The Tertiary21 Manifesto for Higher Education

If I was a political party, what would my higher education manifesto be? Have spent the last two posts poking at the Hunt Report and the Higher Education Policies of the political parties contesting the upcoming general election, isn't it only fair that I nail my colours to the mast and say what I would do to (for, even) Higher Education when I'm inevitably appointed by mass acclamation as planetary despot-for-life.

I've spent almost four hours working out the detail of my proposals (by my estimate, double the time spent by most of the main parties) I'm entirely open to suggestions for improvements or for odd incentives my framework will create. In a short posting I need to keep it high level - I recognise that every sentence of this probably needs many pages of operational policy to flesh out the details and smooth out the fish hooks.

Autonomy 

Firstly, all higher education institutions need to be entirely autonomous, as non profit entities. I don't care what they teach, who they hire, what they charge, whether they grant tenure or not. Off you go. Enjoy yourselves.

Of course there is a catch.

Funding

Funding will be a state supported student loan model, largely following the Browne Framework. I'd love to simply make it free for all, but I haven't got the money. What I will try to do is make it a cheaper system, through other reforms, turning the screws to drive adoption of new, open learning paradigms. Full economic fees for an Arts Degree are €10,000, which is ridiculous. More on tackling that later.

A state run loans system does give me a bunch of handy levers. I can set some courses at zero (or inflation only) interest if we a short on graduates, or even write down loan balances for people who go on to do necessary, but underpaid jobs like teachers and nurses (that is, if actually paying them decently in the first place remains untenable). Loans will be drawn down module by module, and should be straightforward to access, not means tested.  Income levels for repayments need to be set so that you are only repaying the debt your education actually helped you earn more than a comparison group that didn't borrow or study.

There are lots of potential fish hooks to be watched for. We'll need some provision in the system to ensure people don't abuse it by failing module after module. Loan levels for some modules will need to be capped if the employment outcomes aren't panning out. There will be an incentive in the system to create expensive, cool sounding modules ('Outdoor Adventure Instructors' say) that will draw students, but not, once the job market is saturated, actually help them all that much professionally. We'll need a way of handling dropouts and partial completions.

Funding for living costs is a genuinely thorny issue. We need to support poor (sorry, economically disadvantaged) people who actually get as far as third level and want to study full time. At the same time, we want to discourage people from becoming eternal full time students, living on loans they will never repay.  While cheap loans for tuition go to what is, for now, a small controllable group of Higher Education Institutions which were already state funded, cheap loans for living expenses get spent and go straight into the economy - it's potentially very expensive, and much more macroeconomically active. There's no easy one paragraph answer to this issue. It's going to take some very delicate policy work to find a good solution. We can figure it out, but not over a weekend, and not in a mid length blog post.

I can also set conditions which must be met for a given module to be eligible for loans. You're not going to like them one bit.

Openness

To be eligible for loan funding, all of a modules material - course outlines, lecture content, slides, handouts, booklists, marking rubrics, sample papers, marking rubrics, teaching plans, who will teach it (and their qualifications for doing do) - must be open access, available online under a creative commons licence, ideally free for non commercial reuse (ie the other non profit HEIs can nick it). Course will change from run to run, so planned future variances must go up there too.

If you are not familiar with the ideas of open education, there are a couple of recent pieces in the Irish Times and the Times Higher Ed, or you could read DIY U, or take a look at people like David Wiley , a leading US advocate.

Here are a few rationales for Open Education at Third level in Ireland:

• Taxpayers have paid for the material, and are entitled to see it. Virtually every piece of higher education teaching content in the state was developed with taxpayers money. You are entitled to access it. Public money should not be used to create private assets.
• People not attending the course can benefit from open education materials. You might not be able to pay to sit the module, but you might still learn a bit by reviewing at the material online. The feedstock of a knowledge economy is knowledge, and the cheaper and more abundant it is to access, the better for everyone.
• It shifts the value proposition of a module away from a content driven, transmission model, and on to genuine teaching and assessment. You can't really charge a four figure sum for a lecture based module where the lecturer interaction is limited to a Postgrad marking an essay or two. Either the costs must drop, or the institution must deliver real worthwhile teacher interaction and assessment, or provide access to specific equipment or facilities that justifies the cost.
• By placing such a mass of courses online, it establishes Ireland as a central node on the global landscape of higher education. Freely available higher education online will speak with an Irish accent. If you liked the TCD course on Genetics online, why not come on over and do the degree in it here? If you like those Tyndall Institute nanotechnology modules, maybe you should take to them about doing some R&D for you company.
• The Open access requirement will discourage for profit providers. They will be less willing to enter the market if they have to give away the goods. I'm uneasy about government backed loans supporting for profit higher education institutions,  as it hasn't worked out well in the US or elsewhere. This will give them some pause.

Making the content available for free will reduce the inventive for new module development, so we may need to put a funding mechanism in place to provide seed capital for creating new material. I'm conscious also that dumping a weak module online simply creates a weak online module, and there is a long road from there to full, true open education, but the first step on the road is as important as the last. The material can be improved upon over time, and having it in the public domain will create a strong incentive to do so. If it isn't good enough to show in public, how can it be good enough to teach in private? If we believe higher education is a public good, then it must be public. But it must also be good

Quality
A fair proportion of the material put online will, of course, be rubbish. But at least we can all see that now. An open rating and reviewing system, both for the module material, and the lecturers and course delivery, will fairly rapidly sort the wheat from the chaff. Outstanding material and teachers, of which we have many, will rise to the top.
For qualities sake, I would also add a requirement that the module materials get a peer review every few years, which will be published too in the same place online. This means potential students can balance their own opinion of the materials, with scholarly and module graduate perspectives before making their decision to use that module. The peer review can also ensure the modules dependencies (prerequisite or follow modules) are appropriate. Weak modules will wither in the sunlight, and good ones will blossom.
With this model, I can ensure reasonable course quality with relatively little bureaucracy, and empower people to make up their own minds on whether a module is worth doing or not.

We will, alas, need some bureaucratic oversight, targeting audits on modules that are unusually expensive, or have unusually high (or low) completion rates or uptakes, or are getting strange reviews.

Have you noticed there is nothing in this framework so far to stop an individual, or any organisation, designing a course, having it peer reviewed and accredited, putting it ip, running it for free for a cycle to get open reviews, and being eligible for state loan support? Well done. Keep it to yourself.

Deep Modularisation
Underpinning the points of Openness and Quality is an ideal of Deep Modularisation - the Bologna Process taken to it's logical extreme. The Module is now the critical unit, not the degree. Education, and credentialling, can be acquired in module by module chunks, as needed, from any institution, not just in degree sized chunks at the start of a career, when you don't know what you'll need to know. It makes lifelong, distance and part time education the logical central paradigm, and the idea of full time degrees a less logical one. These kinds of changes take a generation to work their way into the mindset, but if we change the framework in which we imagine higher education, that mindset change will come in time.

Deep modulatisation also opens the potential for a module to be more than simply a classroom led learning event. Many of the best learning experiences for students are outside classrooms (In my degree, I learned the most useful things on Fieldwork) and we can open that out further, recognising prior learning and other, non classroom structured learning experiences within the module framework. Could we, for example, use a loan funded module to support an international relations student to work for an NGO like Concern for a bit? I'd certainly like to hear a case made for it. Let's get creative - if it's good, real learning, I'll back it.

Universities will complain to me that this will shift people from accessing full degrees into accessing learning piecemeal. I will understand this is 'people will no longer buy our big expensive things and want smaller, cheaper things instead' which is exactly what I have in mind. I've been rattling on about how the quantum of learning is changing to smaller, more agile units. Deep modularisation recognises this reality.

Access
Modules, of course, can still be stacked up into degrees, just like now, and modules will have prerequisite modules. No point in taking Quantum Mechanics 201 unless you have nailed a bunch of mathematics modules first. But tracing the web of modules down, there is a logical first module, for a 'prime learner, unlearned' which would have no formal prerequisites, and, as an entry level module, it should be possible to complete entirely by distance, just turning up in person for an exam (remote proctoring is, and will remain, technically dicey). So, in time, by picking off the bottom rung prerequisites online first, you can access higher education without bothering with the Leaving Certificate rat race, broadly seen as destructive of minds and (perhaps) lives, at all.

Governance
This should be straightforward. We need three main bits:
A body to administer the student loan and funding systems, it's all straightforward  stuff. In New Zealand, the Social Welfare system looked after that, it's just a bookeeping and payments/repayments management exercise. A couple of years ago, I'd just have tendered this job out to a bank or two to manage. Now, maybe not, but I'm not paying for a whole new agency from scratch for it, not with your taxes.
We'll need a good policy shop to get all over labour markets and outcomes and understand which modules we need to set at zero interest or incentivised in some way, and which we don't need to worry so much about where that sits in government doesn't matter (and, indeed, we can encourage independant research on the matter) once it's good.
Then we need a quality management agency. Their role is to make sure the modules are good, and deliver the learning outcomes they are supposed to, and manage module development grants and so on. They'll also need a rather bloody minded team of cost assessors, who can audit modules and make sure the list price bears some reasonable relation to the cost of delivering them.

Philanthropy and Endowments
I'd like to give Higher Education institution's a little bit of autonomy. After all, if they rely almost completely on loan funding, they haven't really got any independence, even though it is largely students who will control who gets the money. Independence is economic or illusory. Since their administrators will spend most of the next 15 years crying over these reforms we should throw them a bone.
We'll need to make sure that the tax incentives are strong for donations to long term institutional endowments, rather than buildings or isolated, piecemeal scholarships. I'd love to set up our existing Higher Education Institution's with a nest egg, like the US Land Grant system, but I don't have any land. Perhaps there might be something else, a little slot of RF spectrum perhaps, that we could transfer to them on a 100 year lease to give them the potential for revenue. It might be something that seems valueless to us today, as a publicly held good, but having title to it would create an incentive for them to find a valuable use for it. I'm open to ideas. This is a long term strategy, all the more reason to start right away.

That, in a nutshell, is it. An open, actively managed education system supported by government backed student loans. There are, of course, heaps of operational policy issues to address is detail, and whole areas like research and innovation policy, and international education, that I have left off for brevity, as as they sit outside a core educational scope, but I'll happily work out those details for you if needed.

I advocate the system for two reasons:

Firstly, most obviously, I believe it's substantially better than current arrangements. Some of the changes are fundamental, but, like many systems, the state of higher education is strongly dependant on it's history, and it has evolved itself into a dead end, with too much junk DNA from it's 1000 year history. Only an aggressive reform can set it free, and get it moving onwards and updards again. There is much good in our higher education institutions, and we can help set that good free.

Secondly, I think these changes are going to happen anyway. Global higher education systems will look like what I've described by about 2030. Ireland can lead the change, get in ahead, and put our higher education at the head of the global pack, or we can follow, and fall further behind. Leadership carries risks, and demands courage and audacity, but will bring great rewards for our children, and ourselves.

What do you think? 

Fee Fie Fo Fum. The Browne Report

It's out of scope for this blog to assess whether the recommendations of the Browne report are wise or fair. Many others will cover that beat from every angle and political view. Worth reading are Donald Clark, who explains how Browne misses the point, and Charlie Stross, who makes a good stab at putting it all into a larger historical context.

My question is will the recommendations fly, and if it does, will it make any difference to how Universities look in the 2020's and beyond.

My feeling is that they will fly, although I have never followed British politics closely so I'll confess it's only a hunch. The political arcana of Whitehall is a mystery to me. May it ever be so.

Where the UK leads, Ireland will surely follow, and others will take note. It's likely that when my daughter goes to college in 2023 (as of this month, she want to be a vet, by the way) it will be under a funding model quite like Browne proposes, which puts it top dead centre in scope for this blog.

What's driving the thinking in Browne, I believe, is that as attendance at a Tertiary institution slides up into the majority, it's starting to get simply too expensive for the state to support it. Governments have two choices. They can keep funding it publicly, let it go on up to 100% and accept that it will be largely rubbish because it's underfunded. It's very rare that a single purchaser (be it Walmart, or the State) with a broad pool of suppliers to choose from has not bled them white. It only happen when they are all playing too much golf together, or perhaps in Scandanavia. With China and India turning out graduates in increasing numbers, having a high proportion of graduates with fairly indifferent degrees isn't going to be much help. The big IT Offshorers can put 1,000 people on your project tommorow morning. You can't compete on scale.

The other choice is to walk away from directly funding the sector, underwrite it with cheap loans (the education is, after all, a public good, it's the least you can do) and hope that your world class institutions, now student debt funded, can produce graduates of such quality that England Inc. (or Ireland Inc.) will stay in business.

Will it make a difference? Years ago I worked in evaluation of public sector policy, and the experience left (or perhaps found) me cynical about the power of the state effecting real change in the near term. Government politicians like to claim credit, the opposition assigns blame, usually within 12 months of announcing the policy change, and before implementation has even begun. "Major Government initiative might have made a difference, or maybe it didn't, we aren't sure" isn't much of a newspaper headline, especially for an audience who have never heard of a counterfactual. By the time outcomes become clear, all but the hard core policy wonks have forgotten the original initiative. Even big initiatives (the GI Bill comes to mind) often just accelerate patterns of change that were ongoing anyway. That said, this shift probably is big enough to make a change at a generational scale, if the implementation isn't homeopathic, as public policy often is when the rubber hits the road.

For Universities, it's all good. Effectively deregulated, they can charge what they like, and need dance no more with bankruptcy. This will probably lead to some improvements in teaching on the ground. Alas, it will also lead to US style facilities inflation, with an ever nicer set of student facilities being built to entice and compete new entrants. After all, if you are going to go into tens of thousands of debt, what's a few pounds more. Besides, Student Age 19 isn't paying, some hypothetical adult he will grow into will pay in some dark imagined future.

Some TEI's will pull ahead, and engorged with fat fees will produce more appealing graduates. Some of  this will be due to better funding leading to better teaching, and some, alas, because by being more expensive they filter for the elites that elites like to hire.

Will it change the balance of course provision, casting history, classics and so on into the darkness and forcing those without independent means into more lucrative areas? For good or ill, I don't think so. When I worked in New Zealand, which has a student loan system, all the largest loans were for students who had trained as helicopter pilots. New Zealand needs more chopper pilots per capita than most places, but not that many. I recall one course had trained a substantial number of tourist submarine skippers. Vocational sounding, but they would have better off with a classics degree. Browne notes the importance of career guidance up front in the report, and having a PhD in a discipline I've never worked in, I couldn't agree more.

For students, the prospect of a big debt may deter many who might benefit, but I suspect most will suck in their guts, sign on the line and go. After all what's the alternative? The tills at Tesco? It will slow the growth of tertiary education, perhaps holding it at around the 50% level. The loan model means that people without means can still attend if they are prepared to bear the debt, so Universities will still function as engines of social mobility, which is a substantial part of their overall benefit to society. Big picture, the change isn't nearly as radical as it looks. The middle classes still pay, in loans now, instead of taxes.

Related Posts
Follow the Money: http://tertiary21.blogspot.com/2010/07/follow-money.html

Follow the Money

"Follow the Money" Raymond Chandler advised us (via Marlowe), and it's good advice to take when considering how the cost of Tertiary Education effects it's future. It's timely to think about now, as Ireland, from where I write, considers whether to continue with a 'free' fees model, where the state pays, or return to a fee paying model, where some or all of the fees are paid by students directly to the University. How might these choices play out in the long run, and which is the smart one?

All else being equal, the cost of a University education would rise in proportion with inflation. If GDP growth outpaces inflation, as it tends to, University education gets cheaper in real terms. More and more people can afford it, and we all live happily ever after. All else, alas, is not equal. As we get richer, our expectations rise. The school my firstborn starts in on August 31st might as well be on a different planet from the school I started at in '79. It's more reasonable to think of the cost of University education in terms of it's share of GDP.

Whether the cost will rise or fall as a share of GDP depends on who, exactly, is paying.

Where the state funds University education, as in Ireland, it's a single, strong customer with tight pursestrings. That keeps a lid on costs. Unless Universities suddenly get a lot better at picking the governments pocket than they are, the costs can't grow faster than GDP, and will probably shrink as other agendas draw on state coffers. The state will pressure universities to expand enrollments and spend less.  While the slice of national wealth consumed is smaller in relative terms but the cake is growing all the time. So, in absolute terms, Universities do get more money, and deliver a better service. The voting middle classes won't mind them bleeding a little, but won't like to see them bled white, just like schools. While universities command a smaller and smaller wedge of national wealth, more and more people go there, because it's cheap. You end with with near universal tertiary education in the long run excluding only those so already too badly sabotaged by family or school to make it. That's how state funded primary and secondary education works, why should tertiary wind up any different.

Universities won't like this. Having only one paying customer is bad business. Like a pea farmer selling to a big supermarket, you suddenly realize you don't work for yourself anymore, and your profit margin is what they tell you it can be. When they feel a squeeze, you get crushed. Primary schools don't have a lot of autonomy.

Universities would like to work like any other business. They would deliver a service, and charge what it costs, or as much as they can get away with, whichever is more.  As well as helping the top line, making goods more expensive makes them more exclusive. All Universities, deep in their hidden hearts, want to be Harvard when they grow up, and that means being expensive enough to filter out the riff raff, and elite enough to attract the very best talent. Employers, at least ones that potential students would like to work for, like that too. It makes it easy to sort the CV into a slush pile. There are some Universities, who, as a core value, try to keep costs as low as possible, but they are, alas, not economically significant. You can see this model in operation in the US.

Where education is on a fees basis, the prices will rise as fast as the market will bear. Faster, if predatory lending practices, as seen in the US, come into play. If people are borrowing for their education, based on their beliefs around future earnings, fees can logically rise faster than GDP growth. Fees go up, Universities command an expanding slice of the national pie, and (successful) Universities are grand and well resourced, like the US Ivy Leagues. If you can afford to go to the best, or can swing a scholarship, your future is assured. Less and less people can afford to go. Things like community colleges, online and for profit colleges spring up to satisfy that market.

Note that other costs (housing, food, and so forth) are more or less neutral either way. Whether you are in college or not, you've still got to eat and sleep indoors. There is an opportunity cost as well, time spent in lectures and years of earnings foregone while in University. In either model of funding, so long as University can get you a better income than no University it's worth going. That better income might be a better job than a non graduate, or indeed any job. If practically everyone has a degree, not having one would be a fast track to the benefit office, with rare exception.

These two scenarios are of course end members of a continuum of solutions. In Ireland, people suggest an intermediate model, where Universities charge fees but the government provides adequate scholarships to ensure access for people who cannot afford them. This is a great idea, and like many great ideas, it won't fly.  Democracies don't reliably support people who don't vote. Any scholarship programme for the deserving and needy will get whittled away over time. Cutting those programmes keeps them out of college, and not competing for jobs with the children of nice, voting, middle class parents who knows the name of their elected representative and would like the money spent on themselves. Think of the consistent heavy flak affirmative action attracts in the US, and how it survives only because it is supported by a substantial mass of voters who benefit from it.

The other intermediate model is to have some state supported free Universities and some fee paying Universities, so everyone gets what they want. This is not unlike the US system, and has serious consequences for social equity. Your degree will forever record how rich your parents were, and humans being humans, your place in the pecking order is set.

There are, of course, many excellent Moral Arguments for this funding system or that. I'm not concerned in this blog with Moral Arguments, however just. I'm just concerned about what will happen. History has no morals. Nor am I concerned with what decision Society will make. Society does not make decisions, it responds to stimuli.

Universities however, are small enough to make actual choices. Given these two options what should a clever University lobby for? What is likely to ensure your relevance and survival in the long run?

If you are in the top 10%, then lobby for a fees model. You've got a good shot at 'Ivy League like status in the long run. Take it. With the enforced egalitarianism of state funding removed, you can lay claim to the top spot in the public mind. Fees will bring competition, and you're well placed to win it. Call your Minister, book a nice Restaurant and good luck.

If not, think carefully. You're not going to get a big endowment or asset base, like the Land Grant colleges in the US, to cushion you against the hard years. In a free market, they will come. The state might be one big customer, but it's checks don't bounce very often. THe business will start to look a lot like the Private sector. Rising costs will bring in competition, like in the US. Strange movements, like the EduPunks, will challenge your right to exist as an institution. Students incurring big debts are much more likely to cause trouble. If your country grows an Ivy League, and you're not in it, what then?