions. It should appear daunting and difficult because it is. Designing programmes in this way is no guarantee of success and the educational process will still be an awkward and demanding process for students, teachers and institutions alike, because educating people is awkward and demanding. Whilst there are many inspirational degree programmes, teachers and students,

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the fact that we do not acknowledge the difficulty of such design is perhaps the clearest indication of the ways in which many universities have not taken their educational responsibilities as seriously as they should.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that high-quality education processes are based around the careful, collective design of degree programmes. This design is focused on giving students access to structured bodies of knowledge that transform their sense of who they are and what they can do in the world. This design needs to be based on a clear understanding of students’ previous experiences and understandings and offer a pathway for them to achieve a rich understanding of the knowledge that makes up their degree programmes. In the next chapter, I examine the implications of this view of higher-quality educational processes for the ways in which the quality of degree programmes is measured.

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n this chapter, I examine how we should judge the quality of university education using the characteristics of an effective system for measuring the quality of degree programmes outlined in Chapter 4. Judgements of quality are related to who is judging them and for what purpose. For this reason, I first examine how these characteristics play out when informing the judgement of an individual about the quality of particular degree programmes and then consider how they play out in relation to judgements about the quality of degree programmes across a system of higher education. There are two important understandings of the quality of university degrees and how to measure them that underpin this chapter. First, we need to be clear about what is possible in measuring the quality of different degree programmes. This can never be a precise activity because degree programmes are complex and changing. Therefore, whilst there are some useful indicators of quality, these need to be understood as broad indicators rather than precise tools. They have the precision of sledgehammers rather than lasers. Any high precision instrument that we are offered to measure the quality of degree programmes will be lubricated with vast quantities of snake oil. Second, if we are to make informed judgements of the quality of degree programmes then we need to take account of not only what we know from more over half a century of research into learning and teaching in higher education, but also what we know about how institutions respond when they are assessed on performance measures.

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Judging the quality of degree programmes In Chapter 4, I argued that any system for judging the quality of degree programmes needed to have the following characteristics: 1 Reflect the purposes of higher education; 2 Examine quality at the level of the particular degree rather than the institution; 3 Measure the quality of teaching offered rather than reputation or prestige; 4 Draw on a variety of measures that tell us about quality from different perspectives; 5 As a whole, are based on a coherent, research-informed vision of the educational process; 6 Require improvements in educational practices in order to improve performance on the measures; 7 Provide a relatively simple comparison of educational quality. These characteristics will be used to inform the rest of this section. In this chapter, I will mainly focus on what an effective system for measuring the quality of undergraduate degrees could look like. However, given this preferred system of measuring quality does not yet exist and may never exist, how would these principles help to inform someone who is choosing a degree programme?

Making judgements as an individual If we examine the list of seven characteristics outlined above, it is clear that the first four of these can be used to inform individual judgements whilst the last three are more about the measurement system itself. Therefore, it is these first four that can be useful in making individual judgements about degree courses. How might they guide an applicant in trying to decide which degree programme to study? In answering this question, I write as if the reader is

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seeking to choose a degree programme. Whilst I recognize that this is not the situation that many readers will be in, writing in this way gives a sense of the immediacy of these choice processes and helps to convey a sense of what is involved in making these judgements. It can also be helpful for those designing and marketing degree programme courses to think about how these might look from the perspective of the applicant. First, as an applicant, it is important to be clear about why you want to undertake an undergraduate degree. This sense of what you want to get out of it is an important element in deciding what and where to study. Are you interested in particular areas of a subject? Do you want a degree programme that offers you a placement in industry? Are you looking to gain a particular kind of job afterwards? It is important to check whether the degree courses offer the things that you are really interested in. What is offered varies between institutions and degree courses, so it does not work to assume that degree programmes in the same area will all offer the same options and opportunities. Second, this highlights that you should focus on what is offered by particular degree programmes rather than simply choosing a particular institution. In line with the third principle, try to get a sense of the quality of the education they offer rather than simply looking for markers of prestige. In thinking about this quality, in line with the fourth principle, try to get a sense of it from different perspectives. Clearly you will need to consider any entry requirements for the programme and whether you will meet them but this is just the initial start of an involved process. In addition to checking whether the degree course would take you as a student, you should also consider whether you want to study there. You are selecting them as much as they are selecting you. Look at what current students and recent graduates say about that programme. Look at the description of the programme. Do they explain how they seek to educate you? Is there a sense of coherence and an overall approach? Do they seek to tell you how they will educate you or do they just tell you how prestigious they are and how they are positioned in university rankings? Do they explain their processes or do they simply give empty comparators with other programmes? Do you feel you know what the programme will involve based on their description and does this feel exciting to you?

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Do graduates seem to do things that you would like to do? How would your performance on the degree programme be assessed? Do you feel that these methods of assessment will allow you to demonstrate what you have achieved over the course of your degree programme? Having identified the degree programmes that you think educationally work for you then it is worth considering the institutions that are offering them. What support services does the institution offer to you as a student? Does the amount of support outlined seem to be consistent with the size of the institution? Does the institution have the facilities that are most important to you? If you are thinking of moving location in order to study, what is the surrounding area like and what does it have to offer? Don’t simply rely on the information provided by the institution as this is likely to present things in the best light possible. Look for information from sources such as third-party websites. It is important to be clear that this is not information that you can get simply from university rankings because rankings are presented as if all degrees in a particular subject are the same. You need to dig down and read what the programmes you are interested in tell you about the education they offer. Otherwise you may be in for some nasty surprises when you start the degree programme. This may appear to involve a great deal of effort to choose a degree programme and it does involve a lot of gathering of information and thinking about what you want to get out of a degree. However, this effort is entirely appropriate for choosing a degree that you will study for three or four years and will have a lasting impact on the rest of your life. Get as much information as you can from as many different sources as possible. Trust your sense of what will work and think about what seems to offer the best educational experience for you. Whilst this approach to choosing a university degree may appear to reflect the choice processes of the most privileged students,1 the argument here is that it is important for all applicants to find a degree programme that has the best chance of supporting the plans they have for the future. However, it is worth reflecting on why this account appears to represent a privileged route into university. It is because it presents someone choosing a degree programme who has no familial responsibilities, no limits on where they can go to

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university whether these be financial or related to other aspects of their lives, who will be studying full time and will not need to work throughout their degree programme. It basically presents the choice process as disembodied and unencumbered by the demands of life with no gender, no ethnicity and no sexuality. It is important to recognize that these demands and identities can play a central role in shaping the choice processes of those looking to enter higher education. However, it is equally important to be clear that having a sense of the quality of education offered by different degree programmes is important regardless of one’s identities and levels of social and economic privilege. Overall, at an individual level, judging the quality of degree programmes is about trying to get beyond the marketing of university prospectuses and websites to gain a sense of what the programme is trying to achieve educationally and how successful it appears to be at doing this. This is an evidence-informed process but also involves trying to be clear about why you are choosing to study for a degree and what you want to get out of it.

Making system-level judgements about educational quality At a system level, all of the seven criteria are relevant in making judgements about the quality of undergraduate degrees. In relation to the purposes of higher education, as I argued in Chapter 5, one way of thinking about this is to focus on how students are transformed by their engagement with the knowledge they encounter in their degree courses. Knowledge is central to the transformational nature of undergraduate degrees, in which students change their sense of self through their engagement with disciplinary and professional knowledge. This involves students relating their identities to their disciplines and the world and seeing themselves implicated in knowledge. It does not always happen. It requires students to be intellectually engaged with their courses and to see it as an educational experience and is dependent on both students and the quality of their educational experience. As I argued in Chapter 6, high-quality educational experiences can be understood as designing

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ways in which particular students can achieve an understanding of particular bodies of disciplinary and/or professional knowledge. The implication of this is that any measures of the quality of undergraduate degrees need to tell us about how successful they are in meeting these purposes. We need to have a sense of what students can do when they enter a degree programme and how they will have changed by the time they have graduated. In relation to the second principle, any system for measuring the quality of undergraduate degrees needs to tell us about the quality of a particular degree rather than an institution or group of subjects. This is important because the evidence suggests that the quality of degree programmes varies within a single institution.2 This is because, as I discussed in Chapter 6, the quality of degree is determined by how well a particular programme is designed. Therefore, any system for measuring the quality of degrees needs to provide information about individual degrees. The third principle highlights the need to focus on the quality of teaching offered in a degree rather than the level of prestige of a degree programme. So how could educational quality, as defined above, be measured? One way would be to measure educational quality by examining the processes by which degree programmes are designed and developed over time. This would include an examination of how programmes are designed to take account of who the students are who are studying it, and how these programmes are designed to help students achieve transformative relationships to the disciplinary and/ or professional knowledge that underpins the programme. This would involve examining how programme teams use evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of the design of their programmes. A concern may now arise that what is being argued for here is simply a narrative account of the ways in which degree programmes have been designed. This is where the fourth principle comes into play. This focuses on the need for a variety of measures that tell us about quality from different perspectives. In this way, the evidence that degree programmes need to examine would include process measures that examine students’ experiences of studying these degrees and outcome measures that examine the impact of this design on students’ learning outcomes, as well as examining what and how graduates benefit from studying the programme and what

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they contribute to society after they complete it. Providing evidence of such complex processes and outcomes requires a mix of quantitative and qualitative measures. These different measures can be used both as evidence about the quality of the programme and as evidence to inform programme teams about how to improve the design of their degree programmes. However, as I argued in Chapter 4, they cannot be combined to create a single measure of quality. The question of what measures would be used takes us to the fifth principle in that the individual measures or metrics used would need to be part of a collective and coherent system. This involves relating the metrics to a view of high-quality educational processes, as discussed in Chapter 6 and showing how they measure something that is identified as a necessary element in these processes. Any criteria for measuring the quality of educational processes need to be based on a research-informed view of high-quality teaching and there needs to be a clear rationale by which criteria are included or excluded.3 There are two key reasons for this. First, there is likely to be pressure from institutions to include criteria that reflect the things that they are good at or reflect their institutional missions rather than their educational quality. Second, there is a danger that political pressure from policy makers is used to shape the criteria so that they fit with their current preoccupations. Whilst both of these pressures are understandable and perhaps inevitable, they do not help to produce valid measures of educational quality. This means that it is important to resist these kinds of pressure. Having a clear research-informed rationale for what criteria are included and excluded provides a basis on which pressure can be resisted. Without such a rationale, it is very difficult for any resistance to politically, rather than educationally, motivated criteria to look like anything other than special pleading on behalf of a particular higher education interest group. As I discussed in Chapter 2, an example of one such flawed measure of educational quality that is often promoted by policy makers and prestigious institutions is the use of graduate salaries to measure educational quality. This is popular with policy makers because it shows how a university degree contributes to individual prosperity (which can be useful in insisting that students should carry the costs of their university degrees) and popular with prestigious

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universities because they tend to do well on such measures.4 The only problem is that graduate salaries tell us nothing about the quality of university degrees. Instead they reflect the privileged student intake of prestigious universities and many employers’ preferences to appointing students from these universities because they are like them (i.e. privileged). If instead one wants to establish a system for measuring the educational quality of degree programmes, there are a number of potential frameworks that could be used to underpin this kind of research-informed rationale. In Chapter 6, I argued for one set of principles but there are others that could be used.5 What is important is that whichever set of principles used is derived from what we know about high-quality educational processes in higher education. The use of a collective and coherent set of measures and the requirement for degree programmes to explain the basis of the design allow this approach to meet sixth principle, which requires that institutions need to improve the quality of their teaching in order to improve their performance within the quality assessment system. This is because programme teams would be asked to give accounts of how they have designed their programmes based on the available evidence. The advantage of an approach that measures how programme teams use evidence to design, and improve the quality of, their degree programmes, is that it would directly lead to enhancements in that quality. In writing accounts of the design of their programmes, programme teams would collectively reflect on these processes, which is a key aspect of reflective approaches to teaching.6 The combination of process and outcome measures would ensure that the changes in the design of the programme were related to changes in student outcomes. The seventh principle is that measures of quality need to provide relatively simple comparisons of quality. In Chapter 4, I emphasized that the focus on ‘relative simplicity’ is an attempt to balance the attraction of simple measures whilst also seeking to avoid the misleading oversimplification that is created by many commercial university rankings. So far, I have examined how a system-wide scheme could be designed that attempts to meaningfully capture the quality of teaching whilst leading to the enhancement of the

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quality of teaching but the accounts of the development of degree programmes provided would not be a simple comparison of quality. Can such meaningful measures of educational quality be simplified in a way that can speak to an equivalent range of actors as commercial university rankings? Clearly this would not be done by combining the measures into a single aggregate score. Often this is done by asking experienced academics in the subject area of particular degree programmes to compare the quality of degree programmes. They could assess the account provided, its use of the metrics, and the performance on the metrics itself and provide a rating of the quality.7 This would have the advantage of offering the opportunity for different degree programmes to learn from each other. The disadvantage would be that the costs of this kind of measurement of the quality of degree programmes would be high, particularly when compared with the apparently low costs of commercial university rankings. However, it is important to be clear that the low costs involved in commercial rankings are only apparent. First, these rankings are used to sell products that are usually paid for by universities whether this is advertising, consultancy or conference services. Second, the measures provided by such rankings are deeply flawed as measures of educational quality and so do not provide a valid alternative for measuring the quality of undergraduate degree programmes. It is important to be clear that designing and implementing any system-wide scheme that measures teaching quality is difficult. All such schemes will have limitations and lead to unexpected responses that can result in perverse incentives and unintended consequences. However, a great strength of the approach outlined is that it foregrounds the difficulty of developing meaningful measures of educational processes and outcomes. It highlights how such measures can only be established through collaborative conversations between academics, students and other contributors to the educational processes rather than suggesting that assessing and measuring teaching quality is a transparent and straightforward enterprise. Placing these collective conversations at the heart of a quality assessment system makes it far more likely that quality will be improved through the process by which it is assessed.

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Awkward questions about the approach to measuring the quality of a higher education The awkward questions about this way of judging the quality of an undergraduate education focus on whether we need such judgements given that there is general agreement about which are the good universities, whether we need more precise or pure measures of quality, and whether this way of thinking about quality reinforces inequalities.

Why do we need these kinds of measures when we have so many university rankings that tell us which universities are excellent? Commercial university rankings have been consistently criticized as measures of educational quality throughout this book but such is their hold on public ideas of what count as good universities that there will inevitably be awkward questions about whether they provide a more valid measure of quality than is offered here. This awkward question is useful because it highlights the basis on which many commercial university rankings operate. This is that people have fairly fixed ideas about which are the excellent universities and will only accept a ranking that matches with these preconceived ideas. A slight difference between these preconceptions can make the ranking appear even more rigorous. This is because it gives the appearance that ranking is based on something other than institutional prestige if there is an unexpected institution or two near the top of the ranking. These would need to be respected institutions but ones that are not normally considered to represent the embodiment of institutional excellence. However, if certain internationally renowned institutions are not near the top of a ranking then this will cause people to question its validity. This is the way in which the demonstrable prestige of these institutions is mistaken as evidence for their educational quality. The point here is that prestige is not a reliable guide to quality. A prestigious institution

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will have some degree programmes that are of very high-quality and others that are not, the same will be true of a much less prestigious institution. The point is that the prestige of these institutions does not allow us to discern which of its programmes are of higher and lower quality. This is why we need to know about the quality of particular degree programmes rather than about the supposed quality or reputation of the institution as a whole. It is also important to be clear that there is a contradiction at the heart of this question. If we already knew which institutions were excellent and this guaranteed the quality of all of their degree programmes then we would not want to measure the quality of degree programmes. However, these kinds of questions are not used to dismiss the whole enterprise of ranking universities but are usually used to defend the stability of those rankings and to demonstrate how such rankings tell us something meaningful. What they actually do is to confirm our preconceived ideas of where a high-quality education is to be found. Overall the response to this awkward question is to be clear that whilst institutional prestige and rankings do tell us something about higher education institutions, the one thing they do not tell us about is the quality of the education that they offer. To understand this, we need information about particular degree courses and how they are designed in order to bring students into a transformational relationship to knowledge.

How can we use such an imprecise measure of educational quality? The second awkward question highlights the apparent differences between the way of assessing educational quality argued for in this chapter and the apparent precision that is provided by metrics and university rankings. In responding to this awkward question, it is important to be clear that metrics and rankings are deliberately produced to have the appearance of precision. There is something beguiling about providing scores to two decimal places that appear to be finely calibrated and rigorously applied. Some compilers of rankings even have external auditors to verify the assessments made by their

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rankings have been appropriately produced.8 However, we should be wary of such apparent precision. The external auditors’ report simply checks whether the rankings have followed the procedures that they have stated in producing their ranking. They do not provide any assurance that the ranking is a valid measure of educational quality. What these external auditors’ reports actually show is that rankings are important revenue-generating activities in which maintaining the reputation of the ranking is key. If this were not the case, rankers would not pay external auditors to check their rankings. The apparent precision of university rankings is manufactured by turning qualitative factors such as educational quality into numbers.9 These numbers are then combined as if they are part of a common measurement system with the original numbers conveniently forgotten. Whilst rankings have the appearance of the league table in a team sport,10 this is misleading because the position of any team in such league tables is based on a single factor: the results in their matches against the other teams. Whilst in the cases of teams being tied an additional factor or two may be used, if such sporting league tables were calculated in the same way as university rankings then a team’s position in the league would be based on the combined average of: ●●

games won and drawn;

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goals or points scored;

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goals or points conceded;

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average crowd size;

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number of fouls committed (negatively weighted);

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the quality of the pitch;

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quality of the catering at the stadium;

●●

and so on to whatever factors the compiler wanted to include.

This highlights how the precision of university rankings is misleading and unhelpful. The lack of precision involved in the argument put forward here is an appropriate reflection of the kinds of judgements we can make based on the kinds of evidence that are available.

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The processes involved in producing the precision of commercial university rankings distort the measurement offered to such a high degree that we are better off with less precise but more valid measures of educational quality.

Why should the measurement of educational quality lead to its enhancement? Does this reduce the purity of the measurement of quality? Another awkward question is why should we expect the measurement of educational quality to lead to the enhancement of the quality of education? Does this requirement ask too much of the measurement system? Does it reduce its purity? The response to this is that rather than this being an additional requirement of the measurement system, it is actually a way of checking the validity of the measurement. This is because if we are actually measuring practices that meaningfully reflect quality of education then, as a direct consequence of this, we will end up increasing quality. This is because, provided a measure of educational quality is taken seriously by higher education institutions, they will seek to improve their performance on this measure. If they can improve their performance with less effort by attempting to ‘fix’ the measures without changing their educational processes then they will do. This is because changing educational processes across an institution is far more difficult, time-consuming and costly than, for example, changing the way an institution measures a particular factor or reports it to external audiences. These kinds of fixes can also be achieved far more easily by top-down management decrees than actually improving the quality of teaching and learning practices in all of their degree programmes. It is for this reason that we need measures that actually lead to improvements in educational practices. If we don’t then we would have just encouraged universities to further fix the system rather than improving the quality of the education that they offer. It is also important to be clear that the apparent purity of the measures provided by university rankings is another element that is deliberately created by those who compile such rankings. In order for their rankings to be a commercial success, they need rankings

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to appear to be a pure external measure of the excellence of higher education institutions. However, as I discussed in Chapter 5, they are no more pure than what is proposed here. This is because higher education institutions buy the products offered by those who compile rankings precisely because they hope it will improve their performance on the ranking. They buy advertising space so that they are more likely to be mentioned in the reputation surveys. They buy consultancy services from those who compile rankings so that they can understand how to present their data so that they can maximize their outcome in the ranking. This shows how there is nothing naturally pure about the process by which university rankings are generated. Their apparent purity is deliberately produced as part of the production of rankings because it makes them more convincing and marketable to consumers of the rankings.

Does this approach to measuring educational quality reinforce educational inequality by misleading those who know least about higher education? This final awkward question is based on the same logic as an awkward question from Chapter 5. This is again the idea that it is actually prestige that matters for graduates rather than actual quality. The detail is slightly different because in Chapter 5 the focus was directly on prospective students being misled by the argument for the educational purposes of an undergraduate degree. In this case, it is about students being misled by measures of educational quality. This is slightly different because the objection here also involves employers as well as students. The objection is that employers use rankings and prestige to measure the quality of higher educational institutions rather than information about the quality of particular degree programmes. Given that employers mistakenly see prestige as a reflection of educational quality, the objection is that in order to have a successful career a prospective student should maximize the prestige of their degree programme rather than its quality. Furthermore this objection could suggest that the argument made in this book is most likely to mislead those who know least about

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higher education. The argument would suggest that privileged students implicitly know the score and will go for prestige but less privileged students will be misled by this argument. They may end up with a better education but it will not lead to the kind of opportunities offered by attending a prestigious university. There is probably some truth in this argument but only some. The first thing to note is that not all employers rely on rankings to select their employees. The image that is often used in these discussions is the graduate programmes of global corporations that receive so many applications that they need a quick and convenient way of sifting through them. This does happen but most graduates are not employed by global corporations or selected in this way.11 This is another example of how an image of the ways in which a very small and privileged section of society gain their jobs come to dominate discussions of how we should measure the quality of an undergraduate education. The most important question is how do we respond to these misleading images? Do we take them to our hearts and build our systems around them or do we point out that they are based on invalid measures of educational quality and, therefore, completely misleading? Where one stands in relation to these arguments comes down to one’s position on what university education is for. If its fundamental role is to provide students with distinction and act as a signal to employers then it ceases to be an educational activity. If we accept this is the case then privilege becomes ability and prestige becomes quality because we assume that privileged students are the most able and that the most prestigious institutions provide the highest-quality undergraduate education. The result of this acceptance would be to further increase inequality in society, because the most privileged students tend to attend the most prestigious institutions. In many countries, this appears to be the role that universities play in society and unless we want to change this situation there is little point in making an educational case for higher education. If we are to make the educational case then it is really important to disaggregate prestige and quality. This makes the rigorous and meaningful assessment of quality even more important. This is not a task that can be performed by rankings.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued for a coherent and systematic approach to measuring the quality of university degree programmes. I have discussed both how this approach can inform the individual choices of applicants to higher education and how it can be used to build a system-wide approach to the judgement of educational quality. I have argued that this kind approach needs us to be realistic about how precise such measures can be and it is important that we do not use measures that are unrelated to the quality of education offered by degree programmes. In the next and final chapter, I examine the implications of the overall argument for this book for how we think about the educational purposes, educational processes and measurement of educational quality of university education. I discuss these implications for university leaders, those who work in universities, students and policy makers.

8 Transforming and sustaining university education

I

n this final chapter, I examine what can be done to transform and sustain university education. So far in this book, I have explained the problems with dominant myths, and outlined alternative ways of thinking, about university education. However, the danger is that these different ways of thinking are treated as separate approaches rather than being understood as offering a holistic way of thinking about university education. To address this potential danger, in this chapter I offer a way of thinking about transforming university education based on the overall argument of the book so far. In order to make this vision practical, I then outline a theory of change that can support action based on this vision. Drawing on this theory of change, I consider how university leaders, academics, students and policy makers can contribute to transforming university education. Finally, I consider whether this vision of higher education has any chance of becoming reality and, if not, why it still matters that we argue about the purposes, processes and quality of university education.

A vision for transforming university education Through the chapters of this book, I have offered a vision for transforming university education. This has been in response to the

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ways in which debates around the purposes of university education have become dominated by considerations of the higher education’s role in preparing students for the workforce. I have argued that whilst this can be a by-product of studying for a degree, these considerations have undermined a central focus on the educational purposes of an undergraduate degree. I have argued that these educational purposes are related to the ways in which students are transformed by their engagement with structured bodies of knowledge, a process which changes students’ sense of who they are, their understanding of the world and what they can do in the world. This view of the purposes of university education underpins an alternative way of thinking about university education. Rather than thinking about this education in terms of individual inspirational teachers, particular methods of best practice or simply on the experiences of students, it involves the careful design of degree programmes by collective groups of academics and others who are involved in the educational process. This design is based on a clear sense of who the students are and what they know, a deep understanding of the bodies of knowledge that are focused on in the degree programme and how to make these accessible to the particular students who are studying the programme, and a sense of who these students will become through their engagement with these bodies of knowledge. In this way, undergraduate degrees need to be underpinned by a clear educational intention. If we understand university education in this way, then this needs to shape how we measure the quality of this education. Commercial university rankings do not provide an effective way of measuring educational processes. This is not surprising because their primary purpose is not to provide transparent measurements of educational quality but to sell things like advertising, consultancy and conference services. Rather than the combinations of unrelated measures that make up university rankings, we need a coherent series of measures of educational quality that are based on what we know about highquality teaching and learning in universities. Such measures need to provide a clear sense of how particular degree programmes are designed to bring students into a transformational relationship to bodies of knowledge and how these bodies of knowledge change students and what they can do and be in the world.

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This vision of university education puts students’ relationship to bodies of knowledge at the centre of a higher education. It is about having a clear sense of the students’ previous knowledge and experiences and highlights the importance of being clear about how students are given access to, and are changed by, these bodies of knowledge. However, it is important to acknowledge that this way of thinking about the educational purposes, processes and quality of higher education is not widely shared in public debates about higher education. So what can be done to make this way of thinking about university education have a greater impact on these debates? There are two aspects to this. First, in order to create an agenda for lasting change, we need to consider the theory of change that will underpin this agenda. Second, informed by this, we can develop a manifesto for transforming university education.

A theory of change Policies, practices and, indeed, manifestos are underpinned by theories of change. In this context, the word ‘theory’ does not refer to grand theories or narratives1 but rather to the assumptions that underpin the thinking of policy makers, institutional leaders and practitioners that leads these actors to think that certain actions will lead to particular outcomes.2 For example, when a new initiative is introduced, it is done because it is expected to have particular consequences.3 It is the theory of change that provides the link between the initiative and the expected outcomes. An illuminating exercise can be to take a policy and consider its depiction of the current situation, how it wants to change things and the outcomes that are expected from these changes. This can provide the basis for an analysis of whether its theory of change is convincing. Theories of change are often implicit, which means that they are often not subjected to critical analysis and, as a consequence, are usually weak. One aspect that often gets missed is that we need to consider the level that they operate at. We need different theories of change for thinking about how to change individuals, how to change

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institutions and how to change systems.4 This book has focused on discussing how to transform university education at the level of higher education systems. Too often initiatives that are aimed at changing systems of education draw on theories of change that are focused on changing individuals or institutions with the expectation that these will then be scaled-up to the system level. For example, in Chapter 3 I discussed how new initiatives are often introduced through generously funded pilots that are then turned into exemplars of ‘best practice’ that others are encouraged to adopt. This is a very weak theory of change, which has been labelled the ‘contagion’ theory of change.5 This is the idea that if ‘best practices’ can be identified and celebrated then they will ‘infect’ the whole system and lead to lasting change. What tends to happen with such approaches, however, is that they are of great benefit to individual enthusiasts who are given the opportunity to enhance their educational practices but this is something they probably would have done without the funding. They do not lead to change across the system and once the funding ends the enthusiasts move onto something new. Despite this, such approaches are still very often used by governments and institutions looking to introduce system-wide change.6 A theory of change that has become increasingly prominent in some higher education systems is focused on introducing marketlike mechanisms to support change.7 The idea here is that if students can be empowered to be consumers of their university education, then they will choose the highest quality education and competition between institutions for students will lead to increases in quality. Institutions that offer high-quality education will expand and those who offer a poor education will go out of business.8 As I argued in Chapters 4 and 7 when examining university rankings, this kind of competition is more likely to lead to a focus on ensuring that institutional prestige is maintained through marketing and reputation management rather than a focus on improving the quality of education. Part of this challenge is related to the difficulty of providing valid measures of education quality. The other problem is that there is very little evidence that prospective students choose their degree programmes in the way that is assumed in this theory of change.9 This can mean that a great deal of time and effort is put into producing information that is very rarely used by applicants.

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These are just two examples of weak theories of change. There are plenty of others.10 For example, another is the idea that introducing new technologies will inevitably lead to changes in the ways people do things. Over the years, many claims have been made about the ways in which technologies will transform education that have never been realized. For example, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were proclaimed as heralding the death of the lecture and face-toface teaching, in just the same way as it was thought that television would in the 1970s.11 The weakness of all of the theories of change discussed so far is that they do not take into account the way that any new initiative, competition or technology is reinterpreted by those who are using it. Often these reinterpretations are not aligned with the intentions of those introducing the change. These reinterpretations are usually positioned as a problem or as a sign that the change has not been successful. However, this is a mistake. For change to be successful those involved in it have to make it their own. They need to reinterpret it and relate it into their current ways of working. Therefore, when we are trying to transform university education we need to have a theory of change that positions this process of reinterpretation as an essential part of the change process rather than as a form of distortion that needs to be minimized and tightly controlled. In this way, a theory of change for transforming university education needs to have at its centre the understanding that any change is transformed by those who are involved in it. The theory of change underpinning the manifesto for transforming university education, which I outline below, is built on an understanding of the way that knowledge moves through the education process.12 Knowledge that is produced through academic research does not enter into curricula in a pure form. Rather it is transformed as it is turned into a curriculum.13 This happens because there are different views on what elements should be included in a curriculum. These views come from a variety of sources. For example, the academics who are involved in teaching the degree programme will have different views about what should be taught based on their view of the discipline, their view on the nature of the kind of education that they think is valuable. It is not uncommon, for example, for some academics to refuse to change their modules

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when a degree programme is redesigned. How successful they are will depend on a range of factors, including how much, and what kinds of power, they are perceived to have by others involved in the process. These debates and compromises over what should be included in the curriculum mean that its underpinning logic is different from the logic that underpins the knowledge that is produced in research. It is important to be clear that these debates and disagreements are not about knowledge being distorted. It is entirely appropriate that there should be these kinds of disagreements. It is rather that the production of curricula leads to a different form of knowledge than research. Other voices will also shape the curriculum: for example the institution in which a curriculum is located will have regulations about the different elements, such as ways of organizing assessment that need to be part of a degree programme. Professional bodies that accredit the degree may require that certain things are taught and that students have experience of particular kinds of learning environments, such as placements in the workplace or time working in laboratories. All of these voices and others contribute to the transformation of knowledge into a curriculum, with the result that it has a different underpinning logic to the bodies of disciplinary and professional knowledge on which it draws. The curriculum is itself transformed when students begin to engage with it. As they study, students relate their engagement with these ideas to their previous experiences and understandings. This again changes the knowledge. Once again, this should not be seen as a distortion but as an essential process by which students make the knowledge their own. These reinterpretations are also what keep knowledge changing through time and space. If people did not reinterpret knowledge then we would never have new insights, link previously unrelated ideas or see a familiar thing, whether it is an illness, a text or a machine, in a new way. However, this does not mean that all interpretations of knowledge are equally valid. Knowledge has an interrelated structure and part of the process of education is for students to relate their personal engagement with knowledge to this structure. This means that whilst the process of engaging with knowledge leads to changes in the meaning of that knowledge, there are interpretations that are not valid. The resulting

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relationship between students’ personal understanding of bodies of knowledge and those of their teachers is one of the most important and interesting elements of the educational process. A key role of the teacher is to support students in developing valid interpretations of the knowledge that makes up the curriculum. This way of thinking about change has four implications for a manifesto for transforming university education. First, it emphasizes that there will be competing views about what a university education is for and it is important to respect the legitimacy of these different views. So in setting out a particular view of university education, an important task is to consider how it relates to other views and whether the differences between these views can be bridged or need to be held in tension. It also highlights the importance of considering the differences in the power between actors to impose their view of the purposes of university education on others. Second, this means that it is very important to have a clear sense of why transforming university education matters. This is because this gives a sense of how much room for manoeuvre is possible without undermining the central commitment to university education. This clear sense also helps to manage the ways in which university education will be reinterpreted by different actors. The key challenge is to keep an eye on which reinterpretations are aligned and which reinterpretations end up distorting and undermining the central intention and commitment to transforming university education. This highlights that rather than micro-managing the processes involved in transforming university education, it is important to keep a sense of the big picture and where the change is intended to lead rather than getting overly concerned about the route taken. Third, one way of approaching this is to set out the broad principles and outcomes that transforming university education is intended to achieve and then discuss with those involved how their practices align with these principles and outcomes. Care clearly needs to be taken to prevent the outcomes of this process becoming nothing more than ‘marketing-speak’ and window dressing. This can be achieved by ensuring that evidence is provided to support the account of how practices align with the principles and outcomes. However, it is important to recognize that this will involve discussion and debate about what counts as valid evidence.

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Fourth, if transforming university education is successful then its meaning is likely to change through the change process. This highlights that outcomes of this process are uncertain. It is important to recognize this if those involved are going to have a meaningful say in shaping university education. It also means that the process of change is likely to be ongoing rather than occurring over a fixed amount of time. There are two important aspects of this. First, we need to have realistic expectations of what is possible and not end up comparing the outcomes of change with some unattainable ideal. Second, the strategies that we use to support transforming university education will need to be rethought periodically. It is very common for change strategies to become tired. What was exciting and new becomes over-familiar, staid and overly bureaucratic. This is why keeping an eye of the big picture is so important. It is not any particular mechanism for transforming university education that is important but whether we are moving in the right direction. Too often, the means of achieving change are mistaken for the intended outcomes, which leads to an obsessive climate of compliance. This provokes resistance and a loss of ground in creating transforming university education. Overall, this theory of change emphasizes that transforming university education will seek to bring together actors with different views of the purposes of university education whilst also being clear about its central educational commitments and aims. These will be expressed as broad principles and with a recognition that the ways of achieving them are likely to change over time and that the principles themselves are also open to change. This means that a recognition of the dynamic nature of the change process is central to this theory of change.

A manifesto for transforming university education Given the theory of change outlined above, it might seem contradictory to use it to inform a manifesto for transforming university education. Whilst the theory of change emphasizes reinterpretation and change,

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a manifesto is about giving concrete suggestions for action. In outlining what different groups should do to contribute to transforming university education, where is the room for interpretation and debate? The tone of a manifesto is undoubtedly directive but one of the advantages of this tone is that it is much easier to have discussions and reinterpretation when potential courses of action are spelt out clearly than when they are vague. The purpose of providing clear statements is that it provides the space for others to object and offer alternatives, whereas when things are couched in caveats the danger is that any objection can be dealt with by saying it is based on a misunderstanding and that it reflects what was intended all along. This is why, as I indicated in Chapter 1, the central purpose of this book is to provoke reactions and stimulate debate rather than to offer an operational map for change. Understanding the manifesto in this way is important because there is no certainty about the suggested actions being adopted or even moving things in a positive direction if they are.

University leaders As I have indicated throughout this book, many universities and their leaders have played an active role in promoting the dominance of economic rationales for undergraduate degrees. They have trumpeted their performance in commercial university rankings14; they have told policy makers that universities are the best way to produce employees and global citizens; they have heralded the salaries their graduates have received. Many university leaders know that to make such claims is not really based on any credible evidence and they understand the deeply flawed nature of university rankings. They often have a clear sense of the educational nature of undergraduate degrees and how it differs from the accounts of generic skills that are offered to policy makers, employers and prospective students and their families. But isn’t this just marketing? It doesn’t matter in the way that real research matters, does it? The most favourable explanation of what is going on here is that university leaders are ‘translating’ what a university education offers in terms that make sense to policy makers, employers and students. However, they need to recognize

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that this translation has very high costs attached to it. These costs are the distortion of the educational purposes of university education. As I showed in Chapter 3, positioning the purposes of an undergraduate degree in terms of graduate premiums and graduate attributes ends up undermining a commitment to university degrees, to scholarly university teachers and to universities as educational institutions. As I argued in the previous section, it is not translation in itself that is problematic but rather accepting and actively promoting translations that undermine our central educational intentions. It is important for university leaders to be clear about what they are trying to achieve educationally and not use translations of their practices that undermine this. Therefore university leaders need to re-assert the educational purposes of an undergraduate higher education. They need to make less fanciful claims about how they prepare students for the work. They need to be clearer about the limitations of what a university education can offer rather than implying that it can meet any challenge thrown at it by policy makers providing that their responses to these challenges are only properly funded. University leaders need to be more vocal in their protests about the ways in which commercial university rankings are compiled and stop providing their data for such exercises. They also need to stop paying for the services that commercial university rankers provide and playing the game of trying to enhance their reputation through brand recognition. They need to be more honest with prospective students about the limitations of rankings for informing them about the quality of degree programmes and offer them alternative ways of understanding the quality of their degree programmes. Within their institutions, they need to stop using university rankings as measures of their institutional and staff performance. They need to focus on measures that relate to what they are distinctively trying to achieve as institutions rather than focusing on measures that simply compare them with other institutions. As part of this, they need to lead and encourage institution-wide conversations about what their university is intending to achieve through the education that it offers. These conversations need to be inclusive of all those involved in the educational process and place at their centre the collective design of curricula that can transform students through their engagement with knowledge.

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Some might argue that it is impossible for any institutional leader to make this kind of stand. Clearly it will not happen until someone does and they are unlikely to be successful unless there is a collective will from universities to argue that the quality of their education should be measured meaningfully. For many universities, there are also significant vested interests that stand in their way. Given it is the most prestigious institutions that benefit most from the current dominance of prestige over quality, their reluctance to expose the meaninglessness of current measures of quality is understandable. However, this does not mean it is right and, given the current mistaking of prestige for quality, it is even more important that these institutions use their privilege to challenge these misleading measures and create inclusive conversations about the purposes of the education they offer. Otherwise, any challenges to commercial rankings can be easily dismissed as institutional jealousy rather than a principled stand against meaningless measures of educational quality. In a similar way, attempts to transform university education may be belittled as a potential marketing opportunity for lower-quality institutions but not the kind of thing one would expect from an elite institution.

Those who work in universities Those who work in universities need to ensure that they take providing students with access to transformative knowledge seriously.15 This is something that many already do but it is crucial that they spend time thinking about how they can help to provide all of their students with access to this knowledge. For academics, this involves taking curriculum design and teaching seriously rather than dismissing it as the incursion of university bureaucracy on their academic freedom. Similarly, those engaged in other roles need to consider how what they do relates to the provision of a transformative education for their students. It is important to recognize that there are many students who would have withdrawn from their studies without the care and support of members of administrative and support staff. When university administration and student support are done effectively, they play a key role in ensuring students complete their programmes successfully and are transformed by their engagement with knowledge.

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Academics have an even greater responsibility for this environment. This greater responsibility comes from their role as stewards of the bodies of knowledge that students are introduced to in their studies. They have a responsibility to show students why this knowledge is important and powerful and what it could enable them to do in the world. They also have a responsibility to share the potential of this knowledge with wider society. As stewards, they also need to challenge their institutions and policy makers in defence of these bodies of knowledge. This is not about special pleading but about a modest16 assertion of what is needed to give students and wider society access to this powerful knowledge. A key element of this modesty is to not over-claim the implications of this knowledge, the potential that it has to transform students and society, or to inflate the resources necessary to provide others with access to this knowledge. It is about making research-informed arguments in support of these bodies of knowledge rather than producing shopping lists of resources. Some might respond that this call to hold university leaders and policy makers to account wilfully disregards the power differentials between them and those who work in universities. However, university academics are the most highly educated workforce in the world. If they cannot find ways of challenging damaging views of the educational purposes of higher education then what hope is there for the rest of the world in dealing with the challenges that face us globally? To be clear, there are some institutions and societies around the world where academic freedom is so curtailed that this is not possible. However, in universities where academic freedom is not curtailed, there is a great opportunity to help to build debates about the nature of a university education.

Students Students are consumers in some aspects of their university experiences. When they buy food or pay for accommodation from their universities, they are clearly consumers. However, they are not consumers of their education. They are active partners in the educational process who produce new insights into the knowledge they are studying. As part of this role, they need to take their

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educational responsibilities seriously. They need to engage with the knowledge and expect this to change them. They also need to hold their institutions to account by asking the basis on which their degree programmes are designed and demanding that these programmes are inclusive of all students. In this view of a university education, students’ engagement with knowledge is clearly positioned as central to their educational experience.17 The other roles in universities then stem from this engagement with knowledge. Their involvement in their educational institutions as students’ representatives and in the design of curricula is predicated on their engagement with knowledge. It is this engagement with knowledge that gives them the status of students. This view of students may appear to be in tension with debates around the decolonizing of the curriculum in universities, which have focused on whether higher education curricula simply reflect a white, Western idea of valid knowledge. Demands for decolonization have become prominent in a number of higher education systems around the world.18 These are important issues and the commitments in this book lead to a particular position in these debates. It is important that in creating curricula, academics should reflect on their knowledge and consider the extent to which it excludes certain experiences and privileges others. The argument in this book, that the design of curricula needs to take seriously who students are, implies that this is the kind of process they will be engaged with. In this way, curriculum design processes should consider how all students will be given access to knowledge and include mechanisms for considering how successful this process has been. Where students feel excluded by the knowledge or culture of their universities then this is something that needs to be recognized as an urgent educational problem that universities need to address in dialogue with students and staff rather than as the students’ problem or a sad reflection of the dumbing-down of curriculum due to widening participation. There should be debates about what knowledge is included in the curriculum and whose voices and experiences are recognized. Such debates are likely to be painful and uncertain but part of offering an education is being able to explain the reasons for its design and reworking that design based on new knowledge about students’ experiences of engaging with the curriculum.

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Policy makers The agenda for policy makers from this way of understanding transforming university education is that they need to focus on how students studying undergraduate degrees support the development of an inclusive society. This means that higher education is not about distinction but inclusion. It is not about graduate salaries but about the contribution that graduates make to the cohesiveness of their societies. Clearly employment outcomes are an element of this but they are only one element. How graduates contribute to society through their careers is more important than how much they earn. This focus on inclusion rather than distinction means that policy makers need to focus on the health of the higher education systems as a whole rather than on how many universities they have in top 100 worldwide. It is about the quality of education that is offered to all students rather than the prestige of its elite education for a select few. This means that they should focus on how their policies impact on the sustainability and power of their higher education system rather than how these policies impact on a few very noisy and exceedingly privileged institutions. When establishing systems to measure the quality of university education, they need to focus on creating valid measures of educational quality rather than measure of institutional prestige. In doing so, policy makers also need to recognize the limits of what higher education can achieve on its own. As part of a wider educational system, that includes schools and vocational education, universities can play an important role in contributing to more inclusive societies. However, on their own, universities can achieve very little. A key element of this is how universities share their knowledge with societies and use it to work with communities beyond higher education. This involves thinking about what universities are good for as well as what they are good at19 and how graduates work with others in society to make use of this knowledge in new and exciting ways.

Why does any of this matter? The manifesto set out above could be argued to be hopelessly optimistic. There is no way that university leaders are going to eschew

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university rankings. University academics, administrators and support staff are too overloaded and over-managed to be able to resist the tide of performative measures. It is unfair to expect students to carry the burden of thinking educationally about their degree programme, and policy makers are never going to risk alienating the prestigious institutions from which they probably have graduated in order to support a transformative and inclusive system of university education. Even if all of these actors have the best intentions, the pressures of globalization and global competition mean that we can never sustain a transforming university education. Whilst there is a depressing defeatist attitude underlying these views, most manifestos do not become reality. This will undoubtedly be true of this manifesto. So what is the point of the arguments made in this book about transforming university education? The importance of the arguments made in this book comes from thinking about the role of education in society. There is an increasing need to think about how education, at all levels, helps us to be human.20 Given the many challenges that face the world, it is incredibly difficult to live lives that have integrity and commitment although the nature and severity of this challenge vary according to personal circumstance. However, this is nothing new. It has always been difficult and always will be. What is important about education is that it gives us access to knowledge that allows us to see ourselves and the world differently. It can transform us and what we can do in the world. It can only do this if we are open to what knowledge has to offer us, modest in our claims about what this knowledge can do, and honest about our struggles in understanding what this knowledge means and how it relates to other people and the world around us. The process of education is never certain. Students and academics alike do not always achieve understanding and the outcomes from engaging with knowledge are sometimes painful and damaging. But this is part of being human, and without rich engagement with knowledge we are so much less than we could be. This does not mean that we should patronize or dismiss those who do not have access to knowledge but rather should engage them in conversations about what this knowledge can offer them. It is this commitment to pursuing knowledge, sharing it with others and, with them, further enhancing our understanding of its ability to change the world that lies at the heart of a transforming university education.

Appendix 1 Lewis Elton: A personal reflection Lewis Elton was an expert in a number of fields. My experiences of  Lewis were as a higher education researcher and my PhD supervisor. Lewis was my PhD supervisor in the late 1990s. Lewis was a brilliant teacher and the perfect supervisor for me. During my PhD, I would often get very excited about new ways of conceptualizing teaching and learning. This was often a way of avoiding engaging with the difficult task of making sense of my data and developing an argument for an original contribution to knowledge. Lewis was always very generous in the face of these new ideas but would insist that they needed to do more than simply re-describe our existing understanding in a new way. This challenge led to the productive rejection of a number of exciting ideas that, when I had arrived at my supervision, I was fully convinced were going to lead to a revolution in our understanding of teaching and learning. I did this many times but Lewis’s generosity never wavered nor did his insistence on the careful, critical analysis of what these new ideas might offer. Lewis’s great strength was that he had a deep insight into both the nature of teaching and learning in universities and the nature of universities as organizations. The way in which he brought these two together meant that his analysis of change in higher education had an unusual depth and rigour. He was equally committed to explaining these ideas in an engaging and accessible manner. Thus there are a whole range of Lewis-isms that I still find helpful today. One of my favourites is his characterization of the ‘Where there is death, there is hope’ strategy of change. This was Lewis’s rightfully dismissive description of trying to introduce organizational change by recruiting new staff with new ideas and waiting for those who are deemed ‘unchangeable’ to leave. Lewis’s important point was that such

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approaches, rather than leading to sustained changes, are most likely to lead to the new staff changing to fit in with the established ways of working. Lewis wrote in a straightforward and accessible manner. His refusal to hide behind jargon is again a testament to his great understanding of higher education. Lewis’s work is often overlooked because it was published in journal articles rather than being brought together in glossy books on teaching and learning in higher education. However, if you take the trouble to find it, you will be rewarded with an analysis of higher education that stands the test of time. For example, his various articles on defining and measuring teaching excellence and quality, although in some cases over thirty years old, offer a more powerful analysis of the travails of the English Government’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) than anything else I have read. Overall, Lewis's contribution to higher education was marked by a deep commitment to improving the quality of teaching and learning in universities. Lewis was one of the least pretentious and most insightful commenters on higher education and is greatly missed.

Appendix 2 David Watson’s scholarly legacy: Towards a conscience for higher education research I have always been suspicious of lists. They make me wonder about the relations between the different items and how together they form a coherent whole. I wonder about whether the items are mutually exclusive or if they overlap and how. I carried this suspicion with me into David Watson’s brilliant SRHE presidential addresses, as David outlined ‘Eight Category Mistakes in Higher Education Discourses’, the ten commandments of the ‘Oath for Contemporary Higher Education’ and ‘The Ten Laws of Academic Life’. Despite my suspicion, these lists captured something fundamental about contemporary higher education experience. They were wise, thoughtful and always challenging. So in reflecting on and celebrating David’s scholarly legacy, it seemed fitting that this seemed to form itself as a list. In revisiting David’s work and thinking about where it takes us, my sense was that it gives us much of the work that is needed to form a conscience for higher education research.

1. Know your history David was a historian and his scholarly work often contains phrases such as ‘If you look at the long sweep of history’ or ‘If you take the historical view’, which always preceded the demolishing of some supposedly truly original policy or research idea. David’s work would carefully show how in some respects we have been here before and how there were some new aspects to the situation. He would be damning of the refusal to learn from history: whether this was the refusal to learn the lessons from Individual Learning Accounts when removing the cap from student numbers or to learn from DipHE when introducing foundation degrees.

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As higher education researchers we equally need to know our history and to be fully aware of how our research relates to what has gone before so that we do not over claim and thus undermine our contributions to knowledge.

2. Know yourself David’s work is clear that as higher education researchers we need to understand the position that we are arguing from and the ways in which arguments are informed by our own interests. David was a passionate advocate of the power of higher education to transform lives but he was equally passionate that if we are going to claim that higher education is personally transformational then we need genuinely to know how this works. What is the nature of this transformation? Why does it take place? Is higher education a necessary condition for this transformation? Is it a sufficient condition? Do all forms of higher education lead to this transformation?

3. Ask but also answer the difficult questions David often wrote about how we are compelled by an authentic higher education to practise answering difficult questions. He also often answered such questions himself: Is there still a higher education sector? What does post-institutional higher education look like? The key here is the focus on answering these questions. Critique on its own is not enough. We need as higher education researchers to offer realistic and workable alternatives rather than simply saying what is wrong with current arrangements and policies.

4. Be symmetrical David’s work is clear that, in answering these difficult questions, we can have no special pleading. As higher education researchers we need to demand of ourselves what we demand of others and to be as self-critical as we are critical of others. This symmetry is crucial because it gives our arguments power and means that we do not look self-indulgent when we attempt to speak truth to power.

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5. Beware nostalgia and golden age narratives Related to the need for symmetry is the need to avoid the temptation of falling into the trap of the nostalgia of golden age narratives. David’s work is highly critical of those who express distaste for the opening up of the opportunity of higher education to a wider range of people. For example, he criticized Frank Furedi for ‘being disappointed by everything’ and Stefan Collini of bad history and bad analysis of higher education generally, whilst recognizing the strength of his analysis of the humanities. The problem with golden age narratives is that they end up suggesting that the expansion of higher education is a disaster and ends up arming those who want to use social privilege to measure academic excellence.

6. Don’t let prestige and reputation blind you One of the great challenges of contemporary higher education is that institutional prestige is often mistaken for institutional quality. David was dismissive of the self-selecting gang of the Russell Group and the way in which the Sutton Trust positioned not attending a Russell Group university when you could as ‘wasted talent’. Similarly he was critical of the tendency to focus on the ‘royal route’ of eighteenyear-olds to higher education rather than understanding the power of lifelong learning and the importance of credit transfer. He was critical because the blindness encouraged by prestige and reputation limits the potential power of higher education to transform lives.

7. Think collectively and internationally In undertaking higher education research we need to be focused on what we can achieve together. The issues facing higher education and higher education research will be solved collectively rather than individually. Therefore, we need to ignore the pressures towards individualism that are so strongly supported by the reward systems of contemporary higher education. We also need to recognize that we tend to experience a very particular version of higher education.

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David’s work drew attention to how higher education looked from the Global South and how this offered possibilities for seeing our own situation in new ways. Thinking internationally allows us to know ourselves more fully.

8. Take things seriously but never preciously The view from the Global South also helps us to realize how important debates about higher education are. Rather than being blasé about people gaining access to higher education, we need to recognize that there are many people around the world who are desperate for the opportunities that are offered by a university education. We need to passionately defend higher education but we must also not be precious and cling to excluding traditions for tradition’s sake. David’s work asks us to think very seriously about what a higher education system that offered lifelong learning for all those who could benefit from it would look like.

9. Be ambitious, assertive and yet humble Thinking in this way requires ambition and being assertive about what we know about the power of higher education. It also involves being honest and humble about what we do not know. As David argued, ‘At their best the researchers can bring a strong historical sensibility, understanding of the wider role of universities and colleges, and novel insights. At their worst they can be defensive, apologetic, selfserving and repetitive’ (Watson 2011, p. 410).

10. Never forget that it is a privilege David’s work is very clear that despite the very difficult challenges we face, contemporary higher education still offers something that can transform people’s lives in remarkable ways. A key message of his scholarly legacy is that the privilege and joy of researching higher education give us a tremendous responsibility to do it to the utmost of our abilities.

Notes Chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

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Blumenstyk (2015); Sommer (2018); Frank et al. (2019). Massy (2016); Giglotti (2019). Lewis (2006); Brink (2018); Connell (2019). Mok and Neubauer (2016). Masehela (2018); Sperlinger et al. (2018). Hartlep et al. (2017); Case et al. (2018); Oanda and Ngcwangu (2018). Alvesson et al. (2017); Ahlburg (2018). Brennan and Magness (2019). Cheong et al. (2016); Mok (2018); Okolie et al. (2019). Arum and Roska (2011). For a rare exception, see Astin (2016). This book is dedicated to two great advocates for university education who are sadly no longer with us, Lewis Elton and David Watson. Whilst citations of their work in the book are limited, the spirit in which it is written is very much informed by their work. To give a sense of this, I have included, as appendices, a piece on each of their contributions to higher education which I wrote just after they died. Altbach et al. (2019). OECD (2019). Although, it is also worth noting that ‘free higher education’ can mean very different things in different national contexts (see de Gayardon 2019). Willetts (2017). Schleicher (2017); Willets (2017). For example, the Yerevan Communique from European Higher Education Ministers signalled the importance of higher education preparing students for employment despite a large variety in fee regimes across the European Union (see Conference of Ministers Responsible for Higher Education 2015). Chetty et al. (2017); Clotfelter (2017); Friedman and Laurison (2019); Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission (2019); Thompson (2019); Platt (2019); Wildschut et al. (in press). It is worth noting that this is not a new argument. In 1970 Bourdieu and Passeron (1990, p. 210) argued that education ‘confers on the privileged the supreme privilege of not seeing themselves

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as privileged [and] manages the more easily to convince the disinherited that they owe their scholastic and social destiny to their lack of gifts or merits’. For example, see Rigg and O’Malley (2017), and an internet search of ‘how universities change the world’ brings up many university webpages describing how their research and degree programmes change the world. See Ashwin and Case (2018) for a fuller discussion. Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission (2019). For example, see Jack (2019). This point was first suggested to me by David Cooper from the University of Cape Town. See Walker and McLean (2013) for a project aimed at producing professionals who are committed to the public good. Cantwell et al. (2018). See Connell (2019) for a discussion of the sudden emergence of the manifesto genre in higher education and an alternative approach of imagining what a good university could like in 10, 50 and 200 years. David Watson (2014) argues that if universities are to claim they transform their students then they need to be able to show: i) how and why this transformation takes place, ii) whether it is a planned transformation, iii) whether higher education is a necessary and/or sufficient condition for such transformations and iv) whether all forms of higher education result in this transformation. This book focuses on the first two of Watson’s conditions and asserts, in relation to the fourth, that for something to be considered a university education it needs to have the potential to be transformative. The third raises important questions that are beyond the scope of this book.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5 6

Cantwell et al. (2018). For example, see OECD (2019). For an in-depth exploration of how this plays out in policy debates in English higher education, see Ashwin et al. (2015). See Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2018) and ‘Going to University Is More Important than Ever for Young People’ (3 February 2018). For example, see Jackson (2014). See Guile and Unwin (2019). For example, see Arum and Roxa (2011), which caused a great deal of concern about the effectiveness of US higher education. However, it is important to be clear that it focused on the extent to which students developed generic skills over the course of their degree

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rather than the extent to which they achieved an understanding of disciplinary and/or professional bodies of knowledge. 7 For examples of this argument, see Dore (1976); Wolf (2002); and Caplan (2018). 8 Caplan (2018) makes this argument. 9 Holmes (2004). 10 Blasko (2002); Chetty et al. (2017); Clotfelter (2017); Lessard-Phillips et al. (2018); Friedman & Laurison (2019); Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission (2019); Wildschut et al. (in press). 11 See Bowden and Marton (1998) for a full exploration of how ways of seeing can be the foundation of university education.

Chapter 3 Such visions inform the individual teaching awards that are found in many countries around the world (see Skelton 2004, 2005; Leibowitz et al. 2012; Behari-Leak and McKenna 2017; Efimenko et al. 2018). 2 For example, see Elton (2001) on the myth surrounding Richard Feynman’s physics introductory course. 3 There is a related and longstanding myth of the ‘natural born teacher’; see Grambs (1952); Elton (2008). 4 For example, Mellon (1973) reports attending an educational symposium that described the lecture ‘as dead as a dodo’ (p. 530). See also Bligh (2000); Gibbs (2013). 5 See Pritchard (2010) for a thoughtful discussion of the different roles that lectures can play in university mathematics. 6 See Ashwin (2005, 2006). 7 For example, see Ashwin (2003) on how the ways that students were assessed shaped the processes and outcomes of a peer learning scheme. 8 See Elton (2003) and Ashwin (2002) for a discussion of this phenomenon in relation to the implementation of schemes of peer learning. 9 For example a recent large-scale review of student success initiatives (Civitas Learning 2019) found that focusing on understanding the data about the particular students studying a course and designing interventions based on this is more effective than following best practice. 10 For recent examples, see Davidson (2017) and Tagg (2019). 11 For an in-depth discussion of teacher-focused teaching, see Prosser and Trigwell (1999). 1

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See Ashwin (2020) for the full development of this argument. Holmes (2004); MacFarlane (2015). Shulman (1987); Holmes (2004); Biesta (2010). See Ashwin et al. (2020) for a full exploration of this design process. Holmes (2004). Holmes (2004). See Ashwin et al. (2020) for a full discussion. For example, see Kennedy et al. (2016). Lindsay (2019). Kuh (2003). Bachan (2017). See Ashwin et al. (2020) for a fuller discussion. Astin (2016) provides a compelling account of the way in which an obsession with ‘smartness’ has distorted the US higher education system. OECD (2019) shows how across countries the education level achieved by their parents impacts on students’ likelihood of completing their undergraduate studies, with in almost every case completion being highest for those whose at least one parent had completed tertiary education and lowest for those whose parents did not complete their secondary education. This varies by country with differences in completion rates between 5 per cent and 20 per cent (OECD 2019). For a recent example, see Carrigan (2019). For example, see McLean et al. (2018). See Ashwin et al. (2020) for a full discussion. For example, see Chickering and Gamson (1987); Kuh (2008); Ambrose et al. (2010); Gibbs (2010); Laurillard (2012); Entwistle (2018); Ashwin et al. (2020). As was highlighted many years ago by Ausubel et al. (1978).

Chapter 4 1 2 3

For example, see OECD (2017). Boliver (2013); Jerrim et al. (2015); Chetty et al. (2017); Clotfelter (2017); Yu (2019). George Orwell uses this term in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to refer to ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them’ (Orwell 1949, p. 171). This is both a conscious and unconscious process and enables the use of conscious deception with complete honesty.

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The following passage from Orwell seems uncannily accurate as a description of the practices of university leaders in relation to commercial rankings: ‘To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while take account of the objective reality which one denies’ (Orwell 1949, p. 171). 4 The argument made here is in relation to commercial rankings as measures of educational quality. Rankings related to research quality are different and not all of the issues raised here are relevant to research rankings. It is significant that whilst rankings of educational quality are nearly all produced on a commercial basis, they are a number of important research rankings that are produced within the higher education sector. See Marginson (2014) and Vernon et al. (2018) for a discussion. 5 This can readily be discerned by visiting the websites of companies that offer rankings and seeing all of the products that they offer to the institutions that relate to their rankings. For example, see http:// www.iu.qs.com/services/; https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ about-us. Last accessed 9/3/2020. 6 See Ellen Hazelkorn’s (2015, 2016) important work in this area and Espeland and Sauder’s (2016) in-depth study of the impact of law school rankings on US higher education. 7 See Locke et al. (2008) for an account of the ‘reality checks’ used by compilers of university rankings. Clearly this reference is dated and was from a time before commercial rankings were such big business. It is unlikely now that compilers would provide evidence that would so undermine the apparent objective judgement that is offered by their ranking. 8 See Altbach and Hazelkorn (2018). For examples of the methodologies of particular rankings, see https://www.timeshighereducation. com/world-university-rankings/world-university-rankings-2020methodology; https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-universityrankings/methodology. Last accessed 9/3/2020. 9 Boliver (2013); Jerrim et al. (2015); Chetty et al. (2017); Clotfelter (2017); Yu (2019). 10 For example, see Schleicher (2016). The myth here is about the possibility of combining the different elements to give a single picture rather than a rejection of the notion of the power of having access to many data points. 11 For example, see Shacklock (2016). 12 Espeland and Sauder (2016) describe the process by which qualities are transformed into quantities as ‘commensuration’ and highlight the way in which it oversimplifies the differences between things

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by suggesting differences are about amounts within a single dimension rather than differences in kinds of dimension. This is a similar kind of problem as I raised in relation to generic skills in Chapter 2. An international example of such an approach is the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) project that sought to provide international comparisons of educational quality in different universities based on students’ performance on generic skills test (see Ashwin 2015 for a critique of this approach). Goodhart (1984). For a full discussion in relation to metrics, see Muller (2018). For a discussion in relation to higher education performance indicators, see Elton (2004). As proposed by Elton (2004). See Huxley and Peacey (2019). These considerations come from collaborative work with Rachel Sweetman (see Ashwin & Sweetman 2016). See Johnes (2018). The history of quality assessment of university education in England swings between fine-grained assessment of quality that is soon found to be too expensive and more light touch approaches that are soon found to be insufficiently fine-grained. In contrast, see Strathern (2000) on the ‘tyranny of transparency’. Muller (2018) explores the ‘tyranny of metrics’ in education, medicine, policing, the military, business and finance, and philanthropy and foreign aid. He shows the unintended but predictable negative consequences of the current obsession with metrics. These criteria are based on those outlined in Ashwin and Sweetman (2016). It is for this reason that the UK National Student Survey was designed to compare university courses at the subject level, see Ramsden and Callender (2014).

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Bowden and Marton (1998). Ashwin et al. (2014, 2016, 2017) and McLean et al. (2018). Reid et al. (2006). Sin et al. (2012). Wood et al. (2012). Bradbeer at al. (2004). Stokes (2011).

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Notes See Ashwin et al. (2016) This way of thinking is based on two separate literatures that come to very similar conclusions in this area. One is developed out of Basil Bernstein’s (2000) work. Key contributions to this work include Muller (2000); Young (2008); Wheelahan (2010); Maton (2014); Young and Muller (2015). The other was developed in Bowden and Marton (1998) and has been further extended in Bailee et al. (2013). Avvisati at al. (2014); Ashwin et al. (2015); OECD (2019a). See also the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 project: https://www. oecd.org/education/2030-project/. Last accessed 9/3/2020. See Robbins (1988). Both of these examples come from a study I conducted in a university that would consider itself to be world leading by any measure and where some students found the approach to teaching to be a barrier to their rich engagement with their discipline. I should add that there were also plenty of examples of students having transformative experiences, which rather underlines the earlier points about the variation in educational quality within a single institution. Boyer’s (1990) influential work argued for four scholarships: discovery, integration, application and teaching.

Chapter 6 1

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In Chapter 3, I explain how these principles were developed by considering the core of a series of sets of principles about highquality teaching and learning in higher education (see Chickering & Gamson 1987; Kuh 2008; Ambrose et al. 2010; Gibbs 2010; Laurillard 2012; Entwistle 2018; Ashwin et al. 2020). This goes back to Ausbel’s famous statement: ‘If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach … accordingly’ (Ausubel et al. (1978), p. 163). This way of thinking about teaching draws on Lee Shulman’s (1987) notion of ‘pedagogical content knowledge’, the idea of how to make knowledge teachable, which Shulman argues, is the unique province of teachers. See Ashwin et al. (2020) for further discussion of this process. The growing literature on threshold concepts (Meyer and Land 2005) provides examples of aspects of knowledge that have been

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identified as being key to students developing an understanding of particular disciplines. Threshold concepts are particular ideas or understandings that students need to grasp in order to be able to progress in their studies. They involve a particular way of seeing the discipline, without which students will misunderstand the meaning of other parts of their subject. Examples include ‘opportunity cost’ in economics and ‘complex numbers’ in mathematics. 6 Gibbs (2010); Boud et al. (2018); Kuh et al. (2015); Ashwin et al. (2020). 7 For a recent example, see Carrigan (2019). 8 Macfarlane (2016). 9 Cantwell et al. (2018). 10 Boyer (1990).

Chapter 7 1

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For studies on how the process of university admissions is structured in a range of national contexts, see Reay et al. (2005); Jerrim and Vignoles (2015); Gao and Ng (2017); Dias Lopes (2017); Montacute (2018); Dougherty (2018); Walker (2018); Prakhov and Yudkevich (2019). Ramsden and Callender (2014). As discussed in previous chapters, there are a number of existing frameworks that could be used to do this that are remarkably consistent about the elements that they include (see Chickering & Gamson 1987; Kuh 2008; Ambrose et al. 2010; Gibbs 2010; Laurillard 2012; Entwistle 2018; Ashwin et al. 2020). Blasko (2002); Lessard-Phillips et al. (2018); Friedman and Laurison (2019); Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission (2019); Wildschut et al. (in press). Chickering and Gamson (1987); Kuh (2008); Ambrose et al. (2010); Gibbs (2010); Laurillard (2012); Entwistle (2018); Ashwin et al. (2020). See Ashwin et al. (2020). At a superficial level, this may look like the processes involved in the English Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). However, the metrics involved in the TEF (particularly the emphasis on graduate salaries) as well as its focus on quality at the level of institutions and, in the future, groupings of subjects rather than particular degree programmes mean that the TEF does not offer a valid measure of the quality of university degrees (see Ashwin 2017, 2018).

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For example, see https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/ default/files/the_2020_world_university_rankings_methodology_ pwc.pdf. Last accessed 23/3/2020. 9 Espeland and Sauder (2016). 10 Marginson (2016) explores what an Association Football World Cup would look like if determined in the same way as university rankings are constructed. 11 For example, in the UK in 2017 there were 414,000 students who obtained a first degree (see https://www.hesa.ac.uk/dataand-analysis/students/outcomes. Last accessed 23/3/2020) and around 5 per cent of these (19,000) were employed by Times Top 100 companies (High Fliers 2018). Around 60 per cent of those employed in the OECD area are employed by small and mediumsized enterprises (OECD 2017a) and around 20 per cent are employed in the public sector (OECD 2017b). 8

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8

Saunders (2006). See Saunders et al. (2005); Trowler (2020). See Trowler (2020) for examples of how different theories of change play out in particular examples from higher education. See Ashwin (2020a) for a discussion of this in relation to teaching excellence initiatives. Saunders (2005); Trowler (2020). This is also sometimes referred to as a ‘transfer’ approach to change, see Skelton (2004, 2005). See Trowler et al. (2014) for a review that shows how this theory of change underpinned national teaching enhancement initiatives in the UK for many years and Ashwin (2020) for a discussion in relation to system-wide approaches to teaching excellence in higher education. This is the approach used in the English Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) (see Ashwin 2017, 2020) for critical analysis) and the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (see Ashwin (2015) for a critical discussion). This theory of change was set out with unusual clarity in the English Government Green Paper setting out the government’s intention to introduce the TEF: ‘The TEF should change providers’ behaviour. Those providers that do well within the TEF will attract more student applications and will be able to raise fees in line with inflation. The additional income can be reinvested in the quality of teaching and allow providers to

Notes

9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

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expand so that they can teach more students. We hope providers receiving a lower TEF assessment will choose to raise their teaching standards in order to maintain student numbers. Eventually, we anticipate some lower quality providers withdrawing from the sector, leaving space for new entrants, and raising quality overall’ (BIS 2015, p. 19 para. 4). Reay et al. (2005); Jerrim and Vignoles (2015); Gao and Ng (2017); Dias Lopes (2017); Montacute (2018); Dougherty (2018); Prakhov and Yudkevich (2019). See Appendix 1; Saunders (2005); Trowler et al. (2014) for further examples. Mason and Rennie (2006). This is based on Bernstein’s (2000) notion of the pedagogic device that focuses on how societies produce knowledge, transform this knowledge into curriculum and how students’ understanding of this knowledge is assessed. See Ashwin (2014) for a discussion of these distinctions in relation to higher education research in terms of knowledge-as-research, knowledge-as-curriculum and knowledge-as-student-understanding. See Ashwin (2009) for a full discussion of the transformation of knowledge from research to curriculum to student understanding. Although this is not the case in every higher education system and there are still some where there is not such a clear sense of institutional hierarchies, there are signs that it is becoming increasingly prevalent (Cantwell et al. 2018). Connell’s (2019) argument for the good university is built around a consideration of those who work in higher education. See Law (1994) for an argument for a ‘modest’ social science. See Ashwin and McVitty (2015). Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013); Le Grange (2016); Luckett (2016); Connell (2019). See Brink (2018). Beista (2010) highlights three functions of education: qualification and the development of knowledge, skills and understandings; socialization into particular social, cultural and political settings; and subjectification that allows one to have some independence and autonomy from those settings. All three functions are crucial in being human.

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Willetts, D. (2017). A University Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, A. (2002). Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth. London: Penguin. Wood, L., Petocz, P., & Reid, A. (2012). Becoming a Mathematician: An International Perspective. Dordrecht: Springer. Young, M. F. D. (2008). Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education. Abingdon: Routledge. Young, M. F. D., & Muller, J. (2015). Curriculum and the Specialization of Knowledge: Studies in the Sociology of Education. London: Routledge. Yu, P. (2019). The stratification of higher education in the USA and Taiwan: A comparative analysis of students’ college-choice outcomes. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 49(5), 700–722.

Index academics 6, 30, 57, 114, 117, 124, 127 duty as public intellectuals 40 and employers 49 teaching and learning 93, 123 and universities 36, 83, 88, 92–3 access and inclusion, crises of 1 approach (measuring educational quality), characteristics 55–6 coherent, research-informed vision 58–9 comparison 60 at particular degree 57 performance improvement, requirement 59 perspectives 58 purposes of higher education, reflect 56–7 teaching, reputation/prestige 57–8 Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) 139 n.14 Ausubel, D. 140 n.2 Beista, G. 143 n.20 Beloved (Morrison) 52 Bernstein, B. 140 n.9, 143 n.12 big data, myth 50–1 commensuration 138 n.12 commercial university rankers/ rankings 6–7, 11, 46, 105–6, 121–3, 138 n.4

credibility 48 doublethink 47 higher status institutions 48–9 performance in 47 precision 107–9 problems with 47, 49 producers of 47–8 purity 109–10 communication skills 22 Connell, R. 135 n.27 contact hours 52–3 Cooper, David 135 n.25 degree programmes quality, judging 97 characteristics 98 commercial university rankings 106–7 enhancement 109–10 individual judgements 98–101 precision, university rankings 107–9 system-level judgements (see system-level judgements) education, functions 143 n.20 educational justification 70–1 educational quality measures (myth) 11–12, 45 alternative approach (see approach (measuring educational quality), characteristics) big data 50–1 commercial rankings 46–50 comparisons 139 n.14

Index costs of measurement 54–5 gaming 54 silver bullet 51–3 Elton, Lewis 128–9, 134 n.12 employment-ready graduates 72 England 2, 139 n.20 English Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 129, 141 n.7, 142 n.8, 143 n.8 Espeland, W. 138 n.12 failures, educational 34, 38–9, 51 50 Shades of Grey (James) 52 Finland 7 free higher education 134 n.15 funding, crises of 1 gaming 54, 59 generic skills, myth communication skills 22 employability skills 20 enhancing 22–3 problem-solving skills 22 shopping list for household’s food (example) 21 social interaction 19 Goodhart’s Law 51 grade inflation 36, 55 assessment judgements 37–8 loss of innocence 39 performance in degree 36 grading on the curve 37 graduate premiums, myth earnings 17 economic inequality 18–19 on global scale 18 non-graduate job, panic 17 over-educated 17–18 high-quality university education 2–3, 6–7, 42–4, 81 academics and universities 92–3 active researchers as teachers 93–4 bland teaching 91–2

157

coherent set of experiences 84–5 collectively produced 87 degree programmes, dumbing down 89 elitist 94–5 evaluating students’ learning 86–7 expected change, students 85–6, 92 inspirational teacher 90–1 knowledge accessible to students 84 opportunities for unanticipated learning 90 problem-based learning 88 responsibility for learning, students’ 89–90 spoon-feeding students 90 students, understanding 83 higher education. see university/ higher education humanities and social sciences, crises of 1 individual judgements, degree programmes as applicant 99 choosing degree programme 100 choosing institution 99 demands and identities 101 evidence-informed process 101 gathering of information 100 quality of education 99 individual teaching 136 n.1 inspirational teacher, myth 30–1, 90–1, 114 James, EL 52 key elements, university education (myth) 10, 30. see also specific myths access to knowledge 41–2

158

conservative and instrumental student 39–41 high-quality education, principles 42–4 inspirational teacher 30–1 naturally brilliant teacher 31 naturally gifted student 38–9 perfect teaching method 31–3 student-centredness 33–5 students’ work as transparent measurement 35–8 knowledge 10, 24, 66, 117 disciplinary and/or professional 11, 29, 34, 77, 101–2, 136 n.6 in generic skills 22 high-quality education 84–90 higher education research 143 n.12 producing and sharing 5 in purposes of university education 26–7 spoon-fed 6 structured bodies of 69–70, 72–4, 78, 114 students access to 33–4, 40–4, 84, 123, 125 subject 34 threshold concepts 140 n.5, 141 n.5 leadership, crises of 1 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) 117 measurement myths 11–12. see also educational quality measures (myth) Morrison, Toni 52 Muller, J. Z. 139 n.22 myths 9–10 key elements (see key elements, university education (myth))

Index measurement 11–12 purposes of university education (see purposes, university education (myths)) natural born teacher 136 n.3 naturally brilliant teacher, myth 31, 38 naturally gifted student, myth 38–9 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 137 n.3 Norway 7 Orwell, George 137 n.3, 138 n.3 pedagogical content knowledge 140 n.3 perfect teaching method, myth innovations 32 knowledge students 33 lectures, use 32 small and large seminar group 32 personally transformative to students 5, 8–9 policy makers 5–6, 9, 103, 113, 115, 121–2, 124, 126 privilege and prestige, social 4, 101, 132 problem-solving skills 22 purposes, university education (myths) 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, 15 active researchers, education needs 77–8 educational/necessary aims 72 and employment 15–16 future workforce 71–2 generic skills (see generic skills, myth) graduate premiums (see graduate premiums, myth) implications 69–71

Index labour market outcomes 25 natural process of learning 24 sense of knowledge 24, 26 signalling approach 23 single disciplines 73 students, engagement 24, 26 teachers and teaching 27 transformational relationships, students 66–9 universities and educational quality 74–5 reinvigoration, higher education 9 Sauder, M. 138 n.12 Shulman, Lee 140 n.3 signalling approach 10, 23 silver bullet, myth 51–3 smartness 137 n.24 social institutions and universities 5 social justice 2 social privilege 4, 101, 132 society, transforming 4–5, 9, 12 student-centredness, myth forms of knowledge 33 natural process of learning 35 relationships 34 responsibility 34 students’ learning 33 teacher as facilitator, positioning 34 teaching expertise, underestimating 34 teaching-focused teaching 33 students 6, 43, 127 access to knowledge 33–4, 40–4, 84, 123, 125 costs of education 3 course selection 73–4 for employment/workforce 25, 114, 122, 134 n.18 freedom to learn 90 generic skills 22–3, 139 n.14 geography and geoscience 68

159

high-quality education 86–7 law and accountancy 67–8 likelihood, parents impacts on 137 n.25 mathematics 68 misleading 76–7 privilege and prestige, social 4, 101, 132 quality of degree programmes 6 and society 9 sociology 67 spoon-feeding 89–90 transferable skills 19 transformational relationships 11, 114 transforming university education 124–5 students’ work as transparent measurement, myth assessment judgements 37–8 grade inflation 36–7 ‘teaching to the test’ 35 system-level judgements commercial university rankings 105 comparisons of quality 104–5 disciplinary and/or professional knowledge 101–2 graduate salaries 103–4 metrics 103 policy makers and prestigious institutions 103 quality of degree 102, 105 quality of teaching 102, 104 research-informed rationale 103 students’ learning outcomes 102–3 teacher(s) 26–7 curricula and 78 as facilitator of learning 34 higher education 84–6, 93–4

160

Index

individual approach, opportunity 91 knowledge and personal relationship 70 myth of inspirational 30–1, 90–1, 114 myth of naturally brilliant 31, 38 natural born 136 n.3 and students 32, 34, 94, 119 teaching-focused teaching 33 teaching hours 52 theory of change 115, 142 n.6, 142 n.8 changing individuals/institutions 116 choosing degree 116 curriculum 118 implications 119–20 knowledge, changing 117–18 new initiatives/technologies 116–17 reinterpretation process 117 system-wide change 116 weakness 117 transforming/sustaining university education 12, 113, 135 n.28 people working in universities 123–4 policy makers 126 students 124–5 theory of change (see theory of change) university leaders 121–3 vision for 113–15 tyranny of metrics (education) 139 n.22

undergraduate degree 1, 17, 23–4, 56, 70, 121–2 educational purposes 9, 11, 42, 110, 114 importance of 7, 99 quality of 58, 61, 98, 101–2, 105 transformational nature 101 United States 2, 7 university/higher education commitment to 4–6 costs of 2 demand for and participation 2 educational purpose (see purposes, university education (myths)) funding of 2 high-quality (see high-quality university education) investment in 2 key elements 7, 10 transforming and sustaining (see transforming/sustaining university education) university leaders 5–6, 121–3, 138 n.3 university webpages 135 n.21 value of a degree 3–4 Watson, David 130, 134 n.12, 135 n.28 Yerevan Communique 134 n.18

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