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As a university student in the UK I find myself reminded of these problems on a very frequent basis. The purpose of universities seems to have shifted from providing academic research and learning to simply being another stage of school, with the sole objective of handing out degrees. One of the metrics that I feel indicates this most strongly is the radical change in hiring at universities in recent years. It's shocking to know that many universities (mine included) now employ more full time non-academic staff than full time academics.

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The purpose of universities seems to have shifted from providing academic research and learning to simply being another stage of school

There’s no “seems” about it, 50% of school leavers going to university was an explicit policy goal. There’s no way to reconcile an institution of higher learning with one that has to accept anyone that applies

That makes no sense. It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. I believe it is false. Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower. Taking in more students does not inhibit service quality, up to the capacity of the school, which can be easily scaled by hiring more teachers and more teaching space.

Anyhow, the volume of students as a change driver for university quality explanation does not fit with the observations that:

a) Universities employ disproportionately more non-teaching staff than they used to; and

b) Academic staff has a harder time reaching tenure.

The explanation lies elsewhere.

> Academic staff has a harder time reaching tenure.

Tenure in the US sense doesn't exist in the UK academic system. Lecturers/researchers with permanent contracts have the same employment rights as those in the private sector.

Yes, but, the whole of the UK permanent workforce gets tenure in the US sense after, I think, the first year of employment. As do most EU countries. Long may it remain so.

The Tories abolished tenure in the UK sense which roughly removed the right not to be made redundant but didn't affect the standard employment right not to be fired "just because".

In 2012, under George Osborne, it was changed so that it is permissible for an employee to be unfairly dismissed in your first two years of employment.

Is it possible to just 'hire more teachers' though? The teachers that I had in university didn't seem to be the type of people you could just hire more of.

Yes, it is. The fight for jobs in the academic market is fierce; there are far more people looking for academic jobs than there are positions.

> which can be easily scaled by hiring more teachers and more teaching space

Neither of which scale easily.

It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality

But it must be. An institution with AAA A-level students can teach more advanced material at a faster pace than one that admits EEEs. This is surely obvious, no?

It doesn’t mean anyone is better or worse in a moral sense, it just means more or less academically able.

Not at all.

The ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results.

Mastery of the material can help give a good starting point, but I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students.

> The ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results.

I’m very confident that this is false. Citation needed.

ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results

This is incorrect. They are obviously not 100% correlated (even re-sitting the same exam isn't!) but the correlation is extremely strong.

> I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students

The existence of outliers doesn't disprove a correlation.

But that's easily solved by having institutions for multiple A* students, and other institutions for EEE students. Which is the way it actually is.

Well yes, but it’s not a reasonable system if non-Russell degrees cost as much but are actually irrelevant. Shouldn’t those students be funnelled towards qualifications and vocations for which there is real demand?

There was nothing wrong with Polys when they were Polys.

They don't, in practice, because what you repay is linked to what you earn.

Just because they accept them doesn't mean they need to keep them. If the students can't keep up, that's on them.

It's pretty repugnant to accept students that have no capability to perform, take their money, and boot them when they fail out because they aren't prepared or equipped.

They don't have to admit the EEE-level students, they don't have to water down.

Yes, politically, it turns out, that universities were chopped up into research institutions (or research institutions were spun off from universities) and diploma mills, because even that shit level 2-3 years that people take to earn a Bachelor's degree means a lot on the job market.

> Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower.

Only if everyone became a lot more skilled than their grades imply.

Academic achievement is not be a perfect measure, but if you go from the top 3.4% of the population to the top 50%, the only possible situations are:

1) everyone is doing a lot better at school now

2) graduation rate goes down

3) standards go down

Or some combination of those.

That doesn’t mean there is no benefit in getting half the country to spend three more years in education, just that nobody should expect 18.7 times * as many of whatever made you want to get half the population into university in the first place.

* population growth too.

That presumes

That the top 3.4% really were just the smartest - not the also the wealthiest and best connected. There is probably both some dilution of talent and also more competition from all levels of society.

And as to point 1. In the UK at least there is no doubt many many more are doing a lot better at school nowadays. Schools have evened up and pupils work far harder as most jobs require qualifications.

Those points are why I said academic grades aren’t a perfect measure, and also “Only if everyone became a lot more skilled than their grades imply.”

It is not even the “top” 50%, because what of those who are perfectly capable but just don’t want to go to university? It is just 50% of the general population.

If it’s not the top 50% academically, the problem just gets bigger.

Universities used to be elitist in that only the smartest got in.

I believe historically universities were elitist in that only the richest were meant to ever attend them, not the smartest...

Quite probably, I am just thinking back to my lifetime.

Well, a bit of both. For centuries they've been some mixture of upper-class finishing school, and a place for the very brightest of the next generation to concentrated. Using the rich kids to fund the scholars (and using some of the scholar's prestige to attract the rich) was on average quite a productive symbiosis.

At the university I studied at it was well known that their policy was opening up campuses in Africa and China so to entice international students to the campus in England.

This was for the sole reason of increasing cash flow and I know several of the Chinese students that I did my Masters with were paying more than ten times what I was for the same course which both myself and our lecturers were ashamed of.

It may not be all Universities but even ten years ago it felt that they had become less about excellence in teaching and more about printing money.

This is rampant in the US as well. Many of the students cheated to get in, sometimes with the umiversity's knowledge, and weren't fluent enough in English to participate in class.

There are lots of companies writing essays and otherwise facilitating the admissions cheating, and several major universities were caught a few years ago (I believe Duke was one).

I've read many anecdotal stories like this of students complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down.

I think it also has interesting potential long term implications for relative national competitiveness if you think about it regardless of whether that is a goal or not.

> complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down

I'm not sure why those students are complaining...

The wealthy foreign students aren't participating in class much, which effectively makes the class size smaller. They're also subsidizing the degrees of all the Americans. And a lot of them end up going back home after graduating, so they're not even competing in the same labor pool.

The quality of instruction suffers when half the class can barely speak English, and don't contribute to group projects. Getting a degree for half the cost but with half the learning doesn't seem like a good deal to me.

>It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality.

That's exactly what happened, and it pre-dates the Labour government's goal of 50% participation.

The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 allowed polytechnics and colleges of further education to become universities. Many of these institutions had little or no research output and had previously been dedicated to vocational instruction.

There was an immediate and lasting change in how universities operated. Many of these post-1992 universities had extremely lax entrance criteria, in some cases tantamount to an open-door policy. There was a proliferation of degree courses that were obviously vocational and obviously far less demanding than a traditional degree - Sports Science, Hospitality Management, Fashion and Textiles etc.

There was another drop in standards with the introduction of tuition fees. Before 1998, university teaching was funded primarily through government grants, with students paying nothing. The Labour government introduced fees of £1,000 per year, which were increased to £3,000 in 2004 and to £9,000 by the Conservative government in 2010.

These higher fees were ostensibly a maximum, with the intention that universities could compete on price. The structure of the student loan system meant that there was little practical difference for students if they were paying lower fees, so all universities charged the £9,000 maximum. This fundamentally changed the character of British universities, shifting them away from the European social model and towards the American market model.

Less selective universities started to aggressively advertise to lower-performing school leavers, because there was no cap on student numbers and their income was directly tied to putting bums on seats. Universities had a strong incentive to promote humanities subjects over science subjects, because the former are much cheaper to teach. International students have become a hot commodity, because they pay higher fees than domestic students; many universities now offer fast-track schemes for international students, with lower entry requirements than for domestic students.

This move towards a market-led university system has driven a huge increase in pay for senior management and a huge increase in the use of casual and part-time lecturers. As in the US, we're now seeing managers earning salaries in the high six figures, while peripatetic lecturers are struggling to earn a living wage. There was a huge wave of strikes at the start of this year over cuts to university staff pensions, followed by collective legal action from students demanding compensation for missed lectures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_universities_(United_Kingd...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_tuition_fees_in_th...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/08/06/universitie...

Excellent comment, although some are older problems, see the novel series Wilt by Tom Sharpe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilt_(novel)

Anyway, for me Bologna is on the par with the more recent so called adoption of Open Access in the form of "Gold OA", i.e. one more way to turn universities into cash cows, presented as a virtuous move. In the case of Bologna it was about the precarisation of researchers, in the case of "BOAI" Gold OA it was about reselling to researchers their minimal units of publication, paid by themselves, written by them under the pressure of obtainment, eventually, of a senior position.

It keeps a vast amount of young people off the unemployed figures. Has been a stated goal since the Blair years

> The purpose of universities seems to have shifted from providing academic research and learning to simply being another stage of school, with the sole objective of handing out degrees.

This isn't just true at university level either. Recently sixth form college level education basically became mandatory for everyone too, and I suspect the same thing that happened to universities happened on that level too.

I am a bit confused by the last statement. It can take a lot of man power to support the academics at any university. Now this is not to say that there isn't a lot of staff padding going on.

From supporting the physical site of the university which can be across multiple campuses to managing the life and well being of the students. Then top it off with administrative people and their support staffs the numbers can add up quickly.

I think a better metric is how many students, undergraduate and graduate/professional compared to academics and then separately non academics. If the the ratio of those who teach to those there to learn tips is outside of averages we have a real concern

Not parent but, your statement doesn't explain why the ratio of academics to administrators should have fallen, do academics now need more administrators than they did. Are the newly employed non-academics really serving the research aims, or are they meeting the schooling requirements?

Part of it is that, yes, the non-academic staff help with the mountain of non-academic work lecturers would otherwise have.

I used to work in a support role at a university, and although many of the roles will inevitably be automated away, you'd be amazed at how much administration a student on a course requires (from room bookings for lectures, enrolment information, pastoral support, cleaning, cooking, supporting with IT systems, reviewing coursework and exams, QA-ing courses, assisting with research proposals, lining up interviews for PhD candidates...).

It's not something that scales well, the more students you have, the more of these things you need to manage, and the less it makes sense for academic staff to do it (on top of their other publish or perish commitments).

When you have a building that can hold 250 students, and 5 courses with 75 students each, each needing a lecture booking at around about the same time, but not the same time as some will overlap modules, so they can do practicals in the afternoon, whilst potentially needing to book in placement meetings throughout the day with the placements officer, and having the part-time staff in the academic office available for coursework hand-ins... this is where it gets messy. This will all be solved by technology in the future, but the "industry" is growing faster than the infrastructure allows. When you need to solve the problem now, and you're not a digitally-minded organisation, you throw bodies at it.

That being said, I'm not in agreement that 50% of the school-leaving population should be forced into a traditional university setting just because we as a society only value that route as being rigorous enough.

While the things you say certainly need doing, somehow they were all done in the past with vastly smaller non-academic staff. Say 50 years ago. What's changed?

Obviously IT is one thing, but this doesn't seem huge. Or maybe, it's not obvious why it need be a lot bigger than everyone having gmail.

"assisting with research proposals" is certainly new. But is it big?

How much falls under "pastoral support"?

> What's changed?

Student numbers. Massive, monumental growth in student numbers. And the red tape that comes with that kind of size (as ever).

Labour's push for 50% of school leavers to go to university, large swathes of new courses approved that would otherwise have been taught through vocational routes, increase in student applications vs places (in the UK you can apply [or at least could] for up to 6 places, one of the major shifts in the last few years people don't talk about is the push to use all of those slots, whereas you used to only apply to 1 or 2 - this has increased application review and support burden massively).

Also, with an insane growth in the use of Clearing/Adjustment to secure your final place, there's a lot of work put into situational modelling of expected numbers. The market has gone through a phase of only-slightly-organised chaos, and students are now calling the shots at most universities, and leaving things until the last possible moment. This has also meant unis have had to commit to staff numbers before knowing really what their cohorts will look like.

With GApps for Education, most people have Gmail - it doesn't solve anything really. Collaborative software only works if the people required have the time and technical ability (or desire) needed to collaborate. If they don't (like academics), then you get bodies to do it.

> "assisting with research proposals" is certainly new. But is it big?

Yep. University I worked at had a team in each faculty full time helping with this. The grants procedure, writing something actually comprehensible (something of a novelty with some academics, who don't appear to know what a requirement of "plain English description" is...), impact assessment and case study requirements, lining up interviews for candidates, fellows and assistants for the project team, setting up review panels etc... is a major administrative task now. Again, if there weren't support staff doing this, it'd add another bunch of hours onto each lecturer's 80 hour week.

> How much falls under "pastoral support"?

Most faculties will have several student support staff specifically to help with wellbeing during their time at uni. Having been a couple of doors down from someone who tried to commit suicide whilst in uni halls, remember rationalising away those support roles does have a human impact.

Thanks!

> Student numbers

I still don't quite see why overall growth must change the proportion so much.

Maybe the extra complication of everyone applying to 20 places is a factor which doesn't scale. I don't know exactly how you fix that. Perhaps you should cap the number of applications an individual can make?

Re complicated IT, again somehow needing to collaborate on departmental memos somehow wasn't an issue when we had typewriters. I suspect a lot is weird make-work.

> grants procedure

OK, good. I would not have refused such help, but have never had any!

This however does seem orthogonal to students. It's part of the massive stuff-up that is research funding, where we've allowed the question of allocating these funds to eat up not only a majority of the time of the scientists being supported... but also apparently a huge number of other people. All ultimately paid out of the pot we're trying to distribute. Can't we change the rules of the game so that more of the pot goes to things which aren't obviously zero-sum?

> support staff specifically to help with wellbeing

It's nice to do these things, certainly. But lavishing them on the best and brightest young adults while all the other ones with jobs fend for themselves doesn't seem so easy to defend. Why isn't this part of the NHS budget?

> I still don't quite see why overall growth must change the proportion so much.

As a hypothetical, if you were a Dean and you had a £100k to have the greatest impact in the department: Do you employ 2 lecturers at £50k each to teach lectures, do admin and sort out research, or 1 lecturer at £55k, and take a bunch of their tasks away and give them to a research coordinator for £20k (who can support maybe 10 lecturers) and a research assistant for £25k (who can sit on panels, do research, and teach some classes, and support maybe 2 lecturers)?

Also, there are a finite number of world-class lecturers in any field - a lot of which would rather be researching than teaching, so making their time more efficient by basically taking away their "university" commitments to students (undergrads especially), give them more time to work on their projects, is almost the point.

> Maybe the extra complication of everyone applying to 20 places is a factor which doesn't scale. I don't know exactly how you fix that. Perhaps you should cap the number of applications an individual can make?

There is a cap (which I believe is 6). The issue is, that students never really used that many before. You'd have your preferred course, and then maybe a back up (or two tops) - now, students play the market. They used to accept their offers immediately too, now they wait until the day before the UCAS deadline to give themselves the most time (fair enough, but has an impact on universities across the board). This will bed in in the next few years, but you'd be amazed at how sharply this changed.

> Can't we change the rules of the game so that more of the pot goes to things which aren't obviously zero-sum?

One of the hidden effects of the university fees change was that a lot of the research funding was cut and expected to be derived from incoming students rather than distributed by government (hence why so much time now goes into external proposal writing and pandering to the last remaining government schemes with things like REF case studies). You now have to appeal to external funders more than internal ones, making the process more... processy. I've heard of some places not offering PhD places unless the subsidy was from an external source.

Also (and this is a damning indictment of universities tbh), universities have increased the overhead they charge to their staff from their research grants, to spend on capital projects, meaning they need to apply for more money, potentially making the process even harder.

> Why isn't this part of the NHS budget?

Is that a serious question? :) mental health provision in the NHS is notoriously woeful, and "best and brightest young adults" (not especially true when you consider the aim is for 50% to go there, that's not the best and brightest, that's half the bell curve. Also, quite a few mental health professionals really want the age of being an adult recognised as 25 as social dynamics have changed to make it closer to that than 18) put under artificial pressure with little money and no support network, having to identify mental health issues themselves, and then admit themselves to treatment units over... missed coursework deadlines?

True, having better mental health provision for students vs non-students is damning when you consider the social-economic issues behind university access, but as to my previous point about the Dean with cash to spend - at a university system level, the investment in students not killing themselves with dedicated support staff vs community or lecturer pastoral support is one they've balanced.

EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that some of the roles I've mentioned don't always eat up a full FTE over the course of a year. Lots of people work part-time, or roles that have peaks and troughs throughout a season, are supported by teams with different remits. Those wellbeing support staff will help with enrolment during September madness, research staff will help with internal comms, programme admins will help with market research, everyone helps plan open days and applicant visit days.

> the non-academic staff help with the mountain of non-academic work lecturers would otherwise have

Sometimes the academics create lots of extra work for the non-academic staff with their sub-optimal decisions.

I used to work for a university in their IT services, and as a developer I was exposed to a lot of the business rules around enrolment, course prerequisites, degree/major requirements, which we recorded and enforced through a mix of custom software and customised off-the-shelf software. Those rules were written by committees of senior academics. And, rather than keeping them nice and simple, they seemed to like to make them as complex as possible, with the result that the computer systems couldn't cope with the complexity.

The student enrolment system could handle enforcing some simpler subject prerequisites, but for more complex ones the academics concocted – like "PQR101 or BCD142 plus 12 credit points at 200 level in ABC subjects (except for ABC219 and ABC220) plus at least two of DEF211 or DEF212 or GHI292 or JKL205" – we'd just display a warning message to the student "You can only enrol in this if XYZ. Click 'OK' to confirm you meet that prerequisite", followed up by custom reports which would be run to catch students who incorrectly clicked 'OK', who would then be manually forcibly unenrolled, and contacted by phone/post/email to be told to enrol in something else instead.

Added to that, the complexity of the rules would confuse the students, and make the process of planning what to enrol in quite daunting and stressful. Sometimes students would enrol in the wrong subjects, and nobody would stop them, and only later they'd be told that some subject they just spent a semester studying didn't count towards the degree they were enrolled in.

(Hopefully, ten plus years on, they've learnt their lesson and made the rules simpler now. Or maybe not. I wouldn't know.)

All of which complexity used to be handled by printing a course guide with a sentence about prerequisites. And perhaps the professor would remind you on day one. This seems like an example of IT not saving anyone time.

I would certainly hope they wouldn't dumb down their rules...for the sake of the computer system?

I'm a web developer leading a team of four working on a research project that has no full-time academics and 3/4 part time academics. They will have several projects such as this.

There are another 6 full time members of administrative staff running this project. So our ratio is close to 4:1 I suspect. Research can require a lot of manpower...

Our funding does not come from tuition, but research grants and similar.

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