Whose degree is it anyway?

On the surface, he was miffed that his core modules (all of his credit is core modules, apart from a skills slot) don’t seem to include tools like Power BI or Tableau.

But he was even more miffed that modules on other courses in the same university do, and that he’s not allowed to take them.

I’m interested in this partly because of the trend towards less choice within a degree that curriculum reform rationalisation is producing.

Electives disappear with the staff that took (V)R, and the move to block teaching reduces choice to avoid “overwhelm” and improve belonging, that sort of thing.

I’m also interested in where a student has the ability to exercise choice and where they don’t. Across Europe we tend to see a far smaller number of “programmes”, and a far greater ability to mix and match credit within them.

Hence at the University of Helsinki, there are 32 bachelor’s programmes for circa 40,000 students. And within the 180 ECTS bachelor’s degree, every student holds 75 credits to spend anywhere in the university (or, through a national flexible study right scheme, at another Finnish university) along with credit for work, volunteering, and exchange and so on.

Put simply, in the UK choice is abundant between programmes at the age of 17, and then scarce within them at 20. Lots of systems run that the other way round – big degree titles, core first semesters, endless track and pathway choice after, and “off subject” credit acquisition allowed throughout.

In those systems, “big and broad” degrees tend to be steered with plenty of student representation in the mix – at Helsinki every programme has a steering group with two students on it that drafts the curriculum and decides the annual timetable – and breadth is affordable because demand is pooled. A niche module can draw students from every programme.

In the UK, it’s increasingly the case that a module lives or dies inside one programme’s business case, which is where “fewer, larger” (often 30 credit) modules also comes from.

Whose degree is it anyway?

At Helsinki, the Faculty of Arts went from around 50 main subjects to six bachelor’s programmes, and the discipline survives as a study pathway rather than as the owner of the whole.

The university owns a fixed, visible, pass/fail share – 15 credits of general studies and a minimum of ten of career credit – rather than “embedding” itself into every discipline.

And the student’s share is a rule rather than a residual – a compulsory personal study plan they can edit at will, 75 credits to spend across the university, and credit for prior learning, including “skills acquired in working life, positions of trust or hobbies”, as a routine entitlement.

In the UK, disciplines remain sovereign over smaller programmes, the centre might take a common block here or there, and the student’s share is whatever gives when the workload model or the budget can’t. I suspect it’s raided first in every review because it’s the only claim on the 360 credits (180 ECTS) with no defender in the room.

In Helsinki the student’s agency over part of the degree is a thing in policy that has to be taken away with reasons. In the UK it is a thing that students are not considered to be competent to have agency over in the first place.

Six things

When I think about student agency, I tend to think about six things – choice, credit, time, voice, exit, and information. Increasingly, the UK provides only the last, because it’s the only one compatible with a market – ironic given that the evidence on regret from Nicola Dandridge and colleagues at Bristol tells us that it’s the one that helps least.

That research found that 41 per cent of regretful undergraduates thought they should have done more research themselves, and plenty complained about open days “putting on a show”. But 37 per cent said that nothing realistically available at the time would have changed their decision, and regret rose steadily with year of study – 25 per cent of first years against 41 per cent of third years. Graduates were more likely to regret the narrowness of what they’d done than the label on it – “too specialised, it has limited where I can work”.

In other words, a good chunk of what looks like a bad choice at 17 is actually the degree closing in around a student who, by 20, knew perfectly well what they wanted to add or drop – but weren’t allowed to. Better information at the point of sale can’t fix that. Only choice, credit, time, and exit during the degree can.

Helsinki policy even identifies “students” as a responsible actor. Its degree regs say that “students shall be responsible for the progress of their learning and studies”, in the same clause that makes teachers responsible for every teaching situation and each (huge) programme responsible for a level of coherence.

The UK names them as a party to a contract. Consumer protection and agency now pull against each other – a degree the student helps shape is a consumer law exposure, so the safe “product” has the least student authority in it.

Agency without guidance is abandonment

It should go without saying that handing students responsibility without support is just abandonment. Helsinki’s answer is to treat becoming a student as work that takes time, and earns credit.

Every student is assigned someone from orientation week onwards to coordinate guidance on the personal study plan, which is itself a degree requirement worth two credits.

Guidance is a shared responsibility – students are expected to turn up to meetings and answer their tutor’s messages, and the tutor is expected to talk about goals, progress, skills, and career rather than just sign a form.

Faculty advisers handle recognition of prior learning, and the university’s HowULearn survey feeds individual feedback back to each student three times during the bachelor’s degree as well as to the programme.

The university’s strategy commits to “diverse forms of supervision and guidance that meet individual needs” and to studies that are “increasingly open to tailoring”.

Under the heading “knowledge and learning are for everyone”, students are to be “actively involved in all activities of the University community” from the start, the university commits to building “working life skills (including citizen and entrepreneurial skills)”, the framing throughout is Bildung rather than product.

When the 2017 reform was sold to staff and students, the pitch was fewer wrong choices at entry, specialisation once you know what you want, and broader competence getting graduates into work faster. Pretty much what Dandridge et al say students want.

What a student is for

When half of young people go to university in a mass system, neither students nor employers gain much from knowing that a graduate is marginally “better” than the next one on a classification scale that is drifting upwards anyway.

What they want to know is what is different about this graduate. In a system where the student assembles part of the degree, the mix they chose is the answer. In a system where it’s the title, the answer is just the title.

Helsinki’s strategy says that “students will actively develop their own competence, career and skills”, with the university supporting them to do so rather than the other way round.

In the philosophy curriculum I picked through last year, there’s credits for students to reflect on “the unique competence provided by studies in philosophy, in collaboration also with studies in other subjects, which the student has chosen”.

The uniqueness is the point, and choosing is makes it unique.

In the UK, the student who wanted Power BI alongside his analytics core would have graduated with something that distinguished him. Instead he’ll graduate with the same transcript as everyone else on his course, minus the skill the job adverts ask for, having watched students in another room acquire it.

Getting there

If it was up to me, government would approve a shorter, and within those subjects broader, list of degree subjects as a condition of access to the loan book – forcing differentiation inside degrees where it can be revised, rather than on the label where it can’t.

Providers would be required to offer flexibility in credit acquisition within those subjects, across them, and between providers, with a guaranteed credit-bearing placement and credit for work, volunteering, and civic roles.

Every provider would have to assess the real workload of its modules against what the credit system claims, so that a student’s time doesn’t end up as the residual resource that absorbs everyone else’s fixed allocations.

Assessment would allow more than one attempt and we’d expand pass/fail credit to encourage risk-taking. Students would have formal roles on the bodies that design and review curricula, rather than moaning in a liaison committee afterwards.

And classifications would give way to transcripts that describe the breadth – which only makes sense if students have been allowed to build some that is theirs.

A commenter under Soheil Davari and Rashaad Shabab’s recent piece on programme coherence said that having someone responsible for the whole degree “should not be difficult”.

It isn’t, intellectually. It should be the student, surely?