Another day, another report arguing that framing social mobility around access to university and the professions is causing social problems.
DK has covered elsewhere on the site the detail of the arguments set out in Innovation Generation, a new report from the government’s independent Social Mobility Commission, which worries about a relative lack of attention to vocational training opportunities, and calls for a more sophisticated approach to understanding the various factors that contribute to disadvantage – adding that a regional lens could help to take a more coherent and nuanced approach.
I’m not here to take issue with the arguments of that report, in fact I think they are entirely in line with the current historical moment for public and policy discourse about higher education – which is what interests me. Because even for the most nuanced assessment – and the Commission is far from arguing that going to university is a Bad Thing – the rehearsal of the public line that university education serves elites rather than widening opportunity adds fuel to the populist narrative that is deeply (and often cynically) sceptical of the value of higher learning. And I think it’s something that is worth robustly challenging.
Breaking news
As it happens I’ve read the Social Mobility Commission report in tandem with this article from the US publication The Atlantic “How Ivy League Admissions Broke America.” If you have time and interest, do read the whole thing because it does that brilliant best-of-US-journalism thing of giving a tour de force in reasoned and evidenced argument that covers multiple lenses. And of course, if you read the whole thing you can more readily take issue with particular bits of it.
But for our purposes the argument runs roughly as follows: a narrow focus on academic merit as a condition for access to high-status universities and subsequently into elite careers has widened social divisions between elites and everyone else. It has also made life worse both for the hot-housed academic elite young people who have curiosity and passion ground out of them by an education system focused purely on academic skills driven by testing and assessment, and for those who do not benefit from the economic leg up provided by a university education who tend to be from less advantaged backgrounds to begin with.
There is not, suggests the article, a great deal of evidence to suggest that academic capability as we currently measure it is particularly aligned to either future career success or any broader aspirations an individual might have to live a meaningful life; this is likely to become even more the case as AI reshapes knowledge-intensive work. There is, however, evidence that a different set of skills and capabilities centred in curiosity, drive, social intelligence and cognitive agility do align more closely with professional success and a life well lived – the sorts of skills that are more readily developed in co- and extracurricular provision than in traditional classrooms where students are trained to perform according to a set of extrinsic criteria for intelligence.
The solution, helpfully, is not to entirely dismantle the meritocracy – all societies are hierarchical and we do need well-trained professionals, scientists and leaders – but to reimagine it to better value the development of this broader set of capabilities, retooling education to foster and assess a breadth of skills and, yes, creating opportunities for personal and professional development that extend beyond conventional higher learning pathways
So let’s acknowledge that there is no direct read-across from the US Ivy League to, for the sake of argument, the UK’s Russell Group, which educates more than double the students who attend the Ivy League in an HE system that is on the back of an envelope calculation one-fifteenth of the size. That’s important because it speaks to the extent to which opportunities to access the most “desirable” or “elite” forms of HE are more widely distributed in the UK to begin with, which reduces to some extent the negative social impact of academic hierarchy.
It is also worth noting that the UK secondary system relies much less than the US system on standardised testing, and offers a diversity of well-regarded options for level 3 study in different kinds of institutional settings. And, moreover, that the definition of “elite” in the UK is driven by institutional research performance as well as tariff entry thresholds/degree of selectivity.
But though the case may not be as stark, in the UK, as in the US, it’s undeniable that in the second half of the twentieth century the HE system grew on the back of an assumption that academic merit is a legitimate sorting tool for determining who should get the advantage of additional education and the social capital development experience that comes along with it.
Spinning around
That mindset, however, is at odds with what is going on inside higher education institutions, where you have always had, and increasingly see expressed explicitly a thoughtful reckoning with the limitations of the academic performance model. All the discussion is around the core question of designing learning and teaching environments that prepare students for their future lives, that meaningfully engage a diversity of students who bring with them a broad range of educational backgrounds, interests and aspirations and that develop in students the nebulous but essential quality of “agency”. And this very much includes large research-intensive institutions as it does those institutions who have their roots in a much more generous interpretation of what it means to be capable of HE study.
Across UK HE there is increasingly much more focus on education for the whole person, and the development of skills and capabilities through experience as well as traditional knowledge transfer. This is not to decentre knowledge and ways of knowing as the essential components of higher learning, but to broaden the range of ways that students might be enabled to come into a relationship with that knowledge, and experience those encounters as meaningful to them on a personal level, and thus make higher education itself more accessible, more inspiring, and more engaging to a broader range of people. The diversity of the UK sector is a fantastic enabler for this shift. There are a bunch of things that are not: the rigidity of the current full-time model, the current conception of credit, and the league tables that rank universities according to a hierarchy of selectiveness.
So going back to that “alternatives to university” question, certainly we could all welcome a broader range of opportunities that create pathways to “success” through employment, civic participation, broadening of school curricula, and even, as The Atlantic article argues, through some form of national service. But in different ways you do keep coming back to universities – whether that’s through the way that they enable cultural and community activity, work with business and the public sector on innovation, host start-ups, facilitate learning and curiosity throughout life, and give shape and validation to in-work learning opportunities.
Understanding how these aspects of university activity create the space for a broader and more productive concept of higher education is critically important for universities and policymakers, as the question of what constitutes universities’ “core” business comes to the fore when the question is about remaining financially viable. In short: rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, policymakers may need to be prepared to tolerate and even support the jettisoning of what they may think university education looks like, and the associated fetishisation of selectiveness, in favour of something that retains some essential qualities of fostering higher order thinking, but that can offer a transformative experience to a broad base of the population. And in turn, those universities that have built their brand on selectiveness may need to rethink what they are, in reality, selecting for.
I’d argue the vast majority of UK universities are culturally already prepared to shift and expand what is valued and considered worthwhile in society, but it will take policymakers and the public discourse to catch up. To that end the question should not really be “how do we invest in alternatives to university?” but “how do we deploy the full breadth of higher education providers as a resource and as partners in building a more inclusive vision of society that will ‘help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul’?”
