This week on the podcast we discuss fresh polling on public attitudes to UK universities, which shows how a widening graduate/non-graduate divide and sharper political splits are fuelling worries about degree quality and whether universities are focused on the country’s interests.
Plus we discuss the housing crunch – the new Renters’ Rights Act, warnings on missed housebuilding targets, and what a forthcoming statement of expectations on student accommodation could require of providers working with local authorities. And we explore employability insights from new research – the language gap between university “attributes” and real job adverts, and how to recognise skills students gain beyond the curriculum.
With Ben Ward, CEO at the University of Manchester Students’ Union, Johnny Rich, Chief Executive at the Engineering Professors’ Council and Push, Livia Scott, Associate Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
Student accommodation – a tale of two cities, and 2point4 students
The Renters’ Rights Act is out of the oven, but the student housing market is still cooked
Employability: degrees of value / Johnny Rich
You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Deezer, RadioPublic, Podchaser, Castbox, Player FM, Stitcher, TuneIn, Luminary or via your favourite app with the RSS feed.
THE WONKHE SHOW PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
[OPENING]
JIM DICKINSON: Welcome back to The Wonkhe Show, your weekly way in to this week’s higher education news, policy and analysis. I’m your host, Jim Dickinson, and I’m here to chew the fat over this week’s news, as usual, three terrific guests. On Manchester’s world-famous Oxford Road, Ben Ward is Chief Exec at the University of Manchester Student Union. Ben, your highlight of the week, please.
BEN WARD: Morning, Jim. Morning, everyone. My highlight of the week is probably actually our trustee board meeting, where we’ve really grappled with how we align to the university’s new exciting 10-year strategy from Manchester for the World. It’s going to be transformative, transformational and it’s injected a whole new range of excitement in the middle of a difficult term.
JIM: Brilliant stuff. Now, also in South London this week, Johnny Rich is Chief Exec at the Engineering Professors Council and Bush. Johnny, your highlight of the week, please.
JOHNNY RICH: Well, a personal one was visiting my daughter at university last weekend, but a more professional one, a really interesting event at Parliament this week, which was the parliamentary launch of Research Plus, this new collaboration of research-led universities.
JIM: Yes, interesting stuff. That details in the show notes. And in Fishponds, Bristol this week, Livia Scott is Associate Editor at Wonkhe. Livia, your highlight of the week, please.
LIVIA SCOTT: So my highlight hasn’t actually happened yet, but at the weekend I will be going back up to Sunderland to celebrate my granddad’s 100th birthday.
JIM: Happy birthday.
LIVIA: Yeah, happy birthday, Big Lou.
JIM: There we go. So yes, we start this week with polling. Universities still command public support but Livia, the cracks are starting to show.
[SEGMENT 1: PUBLIC ATTITUDES TO UNIVERSITIES]
LIVIA: Yes, so there is more polling out about what people think about universities and for those of us who’ve been kind of following political representations of universities for the past few years, the stuff in there isn’t particularly surprising but it is a little bit sad nonetheless. But don’t panic too much everybody, the public kind of still likes us mostly. It’s a report from More in Common and UCL Policy Lab.
So let’s start with the good news. Most people, so about two in three in Britain, view universities positively. They said they’re good for the country and only 6% said they harm the country. Three fifths of people who live near a university said they had a positive impact on their local area. Things like, you know, they attract skilled graduates, make the area feel more vibrant and more customers for local businesses. So all the usual good stuff.
The public also see universities’ most important roles being training professionals, doing research and all that sort of stuff. But I guess the causes for concern, given why the government’s focus is around kind of getting students into professional education by whatever means is right for them – so, you know, not just university focused – is that non-grads are significantly less likely to say that universities have a positive impact on the country compared to graduates. And they are also twice as likely as graduates to believe that universities only benefit those who attend them, and they are seen as kind of spaces that are rigged for the powerful and the elite.
And a kind of political aspect to this was that Reform voters, you know, given kind of aligning with Reform’s thoughts on things as, you know, mistrust of institutions, Reform voters were much more cynical about universities than the public as a whole. So it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Not too bad, but also not particularly great either.
JIM: Well, fascinating stuff. It’s a really good report, I think. Ben, this graduate gap, we’ve heard about this in the US too. This significant graduate gap is a kind of really big, if nothing else, cultural divide, isn’t it?
BEN: Yeah. I mean, there’s been a lot of talk over the last couple of weeks about the 50% target and what no one ever really used to talk about is the other 50%. And you know Labor is trying to widen this by talking about, you know, two-thirds going into higher skills. Maybe that will change the perception but there is a growing educational and political gap between those that have had direct experience of universities and those that haven’t. Interestingly, you know, certainly in the research that breaks down into where local areas have a university, that gap seems to lessen. So that is a positive step, I think.
JIM: Yeah. Now, I mean, Johnny, I was overnight, I’ve been following, this is the sort of thing I do. I’ve been following the results of the Netherlands election, right? And Geert Wilders from the far right party for freedom, the PVV, has fallen back. And the centrist party has done very well. But looking at the splits, again, it’s absolutely fascinating because in the Netherlands too, PVV mainly is people who have not experienced higher education.
JOHNNY: Yeah. The same gap that we saw in the Brexit vote and in recent elections here is that we’re letting people, for a very long time, we’ve ended up with two nations, the left behind, who… Sorry, this goes back to the David Goodhart stuff as well, much of which I find distasteful. But there is some truth in it that we’ve got a society made up of two parts, the parts who are left behind and the parts who are given opportunities to get on.
And I think that all we can do as a sector is to say we need more opportunities for more people to get on. That doesn’t have to look like traditional residential degrees running for three years, but finding opportunities, making those opportunities more varied so that everybody can tap into this. Because as Ben was saying, the more people who know about this stuff and engage with this stuff, the more they accept it. In fact, cheer it from the rooftops because it is good for society. And, you know, we’ll be coming on to the employability gains from higher education. This is what is going to feed into opportunity, into growth, into economic prosperity for everybody.
JIM: People in that bracket that we’ve been talking about, people who’ve not been to university are going to be saying there are too many Mickey Mouse degrees. But then you’ve also got, because of expansion, a whole bunch of people saying, well, you know, I quite like universities and I enjoyed my time at university. But, you know, there are clearly too many people going these days. The kind of, you know, pulling up that, you know, why is it expanding so much? You know, it ought to be roughly as exclusive as it was when I went. And those two, and you’ve got this major problem, haven’t you?
JOHNNY: Yeah, the 50% target. Yeah, the 50% target. We forget where that came from, which was the Leitch report in, I think, 2006, if I remember rightly. And that never talked about 50% going to university. That too was about 50% having higher skills and higher learning. And so actually what we’re talking about now is the same need for more people to have more skills at a higher level. And that hasn’t changed. In fact, we’re now aiming higher. And that’s a good thing because many societies around the world are doing, and many economies, especially successful ones, are doing this exact same thing, going up 70, 80% even, having higher learning.
JIM: But Olivia, it looks like that is not an argument that, you know, I mean, to the extent to which, you know, we might believe it, even if you refine the definition of higher education away from the cliches, you know, it’s not an argument that’s been won with the public, is it?
LIVIA: No, like I think, I mean, I said I was going back home this weekend, and I think about some of the conversations that I have at home. My sister and my mum are both – God, I said mom, not ma’am. But they’re both school teachers in a secondary school. And honestly, don’t. They don’t listen, so it’s fine. They’re both secondary school teachers, right? And some of the things, some of the conversations that they have with the kids that they teach, you know, around what you want to do either for GCSE choices, what you want to do kind of after year 11, that sort of stuff. And even amongst teachers, some of the conversations are, you know, well university might not necessarily be the right choice for you.
And I think I find it really interesting because, you know, even in schools where pretty much everybody who is teaching there will have went to a university at some point and obviously it’s not right for everybody, but I do think one of the things I find really interesting – and if you think back to kind of Labour Party conference and the white paper around essentially Labour is really keen on kind of supporting young people from kind of all backgrounds to get in and get on, but those things that they are getting in and getting on with might not necessarily be at a university. You know, it might be vocational and technical routes, apprenticeships, whatever. And I think that’s one of the things that in this report says that people say they want more investment in those vocational and technical routes and you can understand I guess why Labour is going down that route.
I think one of the things that concerns me, I guess, is that we say we want all of these kind of more technical things rather than university or, you know, we create spaces for young people to kind of get in and get on, whether it be in university or not. My worry is that students from areas like Sunderland, like me, even though we’ve got five brilliant universities in the northeast kind of nearby, that this rhetoric where, you know, for example Reform voters, it is quite popular, it’s students, you know, from those working class backgrounds that get kind of pushed out of university and encouraged into vocational things because that’s the thing that they’re told to do and they’re told will make them money. And my worry is this rhetoric – the middle class kids will be fine. The people it harms is the kind of the younger working class kids who are like, well, that’s all I can do.
BEN: Yeah, it is interesting that I don’t think it was part of this study, but certainly some recent polling I saw that Reform voters, around two thirds also have aspirations for their own children to go to university. So when they’re thinking about the personal, universities still rate quite highly, albeit you know the caveats with some of their concerns about, you know, the type of degrees, type of institutions, immigration and so on. At the core is still an aspiration for their kids to be going to university.
JOHNNY: Yeah, I remember seeing that research as well and I think that this speaks to a really important issue that people do fundamentally recognize that this get in, get on is highly desirable and is going to – and that universities and higher education more broadly, universities are a means to achieve this. And there is no single campaign that is going to suddenly change the minds of the wider population who are antithetical to universities or antagonistic towards universities. You can’t do that with a single campaign. What you can do it with is by a slow creation of opportunities for all to really ramp up access.
As many people know, access has been a big thing throughout my life. I’ve been campaigning on it, trying to do something about it for a long time. And this is where we can make a difference is by genuinely creating opportunities for everybody. So it is not seen as a purely middle class thing. So it is not seen as something that if you’ve got money, you can access it. But if you don’t, you can’t. That’s the crux of this. Then people will stop being rude about it because they’ll want it for themselves, for their children and for their communities.
JIM: Thing is though, Ben, right? So, you know, I hear Johnny, right? If more people take part and then, you know, I don’t know, your grandkids or your cousins or, you know, whatever. If you know people who’ve experienced HE and they’re more like you, then you’re going to be more kind of supportive and so on. But the other thing that strikes me about this is you get a sense from this polling, don’t you, that the perception of university is still highly academic. And, you know, whether we’re talking about level four and five technical or even if we’re just talking about higher technical, kind of level six or even level seven, you still get a sense that the stuff that is pretty technical, vocational and so on, just is – people don’t know that it exists. It’s like Willy Wonka chocolate factory.
BEN: Yeah, but actually, you know, that’s at the heart of most universities. You know, all of that, you know, research and discovery, you know, scientific change, engineering, all of the stuff that’s being built, you know, it is all incubated in universities. And yet probably the public narrative that people hear about universities is largely put together by humanities graduates from Oxbridge. And so that’s what they see written about universities.
But one of the things I would say that’s interesting about this research in general, if you look at all of the anti-institutional rhetoric, full stop, whether it’s universities, the BBC, the NHS, the police, I think most of those other organizations or sectors would pay a lot of money to have this level of positivity talked about them. And I think we shouldn’t necessarily undermine the fact that universities are still some of the most trusted institutions in anti-institutional culture. We’ve got to be careful with that.
JIM: Olivia, I’ll tell you the other thing that really struck me was that I think it’s fair to say that the notable level of positivity about international students.
LIVIA: Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen that before. I think Public First did some polling, I’m going to say last year, it could be the year before, you know, around the public’s perceptions of international students. And pretty much across kind of all political vote and intention, people overwhelmingly said, yeah, we like international students. You know, we want them to kind of come and study at our local institution.
I guess my kind of word of caution, I suppose, is that sometimes I think for us who, you know, live and breathe higher education, we can see stuff like that and say, OK, well, we’re all right. I think where things get difficult is we are living in a time where social cohesion, community tensions are higher than they have ever been. And the press naturally picks up things that are negative about universities and students and all of that. And I think the thing that makes me nervous is because of that, the government understandably are kind of focusing their attention on, you know, we’ve got the international levy coming in. They’re focusing their attention on kind of winning over, you know, some people who might have intention to vote Reform and also focusing their attention around this kind of idea of universities as spaces of low quality because they can’t get graduates to kind of get in, get out and get a quote unquote good job.
And I think those are the bits that for me remain, I feel quite nervous when I read those things. Like, yes, they are positive about international students. I just don’t think that that translates into kind of community cohesions, like around a campus or in a local area. And that translates into kind of votes, you know, pro-university voting, pretty much.
JIM: Tell you what though, Johnny, the other thing that really strikes me is that there’s a bit in there that says, you know, there’s a bunch of people, one of the questions that gets asked in the research is that one of the roles of universities is that they help students grow personally and become independent. But amongst those who’ve got a negative view of universities, only 18% recognize that as a function. So, you know, you do have this really interesting split, don’t you, between a bunch of people who are aspirational for their kids and who presumably would rate that very highly and then other people who regard that as unnecessary or a luxury or something the middle classes get to do. I mean you’ve got this real split on the actual impact on the student haven’t you?
JOHNNY: Yeah, I think there’s a real question about the instrumentalism of higher education. And so the middle class idea of university or the idea of university for the middle classes is very much around you can do the academic courses and you can do a wider personal development and go to have this immersive residential experience that translates you as a person. Whereas everybody else has got to go and do a vocational course that leads specifically to a career.
We’re going to come back to the employability thing later. And I do want to talk about that a lot because I do think that we get it wrong when we think that universities, the academic courses, are not about employability skills. They absolutely are. And we also get it wrong when we – I think the government is getting it wrong with the maintenance grant plan. I think it’s worth saying that the white paper is talking about bringing in maintenance grants for the poorest students if they do certain courses. And this is feeding into exactly this kind of very nasty mentality, if you ask me, that if you’re poor, you’re allowed to do these instrumentalist courses. If you’re rich, you can do whatever you like. I find it most unseemly, to put it lightly.
LIVIA: Yeah. And so much of that is compounded, I think, when you look at the way that kind of the student finance system is set up at the minute. You know, we’ve got the fact that to get the maximum maintenance loan, the kind of threshold to get that hasn’t changed since 2007. And you’ve got more and more students who perhaps would essentially need more and would have gotten more. And it is being put on their parents to supplement them going to university. I think that therefore adds to all of the pressure of well, I’ve, you know, potentially didn’t have a few extra grand to spare but I’ve pulled money out of my pension fund or whatever to support my kid to go to university. If they’re getting out and they’re not getting a kind of a high paying job that’s, you know, better and beyond what I could have thought of was possible for me, I think that that’s kind of adding to the pressure. That it’s not just, you know, there’s the tension, isn’t there? Because I want all students to be able to kind of go and do whatever they want at university and study whatever they want with the pressure that because of how much it costs and the parental kind of amount of money they have to give to support their child to go to university. There is more pressure on those students kind of getting out and getting a really good job. And if that’s not happening, that’s what I think when the kind of anti, the frustration at university is caused, even though that’s kind of a wider economic problem and not necessarily the fault of the university.
JOHNNY: The fact is that the data says, on average, that is what’s happening. Of course, there are exceptions and they are very regional. And that’s the real problem is that deprived areas, if you want to stay in a deprived area, then you’re going to find there are fewer jobs and there are fewer jobs for graduates as there are fewer jobs for everyone. So they’re getting out, getting on. Unfortunately, social mobility in this context can also mean geographic mobility. And that is something that the government, to give them credit, having slagged them off a moment ago, to give them credit, they absolutely want to knuckle down on that. And so they should.
JIM: Tell you the other thing that strikes me, Ben, is, you know, I mean, I sort of get it. But if I look at the questions, my assumption is, and I don’t know this, but my assumption is that the public think that a huge amount of public money is going into universities. Now clearly it is, but a hell of a lot of it then comes back via, you know, delayed graduate contribution. You know, I often read these reports and think, does the public realize once you add that up just how little money outside of, you know, research investment goes into the university teaching endeavor? I’m not sure people even in universities understand that.
BEN: You know, I think the complexity of the system means that, you know, people keep on talking about, you know, the overall cost and of course, you know, the cost to the exchequer and so on of, you know, writing off loans as a, you know, as a subsidy. But I think, you know, there is very little money that is a direct lever from government going into universities.
I mean just on the identified courses, you know, who gets to do that? You know, will it be reflected in local needs or, you know, are they nationally strategic important courses? Because one of the interesting things for me, you know, is there’s a recent report about access to the creative arts professions and how that’s still very much middle and upper class profession and the need to get more working class kids going into it. Now, there is no doubt that these strategically important courses won’t include art, won’t include music, won’t include many of the real growth industries for the UK. When are we going to start focusing on the fact that we’re not building things with steel or generating steel anymore? We are creating things. We’re a creative economy. And I’d be interested to see, you know, who gets to decide these strategically important courses.
JIM: Yes, I mean, Johnny, your stuff about, you know, access, you know, we’re still in a position where we actually can’t see access and participation figures by subject, which, you know, has frustrated me for about 15 years now.
JOHNNY: Yeah, and access in different subjects means a very different thing. You know, I know about engineering and the big challenge in engineering is not around males, which it is more broadly, it’s around females getting in, in particular females from ethnic minorities or particular ethnic minorities getting into engineering because the balance is very different. And we don’t take that discipline focus. And one of the effects of that is that it means that universities can game their access data by just shifting their course focus. But that’s a kind of different topic.
I think that the issues here are around the, again, as I was saying, the instrumentalism of seeing courses that are supposed to lead very directly into jobs, and very few of them do that. What they do is they create a more general employability, and that more general employability creates opportunities that allow people to be resilient and flexible in a developing job market throughout their lives. And so it means that the only Mickey Mouse degrees out there are the ones in history of animation.
[BLOGGER SEGMENT]
JIM: Right, let’s see who’s been blogging for us this week.
JAMIE WARNER: Hello, I’m Jamie Warner from Goldsmiths. And this week on Wonkhe, I’ve been blogging about what happens when a university goes under. The truth is universities are all tied together. They have the same pension schemes, the same suppliers and the same lenders. So when a university fails, a financial shockwave ripples through the sector. International students panic, towns lose income and neighbours take a huge financial hit. I’ve crunched the numbers. Either one collapse could wipe out half the surplus for the university next door. It’s not really about can a university fail anymore, it’s about what happens next when one inevitably does.
[SEGMENT 2: RENTER’S RIGHTS BILL]
JIM: Now, next up, the renter’s rights bill has finally become law. It bans no-fault evictions and rebalances landlord-tenant power. Ben, what might the impacts be for students?
BEN: Well, I mean, one of the challenges for this is we’ve seen huge exits from private landlords for houses of multiple occupancy. Obviously, no-fault evictions is something that we’ve been talking about for a long time, but it also interlocks with some of the stuff that I think has been lost in all the other discussions in the white paper last week, which is a recognition of significant increases to rents for students and also one of these things that keeps on coming back every so often around calling upon providers to work with local authorities and other bodies in their local area on accommodation planning, ensuring adequate accommodation for the individuals that they recruit. Now, without huge changes to the machinery of government and better coordination, we know that that is a very difficult thing to pull off at the local and the national level.
JIM: Yes, now, Olivia, I’ve been down this rabbit hole this week. Quite often, I’m a specialist in mock incredulity, but my incredulity wasn’t really very mocky.
LIVIA: Yeah. I think, now look, the Renter’s Rights Bill, we’ve kind of gone, it’s been in the works for, I think, the whole time that I’ve been at Wonkhe now, which is like three years. And I think one of the things that I think is going to be frustrating with both the renter’s rights bill and the kind of – so at the same time this week, we’ve had one of Rachel Reeves and Labour’s big targets kind of ahead of her budget at the end of the month is that they will stimulate the economy and provide more housing. And they’ve got a target to build one and a half million homes by 2030. And basically the Home Builders Federation has just said like, look, that’s not going to be possible unless the government, you know, adds measures to kind of make buying more homes more accessible and building them easier. And one of the ways that they’ve suggested that they could do this is through mandatory local housing targets.
Now, what this has to do with us in higher education is if you look at the white paper from last week, you know, take a shot every time one of us says look at the white paper, but for the first time in years, a government white paper has acknowledged housing as part of students’ experience. You know, all the reports have done so, but that’s not really been the case in government white papers over the past few decades. And they acknowledge, you know, rocketing rents and issues with affordable housing. And one of their solutions, apart from saying to universities, look, you need to have this kind of minimum expectations of standards and kind of what housing should look like, which they already have. And UUK, you know, published a few years ago. And I remember writing and waxing lyrical about it to student unions for a good year. And nothing ever came of it. Nothing, you know, nothing was ever done with it. But their other solution is that universities should work with their local authorities to ensure there’s adequate accommodation for students they recruit.
And I think the kind of argument that Jim has set out and kind of deep dive into Bristol as an example, is that this is just going to be so impossible because essentially when there are housing targets for a lot of kind of local authorities, the kind of means to which they can show that they’re meeting those targets are basically set up against improving things for student accommodation, pretty much. You know, it’s about, for example, PBSA, but building more PBSA isn’t really the best thing for students. It tends to be more expensive, but also you cannot use PBSA for families, for example. So it’s just, it’s such a conundrum and there is another way if we look to Europe, but I just at this stage I’m not super hopeful that kind of this government would be willing to do that.
JOHNNY: The thing that really strikes me if I sort of zoom out is that, you know, if you’re a local authority, you’ve got these kind of 10-year plans and even when, you know, you kind of stimulate either what the equivalent of house building, which, you know, is purpose-built student accommodation, you can’t throw that up in a couple of months. And the problem that we got is, if we look around the sector, international student numbers and home student numbers are so volatile that it means we’re almost guaranteed to have too much student-specific housing or not enough student-specific housing.
JOHNNY: Yeah, this is very important. I mean, for those who haven’t noticed yet, Jim has written a really fantastic piece on this. I’m also going to say long, but it is very long, but it is also well worth the read. So do stick with it and go and take a look on the site. Pot of tea, not copper tea, pot of tea exactly. But in it you talk a lot about this and it’s how difficult it is to predict student numbers in 5, 10 or 50 years, because for many of the leases involved in building student accommodation we are talking 50 year, 75 year leases.
And this goes back to the last thing we were talking about because a lot of the antagonism that might develop in regions about universities and the resentment, it comes from rising rents, parking, noise, ghettos, as they’re seen, you know, I’m putting that in big inverted commas. But housing becomes this flashpoint between the local population and a less well-integrated student population, especially if they’re living in these high-rises, which are great ways of dealing with the situation. But we need a mix of different solutions so that we don’t end up with student high-rise ghettos.
And we also need something you talk about in your article. You and I have had this conversation many times, is this, if you can’t house them, you can’t recruit them. I think that there is something here for the regulation. I don’t like student number controls as a rule. I don’t think we should be, especially when we’re trying to increase access, but it is worth saying that individual institutions that want to increase their intake should be able to demonstrate with their local authority that there is provision for them to have places to live that are reasonable and not too far from where they’ve got to study.
JIM: Yes. I mean, it’s interesting this, Ben, isn’t it? Because, you know, I guess for a good decade, the studentification debate was about places like, I don’t know, Lenton in Nottingham, right?
BEN: Yeah, Fallowfield in Manchester and so on and so on.
JIM: But actually, the thing that really strikes me is that once the thing becomes local authorities trying to build PBSA to host increase, then what you’re actually talking about in lots of places is a different kind of thing, which is the only investment in my town and city appears to be these gleaming towers. And in some of these towns and cities, those gleaming towers are now empty, whilst the retail is still on its knees and, you know, the high street is full of vape shops and broken pavements.
BEN: Yeah, because, you know, as others have said on the podcast, that student numbers have been so volatile. You know, we’re in a whole set of a perfect storm of challenging circumstances. So, you know, potential university failures and course closures. We’re approaching a demographic downturn, particularly for home students. That’s damaging investment confidence, political volatility, and there’s a real coordination challenge. So, universities need to work together and with local authority.
In Manchester, particularly, we’re seeing de-studentification in those areas as people migrate to the city centre in these very palatial towers, should we say, with free breakfast and other such things that they pay – water slides, they’re paying a lot of money for. But what’s interesting is the map of overlapping jurisdictions. So, you know, if I think about the local area here, Manchester City Council, you know, has its housing plan. This is sort of fed into by the universities. You’ve got the combined authority that’s trying to use its convening power, but doesn’t have any actual power to force the universities to plan together. We’ve then got, you know, the rise of the civic university agreements. One of the things that could and should be on there is working together on student housing. We’re talking about how institutions contribute to the local economy. One of the ways is to sort out housing, both for local people and students in general. We nearly get there, but never quite.
JOHNNY: I just wanted to say how important this issue of housing as a market is to the whole question of student finance, because we must remember that housing is by far the largest proportion of a student’s maintenance. And because it’s a market, if you increase the maintenance availability, so students, for example, have more money in their maintenance, whether it’s a loan or a grant, if they have that, then the local rent market will adapt. It may adapt if there are shortages, it may adapt by at least as much as the increase because basically the rental market will just up the prices to match the student’s ability to pay. So what we may end up seeing is the public purse providing more money for student maintenance, which goes straight to private landlords. That’s at the heart of this.
So the government hasn’t addressed that in the white paper. They have said, we’ve got to look at student housing. And they haven’t addressed that in the Renters’ Rights Act, as it now is. But that phenomenon you talk about, Johnny, which is, you know, when you’ve got a particular type of kind of housing, which is, you know, kind of social infrastructure, as well as being partially privately run, you’ve got to be careful about increasing income because then you can increase rent. But that’s exactly why there are rent controls in the social housing sector. There are not in the PBSA sector.
JIM: And controls on tuition fees, for instance.
LIVIA: Yeah. And a lot of the stuff that the Renters’ Rights Act does is actually not remotely relevant to students anyway. Things like the rent rise appeals and the new ombudsman, all very nice, really useful for long-term renters. But most students are not that long-term. A year is not that long. And most students are renting for 10 months. And so if it takes you two, three months for the ombudsman to take a look at what your complaint is, then it’s not really going to be of much help to most students.
JIM: Bit of director’s cut stuff here, Olivia. Believe it or not, the original of that article was even longer.
LIVIA: Did it go through the renter’s right bill?
JIM: No, no, no. Yeah, that’s right. But there were actually, I mean, there were a couple of paragraphs where I was in proper rant mode because the brass neck cheek of the Department for Education turning around and saying, well, at city and institutional level, you lot should all be talking to each other. And it’s like, OK, fine. But is there any evidence of the Department for Education and the Home Office and whatever the Ministry of Communities is called this parliament? Is there any evidence of that happening? Because, you know, as ever, when we talk about this sort of stuff, what you’re talking about is lots of difficult trade-offs, different agendas and so on. Surely there needs to be something approaching some national coordination overall.
LIVIA: I think, look, like back to the kind of – if we think about PBSA, I was again saying I’m going home. If anyone else has had the joy of getting off at Sunderland train station, you will get out and first you will see the bright lights of Greggs. And then above that, you will see a lovely, colourful PBSA building, which has been there for the best part of 10 years. And there was absolute uproar when it was very first built, if I remember rightly, because it was being built when high street shops were being closed down. And if you look at the kind of shops below that, it is what Jim said. It’s vape shops. It’s a random kind of convenience store and a Subway, I think. And Gregg’s, obviously.
But I think there’s something really frustrating for me around the DfE and their inability at the minute or I’m going to have to presume it’s kind of not understanding and not knowledge rather than kind of willful ignoring to kind of say things like yes, let’s improve housing and, you know, we recognize that renting is expensive for students and kind of passing the buck back to universities to talk to people nearby them. But I just think universities already do that. And there is no kind of – you’ve got universities within local areas often kind of competing for similar students or you’ve got kind of that – they’re essentially in competition with one another and kind of getting them to then work with each other and then get them to work with the local council who was already probably overburdened trying to look at social housing, you know, an area like Sunderland where, you know, people haven’t got generally loads of money. There is a need for family housing, they’re not going to look at, you know, students in the area, international students, for example, and think, oh, that’s the priority that we need to solve for this council because those are the people that are going to keep me in my council seat.
Like, it’s just, I don’t know. I just find it really frustrating the way that students just feel left. There are no circumstances under which the policy as proposed will work.
BEN: No, basically that. But like, I’m really trying to, I’m really trying to be like glass half full, not kind of defeatist, but I just don’t understand what the solution is because if you look at kind of in European cities, every time we went on a student union study tour they would say things like yeah, we’ve got a really, you know, issue with housing, but their issue was never kind of the issue is about kind of the supply of it. But generally speaking, their local authority, university and PBSA providers all worked kind of together to try and do some planning. Whereas it just feels here, everybody is kind of so individualistic. Everyone’s out for themselves. And it’s just like students and their parents who are paying for their expensive accommodation just kind of get left in the lurch.
JIM: I think we can be glass half full if there’s student accommodation out there with water slides. I didn’t know about that. I’ve got this vision of…
LIVIA: I want to see the price, Johnny.
JOHNNY: Oh, that’s a shame. I had visions of sort of Wallace and Gromit arriving for my free breakfast via a water slide that dressed me at the end.
BEN: A little bit like that, but a bit more Jetsons and a lot more expensive. But I do wonder on the local planning, is there more of a role at a regional or combined authority level, because there is less, I think, deep political interest and trade-offs at that level of local government than with councils who, you’re right, are having to deal with social care, having to deal with social housing, having to deal with really intractable issues that this is just another thing that will become a bureaucratic burden. So maybe there’s another opportunity in devolution to look at some of this stuff.
JIM: Well, here’s a proposal then, right? And this came up in, I won’t say which team member floated this, but this came up in a wonkhe team meeting where, you know, to some extent, there are geographical implications of immigration, right? So if the government said, okay, we will issue X hundred thousand visas for students next year, and we will allocate them to devolved mayors, right? And this will be the plan over the next 10 years. That would be a form of international student number capping. But at least local authorities, or at least combined metro mayors, whatever the devolution structure is, would then be able to factor in over the medium term some geographical implications that come from the housing. And there’d be a bit more of a distribution of those international students around the country.
JOHNNY: Yeah, I mean, I think that would be a very neat policy solution. We don’t have any vice chancellors with us on the show today, but I think they may be more concerned about that.
JIM: And on that bombshell.
[FESTIVAL ANNOUNCEMENT]
MARK: Hi, it’s Mark here from the team, interrupting your podcast to remind you that we are now in the final countdown to the Festival of Higher Education, which is just a few weeks away. In case you’ve been living under a rock, the festival is the biggest, most exciting and relentlessly interesting event in HE. Hear from ministers, policy makers, wonks of every stripe as they come together, today’s sector leadership and tomorrow’s future stars. We’ve got data, we’ve got debates, we’ve got analysis, we’ve got interviews, all focused on the biggest and most thorny problems facing UK higher education today. And of course, we’ve got fun and hijinks too. Four stages, two amazing days, plus one massive party.
There’s nothing quite like it. We think it’s going to be the biggest and best festival we’ve ever staged. So big, in fact, I’m going to need a lie down after all this excitement. Yes, the rumours are true. The festival will be taking a break next year, so it’s your last chance to be part of something like this for a while. We hope to see you there. That’s 11th and 12th November at the University of London. Discounts are available for wonkhe subscribers, of course, and you can find out all the details at the Festival of HE dot com.
[SEGMENT 3: EMPLOYABILITY AND SKILLS]
JIM: And finally this week, a brace of new reports looks at employability and skills. Johnny, tell us more.
JOHNNY: Yeah, so this brace comes from Medha and Advance HE, who’ve done this research project called Are We Speaking the Same Language? And a report from AGCAS, the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services, called Uncovering Skills. And these are both on employability. And I am so excited to see these, genuinely, because employability is a topic that has occupied me for a very long time.
And when I knew that we were going to be discussing this, I thought I would go and dig up a paper that I wrote 10 years ago on employability for HEPI called Degrees of Value. I was surprised to discover it was as long as 10 years ago. But let me take you back to 2015, because this was a time when a white paper had just been published by the government. And that white paper was proposing that tuition fees should go up if universities excelled in TEF. And OFS was taking a new look at how TEF should work. Well, I mean, at the time, TEF was new, but they were examining how TEF should work. And how things have changed, you might say.
Well, actually, they have changed a lot as these papers on employability show, because my paper was talking about employability as this outcome of higher education that hardly anyone ever talked about. And when it was mentioned, people were usually confusing employability with employment, and they’re not the same. And these two developments we’re talking about now do show that we’ve come a very long way because the two main messages I take from these papers are, firstly, that they’re both talking about the need for a simplified language for talking about employability that can be used and understood by employers, universities, and students. As it happens, I did talk about this exact issue in 2015, and I described it as a Babelfish framework for employability.
The other thing that the papers raise illustrates is connected, and that is that both of them are picking up on the idea that employability is, for the most part, not some new thing that we’ve got to try and add into higher education, but rather it is inherent, intrinsic in what we develop when we develop graduateness, for want of a better word. There’s a brilliant researcher in this area called Kate Daubney who is cited in the AGCAS work and she calls this inherent employability in studies. She calls it extracted employability. And I talked about this also in 2015 because it’s very important to help students to see that what they’re – to see that they’re developing this extracted employability when they study so they can reflect on it and articulate it in this simple common language.
I do want to quote one thing from my 2015 paper, sorry to be so self-serving with this, but I did write it. I hope this is helpful, but actually to understand what we’re talking about here because it says the language of employability as spoken by employers and by academics needs to be a shared language. Both groups would find they value remarkably similar attributes. For example, while one culture values the persuasive argument, the other values a compelling pitch.
And I know all of this sounds like I’m an old fart saying I told you so back in 2015. That’s not what I’m saying because although I do still stand by what I wrote back then, it was profoundly basic compared to where the sector has come in embracing employability since then, as is shown by both these papers. And what OFS and the government need to do more is to pay attention to what Medha are doing and understand that employability can be embedded into our understanding of the outcomes of HE and that that all connects with a better understanding of learning gain. And that’s what I was asking for in 2015. And that’s what the OFS should be doing now is not framing TEF around poor proxy metrics, but around measuring the value added.
JIM: Yes. Now, Livia. Full marks to Medha for publishing a paper called Are We Speaking the Same Language? You know, Babel and all of that. You know, very amusing. But, you know, one of the things that strikes me is sometimes debates around this are about what subjects are studied and what skills are actually being developed. I mean, the thrust here, really, from both of these is, look, there’s plenty of skill development happening, but either students don’t recognize it or it’s not being communicated effectively. Now, is that true? Because part of what strikes me here is that if a student can, I don’t know, get a first in a degree, then it might not be just about the way in which they or others recognize the skills they got in that first. It might be that that first did not test some of these skills.
LIVIA: I think it’s both. I really – I think I find it really interesting when we talk about kind of students and kind of what they learn at university and it translating directly into employability. I’ll be really honest. I think I’m the opposite of Johnny and my kind of hackles go up a little bit because my brain immediately goes to kind of employability and kind of careers lessons that we had at school which were kind of what do you want to be when you grow up kind of vibes. And they also – it makes me think about the kind of careers module that was on offer when I was at university which I was like I’m doing a history degree, why would I want to do this generic thing? So my hackles go up a little bit.
But I think there’s a few things that go on. I think when you are doing, for example, I did history, right? If I think back to what I did when I was kind of studying, I know now kind of four or five years out of graduation that I was developing kind of the ability to kind of think critically, you know, bring loads of kind of information together and communicate that in a really kind of natural and good way, which I’m probably not really showing right now. But, you know, I was able to do that. When I graduated, I had no idea that that was the thing that I had spent three and then another year at my master’s doing. I had no sense of kind of what the report calls its implicit language.
So for example, one of the things is like navigating priorities independently builds trust in a job. In a job advert, students don’t necessarily know when they’ve kind of had experience of doing that. And I think particularly if you’re just out of uni, talking about your kind of academic prowess feels very separate to employability skills or it did for me. And I think one of the really interesting parts of this is around the kind of – I guess there’s something here about the way that the jargon that employers use, like I just think job descriptions and job applications are fundamentally insane and hard. I don’t think, you know, they’re always going to be difficult and hard. And I think there’s the way that they kind of work as opposed to kind of the way that students recognize the skills that they build are different.
But I don’t think this is all on universities to kind of sort out. I think the universities have come on in leaps and bounds since I graduated in terms of kind of helping students understand the skills that they are building. But I think there’s something here around how do employers kind of recognize those skills? Like, I do still think there’s a real thing here about employers being like, yeah, yeah, you’ve been to uni and you’ve done all that academic stuff. But like, how does you being able to write an essay show that you can kind of communicate and present clearly?
JIM: Ben, some insider baseball for you here. Today, in theory, originally on the grid, we were going to get OFS’s annual grade inflation report. Whoop-de-doo, right? So, you know, that would have been a thing. Now, they’ve put it off for a couple of weeks, I think, because of some, you know, data checking quality issues. But, I mean, what that would have done is open up the opportunity for me to have my usual rant, which is, in the UK, the thing you get is a bit of paper that says, first, 2-2, do one, and so on.
Across Europe, every time I look, it gets better and better. That degree transcript, the equivalent of the old, whatever it was, the higher education achievement report. That project across Europe gets better and more sophisticated every year. European graduates leave with a piece of paper that’s much, much more sophisticated in terms of what is interesting about that graduate, what that graduate can do, their competencies and so on. We are being left in the dust, aren’t we?
BEN: We are, yeah. And look, we still very much take part in the HEAR reporting every year. It’s great to see that some of our elected and paid roles are on the degree transcript, but that’s all it says is that this person was a student rep or they led this society or whatever. What does that mean? What’s the granularity underneath that? How do students get to articulate it? But also that the university as a quality mark is stamping that on behalf of the student.
We have been left in the dust. And I don’t know, I think it’s been left too much to individual institutions to come up with their own employability awards that really don’t mean anything once it leaves the institution because there’s no comparability across degrees. Whereas what you’re talking about is a systemic change to degree transcripts across a whole sector in a European country.
JOHNNY: Just to carry on the theme of being old farts, I dug out a report I worked on with NUS and the CBI back in 2011 where we were looking at this to help students try and articulate it and the overlap between what employers were defining as necessary then in 2011 to now is exactly the same. And why hasn’t this moved on? And Livia is absolutely spot on that the inaccessible language that’s actually getting worse in job applications, as I think maybe people use chat GPT to generate job descriptions and so on.
But we’ve got to start engaging with it and to try and help it change. One of the ways that we’re thinking of doing that in Manchester is thinking about more partner engaged learning and partner engaged assessment. So, you know, a history student might go and work in a local archive, for instance, and get real world experience that could – and that’s happening in pockets in universities. But, you know, that goes to, you know, more sophisticated assessment, better reflection of what’s necessary to become more employable and so on and so on. So there is innovation happening in the sector, but I can’t believe that these things haven’t moved, whether it’s 2011 or what Johnny was saying in 2015 to now.
JOHNNY: Some things have changed since 2011. That report, I didn’t know you were involved in it, Ben. It was a fantastic piece of work and I still actually quote it from time to time. But some things have moved on. The big thing that’s moved on is technology and the importance of different transferable skills from in 2011. In 2011, there were some things that we valued that aren’t as important now because computers can do it for us. And there’s some stuff that employers value now more, like creativity, that weren’t highlighted so much in 2011 because it was felt that this was some airy-fairy thing that artists do. But actually, it’s now realized this is an extremely important human skill that AI is not nearly as good at.
I’d like to think that we can connect the first issue we’ve been talking about today and this issue, and some of the things Olivia was talking about, that good employability education is not about somebody coming in and doing some siloed add-on of, let me talk to you about careers and employability, which is in itself a really dull sounding word. Instead, it should be about metacognition, understanding in the first place why it is what you’re doing. So when you apply for history, are you told what skills you’re going to gain from applying for history? And do you see how the modules you’re going to do are going to develop those different skills in different ways, either through what you’ve called real world activities, Ben, or through doing academic activities where you can bring out your extracted employability.
And then once you’ve got the metacognition, so you can go into it with an awareness of what it is you’re learning, you will learn those transferable skills better. And then if you have reflective practice at the end, where you can look back and say, what skills did I develop? And how does that translate into this common language framework so that I can talk about what I’ve learned through writing a dissertation or some other supposedly academic activity and translate that into what would be important to an employer when it comes to writing a report or carrying out a project.
[CLOSING]
JIM: So that’s about it for this week. Remember to go in deep on anything we’ve discussed today. You’ll find links in the show notes on wonkhe.com. Don’t forget to subscribe. Just search for The Wonkhe Show wherever you get your podcasts. And if talking about the future of HE is your thing, do come along to the Festival of Higher Education. Final few tickets are on sale now. Just visit thefestivalofhe.com to find out more. Don’t forget, if you want to get ahead of everything going on in UK HE, just click subscriptions on the site to find out more. Thanks very much to Ben, Johnny, Livia, Michael Salmon, who makes it all happen. We’ll be back next week. Mark will be here. Until then, stay Wonkhe.