The exercise, devised and compiled by London South Bank and published by HEPI, says that it compares the performance of individual English higher education providers by measuring the “social distance travelled” by graduates from each institution – as well as the proportion of graduates so transported.
It combines access, continuation and outcomes measures for undergraduates for all modes of study (except, this year, apprenticeships).
The problem is that while a university might be great and getting disadvantaged students in and getting them to the second year on the one hand, and getting them into a well paid job on the other, they may not be the same students.
In other words, what if the people who got in via the “poor door” are not the people who end up in the plum jobs? Medics tend to top up salary performance, for example – but few are looking at their med students as a rich source of examples of students from low-income backgrounds.
Don’t just take my word for it. When the IFS and the Sutton Trust had a run at a similar exercise a few years ago – albeit using different variables and slightly different weightings – it specifically highlighted the “considerable variation” in mobility rates across subjects within the same institution – noting that many institutions had courses (it meant subjects) both in the top and bottom 10 percent in terms of mobility:
This suggests policy might be more appropriately focused at specific combinations of universities and subjects rather than on universities as a whole.
Better would be an index that surfaced a subject-level multiplication of “inputs” and “outputs”, or even one that worked at individual student level. But outside of the impressive top few in the SMI tables (where even playing the averages couldn’t account for impressive numbers), further down the exercise becomes meaningless once the provider is large.
Over the past year or so I’ve been handling the admin on a death of a family member, and at various points I’ve had to have someone in one of the “professions” watch me sign something. Each time I’ve briefly wondered which provider they got their education in, and what sort of background they were from.
If we want society – and those “top jobs” – to be more equal, we’ll need measures that test how well we’re doing on that. The danger is that measures of this sort distort the self-perception and avoid tackling the need to regulate and improve both access and participation at least at subject level.