To save me clogging up this blog by banging on about the lazy 'education is broken' meme used to justify venture capital, I've set up one of those Tumblr blogs that gathers stuff together here: http://brokeneducation.tumblr.com/
I think there's a slight danger that like Pseuds Corner in Private Eye it ends up including too much. In the case of Pseuds corner it sometimes seems that any attempt to use words of more than one syllable will be lampooned. Similarly, this tumblr may end up including any attempt to talk about the future of education. In general what I want are those pieces where the education is broken meme is trotted out largely as a pretence for some solution the company or individual has to offer. But I'll take anything in this area really. I would like to pretend that one day I'll go through them and do a semantic analysis or cluster analysis of concepts. But I'll probably just make a sarcastic one-liner instead.
Any suggestions for inclusion just tweet me @mweller.
Mildly interesting aside - I often talk about finding the right voice for a blog. This one is the carefully considered, balanced, poorly written one. I found that as soon as I started doing this tumblr blog it revealed a much snarkier, sarcastic me. Some people may like that, others not.
David Kernohan has a good piece on education funding and the manner in which MOOCs commercialise higher ed over on his blog (although I disagree with his criticism of Jim Groom and Stephen Downes). It resonates with some discussions I had with people at the Hewlett OER conference in San Diego last week. As readers of this blog will know, I'm no fan of the 'education is broken' cliche.
At the San Diego meeting several smart open education people stated this belief quite passionately, and I voiced my anger at it to the point where it almost came to blows. In the ensuing discussions it became apparent that people bundle together several things under this banner. At different times it was because i) kids are taught in age bands, ii) that we don't encourage creativity, iii) that American kids have to walk to school through gang neighbourhoods or iv) that the current model is financially unsustainable.
I would argue that i) is maybe problematic but is what happens when you want to ensure education happens on a massive scale. None of the alternatives I've seen would really operate at the scale of a nationwide system and are often predicated on very motivated children and parents. But I could be convinced otherwise. I would argue this is an administrative convenience at the moment, not indication that something is broken, and if you can show me how to do it robustly otherwise, I'd go along with it.
For ii) I think we are in the really interesting area where we could do some great stuff with good pedagogy and technology. I was impressed with the project based learning they do at High Tech High, and they take a very egalitarian approach to recruitment so I think there is a model here that could be applied elsewhere. Or many other models. This to me is a sign for opportunity.
For iii) I wonder how much people expect schools to do. If your society is this broken, then don't think schools can fix it on their own.
Which brings me to iv) - funding. Quite often this is what people mean when they say education is broken - that it is financially unsustainable. And this is where I think we are on dangerous ground. If we go around as an education community saying this what we are really saying is "please come and privatise education for the lowest cost". They won't claim to do that at the start, the promise will be to offer better education, for less money. But then market forces will hit, they're in competition with other providers, they need to pay back that VC funding, they need to comply with regulations on fair provision of education, they're facing a lawsuit for incorrect assessment... And those promises get trimmed one by one until the model looks pretty bleak and we sit around in conferences moaning 'this system is even more broken than the last one.'
As I mentioned on David's post, if the argument is really about funding, then let's have that debate, but let's have it in the open. Maybe the full commercial model is the only viable one. We can then decide what we lose by this. But maybe other models are viable too. We spent over £20billion in the Iraq & Afghanistan wars for very little return after all, imagine if we'd put that money into education. It's a cliche I know, but always worth considering.
I don't think people have done proper analysis on the ROI for society for having free higher education (if they have please point me to it). For instance, there was a golden heyday of the Arts college in the 70s. Everyone went to Arts college when they couldn't think of anything else to do. And most of our successful bands and designers came from this background. You couldn't directly attribute the money they generated to the education they had (often they dropped out) but it created the right atmosphere for them to flourish. And sometimes young people just need some space to find out what they want to do before getting caught up in work, and this often means they do better, more productive work later.
So free higher education may not be the 'unicorns and rainbows' dream it seems. If we have the proper debate about education funding, at least we can look at these issues. And all of this is to ignore the more general benefits to society of having more broadly educated population. As David suggests, we need to be wary of being useful idiots by playing into this commercial solution because we've made it seem like the only possible outcome. So the brokenness and the solution are intertwined, but as Chief Brody says, "it's only an island if you look at it from the water".
I've mentioned the idea of resilience before (thanks to Joss & Richard for linking it to open education and giving me the idea). When Terry Anderson from Athabasca visited us last year, I worked on a paper to explore the idea more fully with him.
Resilience borrows the idea from ecosystems, pioneered by Holling, who described it as "‘a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables".
In our paper we take the concept and use it as a means of thinking about how HE institutions can view the impact of digital technology. As Joss points out we shouldn't think of resilience as 'resisting', but rather an ability for core functions to persist, in a new context. Terry and I take two possible digital challenges (MOOCS, no surprise, and Open Access) and look at our respective institutions responses to them from a digital resilience perspective.
I think it's a framework that could work well as a way of thinking about how well places an institution is and areas they need to address. The scoring is subjective of course, but in a group setting it works well to create discussion. Have a go yourself for your institution (or one of your choice) and any particular challenge.
The paper has just been published in EURODL, and you can read it here. Hope you like it.
David Kernohan likes to joke that he has a disruption klaxon that sounds whenever that over-used term is deployed. It must have sounded like a nuclear attack warning when reading this educause piece (which he pointed me at, and which Pat Lockley gives the perfect, hilarious response to). Now, I'll confess, I've used the D word in the past. I liked Christensen's first book, it was well researched and well argued. But like so many concepts it has been misapplied to the point where it is meaningless.
If you are about to employ a consultant, particularly in education, I will offer you this money-saving advice for free: don't look at one that uses the word 'disruption' (or, even worse, describes themselves as a 'disruptor').
Disruptors are not concerned about your specific problem, they only have blanket solutions. They don't worry about making something useful, only about sounding revolutionary. Disruption is about ego. You see disruption appeals to people because it's revolutionary, elite, new, sexy. Just being useful or practical looks all dowdy besides glamorous disruption.
So, everything has to be disruptive, a game-changer, a revolution, an all-encompassing tsunami of change. It can't just be useful in a particular context. That educause piece judges OERs a failure precisely because they are not disruptive. That tells you more about the author than it does about OERs - in their world only disruption matters. Take the OER based TESSA project. Useful? Undoutedly. Disruptive? Probably not. So, who cares about it, right? We should aim higher than getting well paid speaking gigs for middle-aged men with goatees who skateboard to work.
Any educational technology advance in the past 15 years will have been claimed to be disruptive by someone: elearning, learning objects, VLEs, OERs, games, MOOCs. The thing is all of these are very useful for particular problems. But if they ain't disruptive they're no good.
So this is my motto from now on: don't be disruptive, be useful.
Last thought - whenever I hear disruption, it is not David's klaxon that plays in my head, but Mitchell and Webb's NumberWang, except it is now "DisruptionWang". Try it, you'll find it makes as much sense.
UPDATE: DisruptionWang is sweeping the nation. You can now get the t-shirt (courtesy of David Kernohan)
I've blogged a couple of times before about my frustration with the education is broken rhetoric. To be clear this doesn't mean I think everything is rosy and we carry on as we are, but I think it's too simplistic and doesn't really get us anywhere. I'll try and explain why in this post.
Clay Shirky posted a piece on MOOCs as higher education disruptors last year, and has followed up with another piece here. He uses the phrase "school is broken" so my education is broken klaxon went off, forcing this post.
I should say that, unlike some of my edtech peers (stand up David Kernohan and George Siemens), I like Shirky, I think he is often very perceptive and he is also a very persuasive writer. In this piece he definitely nails some things - most significantly the common misperception of a university student and university life. It isn't young people at pristine universities, so making appeals to this type of learning as typical doesn't do anyone any favours. I wonder though how many people really do this? Maybe it's a US thing - in the UK we've had a very mixed economy of higher education (including that Open University thing) for a long time now.
I have a number of issues around the education is broken theme though. It's never clearly explained what exactly is broken. Is it the cost? Is it student achievement? Is it student drop-out? These are quite different issues. If cost is your main concern, then maybe it's not that education is broken, but that education funding is broken. This is quite different. You could argue here that the problem is not with an inefficient education system (I'm sure it is inefficient, but certainly less so than it used to be), but rather with the notion of an education market. As has been pointed out in the UK, marketing spend has gone up considerably in universities. This is a natural consequence of making education compete in a market place. As is providing better sports facilities or bars than competitors. All of this spend has little to do with education, but having created a commercial market through fees, you can't then complain that universities behave in an entirely appropriate way to survive in that context.
If it is student drop-out that is your main concern, then I agree, we could do a lot more. A small example, but my colleagues on the Bridge 2 Success project worked with many of the students Shirky identifies, and who had struggled with maths to the point where it was preventing them from gaining employment. By creating an online course from OpenLearn content and backing this up with support (sometimes face to face, sometimes online) they got something like an 80% pass rate. Absolutely we need more ideas like this, simply sending people back through the same system that they've struggled with before makes no sense.
So, I think we need to decide what is broken with more clarity before offering solutions. We need to know what is broken to fix it effectively. I don't want you amputing my leg and fitting me with a prosthetic, no matter how marvellous it is, if my problem is migraines.
My second beef/horsemeat (UK joke) with Shirky is his naive view of MOOCs as panacea. He cites a book "Don't go back to school" which interviewed 80 people who had dropped out of school and gone on to be successful. I'm sure there are very interesting lessons to learn here. But really, a carefully selected sample of 80 people? And from that you want to make recommendations about education for everyone?
So when Shirky promotes MOOCs as the equivalent of MP3 or YouTube, he underestimates the demands that will be put on them, and is, unusually for him, wrong about the analogy. MP3s could replace vinyl/CDs pretty much completely. Free MOOCs can't replace education because much of the cost of education is nothing to do with the educating part. Taking a MOOC for fun is great. But when your job will depend on it, then you'll start making demands of it that currently don't exist. If MOOCs replace higher ed then they'll need to find ways of doing the following:
Dealing with student appeals
Coping with a diverse range of students and abilities
Ensuring quality control of content
Develop assessment methods and procedures that can be defended
Ensuring robustness of service
Ensuring accreditation reliability and trustworthiness
Complying with numerous regulations on issues such as accessibility
Etc
You get my point. All of these requirements will cost money. So MOOCs as universal education method will soon begin to cost more and more. They'll also start to spend more and more on recruitment and marketing. Sound familiar?
But, I think he is right when he highlights price as a factor. Free education is one revolution, cheap education might be even more significant.
(I know what you're thinking: "if only someone would write an opinion blog post on MOOCs, there just aren't any out there").
Reactions to MOOCs tend to fall into two camps. The first is the MOOC will conquer all group who see them as saviours of learning and destroyers of universities. See Clay Shirky's MP3 analogy for an example (and also David Kernohan's excellent response) although this month's MOOC hyperbole award goes to this techcrunch piece.
The second camp are the dismissers. MOOCS are a fad, they aren't anything new, or they're so flawed they aren't worth considering. See for example, MOOCS fad and bubble .
What I want to consider here though is the idea of MOOCs being complementary to existing Higher Education practice. It's a line I've promoted before, in my digital scholar book I make the argument that:
"Competition with informal learning is true to an extent, but it presupposes a set amount of learning by an individual, as if they have a limited number of cognitive learning tokens to be used up in a lifetime. But it is more often the case that learning begets learning. In this respect open, informal education is complementary to formal education, indeed something of a gift, rather than a threat. In a world that generates vast amounts of niche content which people are increasingly engaged with, either through generating their own, sharing or discussing, the outcome is a larger population of active learners. A population of active learners are more likely to engage in formal study than a population of passive consumers."
I've been asked to do a couple of MOOC presentations recently, and I've tried to provide examples of where MOOCs can work in harmony with current educational practices, either boosting recruitment, enhancing the student experience or allowing different approaches. So, here's my top five ways in which MOOCs are your friend:
Open up a portion of courses - one could structure online (or blended) courses so a portion of them is a stand-alone MOOC. This is what I'm doing with H817, where my 7 weeks of the 20 week course is open. This allows students to see if it's the type of course they want to study, to make connections and experience studying. We found this type of trialling quite important in OpenLearn (as the research report sets out). It has several benefits for the institution and the learner. Firstly, it's the shop window, so it can increase student recruitment. Secondly, it can increase student retention, since those learners who will struggle can find this out for free, and either take a different subject, study at a different level or take preparatory material. Thirdly it can widen participation, reaching audiences you may have struggled to reach before, because they can try it for free and widening participation is one of those strategic targets many universities set themselves and then struggle to achieve.
Open boundary courses - DS106 and Phonar are good examples of these. A campus based course with fee-paying students supported on campus, has an open boundary so informal learners can study online too. As well as the advantages set out in 1) this has particular benefits in certain subject areas. Photography is one such area where exposure to a wider audience, including professionals and experienced hobbyists, is beneficial. But for all students there is a benefit in developing a network of peers beyond their immediate cohort.
MOOC collaboration - HEIs can collaborate on MOOCs which are useful for a range of their students. Why teach the same subject at several places, when you can create a high quality MOOC that they all take, and is recognised by all participating HEIs?
MOOC recognition - by formally recognising certain MOOCs, HEIs could shorten some of the courses they offer. For example, if you have successfully completed four of these ten MOOCs, then you can skip the first year of a degree programme and complete in two years. This may not look like a win for the HEIs, but it could be. For the students it means fees are reduced by at least a third, which might make degree study more attractive. For campus universities they are selling the 'campus experience' more, without it costing quite so much, and as with 2) we may see higher retention of students who do sign up because they've been through MOOCs already.
Curriculum experimentation and expansion - formal, online courses are an increasingly large investment for HEIs, which means course approval is more rigourous. The demands placed on a formal course are lessened for a MOOC (although they do not disappear), which allows for experimentation. And because you are appealing to a global audience, what is not a viable course for a campus, fee paying constituency may well be viable to a global community of informal learners. This means you can experiment with the curriculum, and find out if courses, or technology, or pedagogy, can be rolled into your formal offerings. It also means you can offer a broader curriculum, because you can offer your own low-cost MOOCs but also recognise others. "Hydro-engineering and Russian?" We do the engineering part, you do the Russian via this MOOC.
So there you have it - MOOC as slightly annoying friend.
This post isn't intended as a criticism of anyone, rather an observation on a trend I've noticed from several others also.
I'm running my block of the Masters course H817 as a MOOC. It'll start this March, and one of the things I wanted is a DS106 style blog aggregator. That is, I want the contributors to register their blog, and for posts they tag appropriately to repost automatically in the course blog.
Now, the sensible way to do this seems to be to install WordPress and use the FeedWordPress plug-in. For reasons I won't go in to, I haven't been able to get this done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I've spoken to people at others unis and it isn't isolated to the OU, it seems to be this low-level, experimental type of IT support is increasingly difficult to find.
Do you know who I think the culprit is? The VLE. As universities installed VLEs they became experts at developing enterprise level solutions. This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution. In short, we know how to spend £500,000 but not how to spend £500.
With time pushing on, I got some local support in IET (thanks Will), and investigated the best options. It became clear that hosting externally would be the easiest option. I asked on Twitter who the best hosting solutions were and got a great set of responses. Alan Cann suggested siteground and sent me a friend's introduction offer, so I signed up with them. In 10 minutes I'd followed their WordPress installation, installed WP, found the FeedWordPress plug-in and installed that too. The blog is here: h817open.net
My next problem was to get registration to work. I looked at what DS106 have done, and in response to a request on Twitter, Alan Levine pointed me to this solution from Martha Burtis. That was a bit beyond my coding skills. So I created a simple Google Form and embedded it in my blog. I then asked Martin Hawksey if he knew how to take a Google form output and turn it into an OPML file as FeedWordPress allows you to create a list of syndicated sites from an OPML file. He pointed me to this service, which does just that.
He and Tony also suggested some solutions which will help with autodiscovery (ie finding the feed for the blog if someone just enters their main URL). Martin lists some options here. I haven't quite cracked this yet, so it needs people to enter their feed url, which isn't ideal, so I'll keep working on this.
So, I think I have a working solution. If you have time, could you try it for me by registering your blog here and then posting something which has the tag #h817open. Only posts with this tag should appear. You can just do a test post, but perhaps more interestingly you could respond to the idea of whether "openness has won" or not with a post "Openness has (hasn't) won because..."
This took me about an afternoon. The problem is that it's quite a flaky solution, the OPML service could disappear, I don't really know if it will work for all blogs, and there's no support. So it could go down and I've got no backup. More worryingly I am at the edge of my expertise here, so I can't really do much more. So a university supported proper grown-up solution would be preferable. On the other hand, one of the things I frequently say is that the best thing we can teach our students is how to be good members of a network. And this is a clear demonstration of why I believe that. I think this tension between the innovative possibilities of new technology and the understandably cautious nature of institutional IT services will mean that we'll all need to do more of this DIY tech set-up and experimentation. And the only way to do that is to have a good network who can help.
One last plea - I joked with Alan that I needed DS106 out of a box. I think I'm serious though - it would be great to have a step by step, idiots guide to installing and setting up a DS106-like environment. The rest of us don't have Alan and Jim's tech skills, so getting to the starting line is difficult. I know they'll say you should invent your own way, but they done so much great work that I don't think they realise just how much expertise they have. A simple installation that let the rest of us get started, would mean we could all go off in different directions then. So any of the DS106 crowd up for it? And I do mean a simple guide, it has to be Weller-proof.
I've complained about the "education is broken" meme before - my reservations about it have been threefold:
i) It's just lazy - saying something is broken (or dead) avoids having to do any subtle analysis and appeals to a simplistic viewpoint.
ii) It frames technological change as a crisis and not an opportunity - Mike Caulfield covered this better than me, but once you adopt a 'broken' metaphor then a whole set of language accompanies it which frames it as a negative problem to be fixed.
iii) It's suspicious - those who peddle the "education is broken" line usually have something to gain from its acceptance. Either they are directly selling a solution that will mend it (after all, a broken something needs to be fixed, see point ii) or they have individual prestige in being seen as someone who can at least see the means of fixing it.
I've been studying the Masters in History at the OU recently (it's an 18 month long haul, only 2 months in). So I thought I'd reflect on how 'broken' this experience feels. The answer is, well, not at all really. This isn't an advert for the OU, I'm sure the majority of reliable HE institutions would provide a similar experience. The point is that it isn't a radical course in terms of approach or technology, and so provides a reasonable experience of what education is really like I think. I'm sure there are plenty of worse examples, and grudgingly, maybe I'll concede there are some better ones, but this is what distance education in the 21st century roughly equates to, I'd hazard.
First of all we had to read quite a dense text (Davidoff and Hall's Family Fortunes), we were provided with reviews around it and the first assignment was based around analysing its approach. The aim of this was, I think, to introduce us to the type of academic writing in history (I suspect it weeds out the people who really just want to do genealogy), and to think about the range of references and resources required to provide a comprehensive argument (Davidoff and Hall are exhaustive, and at times, exhausting in this respect).
The assignment was an old fashioned 2500 word essay. And it worked - I read the book in a much more analytical manner because of it, I followed up references, I considered the manner in which evidence is found and constructed to form a picture, I engaged with fellow students in the VLE (shhh).
I'm not going to do a critique of the course, but studying it has reinforced my belief that "Education is broken" is an unhelpful stance to take. For a start it doesn't reflect the reality. I would urge anyone who uses this claim to study a course outside of their own domain of expertise and see how it feels (I'm obviously focusing on higher ed here, the claim is also frequently used for K12, which I can't claim expertise in). I think many protaganists are basing their claims on rather outdated views of what it feels like to be a student.
But more importantly, if one adopts the broken stance then you want to start afresh. In my experience this isn't beneficial. I can see how you could take the existing course and maybe add some new elements in to it, or campaign for open access to all historical archives for instance, explore new forms of assessment, find ways of making such courses more accessible and open (I didn't say MOOC, no sir), etc. These are opportunities to build on top of a successful approach, which seems a better, if less sexy approach, than demanding wholesale revolution with some glorious new leaders installed.
Reflecting on this has made me think of a fourth reason why I don't like the 'education is broken' rhetoric, and that is it is fundamentally cliquey or elitist. It's underlying message is "all these other people don't get technology like we do. That's why they're stuck in that old fashioned way of thinking which we know is hopelessly broken. Come join our new gang." But of course, if this new gang became the establishment they'd quickly abandon it. They don't really want educational change, they just want to feel cool for a while. Let them do that, we can do better.
Last night, after Nick Clegg's semi-apology over student loans (see comedy version with honesty subtitles below), I got involved with a twitter chat with an economist from Demos. He argued (very intelligently) that the loan scheme would actually save the tax-payer $2.5K per student, and that it should be viewed as a progressive tax, and not debt.
I don't know enough about economics to really counter his claim about the savings. It certainly appears that the Coalition were caught out by all universities charging the full fee, which would suggest it isn't being quite the financial success they had envisaged. But the fact/misleading rumour that it was unaffordable was only ever an extra insult/icing on the cake to what was generally perceived to be a damaging policy to higher education. "You've done all this damage, and it's worked out worse than the old scheme anyway" was the cry.
Let's accept for now then that it could theoretically save money in the long term. This doesn't mean it won't severely damage the higher education sector. And here I do feel on firmer ground, because economists (particularly free market ones) tend to ignore those pesky humans in the mix and assume a rational market.
I would like to propose two psychological factors that will come in to play, which I don't think have been modelled in any government plans.
Prospect theory - Tversky and Kahneman conducted a series of influential experiments in the 70s which demonstrated that people give loss more psychological weight than gain - put bluntly losing £20 has more significance than finding £20. People then adjust their behaviour accordingly - they are risk averse.
In our case this means they will perceive the student loan as debt, and that debt will weigh more heavily than the potential gain of a good job, a rewarding time, or future earnings. They will thus behave appropriately, with two courses of action:
a) Risk aversion - they don't go to university in the first place and take on the debt. This harms the higher education sector.
b) Risk reduction - they act as if it is current debt and seek to pay it off. This harms society more broadly, for instance, they avoid taking on more debt in the form of a mortgage thus impacting the construction sector.
This won't affect all students, just as some people are more risk averse. Some will judge it a risk worth taking and study anyway. Tversky and Kahneman also talk about the 'Value function", whereby the difference in loss between £100 and £200 is seen as greater than the difference between £1100 and £1200. This would suggest that the impact will be felt most keenly for those from less well-off backgrounds as the potential debt is perceived as a larger part of current wealth, it is a bigger risk
It would take a big research project to estimate the impact of this factor on student behaviour, so for now let's take a figure of, say, 20% fewer students applying, given that is a strong psychological factor found in many instances.
The panopticon of debt - the second factor is that of the panopticon. Taken from Bentham's proposal for prison design and adapted as a metaphor for society by Foucault, the panopticon suggests that when all prisoners/citizens can potentially be observed all the time, they act as if they are. As Foucault puts it:
"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection"
It doesn't matter that they aren't observed all the time, the knowledge that they could be makes them act as if they are. I would suggest future debt acts in a similar way. The knowledge that it could become debt and be paid off makes people act as if it is current debt, even if they never had to pay it off (because their earnings didn't reach a certain level). As with prospect theory the impact of this factor is likely to be felt more keenly in some sectors. Some prisoners in a panopticon prison will calculate the probability of being observed at any one time and overcome their fears, others won't.
This transfers the debt from a national one to an individual one, and at this level its impact is more toxic in the economy. The outcome will be the same as for prospect theory: a reduction in numbers applying and a reduction in spending from those coming out the other end.
Again, knowing the size of the impact of this factor would take more research than I can put into a blog post. But let's say it adds another 10% to our previous 20%, giving a total reduction in student numbers of 30%. Like the impact of these factors, it would not be evenly distributed, so Russell Group unis might see no decline at all, while others might see a drop by as much as 50%. This would surely send some under.
Now, it may be that we think a 30% decrease is desirable, that the higher education sector has become over-crowded. But it would be better to state this as an aim, and to work towards it (universities could do better planning then), rather than hope it occurs as the result of an unpredictable system. It would be interesting to know if any of these factors were considered when modelling the future of higher education?
So last week, London Met university had their licence to act as a sponsor for overseas students revoked, so it can't teach its existing 2,600 non-EU students, or get new ones. This is unprecedented, and as well as being obviously distressing for those students, will send a loud message around the world about the UK's openness to overseas students.
I think there are three interpretations as to why it occurred:
LMUea culpa - it's all LMU's fault, they've been playing fast and loose with the immigration system and have been caught out. I'm sure there will be evidence of wrongdoing, indeed I would suggest the Government has been waiting for such a case where there is unarguable evidence, so it can take such action. But even if we accept that LMU are at fault, the reaction seems way out of proportion. A warning, a suspension, a fine would have all been reasonable - but revoking it and causing such distress seems a clearly targeted action to create publicity. Which brings me onto my next two options.
Sinister pressure - it was not the result of a direct order or intervention, but rather the outcome of pressure created by Government. As this piece points out, Teresa May is under pressure to hit targets for reducing migration, and student visas are perceived (incorrectly as I understand the process) to be an easy option. It is therefore part of playing to the home crowd Tories to be seen to be taking a firm stance. There is undoubtedly something in this, and combined with an element of dodgy behaviour at LMU it may be sufficient as an explanation. But I want to consider a third option also.
Conspiracy theory - John Naughton reminds us that "Whenever someone intelligent seems to be behaving oddly, the hypothesis has to be that they know what they’re doing and that you simply haven’t figured it out." Let's assume people in the coalition aren't stupid (yes, I'm not sure about Gove either, but let's go with it). On the face of it, the LMU decision is stupid. It is over the top, and will cause damage to the sector, when that sector is one of your primary exports. In times of financial crisis you would do everything possible to support such a sector, not undermine it wouldn't you? So, taking John's reasoning, this must mean we haven't figured out what they're doing.
Which heralds in the conspiracy theory. A while ago I blogged that higher education in the UK felt not just like any sector in a crisis, but one which was being deliberately targeted. In that post I was highlighting how the student loan scheme, combined with student number control would damage universities. If we give our conspiracy theory free rein, then having undermined the financial basis for the domestic market, the LMU debacle begins to look like the next stage in this plan, namely to undermine the overseas market.
Why then would the Government deliberately seek to destabilise an industry? The answer would be that it seeks to gain from that destabilisation. Having seen the problems it encountered by trying to reform the health system through due process and passing legislation, it doesn't want a repeat of this protracted and damaging scenario. A better approach is one of stealth - by financially undermining the existing structures, many universities will go to the wall. This will leave room for the private universities, which they have already made warm noises about (and remember, student number control doesn't apply to these).
By these commando tactics, the Government could achieve a radically different higher education model, with the high brand universities remaining intact, and the rest of the market provision from private universities, which fits better with a conservative free market model. And all without having a single debate in the House of Commons, or attracting any negative headlines.
Now, I'm not really one for conspiracy theories, and maybe it is a bit far-fetched. A combination of my first two explanations is more realistic. But, if the conspiracy theory is true, I'll make the following predictions:
We'll see more universities lose their sponsorship licence, or more likely, a 'toughening up' of the student visa process to continue to make the UK less attractive.
Student number control and capping of fees will be used strongly and undermine some universities
A piece of legislation favourable to private universities will be slipped through on the back of another bill.
Up to 10 unis will go to the wall and others will retract significantly.
Unis will be encouraged to partner with private providers.
Of course, if the conspiracy theory is true, then the stance universities & VCs take towards the Government, which has largely been one of cooperation, should change drastically. Just to emphasise, I don't say it is true, but if we see my five predictions above begin to come true, then we should be suspicious. Of course, by then it might be too late.
