Dumb and Dumber

As the ritual annual self-flagellation over A level results reaches fever pitch, my mind turned to a story that I came across in the Telegraph a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that universities, amongst the main critics of the rising A level pass rate, may themselves be guilty of ‘dumbing down'.

According to the Telegraph, over the last ten years or so the proportion of students gaining firsts almost doubled, with upper seconds rising by a more modest 8%. The proportion of students therefore gaining ‘good’ degrees rose from 52.2% of the student body in 1997 to 61.4% last year, an 18% rise. The increase is even more marked if we go back to the 1980s when only a third of students gained the top two degree classifications.

In many ways this seems surprising. Universities are constantly bemoaning the declining skills of undergraduates caused by ‘satnav’ A level qualifications. Reports allege that students "lack the basic ability to express themselves in writing", and that there has been an “alarming decline” in numeracy standards. At the same time, the expansion of university education (numbers rising from 23% of under 21s in 1991 towards the government’s target of 50%) must surely imply some dilution of quality. In this light, one would surely expect a reduction in the number of 'good' degrees rather than the large increase we have seen.

It is possible, of course that universities are simply getting better at preparing undergraduates for their final degrees, but the evidence is that more and more universities are making use of postgraduates for teaching rather than their ‘big name’ academics. At the same time an increasingly market-driven environment is also leading to inexorable upward pressure on degree classes.

This pressure comes from two main sources, the external market and the internal one. Firstly, as discussed in an earlier post, university league tables include the proportion of good degrees as part of their ranking – with students being increasingly aware of the tables, a good ranking is important for recruitment and, by extension, funding. A leaked email from Manchester Metropolitan university last year showed how these pressures were brought to bear. The email, to Maths and Computing staff, says: "As a university we do not award as many Firsts and 2:1s as other comparable institutions so there is an understandable desire to increase the proportion of such awards. Please bear this in mind when setting your second and final year assessments, especially the latter." As hints go, this is a pretty broad one.

The internal market also exerts pressures – universities will close down courses that are not ‘economically viable’, essentially meaning having lots of students on them. If you want to keep your job, you need to run a course, and students are unlikely to sign up for courses in which high grades are difficult to acquire, leading to a beauty contest between different courses within degree programmes.

As a consequence, universities' protests at A level grade inflation making life difficult for them begin to ring a little hollow, as the same criticisms are now being levelled at them by prospective employers. Indeed, there have been some reports suggesting that degrees have become so devalued that employers prefer to look at university graduates' A level grades as being a better discriminator than degree class! A worrying development, given the rising cost of studying.

It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that at the very time when A level grades are being benchmarked against the students' GCSE background, to try to mitigate against grade inflation, universities are resisting any attempts to introduce greater rigour into their own procedures - since the demise of the CNAA (after polytechnics became universities back in 1992) each university has set its own standards with no over-arching supervision. Pots and kettles come to mind.

The Pure Hell of St Trinian's

It was with no great sorrow that I read in the Telegraph last week about the demise of two all-girls schools in Bedfordshire, forced to merge as a result of falling student numbers. Although no doubt recession-related, the closures are part of a seemingly inexorable decline in single-sex education in the UK. In the 1960s there were over 2500 single-sex state schools in the UK, but numbers have fallen to around 400 today. In the independent sector, 130 single-sex schools have merged, turned co-educational or closed. Having observed first-hand the anti-socialising effects of single-sex education, I find this trend a welcome one.

My own story is that at the tender age of 9 (the end of year 4), I left my local primary school to join an independent all-boys day school. When I left primary school, interactions with girls were generally of the pigtail-pulling, skipping rope stealing, chasing around the playground nature and although differences were beginning to emerge, we were largely an amorphous lump of tag-playing children. Three years later I rejoined co-education (at the start of year 8). Things had changed; on the cusp of teenage years, it became rapidly apparent that not only was pigtail-pulling no longer on the agenda, but more fundamentally I had no clue as to what the agenda was.

Perhaps in this I was no different from my class-mates – we all seemed to struggle to interact with girls, but for me the situation was more acute – I had been teleported from a world dominated fundamentally by top-trumps, dirt and rude noises to a maelstrom of emotion and hormones with which I was singularly ill-equipped to deal. How those who are wholly single-sex educated ever learn to cope is beyond me; it is perhaps no surprise to learn that boys educated at single-sex schools are a third more likely to divorce in later life than their co-ed counterparts.

But what of the academic benefits? These seem largely to centre around the idea that girls will be academically more successful in single-sex education. Looking at the GCSE and A level league tables, they are dominated by top independent girls schools – surely a strong argument in favour of single sex education? Not according to Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at Buckingham University and Director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research. Smithers' research suggests that whether or not a school was single sex makes no difference to the students’ educational attainment. Differences in performance were accounted for by the ability and social background of pupils, and head teachers made ‘exaggerated claims’ about the benefits of single sex schools because they were under threat.

Nevertheless, in the US, there is a growing movement in favour of gender segregation, arguing that girls and boys learn differently, and will therefore benefit from single-sex education. There is much debate over the validity of this research. Rosalind Chait Barnett, from the Women's Studies Research Centre at Brandeis university, argues that the studies behind this single-sex revival in the US 'do not meet even the most primitive standards of scientific query'.

To some extent, though, this all misses the point. Proponents of single-sex education generally focus on the benefits to girls – but girls already outperform boys at almost every level in the UK. Girls have outperformed boys at GCSE since records began in 1988. Since 2002, girls have scored more A grades at A level than boys, and girls score more 2:1 degrees or better. Boys now only have the lead in the proportion of first class degrees awarded, and this year could see that bastion breached too. Whilst I suppose proponents could argue that girls would do even better if educated separately (although Professor Smithers would demur), this has to be weighed against the fact that girls and boys are prevented from mixing and learning about one another, and the social damage that this must cause.

In the end perhaps we should leave the final word to those educated in single-sex schools. 40 percent of them would want their own children to be educated co-educationally. I am definitely one of them.

University league tables, perils and pitfalls.

xx
"I'm not going to York!"

Little surprises me much these days, but I was slightly taken aback by the vehemence of the student’s objection. I mean, OK the Stonebow centre is a monstrosity, but by and large I had thought York to be a decent enough city when I lived there for a few years as a teenager. What’s more, several of my former students have recently come back to tell me how much they are enjoying their economics course there.

“Why not?” I enquired mildly.

“Because,” came the ringing reply, “They are ranked 23rd in the UK for economics!!!

This was a couple of weeks ago, as we had been beginning the process of university application for 2010, and I had (clearly mistakenly!) suggested that the student have a look at York.

Not willing to leave it at that, I probed further:

“Ranked 23rd in terms of what? What criteria were they were using?”

“Er. They were just 23rd.”

“23rd in terms of the quality of gherkins in the student restaurant? 23rd for the loudness of music in the bar? 23rd for the dress sense of the lecturers?”

“Don’t think so. Dunno really.”

This encapsulates in a nutshell the problem with university league tables. It’s not that the Times (the one used by the student in this case) hadn’t made its methodology patently clear (it had). It is simply that we seem drawn to look uncritically at the rankings like moths to flames.

As the student and I investigated further, it turns out that the Times looks at Research Quality, Student Satisfaction, Graduate Prospects and Entry Standards (the average A level grades of students on the course). The problem is that not all these matter equally to all applicants, some of them are subjective and variable over fairly short periods of time, and others rely on data from some time ago. Whilst we can probably all agree that Oxford and Cambridge are good places to study, it is less clear that it is easy to tell the difference between say York’s economics department in 23rd place (83.3 points) and Bristol’s in 11th (86.6 points), a difference of 12 places for 3.3 points. Looking at the two, we find:

xxxxxxxResearch xxxxEntry xxxSatisfaction xxxProspects xxxTotal
Bristol: xxx 3.9 xxxxxxx457 xxxxxx70% xxxxxxxxx86% xxxxxx86.5
York: xxxxx3.2xxxxxxxx457 xxxxxx74% xxxxxxxxx72% xxxxxx83.3

York’s score is therefore lower than Bristol’s because when research quality was last assessed (2008), Bristol’s was better (whether this makes much difference to undergraduate students, however, is a matter for debate) and secondly, better ‘Graduate Prospects’, an item based on the job destinations of 2006 and 2007 economics graduates (a relatively small sample), and where the methodology behind the calculation was unclear.

What about all the other relevant factors? Bristol is a city-based university, York is on a campus. Bristol is a big city, York isn’t. What about accommodation, student life, safety and a million other factors which cannot possibly be crammed into the economics subject league table?

And the problems don’t just end there. Other league tables exist too, measuring slightly different factors, but on occasion producing wildly differing outcomes:

• Edinburgh: A poor 20th= in the Times, but a cracking 4th in the Guardian.
• East Anglia: A respectable 13th in the Times, but fails to trouble the Guardian’s scorers at 49th.

Who should we believe? Are we diligent enough to check the methodology?

I hope so, but the reality is that laziness leads to far too many students making decisions based on a relatively narrow and subjective set of data, a decision that will make a huge difference to their next three years and possibly the rest of their life. At the very least, it could be an expensive mistake, with 1 in 5 students failing to complete their degrees.

League tables are obviously helpful, but an understanding of their limitations is crucial. They should form only a small part of any decision – anyone who hasn’t actually been to visit universities, spoken to some current undergraduates, and thought carefully about exactly what they want, but has instead simply worshipped at the altar of league tables, is far more likely to be in the 1 in 5 that drop out than the 4 in 5 who complete, with a debt of around £22,000 to repay for their troubles; A high price to pay for laziness.