Two readings of what a degree is worth arrived within a week of each other this summer and they point in opposite directions. A national survey of more than ten thousand undergraduates found the proportion rating their course as good value at its highest level in over a decade, with the quality of teaching the most commonly cited reason. An international polling company, asking the wider public in the same weeks, placed this country last of thirty-one on whether a degree is worth what it costs, and among the very few where more people would advise a young person to go straight into work than to study. The obvious reconciliation is that those who know the product rate it, while those who do not rely on hearsay. That may be so. It is worth asking precisely what the first group knows that the second does not.
The account the sector has reached for this week treats the divergence as a problem of representation. Universities, on this reading, are over-advertised and under-sold, their case made through paid digital placements and the backs of buses rather than through the sustained relationships with schools and communities that once did the work. Applicant research circulating alongside suggests that the stock phrases of the prospectus, the real-world experience and the industry links, are received with something close to disbelief unless explained. The remedy proposed, with some force, is specificity. Say what this institution alone does and evidence it, and the claim will be believed. There is a good deal in this. A reader who cannot tell one prospectus from another is right to discount them all.
What specificity requires
Specificity is not a style, however, and cannot be supplied by a better copywriter. To say what an institution alone delivers, and to be believed in saying it, requires evidence particular to that institution: which programmes change which outcomes for which students, what became of the cohort who took the placement year, where a change made in response to feedback can be demonstrated to have altered anything. Claims of this kind are rarer than the language of institutional confidence suggests, and the reason may be less a failure of nerve than something more structural. Institutions tend to claim in general terms because the general is the level at which they know themselves. The poster says “cutting-edge” because nobody involved in producing it could have said anything more precise.
The knowledge that would make a specific claim possible does exist, though it lives some distance from the people who make claims. It sits in the enhancement machinery every institution operates: periodic programme review, the reports of external examiners, module evaluation, the work done with students as partners, the record of what was changed after a poor set of results and whether the change held. This is where an institution learns what it does well and for whom. It is also material that rarely travels. It reaches the committee that commissioned it and the quality office that files it, and seldom reaches those who write the institution’s public account of itself, or the governing body that might reasonably ask whether that account is true.
Where value is recognised
Students appear to recognise value where they can see it. The interviews behind one commentary this week found that undergraduates judge worth through what is in front of them day by day, the teaching, the contact hours, the useful feedback and the member of staff who can be found, rather than through any endorsement of the price they are paying or the way it is funded. This suggests a plainer explanation for the two surveys than hearsay. Those inside an institution can see the workings. Those outside are offered the poster. The gap between the two readings may be, in part, the gap between what an institution can show and what it has grown accustomed to saying, and that gap is one the institution itself has some power over.
None of this should be taken as an argument that better evidence would repair public confidence. The scepticism the poll recorded has causes no institution can touch: years of argument about the sector from more than one political direction, a funding debate that colours every claim made about a degree before it is read and a press for which the debt is the whole of the story. No programme review will move a national poll. There is also a real risk in the opposite direction, that an institution which tries to evidence everything produces a prospectus nobody reads and a set of papers nobody finishes, and that the reflective functions on which such evidence depends are, as another commentary this week observed, often the first to be thinned when every hour is costed.
The claim here is narrower, and perhaps less comfortable for it. An institution that cannot say, from evidence it holds rather than language it has approved, what it does well and for whom has a difficulty before its communications. I don’t think focusing on the communications will resolve it. The habit of the general claim is a symptom. What it indicates is that the machinery through which an institution comes to know its own teaching is running, in most places, as a matter of assurance rather than as a source of the institution’s account of itself, and that the two functions, the one that knows and the one that speaks, are seldom in the same room. Whether they should be is a question for those who lead an institution rather than for those who write its copy.
Three questions may repay a senior team’s attention most. Whether it could name, from evidence the institution already holds, three things its teaching does for its own students that a neighbouring institution’s does not, and how long it would take to find that evidence. Whether the people who compose the institution’s public account and the people who conduct its programme reviews have ever, in any structured way, met. And whether the distance between what a student inside can see and what the public outside is told is one the institution would notice widening or narrowing, or whether, like much that matters, it is held by nobody in particular and measured by nothing at all.