Attempting to manage market distributions in higher education: the experiment with Student Number Controls in England 2012-2015

Author(s):

Colin McCaig(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 02 B, Policy, Management and Governance in Higher Education

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-02

15:15-16:45

Room:

B021 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Jussi Välimaa

Contribution

This paper sets out to report on research carried out by the author into the impact of an attempt by the UK Government to create a market mechanism (student number controls that encouraged unrestricted recruitment of highly qualified applicants within a fixed numbers cap) to drive up quality and reduce public expenditure in English high education. The policy was abandoned in December 2013 after only two academic years in operation, nonetheless the research carries valuable lessons for any system attempting to create a market without a full understanding of the motivations of key actors and a case study in market failure.

This paper will look at two key areas of immediate impact that also illustrate how SNC threw into relief precisely those key factors that made it unworkable in the Government's timeline: institutions' strategic responses to the SNC policy; and changes to institutional profiles in terms of the student body and the ways institutions positioned themselves in the marketplace. It should certainly be of interest to delegates from states introducing or considering marketised HE system reform.

The UK Government has a long track record of encouraging marketisation of the HE system in England (education is a devolved responsibility in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) (McCaig 2011, Gibbs and Knapp 2002; Brown and Scott 2009). A review of HE finance,Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education(the Browne Report, 2010) recommended a stronger role for markets through the mechanism of informed student choice which would drive up quality (McCaig 2011; McGettigan 2013). The White Paper Students at the Heart of the System (BIS 2011) made the system more responsive to student demand through the application of market forces in three main ways:

1. Variable tuition fees up to a new maximum of £9,000 to open up a price-differential between those institutions that most and least satisfy the wants of students. Combined with a liberation of student numbers, hitherto distributed on the basis of 'block grant' the fee market would reward excellence, provide incentives for others to improve, and for those institutions unable to justify high fees as applicants chose to study elsewhere, new providers would be licensed to compete with them for student places at lower costs.

2. The provision of market information to enable applicants to make more informed choices. Key Information Sets (KIS), hosted by individual institutions, consist of four types of information: on the course of study (for example, data on student satisfaction, the amount of contact time offered by staff and the assessment methods used etc); costs (including tuition fees, accommodation costs and details of any bursaries and scholarships to offset costs for poorer applicants); employment outcomes (containing information of the destinations and salary-levels of leavers after 6 months and 40 months after graduating).

3. Student number controls and exemptions for high achieving applicants. The system of student number liberation was designed to reduce the student number control (SNC) allocation for each institution in two ways, known together as the 'core-margin' policy. Firstly, a market effect based on quality was created by exempting the highest achieving applicants (the margin) from student number control (the core). Secondly, the policy initially enabled the removal of another margin of 20,000 places reserved for further education colleges (FECs) and new entrant providers willing to offer HE at £6,000 per year of study (thus attempting to match quality and price on the basis of 'value for money').

Method

In order to map and evaluate the impact that changes in student number controls and increased fees are having on the student profile and the student learning environment, the methodology reflected a dual emphasis. Our aims were to gather data on institution-level planning and on course-level impacts of such planning on the student learning experience. This enabled us to analyse national comparative data and to subsequently explore some cases and key issues in more depth. The research used a mixed methods design incorporating a national survey and subsequent in-depth semi-structured interviews with a selected representative sample of different HEI mission groups and FE Colleges with a large proportion of college-based HE (CBHE). The sequential nature of the research design enabled a quantitative, comparative national analytic mapping to be followed by small-scale qualitative research which generated significant detail, depth, and specificity, thus enabling the production of a more finely-grained and nuanced account than would quantitative or qualitative approaches alone provide. The initial stage took the form of an online survey of senior managers in all English universities and further education colleges with significant HE. The census cohort was HEA contacts at Pro-Vice Chancellor level (HEA PVC Network) and their equivalents in the CBHE sector. Second phase interviews with ten key managers responsible for implementing and effecting institutional change strategies, for example strategic level managers at PVC, Dean or Vice Principal (for colleges). Interviews enabled the authors to capture in-depth accounts of institutional decision-making practices including the implementation of number controls, of the impacts of number controls and other aspects of the new financial regime (including fees and levels/modes of student financial support) and on strategies for managing consequent change at departmental, discipline, subject and course level. HEI interviews were carried out face-to-face during the autumn of 2013. The research was conducted in accordance with institutional and BERA Codes of Ethical Practice and all comments have been anonymised.

Expected Outcomes

All institutions had to grapple with the new landscape created by Student Number Controls. However, the greatest impacts felt by institutions wanting to increase their share of AAB+ (and later ABB+) students and those in a position to offer provision at less than £7,500 who could bid for additional places from the removal from the core of 20,000 places. This mainly affected selective, research-intensive pre-1992 institutions and the CBHE sector for whom SNC necessitated a strategic rethink. Post-1992 universities were less affected strategically although they were affected, significantly in some cases, by the reduction of overall allocated numbers. Across the sector, this led to closure and rationalisation of some courses, and increased scrutiny of recruitment and retention, league table positioning, and NSS scores (Cheng and Marsh 2010). For pre-1992s the impact of SNC led to strategic decisions to centralise admissions systems and thus remove a department’s ability to make contextual offers where students hadn’t achieved sufficiently high grades. Numbers clawed back by the institution were then used either for subjects likely to attract a WP intake or for subjects that the institution wishes to offer despite low numbers of highly qualified applicants. In policy terms the employability of graduates is increasingly being more strongly linked in policy and public discourse to the raising of tuition fees. Employability skills are now encoded in the development of institutional graduate attributes statements, and made publicly available through Key Information Sets (KIS) and the Destination of Leavers from HE (DLHE) survey. Employability is a comparatively new concern for selective institutional , articulated partly in relation to higher fees and partly in relation to vulnerable subjects. HEIs were reviewing their own marketing and recruitment practices to target particular groups of students and expected this to grow in future.

References

An Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance. (2010) Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (The Browne Report) BIS. (2011) Students at the Heart of the System, TSO, July 2011 Brown, R & Scott, P (2009) The Role of the Market in Higher Education, Higher Education Policy Institute Cheng, J. and Marsh, H. (2010) National Student Survey: are differences between universities and courses reliable and meaningful?, Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 693-712 Gibbs, P & Knapp, M (2002) Marketing Further and Higher Education Research: an educators guide to promoting courses, departments and institutions, London, Kogan Page. McCaig, C (2011) Access agreements, widening participation and market positionality: enabling student choice? in Molesworth, M, Nixon, L, and Scullion, R (eds) The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer, Routledge, London and New York, Chapter 10, pp115-128 McGettigan, A (2013) The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and Future of Higher Education, Pluto Press: London

Author Information

Colin McCaig (presenting / submitting)

Sheffield Hallam University

Centre for Education and Inclusion Research

Sheffield

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