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The Renewed Threat to STEM

Posted in Education, Finance, Science Politics with tags , , , , , , on July 26, 2015 by telescoper

A couple of years ago, soon after taking over as Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) at the University of Sussex, I wrote a blog post called The Threat to STEM from HEFCE’s Funding Policies about how the funding policies of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) were extremely biased against STEM disciplines. The main complaint I raised then was that the income per student for science subjects does not adequately reflect the huge expense of teaching these subjects compared to disciplines in the arts and humanities. The point is that universities now charge the same tuition fee for all subjects (usually £9K per annum) while the cost varies hugely across disciplines: science disciplines can cost as much as £16K per annum per student whereas arts subjects can cost as little as £6K. HEFCE makes a small gesture towards addressing this imbalance by providing an additional grant for “high cost” subjects, but that is only just over £1K per annum per student, not enough to make such courses financially viable on their own. And even that paltry contribution has been steadily dwindling.  In effect, fees paid by arts students are heavily subsidising the sciences across the Higher Education sector.

The situation was bad enough before last week’s announcement of an immediate £150M cut in HEFCE’s budget. Once again the axe has fallen hardest on STEM disciplines. Worst of all, a large part of the savings will be made retrospectively, i.e. by clawing back money that had already been allocated and which institutions had assumed in order to plan their budgets. To be fair, HEFCE had warned institutions that cuts were coming in 2015/16:

This means that any subsequent changes to the funding available to us from Government for 2015-16, or that we have assumed for 2016-17, are likely to affect the funding we are able to distribute to institutions in the 2015-16 academic year. This may include revising allocations after they have already been announced. Accordingly, institutions should plan their budgets prudently.

However, this warning does not mention the possibility of cuts to the current year (i.e. 2014-15). No amount of prudent planning of budgets will help when funding is taken away retrospectively, as it is now to the case. I should perhaps explain that funding allocations are made by HEFCE in a lagged fashion, based on actual student numbers, so that income for the academic year 2014-15 is received by institutions during 15/16. In fact my institution, in common with most others, operates a financial year that runs from August 1st to July 31st and I’ve just been through a lengthy process of setting the budget from August 1st 2015 onward; budgets are what I do most of the time these days, if I’m honest. I thought I had finished that job for the time being, but look:

In October 2015, we will notify institutions of changes to the adjusted 2014-15 teaching grants we announced in March 20158. These revised grant tables will incorporate the pro rata reduction of 2.4 per cent. This reduction, and any other changes for individual institutions to 2014-15 grant, will be implemented through our grant payments from November 2015. We do not intend to reissue 2014-15 grant tables to institutions before October 2015, but institutions will need to reflect any changes relating to 2014-15 in their accounts for that year (i.e. the current academic year). Any cash repayments due will be confirmed as part of the October announcements.

On top of this, any extra students recruited as as  result of the government scrapping student number controls won’t attract any support at all from HEFCE, so we wll only get the tuition fee.And the government says it wants the number of STEM students to increase? Someone tell me how that makes sense.

What a mess! It’s going to be back to the drawing board for me and my budget. And if a 2.4 per cent cut doesn’t sound much to you then you need to understand it in terms of how University budgets work. It is my job – as the budget holder for MPS – to ensure that the funding that comes in to my School is spent as efficiently and effectively on what the School is meant to do, i.e. teaching and research. To that end I have to match income and expenditure as closely as possible. It is emphatically not the job of the School to make a profit: the target I am given is to return a small surplus (actually 4 per cent of our turnover) to contribute to longer-term investments. I’ve set a budget that does this, but now I’ll have to wait until October to find out how much I have to find in terms of savings to absorb the grant cut. It’s exasperating when people keep moving the goalposts like this. One would almost think the government doesn’t care about the consequences of its decisions, as long as it satisfies its fixation with cuts.

And it’s not only teaching that is going to suffer. Another big slice of savings (£52M) is coming from scrapping the so-called “transitional relief” for STEM departments who lost out as a result of the last Research Excellence Framework. This again is a policy that singles out STEM disciplines for cuts. You can find the previous allocations of transitional relief in an excel spreadsheet here. The cash cuts are largest in large universities with big activities in STEM disciplines – e.g. Imperial College will lose £10.9M previous allocated, UCL about £4.3M, and Cambridge about £4M. These are quite wealthy institutions of course, and they will no doubt cope, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable for HEFCE to break a promise.

This cut in fact won’t alter my School’s budget either. Although we were disappointed with the REF outcome in terms of league table position, we actually increased our QR income. As an institution the University of Sussex only attracted £237,174 in transitional relief so this cut is small potatoes for us, but that doesn’t make this clawback any more palatable from the point of view of the general state of health of STEM disciplines in the United Kingdom.

These cuts are also directly contrary to the claim that the UK research budget is “ring-fenced”. It clearly isn’t, and with a Comprehensive Spending Review coming up many of us are nervous that these cuts are just a foretaste of much worse things to come. Research Councils are being asked to come up with plans based on a 40% cut in cash.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Yes, science produces too many PhDs

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , , on February 19, 2015 by telescoper

I came across a blog post this morning entitled Does Science Produce Too Many PhDs? I think the answer is an obvious “yes” but I’ll use the question as an excuse to rehash an argument I have presented before, which is that most analyses of the problems facing yearly career researchers in science are looking at the issue from the wrong end. I think the crisis is essentially caused by the overproduction of PhDs in this field. To understand the magnitude of the problem, consider the following.

Assume that the number of permanent academic positions in a given field (e.g. astronomy) remains constant over time. If that is the case, each retirement (or other form of departure) from a permanent position will be replaced by one, presumably junior, scientist.

This means that over an academic career, on average, each academic will produce just one PhD who will get a permanent job in academia. This of course doesn’t count students coming in from abroad, or those getting faculty positions abroad, but in the case of the UK these are probably relatively small corrections.

Under the present supply of PhD studentships an academic can expect to get a PhD student at least once every three years or so. At a minimum, therefore, over a 30 year career one can expect to have ten PhD students. A great many supervisors have more PhD students than this, but this just makes the odds worse. The expectation is that only one of these will get a permanent job in the UK. The others (nine out of ten, according to my conservative estimate) above must either leave the field or the country to find permanent employment.

The arithmetic of this situation is a simple fact of life, but I’m not sure how many prospective PhD students are aware of it. There is still a reasonable chance of getting a first postdoctoral position, but thereafter the odds are stacked against them.

The upshot of this is we have a field of understandably disgruntled young people with PhDs but no realistic prospect of ever earning a settled living working in the field they have prepared for. This problem has worsened considerably in recent  years as the number of postdoctoral positions has almost halved since 2006. New PhDs have to battle it out with existing postdoctoral researchers for the meagre supply of suitable jobs. It’s a terrible situation.

Now the powers that be – in this case the Science and Technology Facilities Council – have consistently argued that the excess PhDs go out into the wider world and contribute to the economy with the skills they have learned. That may be true in a few cases. However, my argument is that the PhD is not the right way to do this because it is ridiculously inefficient.

What we should have is a system wherein we produce more and better trained Masters level students  and fewer PhDs. This is the system that exists throughout most of Europe, in fact, and the UK is actually committed to adopt it through the Bologna process.  Not that this commitment seems to mean anything, as precisely nothing has been done to harmonize UK higher education with the 3+2+3 Bachelors+Masters+Doctorate system Bologna advocates.

The training provided in a proper two-year Masters programme will improve the skills pool for the world outside academia, and also better prepare the minority of students who go on to take a PhD. The quality of the  PhD will also improve, as only the very best and most highly motivated researchers will take that path. This used to be what happened, of course, but I don’t think it is any longer the case.

The main problem with this suggestion is that it requires big changes to the way both research and teaching are funded. The research councils turned away from funding Masters training many years ago, so I doubt if they can be persuaded to to a U-turn now. Moreover, the Research Excellence Framework provides a strong incentive for departments to produce as many PhDs as they possibly can, as these are included in an algorithmic way as part of the score for “Research Environment”. The more PhDs a department produces, the higher it will climb in the league tables. One of my targets in my current position is to double the number of PhDs produced by my School over the period 2013-18. What happens to the people concerned seems not to be a matter worthy of consideration. They’re only “outputs”…

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A whole lotta cheatin’ going on? REF stats revisited

Posted in Education, Science Politics with tags , , , on January 28, 2015 by telescoper

Here’s a scathing analysis of Research Excellence Framework. I don’t agree with many of the points raised and will explain why in a subsequent post (if and when I get the time), but I reblogging it here in the hope that it will provoke some comments either here or on the original post (also a wordpress site).

dereksayer's avatarcoasts of bohemia

 

1.

The rankings produced by Times Higher Education and others on the basis of the UK’s Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs) have always been contentious, but accusations of universities’ gaming submissions and spinning results have been more widespread in REF2014 than any earlier RAE. Laurie Taylor’s jibe in The Poppletonian that “a grand total of 32 vice-chancellors have reportedly boasted in internal emails that their university has become a top 10 UK university based on the recent results of the REF”[1] rings true in a world in which Cardiff University can truthfully[2]claim that it “has leapt to 5th in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) based on the quality of our research, a meteoric rise” from 22nd in RAE2008. Cardiff ranks 5th among universities in the REF2014 “Table of Excellence,” which is based on the GPA of the scores assigned by the REF’s “expert panels” to the three…

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Higher Education Funding: A Modest Proposal

Posted in Education, Finance, Politics with tags , , , , , on August 8, 2014 by telescoper

With next year’s general election already looming there are signs that the higher education funding system is likely to be a hot topic. The Conservatives, for example, are reportedly considering removing the cap on tuition fees (currently set at £9K per annum) while Labour is talking about reducing the figure to £6K. Labour’s idea is likely to prove popular among potential students, it will result in a reduction of fee income to English universities of a third, potentially leading to wholesale redundancies and closures unless it is offset by an increased contribution from the taxpayer to offset this cut. Responsibility for higher education funding in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is devolved, so Westminster policy does not apply directly there although the knock-on effect of changes in England would be considerable given the number of students who choose to study away from home.

The backdrop to these suggested policy changes is the obvious fact that the current system is unsustainable. Although there has not been a marked reduction in numbers of students applying to university since the introduction of tuition fees, it has become increasingly clear that the system of loans and deferred fees is actually costing the Exchequer more in terms of short-term borrowing than the old system. Moreover, there is a growing realization that the fraction of this cost that will actually be recouped in future is going to be much smaller than its advocates would like to admit. Recent estimates, likely to be revised upwards, suggest that 45% of student loans will never be repaid.

On top of this there is the problem that the so-called “elite” universities have not succeeded in “widening participation” (as the phrase goes). Oxford and Cambridge both continue to take about 40% of their pupils from private schools; many other institutions. My own institution, the University of Sussex, takes about 86% of its intake from state schools, which is about the average across the sector.

Although only a small fraction of pupils (about 7%) attend (private) independent schools, about 65% of those go on to University; only 24% from the state sector do. In my opinion, not all universities take widening participation seriously but even if they do (like we do at Sussex) it is difficult for higher education institutions to repair the divisions that arise much earlier in the education system.

The average fee per term for a day pupil at a private school in the UK is about £3400; this rises to about £7800 per term for boarding schools. Since there are three school terms per year this means that the average cost per year for day pupils is £10,200, well above the £9000 per year maximum fee for university tuition. That says a lot for how poorly funded UK universities really are, even with increased tuition fees, especially in STEM subjects which require expensive laboratories and other facilities. Moreover, private school fees are payable upfront while tuition fees for students in higher education are funded by heavily subsidized loans which do not need to be repaid until the student is earning more than a certain minimum salary (currently £21K pa).

When funding is tight it is particularly important that it should be targetted where it is needed most. For me that means to encourage more students from state schools to go to university. The principle I’d adopt here (and indeed in many other contexts) is encapsulated in the phrase “to each according to their need, from each according to their ability”.

Parents who have decided to send their offspring to private schools have, in my view, already demonstrated that they can afford to contribute to their education at a level considerably higher than the current tuition fee for university students. In such cases there is no need for a means test to determine whether they need support from the taxpayer; they have already done that calculation for themselves.

My proposal, therefore, is that students whose parents have decided to take their children out of the state school system should be deemed to be ineligible for state support for higher education. They should therefore pay the full fees upfront. I think there’s a case even for making such students pay for the full cost of their education which is not the £9K fee payable by Home/EU but the much higher fee charged to students from outside the EU, which is currently £17K at the University of Sussex. The money saved in this way should be used to provide better fee waivers and and maintenance grants for students from the state school system (on a means-tested basis). This could be accomplished by, e.g., a system of vouchers available to students from state schools in England; the rest of the UK could adopt a similar system if they wish. This would also be a step towards reducing the incentive for families to increase social divisions by taking their children out of the state system.

As well as driving greater equality and stimulating social mobility, my suggestion would also correct a number of anomalies in the existing system. One is that students attending English universities who went to Schools elsewhere in Europe (including Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) are entitled to the same financial support as English students. However, most students from outside the UK will return home after graduation and there is no effective means of making them pay back their fees and loans because these are currently recovered through the UK tax system. In effect, therefore, the taxpayer is providing free higher education for these students and it is one of the reason why the default rate on student loans is likely to be very high. In my proposal this loophole would be sealed; unless a student went to an English state school they would not have the means to access HEFCE support.

I have heard it said that this idea would remove choice. I don’t agree. Parents will still have the choice of sending their sons and daughters to private school if they wish. What it will do is remove part of the incentive for them to do that.

Across the UK over 80% of university students are from state schools, so the measure I suggest will not on its own solve the University funding crisis. On the other hand, I think it would at least be fairer than the current system. On the other hand, I’m not sure fairness counts for very much these days…

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Why Graduate Teaching Assistantships Should Be Scrapped

Posted in Education with tags , , , , , , on April 24, 2014 by telescoper

There’s an interesting piece in today’s Times Higher about the variability in pay and working conditions for Graduate Teaching Assistants across the UK Higher Education sector. For those of you not up with the lingo, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are (usually) PhD students who fund their doctoral studies by doing some teaching for the department in which they are studying. As the piece makes clear, the use of GTAs varies widely between one university and another across the country and indeed between one department and another within the same university. The use of such positions is higher in arts and humanities departments than in science and engineering, because the latter general have more opportunity to fund scholarships for PhD students, either from one of the Research Councils or elsewhere. Such scholarships pay a stipend (tax-free) as well as the fee for studying as a PhD student.

When I arrived at the University of Sussex last year I found that the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences operated a GTA scheme in parallel with Research Council bursaries. Students funded by a research council scholarship received a stipend paid at a national rate of about £13,600 per annum, but were able to top this up by undertaking a limited amount of teaching in the School (e.g. marking coursework, helping with workshops, or demonstrating in the teaching laboratories). Externally funded students did teaching on a voluntary basis. The GTAs on the other hand were required to undertake a fixed amount of teaching without remuneration in order to cover their fees.

I found this two-tier system unfair and divisive, with students funded as GTAs clearly treated as second-class citizens. One of the first major decisions I made as Head of School was to phase out the GTA scheme and replace it with bursaries on exactly the same terms as externally-funded ones with the same opportunity to top up the stipend with some teaching income. I announced this at a School meeting recently and it was met with broad approval, the only reservation being that it would be difficult if too few students opted to do extra teaching to cover the demand. I think that’s unlikely, actually, because although the stipend is not taxable so is equivalent to a somewhat higher amount in salary terms, Brighton is quite an expensive part of the country and most students would opt for a bit of extra dosh. Also, it is actually very good for a PhD student to have teaching experience on their CV when it comes to looking for a job.

Existing GTA schemes make it too easy for departments engage in exploitative behaviour, by dumping a huge amount of their teaching duties on underpaid and unqualified PhD students. It’s also unfair for the undergraduate students, nowadays paying enormously high fees, to be fobbed off onto PhD students instead of being taught by full-time, experienced and properly trained staff. Of course the system I’m advocating will be difficult to implement in departments that lack external funding for PhD students. Having to pay a full-stipend for each student will be more expensive and will consequently lead to a reduction in the number of PhD students that can be funded, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, the whole structure of undergraduate teaching will have to change in many departments. From what I’ve seen in the National Student Survey, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing either…

As I’ve argued a number of times on this blog, the current system drastically overproduces PhD students. The argument, a matter of simple arithmetic, is that on average in a steady state each potential PhD supervisor in the university system will, over their entire career, produce just one PhD student who will get a job in academia. In many fields the vast majority of PhDs have absolutely no chance of getting a permanent job in academia. Some know this, of course, and take their skills elsewhere when they’ve completed, which is absolutely fine. But I get the strong feeling that many bright students are lured into GTAs by the prospect that an illustrious career as an academic awaits them when really they’re just being hired as cheap labour. The result is a growing pool of disillusioned and disaffected people with PhDs who feel they’ve been duped by the system.

The British system of postgraduate research study is that it basically takes three years to do a degree. In the United States it usually takes much longer, so the employment of students as GTAs has less of an impact on their ability to complete their thesis on schedule. Although there are faults with the UK’s fast-track system, there is also much to recommend it. Not, however, if the student is encumbered with a heavy teaching load for the duration. The GTA scheme (which incidentally didn’t exist when I did my PhD nearly thirty years ago) is a damaging American import. In much of continental Europe there are far fewer PhD students and in many countries, especially in Scandinavia, PhD students are actually paid a decent wage. I think that’s the way we should go.

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More Cuts to University Funding

Posted in Education, Politics, Science Politics with tags , , , , , , on February 11, 2014 by telescoper

Grim news arrived yesterday with the announcement by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills of further deep cuts in funding for Higher Education in England. This announcement has been delayed due to internal wrangling over the allocation of funds but in the end the grant letter to HEFCE makes little attempt to sugar the pill:

The settlement will mean reductions in HEFCE funding for higher education institutions in 2014-15 and again in 2015-16 beyond those accounted for by the switch to publicly funded tuition fees. The Government has asked HEFCE to deliver the reductions in ways which protect as far as possible high-cost subjects (including STEM), widening participation (which is funded via the HEFCE Student Opportunity allocation), and small and specialist institutions.

The science budget is, of course, “ring-fenced” which means that recurrent funding for that is maintained at £1,573 million, the same cash levels as 2013-14. This has, for example, translated into the expected flat cash settlement for the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC), although there has been some rejigging of the way this money is allocated within STFC, and an apparent increase in funds available for international subscriptions. At least this should unblock the numerous programmes in STFC and elsewhere in the Research Councils that have been on hold pending the final budget allocations.

That said, the overall picture looks very bleak for Higher Education. The really important figure for HEFCE is buried in Annex 2 of the latest grant letter, which reveals that, including the ring-fenced funds, HEFCE will have just £4,091 million to allocate in 2014/15. The corresponding figure for the current year, 2013/14, was £5,014 million. That’s a cut in cash terms of an eye-watering 18.4%.

The scale of the cuts makes it even more likely that if they continue there will be very little money available for HEFCE to allocate as a result of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, in which case the vast expenditure across the sector preparing for that exercise may will have been wasted too.

For the time being, however, it seems that research has been spared the axe. The bulk of the cuts will therefore fall on teaching grants. HEFCE has been instructed to try to protect STEM subjects as it cuts expenditure on teaching, but will it be able to? The extra funds that have previously supplemented tuition fees have been steadily whittled away anyway, so expensive subjects like Physics only get about £1000 per year more than Arts subjects. There is already a strong incentive in the current funding model for universities to expand cheap subjects. That pressure will only increase with this new settlement.

The last paragraph of the grant letter says:

We recognise that our universities are one of our most valuable national assets. Higher education transforms people’s lives through excellent teaching and transforms society through research and the application of knowledge. The Government’s reforms have laid the foundations for a more securely funded, stronger, more confident and more responsive higher education sector. We will continue to work with the Council and the sector to communicate the enduring value of higher education to potential students and the wider world.

I’m sure readers of this blog will forgive me if I suggest that these words are rendered meaningless by the scale of the cuts announced in the grant letter. If the government really regarded our universities as “valuable national assets” it would be increasing investment in them, not cutting it. What worries me most is that these cuts will never be reversed, whatever the complexion of the next government as there seems to be more enthusiasm across the political spectrum for continued cuts than for investment in the future education of our young people. I’m increasingly ashamed of the legacy being left by my own generation.

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Caught in the Middle

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , , on December 7, 2013 by telescoper

Academics these days are caught between a rock and a hard place.

On one side we have a government which seems not only malevolent but also utterly incompetent. I cite the recent example of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, which has completely lost control of its budget, meaning that further cuts are likely to a higher education sector already struggling to cope with the instability generated by constant meddling from successive governments.

On the other we have our students, who are definitely getting a very raw deal compared with those of my generation. Most are justifiably  unhappy with the high level of fees they have to pay. Many also feel generally alienated by the way the country is run, for the benefit of the rich  at the expense of the young and the poor. Recent campus protests across the country are clearly a manifestation of this groundswell of resentment, although in some cases they have clearly been hijacked by extremist elements who will protest about anything at the drop of a hat just for the sake of it.

In between we have us academics, the vast majority of whom agree with the students  that UK higher education is in a complete mess and that the UK government is responsible. However, most of us also believe in the importance of universities as places of research, scholarship and teaching and want to carry out those activities as best we can for the benefit not only of our current students but for society as a whole.

So what should we academics who find ourselves caught  in the middle do?

Unsurprisingly, opinions differ and I don’t claim to speak for anyone but myself when I state mine. I think it’s the responsibility of academic staff to recognize the burden placed on our students by government and in the light of that do absolutely everything in our power to give them the best education we can. That means ensuring that as much of the money coming into universities from tuition fees goes directly towards improving the education of students – better teaching facilities, more and better trained staff and a better all-round experience of campus life. That is the reason that I did not participate in the recent strikes over pay: I absolutely refuse to take any action that would be in any way detrimental to the education of students in my School. Call me a scab if you wish. My conscience is clear. For me it’s not a matter of choice, it’s a matter of responsibility.

So what about the recent wave of student protests? Again, all I can do is give my own opinion (not that of my employer or anyone else) which is that I believe in the right to protest – as long as it’s peaceful – but targeting universities is short-sighted and counterproductive.  I’m sure that all the government is delighted that none of the latest protests have been in Whitehall, which is where the focus of complaint should be, but instead dissipated at arms length in a series of futile and divisive campus demonstrations.

And if one of these protests causes enough disruption that it succeeds in closing down a university for good – and don’t tell me that this government won’t allow that to happen – what good will that have done?

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The Russell Groupies

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , on November 29, 2013 by telescoper

There’s an interesting article in Research Professional upon which I thought a brief comment would be appropriate. The article is mainly about the recent demise of the 1994 Group of universities, made inevitable when some of its larger members jumped ship to climb on board the much posher Russell Group. I’ve always felt that mission groups of this type were of little interest or value, but the growth of the Russell Group has, in my view, become rather sinister because it involves a cynical attempt to manufacture status when none is justified by performance.

The piece in Research Professional says:

Vice-chancellors and principals are not the only ones playing the status game. Students, employers, academics and government ministers—who seem to love visiting Russell Group universities—all want to be associated with high-status universities, even if those institutions do not necessarily provide better education or research. A 2009 analysis of the results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, carried out by the Higher Education Policy Institute, found that Russell Group institutions performed only half a percentage point better than the overall average, and that when universities in the golden triangle were excluded the score fell to below average. Truly, this is an emperor with very modest clothes.

This echoes my experience. Before moving to the University of Sussex earlier this year I worked in two Russell Group universities (and one which wasn’t in the Russell Group when I worked there but is now). All these institutions have much to recommend them – and I have no desire whatsoever to say negative things about former colleagues – but it is clear to me that they (or at least their Physics Departments) can’t claim to be any better than the one in which I currently work. Indeed the Physics department that performed best in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise was Lancaster, which is also not in the Russell Group.

It’s also noticeable that the primary characteristic of Russell Group universities in the National Student Survey tables is that they generally do quite poorly relative to non-members. Does Russell Group status mean promoting research at the expense of teaching and the student experience generally?

There’s no doubt that by many metrics there is a group of “elite” English universities – Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, and Imperial. The Russell group comprises these and a few other excellent institutions. But the later additions are simply a group of fairly average universities who thought the £500,000 joining fee was worth paying to try to convince students and others that they had elite status too. Worryingly, it seems that the Russel Brand Group Group Brand has been marketed so effectively that politicians are starting to talk as if “research intensive” and “Russell Group” mean one and the same thing.

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The Dark Side of the REF

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , , , , , , , on August 8, 2013 by telescoper

There’s a disturbing story in the latest Times Higher which argues that the University of Leicester has apparently reneged on a promise that non-submission to the forthcoming (2014)  Research Excellence Framework (REF) would not have negative career consequences. They have now said that except in exceptional circumstances, non-submitted academics will either be moved to a teaching-only contract (where there is a vacancy and they can demonstrate teaching excellence), or have their performance “managed”, with the threat of sacking if they don’t meet the specified targets.  I’d heard rumours of this on the grapevine (i.e. Twitter) before the Times Higher story was published. It’s very worrying to have it confirmed, as it raises all kinds of questions about what might happen in departments that turn out to have disappointing REF results .

There are (at least) two possible reasons for non-inclusion of the outputs of a researcher and it is important to distinguish between them. One is that the researcher hasn’t enough high-quality outputs to submit. In the absence of individual extenuating circumstances, researchers are expected to submit four “outputs” (in my discipline that means “research papers”) for assessment. That’s a pretty minimal level of productivity, actually;  such a number per year is a reasonable average for an active researcher in my field.  A person employed on a contract that specifies their duties as Teaching and Research may therefore be under-performing  if they can’t produce four papers over the period 2008-2013. I think some form of performance management  may be justifiable in this case, but the primary aim should be to help the individual rather than show them the door. We all have fallow periods in research, and it’s not appropriate to rush to sack anyone who experiences a lean time.   Andrew Wiles would have been considered `inactive’ had there been a REF in 1992 as he hadn’t published anything for years. Then he produced a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Some things just take time.

A second reason for excluding researcher from the REF is that the institution concerned may be making a tactical submission. As the Times Higher article explains:

The memo suggests that academics would be spared repercussions if, among other reasons, the number of individuals submitted is “constrained” by the volume of case studies their department intends to enter to demonstrate research impact.

Institutions must submit one case study for every 10 scholars entered.

Maria Nedeva, professor of science and innovation dynamics and policy at Manchester Business School, said the tactic of deciding how many academics to submit based on impact case study numbers was “rife”.

(Incidentally, the second paragraph is not quite right. The number of case studies required depends on the number of staff submitted as follows: for fewer than 15 staff , TWO case studies;  for 15-24.99 staff it is THREE case studies – and then for each additional ten members of staff entered a further case study is required.)

e case study for every scholars included plus one, i.e. forThe statement at the end of the quote there is in line with my experience too.  The point is that the REF is not just a means of allocating relatively small amounts of so-called `QR’ research funding . Indeed, it remains entirely possible that no funding at all will be allocated following the 2014 exercise. The thinking then is that the number of staff submitted is largely irrelevant; all that will count is league table position.

This by no means the only example of the dangers that lurk when you take league tables too seriously.

If a department is required to submit, say, four impact cases if all staff are included in the REF submission, but only has three viable ones, it would not be unreasonable to submit fewer staff because their overall would be dragged down by a poor impact case even if the output quality of all staff is high.  There will certainly be highly active researchers in UK institutions, including many who hold sizable external research grants, whose outputs are not submitted to the REF. As the article points out, it would be very wrong for managers to penalize scholars who have been excluded because of this sort of game-playing. That’s certainly not going to happen in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Sussex University.  Not while I’m Head of School, anyway.

Moreover, even researchers whose “outputs” are not selected may still contribute to the “Environment” and/or “Impact” sections so they still, in a very real sense, do participate in their department’s REF submission.

My opinion? All this silliness could easily have been avoided by requiring all staff in all units of assessment to be submitted by all departments. You know, like would have happened if the system were actually designed to identify and reward research excellence. Instead, it’s yet another example of a bureaucratic machine that’s become entirely self-serving. It exists simply because it exists.  Research would be much better off without it.

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Tuition Fee Caps

Posted in Education, Finance, Politics with tags , , , , , , , on May 27, 2013 by telescoper

I know it’s a Bank Holiday, but I’ve been thinking…

About a week ago I posted an item arguing that the current system of higher education funding is detrimental to the health of STEM disciplines (i.e. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The main reason for this is that present funding arrangements fail to address the real difference in cost of degree courses in various disciplines: the income to a University for a student doing Physics is about £10.5K whereas for a student doing, say, English it is £9K. I would  estimate the extra cost for the former corresponds to at least a factor two and probably more. That’s partly because Physics requires laboratory space and equipment (and related technical support) that English does not, but also because Physics students receive many more contact hours with academic staff.  The issue is just as much about arts students being ripped off (as they undoubtedly are being) as it is a strategic failure to protect the sciences.

The problem is that the Council responsible for distributing funding (HEFCE) is strapped for cash, so is unable to fund STEM disciplines at the higher level of resource that it used to.  Since the government has decided, in its  (finite) wisdom, to transfer most of the cost of higher education to the students, HEFCE can now exert very little influence on how universities plan their portfolio of courses. Since it is a lot cheaper and easier to expand capacity in Arts & Social Sciences faculties than in the more expensive STEM disciplines, this is an incentive for Universities to turn away from the Sciences. Given our economic predicament this policy is simply perverse. We need more scientists and engineers, not fewer.

This morning I read an article in the Times Higher about the present £9K tuition fee cap. Not surprisingly the Russell Group of self-styled “elite” Universities wants it lifted, presumably so its Vice-Chancellors can receive even bigger pay rises. But that’s not the point. The article made me think of a cunning (or perhaps daft) plan, which I’m floating here with the prediction that people will shoot it down through the comments box.

Now before I go on, I just want to make it clear that I’m not – and never have been – in favour of the present funding system. I don’t object to the principle that students who can afford to should contribute to the cost of higher education, but the arrangements we’re stuck with are indefensible and I don’t think they will last long into the next Parliament. It’s telling that, only a decade after introducing tuition fees, Germany is now scrapping them. I’d prefer a hybdrid system in which the taxpayer funds scholarships for STEM disciplines and other strategically important areas, while leaving universities to charge fees for other disciplines.

However, since we’ve been lumbered with a silly system, it’s worth exploring what might be achieved by working within it. There doesn’t seem to be much creative thinking going on in the coalition, and the Labour Party just says it would reduce the fee cap to £6K which would squeeze all academic disciplines equally, without doing anything about the anomalies mentioned above.

My  idea is quite simple. I propose that universities be entitled to lift their fee levels for STEM subjects by an amount X, provide that they reduce the fees for Arts and Social Sciences students by the same amount. The current fee level is £9K for all disciplines, so an example might be for STEM subjects to charge £12K while A&SS (if you pardon the abbreviation) get £6K. That would achieve the factor of two differential I mentioned above.

The advantages of this proposal are that it gives an incentive for universities to promote STEM disciplines and more properly reflects the difference in cost of the different subjects, without increasing the cost to the Treasury. In fact only about 25% of students study in STEM disciplines, at least for the moment, so the cost of fee loans will actually go down…

The biggest potential flaw is  that increasing the cost to STEM students would put them off. There’s simply no data on which to base an argument as to whether this would be the case or not. I suspect however that a difference in price would be perceived by many as a difference in value.

Anyway, it’s just an idea. That’s what blogs are for. Thinking out loud as it were. Feel free to object..

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