left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

There’s lots of reasons why, despite it being the middle of July, it doesn’t really feel like summer.  The weather.  Obviously.  A general election that didn’t exactly lift the spirits.  Even more obviously. I suspect that the clincher for me, though, has been that it’s only been in the last week that the cricket season has really kicked into gear with the first test match of the English season.

everything changes …

Not that there’s been any shortage of international cricket: 28 days in June saw 55 T20 internationals played in the West Indies and USA, with the latest instalment of the T20 World Cup.  And while I’m sort of interested, I watched all of about six balls of this on a big screen while passing through a pub.  I decided that rather than watching it, the best way to follow this World Cup was to listen to the analysis on Peter Lalor’s and Gideon Haigh’s podcast.

I am conscious though that this reflects a cricket-related mindset that many would think has a certain heritage, perhaps even antique, quality to it.  Despite its inauspicious and unpromising beginnings in England, the snack-sized version of cricket that is T20 has in many ways become the central driving force in the game.

So what does any of this have to do with higher education?

… but you

Essentially it was the contrast between the way in which bite size cricket has become so dominant, and the important but more marginal impact of models of ‘bite size’ higher education in the UK over the same period.

It’s tempting to think that the importance and prominence of the discussions of more flexible and modular higher education provision all started around 2012 with the craze of the Great MOOC Rush, but of course it goes back much further.  Back in 2010 Simon Marginson was quoted to this effect, in an article on the future of higher education prompted in large part by the last change in political party of the UK government:

In 2020 the sector will look much as it does today – in the same way as today it looks much as it did in 1990 … we will still be talking about changing the paradigms of higher education to just-in-time learning, bite-size learning and so on, as we have been for the past 20 years.

Simon Barker, ‘The Market Charge’, Times Higher Education, 28 Oct. 2010

Of course there are universities that are offering this type of provision, and doing so successfully, but it’s difficult not to see all the current talk about the future growth of micro-credentials, and the brave new world of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) and flexible and modular provision, as evidence of a failure to make the progress that some anticipated and/or desire. Marginson’s scepticism has proved to be well-founded.

avalanches can happen …

Of course things that remain unchanged for long periods of time, can then change.  But when that happens, there are reasons why the historical pattern changes.

With T20 cricket those reasons were obvious.  India’s 2007 T20 World Cup triumph converted a previously sceptical country to the new format.  Then with the proverbial zeal of a convert, India established the Indian Premier League. Through this, and the resulting hunger for T20 in the largest cricket playing and loving country in the world, it established an economic model for T20 that is now dominating world cricket.  And the speed at which this has transformed world cricket has been dizzying.

The parallels aren’t exact or perfect, but I suspect an important reason why we’re still talking in higher education about moving more towards bite-size/modular/flexible provision is the lack of a compelling economic model to drive significant change in the way that a compelling economic model has driven T20’s transformation of cricket.

… but often don’t

One aspect of this is demand in the UK higher education sector.

There’s a lot of talk about the demand for more modular and flexible provision (higher education’s T20).  That may be true (though it can be questioned), but there are also still very high levels of demand for higher education’s test cricket (the degree programme).

It might be argued that the health of the market for the degree programme reflects historic and supplier-driven patterns of higher education provision. Programmes are studied, because programmes are what we offer. Modular and flexible provision isn’t as readily available, so fewer study in that mode.

There may be some truth in that, though I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced. Consequently I think why higher education is still so dominated by the degree programme is a question that also needs other answers.

Of course there are academic and philosophical reasons for this. But another key element is that unlike in cricket with T20, the economic model for bite-size/modular/flexible provision doesn’t really stack up in a way that would lead to the type of expansion of this type of provision that its advocates think is needed.  And the LLE as developed under the previous government is so flawed that it’s not going to change that.

it’s the economy, stupid

A recent post from Dan Heard on WonkHE drew attention, as part of the recent discussions on the future of higher education within the general election campaign, to why a move towards a greater emphasis on bite-size/modular/flexible provision is needed, from a societal and economic perspective.  It’s a good case, made stronger by the potential contribution this could make to the new government’s focus on delivering increased economic growth. But as well as being something they are drawn to by societal needs and their commitment to deliver public good, more is needed.

If we genuinely want to deliver this, and not be here in 2034 saying that the future of higher education is a move towards more bite-size/modular/flexible provision, a more compelling economic model (which includes recognising and addressing the economic consequences for universities of the regulatory architecture) needs to be established by the new government so that more universities expand further their offer in this mode.

And it needs to be a model that doesn’t just make bite-size/modular/flexible provision look more economic to universities, by allowing the unit of resource for more traditional provision (particularly the modal three/four year undergraduate degree) to be ever more eroded.  It needs to be a model that ensures that for universities bite-size/modular/flexible provision is a genuine opportunity in economic terms – maybe not to make lots of money, but to be sufficiently viable to incentivise more universities to increase this type of provision.