Serious business: framework is unveiled

*This* comes from someone who read PPE at Oxford? Utterly appalling...

This is more like a plan to destroy higher education in the UK. Applicants are not stupid. They know which institutions are better than others and apply accordingly. To mandate that we treat students like customers and focus on what is essentially vocational training will undermine the critical thinking and broader perspectives which university is intended to foster. Students are not consumers, they are more precious than that. We are not shop clerks who are meant to please them by giving them what they want. Are you people mad? It will empower bureaucrats in HEFCE and universities to implement even more silly time-wasting schemes that hurt rather than help. It will KILL university education in the UK. Sorry to sound so shrill but it is really dire.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.... this really does not sound good.

As the world fills up with graduates, there are going to be more and more people who are convinced they could do a better job than the lecturers they actually had. You meet them in droves at dinner parties and Lord Mandelson is, no doubt, just one such. Surely he is simply extending the contemporary culture of blame. If your life is screwed up, blame your professor! But how would he deal with the back three rows of my first year lecture, where ill-mannered students won't stop talking, giggling, eating, fidgeting and texting, to the annoyance of everyone else in the room, and think a telling-off is really cool. They are already unemployable, and they're the products of Labour's wonderful secondary schools where standards are, we are told, ever advancing. " Employability", "Research concentration", "Business awareness". Didn't we have all this in the Thatcherite 80s, and where did that get us? There's nothing new here, except the prospect of even more paperwork. I think I'm ready to retire, and thank God!

For the last 3 years I've been trying to find academic work and becoming ever more depressed and dejected about my inability to do so, despite having everything on my CV (the competition for posts is simply too intense). Today, all of those clouds blew away and I thank God (despite not even believing in him) that I am outside of the profession and now thoroughly intend to remain so. Good luck to those who stay in the field and end up with 75-hour weeks, 40 of which are likely to be spent chained to desks dealing with every trivial, nonsensical undergraduate request along the lines of "how do I use the library?" in the name of customer service.

This is even worse that the pre-digested versions which appeared in the press beforehand. The Prince of Darkness is, sadly, no fool, so he has mixed in the reasonable demands (that universities say something about contact hours) to leaven and make harder to chuck out the crass, myopic, frankly cretinous rubbish here. Why should I teach my students "business awareness"? Maybe I should explain to them that the trick in career terms is to resign twice under questionable circumstances, then creep around politicians until someone gives them a job (with a few trips on yachts with dodgy oligarchs along the way). Oh yes, and let's get some of those oh-so-clever banker chaps in to tell us how to run universities. Brilliant, innit. Fat chance of the VC club standing up to this of course (knighthoods all round). But there's an interesting point here about the workings of democracy: if this is the trade-off for the higher fees which (apparently) "universities want", when does the public get to vote on that? Oh sorry, it doesn't. Mandy proposes and Mandy disposes.

There's an way of incorporating these objectives, and it's a logical extrapolation of Mandelson's thinking: reclassify all but the top research institutes as polytechnics. All undergraduates would attend the local poly where their first year be a foundation course training them up in life skills and business awareness. Then they could beneit from the increased emphasis on practical skills across all disciplines. Lecturing staff would start off on about £21,000, max £29,000 tops! 26 contact hours a week contact hours - that should give the students value for money. And the remaining elite universities would be blessedly free from undergraduates. That'll be better for the students who come in without A levels too. A win-win situation, no?

@Petey: Well, no, not if you think an undergraduate education matters, which I do. "Blessedly free from undergraduates"? As in: yes, we have no future.

Well, that's the last nail in the coffin currently housing what's left of my desire for a career in academia. It almost comes as a relief.

Universities, and education institutions, do not exist to prepare people for employment, they exist to promote the advancement of knowledge, learning and culture. The crass linking of education to economic goals is very troubling and simply extends an outmoded Victorian way of doing things that has pervaded the system long passed its sell by date. The current economic system is crumbling and what we need are graduates who are not just consumers ready to jump through hoops but innovators and thinkers who will be able to contribute to solving some of the very dire problems that the whole planet faces. These graduates will need critical thinking skills of the highest order, excellent communication skills so that they negotiate complex and resource challenged times with minimal conflict and maximum empathy for human development in its broadest terms. The developed world will have to down size - we need to prepare people for a radical change in their ways of life and not an initiation into a world that expects economic development to solve all of its problems. As for Petey the Anchorite, your suggestions will reinforce hierarchies and divisions that fracture societies and continue the patterns of contempt and exploitation. Surely, we all have the right to develop to our full capacities - for everyone to have this right, everyone must be respected equally in the system.

@Petey. I work at a Research Intensive uni and I LIKE teaching students. I enjoy it. I find it rewarding and it enriches my research. A uni without undergraduates would be so tedious. This news item makes me so depressed. Many of the posters above have framed the issues well so there is no need to repeat them. I am updating my cv and applying for jobs overseas.

I would pay more attention to Willett's response that Mandy - the current lot'll be out by the Summer anyway, we'll all have a brief party and breath a sigh of relief, and then it'll be all change again...

David Willetts (in a recent Guardian article) asked why private institutions charge 3000 pa for degrees when public HEIs charge 10,000? He cites the use of online technology to reduce real-world contact hours as a major factor. If you think Mandy's vision is bad - Willetts clearly intends to reduce HEIs to the level of the Boondocks Bible and Evolutionary University of Greater Redneck. Vote Labour and 2/3rds of us just might still have jobs by 2015; vote Tory and watch the soft HEI underbelly become a prime target for deficit reduction - 50%, 60% job losses anyone?

I would pay more attention to Willett's response that Mandy - the current lot'll be out by the Summer anyway, we'll all have a brief party and breath a sigh of relief, and then it'll be all change again...

"Advancement of knowledge, learning and culture"? Those things are unkown (by both students and academic staff) in quite a few of our alleged universities. Therefore, it makes a great sense to "polytechnisize" at least half of the universities so that they can give better value for money to the taxpayer.

Do what I did. Go overseas. The job market isn't much better, but at least some sanity prevails.

Nice to see a Lord wants us to churn out students who will toe the line and quietly get on with the status quo, rather than people who are aware and keen to engage in critical and incisive thinking. Who knows, if we carry on as we are we might end up with graduates who get fed up with being told what to do by unelected and multiply disgraced politicians. I'll take a lecture on contributing to the economy when the government stops throwing money at the bankers who brought the economy to its knees. On past evidence I'm better for the economy than they are. Perhaps it's just that academics aren't usually rich enough to entertain politicians on fancy yachts? The really annoying thing is we commoners aren't allowed to vote Mandy out any more, now he's weaseled his way into the House of Lords. We just have to doff our hats and say please sir, yes, sir, may I lick your boots, sir? He may be a fighter, but by the looks of these comments he'll be forcing a lot of academics to consider becoming quitters. At the moment I'm paying tax; come next year I'll probably be on the dole. Fat lot of use that'll do the economy.

I'm puzzled. If this is the way he wants to go, why not just encourage more students to use ratemyprofessors.com and then make funding decisions on what students say there? With bonuses for those who get the most chili peppers, naturally.

Surely this has been produced by one of those agencies that produce specious essays for cash? I like the circular references - references to the response to the Select Committee report when that report says that a response will be made in the policy statement - that is pure Sir Humphrey! And the inconsistency in saying that pay structures should attract the brightest and best whilst elsewhere implying that university staff are grossly overpaid. The people who wrote this are not only ignorant but they clearly do not communicate - perhaps universities do have something to answer for!

Job in Higher Training anyone?

One shouldn't really blame the government - it can't help it: it is in the grip of a fundamentalist ideology where all policy, including education, is oriented to hyper-liberal greed-satisfaction. No more than one should blame Scientologists or Raëlists ("scientifically advanced humanoid extraterrestrials created humans") and suchlike other fundamentalists for acting on their convictions. Government ministers may even believe what they say, odd as that seems from the point of view of the reality principle. The system that engenders hyper-liberal fundamentalism is called capitalism. As the late Jerry Cohen from Oxford wrote, "The combination of conservatism" - in this case the conservation of autonomous academic values - "with wealth and inequality was relatively easy to sustain in a pre-capitalist society, but, when inequality became capitalist inequality, the combination of conservatism with wealth and inequality became untenable, among other reasons because capitalism so comprehensively transforms everything, including itself: in the phrase of the Communist Manifesto, under capitalism, 'all that is solid melts into air'." Capitalism will throw anything overboard, if destruction may serve the profit-and-greed imperative. So it's now destroying the universities.

As said over and over above, this is disgraceful, and accounts to no less than getting rid of universities and replacing them with a sort of careers service/graduate program controlled by businnesses. It will lead to an exodus of the best teachers and researchers, frustration, lowering of standards and presumably industrial action.

The market is notoriously fickle, and churning out students in "marketable" fields only means that three years down the line there will be a glut of people for those jobs and a serious lack of eligible people for emerging jobs in other fields. Not to mention the fact that big advances in technology do not come from training people in existing technologies, they come from letting people loose in "blue sky" research. In other words, the kind of research which will go begging in this plan. This looks more like a plan to collapse the country's talent into mediocrity and cripple long-term international competitiveness.

@Petey the Anchorite. Those are the terms and conditions of an FE college. Since FE has to cope with everything else, why not reclassify your Polys as Technical Colleges and they can deal with the dissafected 14 year olds as well. The need isn't for 'business skills' it's for thinking skills. If we want to meet the challenges presented by other advancing nations (China, India, etc) then people need to learn to cope with what we don't yet know about (see Shift Happens on YouTube). It's not just about qualifications, its about the process that occurs in getting the qualification. If we get even closer to an education system more akin to a Henry Ford production line, then the whole point of HE will be lost.

A proposal. Seeing as mandy is going to concerntrate all the research funding in the "inherited excellence" of the older institutions. I suggest that the staff of any new university that did better in the RAE than their redbrick and oxbridge peers immediately be transferred across and replace these inadequetes. Meritocracy and all that.

A proposal. Seeing as mandy is going to concerntrate all the research funding in the "inherited excellence" of the older institutions. I suggest that the staff of any new university that did better in the RAE than their redbrick and oxbridge peers immediately be transferred across and replace these inadequetes. Meritocracy and all that.

Dear UK HE, Thank you for paying me to do a PhD in this country. My work now is almost done, I won't bother you anymore. Off to seek a research position overseas -- after all, those are the rules of a free-market economy, right?

X writes: 'big advances in technology do not come from training people in existing technologies, they come from letting people loose in "blue sky" research.' 99.999% of the graduates are never going to advance anything at all, small or big; it makes a great deal of sense to try and change this by insisting that they study something useful. The other 0.001% should of course be funded and let loose. Lord Mandy is absolutely right, and university academics should pay heed to his words instead of hoping that they will continue to easily milk the public cow.

I was always taught to be a bit suspicious of people who claimed to knw (let alone who called themselves) Truth. It's not very scientific, you see. But what, Dr Truth, do you regard as useful (which all but thirteen students per annum will be sent off to study)?

Two things to note here. Firstly, new labour will soon be a thing of the past so this report is not worth the paper it is written on. What matters is as 'RichTea' points out what Willett's says in response. Secondly, UK HE is a success story, evidenced by the large number of foreign academics who want to work here and students who want to study here. The word rankings also support this. No goverment in its right mind are going to make any changes which will damage the current situation. However, it is clear that research funding will in the future be concentrated in the established universities and that a tier of teaching only universities will be established.

@whippet - "No goverment in its right mind are going to make any changes which will damage the current situation." I'm afraid the operative phrase is "in its right mind." Who says the government, either current or likely future is in its right mind?

@Dr Howard Fredrics. You are a little pessimistic...

Most of these contributions have missed the point. Are students and taxpayers consistently getting value for their ever increasing investment? No they are not. Did Universities recognise the issue and take credible steps to fix it themselves? No, they did not, so they are now being forced to fix it by external draconian means which will probably not be as effective as self-fixing would have been. Are Universities ashamed that things have come to this pass? No, they most certainly are not. These pages are filled with a bruised sense of entitlement and an implication that complete academic freedom to teach what and how one thinks best without accountability to anyone is the only and best model for the student, by some mysterious trickle-down alchemy. It is not.

Ok Whippet what about those academics who are at new universities that actually out-perform the "established" universities. The RAE has shown there's a fair few of them.

mcdonagh writes: 'Are students and taxpayers consistently getting value for their ever increasing investment? No they are not' What are you even talking about? This is probably the most broad-brushed, sweeping, gratuitous comment I've ever read in a message board, and I include those for football fans... UK universities constantly rank among the best ones, both in teaching and research. The taxpayer gets a fine good return on their investment by getting a) a high education b) qualified professionals, scientists, teachers, doctors, artists, etc and c) an independent source of expertise, research adn development. My institution, like many others, has an excellent research record and student feedback. There is constant external supervission and audits. And my sense of entitlement is not bruised at all: I know what my job is and I do it as best as I can, without the need to be turned into an employer trainer for some multinational company.

The mechanics of this are interesting. 1) Impose fees though you said you wouldn't. 2) Expect universities to expand (possibly indeed to unachievable numbers without a drop in standards and the necessary introduction of courses of questionable value). 3) Run an RAE, at considerable expense, which recognizes excellence wherever found (for example: look at the output results for English and the showing of several new universities against Oxbridge). AND THEN (trumpet flourish and enter His Lordship): 4) Remind universities that fees = consumers = expectations, because in fact 5) you plan to increase the fees becasue some VCs have told you they need the money but 6) On no account allow the electorate a say in the matter (spot the cross-party deal). 6) Threaten universities with withdrawal of funding for the courses they put on to meet your targets (whose shortcomings incidentally reflect as much on your policy decisions as any university misdemeanours) and finally the really classy counter-scientific coup de grâce: 7) Reverse the findings of your own RAE to ensure that you fund research only in certain designated a.k.a. self-designated universities (possibly those whose VCs are your mates) after all. @mcdonagh:no-one as far as I can see is claiming "complete academic freedom to teach what and how one thinks best without accountability to anyone [as] the only and best model for the student". But ... many academics (legitimately)have views on what their subjects are about (and (equally legitimately, indeed I'd say as a sine qua non of their professional responsibilities), views on the role and function of higher education, in rather the same way (say) that consultant surgeons probably have views on what the content of medical training ought to be. Subordinating all of this to the views of one unelected peer, whose department has removed the word "university" from its name, seems a strange way to proceed in order to promote what (or so we are told) is the national interest.

academic 3 November, 2009 @Petey. I work at a Research Intensive uni and I LIKE teaching students. I enjoy it. ********* Me too, academic: I love teaching. My field is medieval literature, so I'm a bit hard placed to demonstrate the market impact of my research or exactly how a keen understanding of Anglo-Saxon hagiography is going to get my students into industry. I can't really see much of a future in teaching in higher education, but I really hope I'm wrong.

Mcdonagh rather illustrates my point about kneejerk criticism of universities. That the student experience has declined over the last two decades should surprise nobody: almost every institution is accommodating more than twice the number of undergraduates it was designed to house, and without commensurate increases in funding even taking higher fees into account. But to be positive, much of what Mandelson wants is already being put in place, at least as far as we are able. In my university, our physics, maths, engineering and IT programmes have been renamed, relaunched, recombined and reinvented more times than I've had hot dinners, but still the candidates don't come forward from New Labour's numeracy-free schools. Every prospectus from every university in the land is packed with information about graduate destinations, but of course the information is anecdotal because HESA has the real statistics and the Data Protection Act keeps them secret. As for business awareness, almost every subject in my university can be taken "with Business Management". This has been in place for 20 years. So play fair, Mcdonagh! A final point that seems to have escaped attention is that higher fees were originally brought in to allow university staff decent salaries, after years of deliberate attrition by a hostile Tory government. It's another curious facet of public prejudice about academics that people think we should work for free. Well, I won't.

@ Dr Truth - don't you know that infinitives should not be split? Get an eddication, damn it!

@Professor retiring shortly: please don't.

We need to go back to when the world was properly organized: the polys trained the hoi poloi to do what the hoi poloi do best, and the universities produced real university graduates. The situation we have right now, i.e. a whole lot of pretend universities doing who knows what, is entirely unsatisfactory; and just about every level-headed person knows this. By default, we are going back to a two-tier system, and the question is whether or not we continue to close our eyes on that path. One possible way to go is to upgrade the small number of real academics (from the post-92s) and to downgrade the small number of imposters (in the universities) and then appropriately distribute research funding and other serious money. PS: mcdonagh, you are right.

"Dr Truth - don't you know that infinitives should not be split?". Superstition that only the uneducated pay attention to---if they even know what an infinitive is. See Fowler's.

Dearie me, but there aren't half some objectionable and ill-educated morons out there banging on about what "the [sic] hoi poloi [sic]" should and shouldn't be allowed to do. I think my suspicions of Truth are confirmed.

Though this may nolonger be read in relation to the proposed future tasks of our universities, Might we suggest to Government: (i) All who intend to benefit from a higher education should first register at a Polytechnic, in order to gain a basic qualification in a profession, etc. (ii) They would then be expected to undertake a period of practical training. (iii) Only those who had satisfied the above requirements and now wished to embark on a period of study in depth for its own sake, would now be admitted to a university.