Quality and what is worth knowing

16th February 2010

1.Various commentators claim that our universities “don’t know what counts so they count everything”. How surreal this sounds against the crisis of the multi trillion-dollar rescue of the global economy. It is even more surreal when we learn that highly educated traders with degrees from some of our most prestigious universities have facilitated this catastrophe. So do our universities bear some responsibility for this systemic problem? More fundamentally are universities fit for purpose in the twenty first century? There are a growing number of educators around the world who are questioning the effectiveness of our higher education system in providing a flexible workforce to meet the complex challenges of climate change, poverty; HIV Aids; peak oil and food shortages. One eminent American academic has even asked why it is that those who contribute most to exploiting poor communities and the Earth’s ecosystems are those with BAs, MBAs, MScs and PhDs and not the ”ignorant” poor from the South (Orr, 1994)?

If universities are the nurseries of tomorrow’s leaders and educate most of the people who develop and manage society’s institutions, then the sector bears ”profound responsibilities to increase the awareness, knowledge, technologies, and tools to create a sustainable future”, as the Talloires Declaration (signed by many of the world’s university leaders) stated in 1990(ULSF, 1990)

2.The current approach to quality in higher education emphasises the role of universities in serving economic interests, which restricts how quality is defined, understood and measured. Hence value for money, completion rates, graduate employment and graduate earnings feature strongly. Does this mean that a degree becomes equivalent to a share certificate whose value is determined by the issuing university? A recent select committee report was highly critical of the Vice Chancellors who gave evidence but could not give” a straightforward answer to the simple question of whether first class honours degrees achieved at different universities indicate the same or different intellectual standards”

3.A recent report by the New Economics Foundation (nef), ‘University Challenge: towards a well-being approach to quality in higher education’ takes this argument even further suggesting that the economic focus has led to a ‘marketisation of the sector’ and links this to the discussion about the introduction of variable tuition fees. This report also quotes from The Guardian (10/08/06):
‘This commercialisation of higher education serves a bigger purpose, though. It softens students up for the rigours of globalisation. By creating a market, young people are encouraged to think and behave like rational economic man. They become “human capital”, calculating the rate of return on their university investment. A degree becomes a share certificate. Commercialisation conditions students to expect no help from others, or society, and therefore never to provide help in return. Debt and economic conditioning discourages graduates from going into lower-paid caring jobs - and instead into the City, where the real “value” is. It fashions a Britain that competes rather than cares.’

4.More value could be given to how learning contributes to wider social functions such as active and ethical citizenship and shaping a democratic civilised and more sustainable society. Universities have a significant role in developing ‘sustainability literate’ leaders and hence optimising their contribution to the future of society and the environment and not only the future of the economy. But sustainability in this sense does not feature in our procedures for monitoring and evaluation and quality assurance.

5.A highly critical select committee report on quality and students (Students and Universities, 2009) contained the following student quote: “contact time we have with staff is a problem. Lecturers are often informative but there is no one –to-one time. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a sausage factory rather than surrounded by some of the foremost minds in my field “

6 We urgently need to encourage and seek ways of integrating the principles of sustainability into quality assurance procedures so that we count things of real value. The current HEFCE Review of quality assurance in England and Northern Ireland offers a window of opportunity.

Stephen Martin
For the past eight years he has held the visiting chair in Education for Sustainable Development in the Centre for Complexity and Change at the Open University. During this period he has been a sustainability change consultant for some of the largest FTSE100 companies such as BP, Barclays, Tesco and Carillion as well as Government Agencies such as the Environment Agency, the Higher Education Academy and the Learning and Skills Council. As a member of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate he held the national responsibility for Environmental Education. He was formerly Director of Learning at Forum for the Future, the leading Sustainability Charity in the UK. He is the co founder and president of Student force for Sustainability and serves on the Council of the Institute for Environmental Sciences one of the UK’s foremost professional bodies in sustainable development. He is a member of the Higher Education Academy’s Sustainable Development Advisory Group