Transforming University Education

A Manifesto

Paul Ashwin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350157255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

What is a university degree for? What can it offer to students? Is it only about getting a job? How can we measure the quality of an undergraduate degree? Paul Ashwin shows how, around the world, economic arguments have come to dominate our thinking about the purpose and nature of university education. He argues that we have lost a sense of the educational purposes of an undergraduate degree and the ways in which going to university can transform students' lives. Ashwin challenges a series of myths related to the purposes, educational processes, and quality of an undergraduate education. He argues that these myths have fuelled the current misunderstanding of the educational aspects of higher education and explores what is needed to reinvigorate our understanding of a university education. Throughout, Ashwin draws on his deep engagement with international research to offer an accessible and thought-provoking analysis of the nature of university education.

1

Introduction: Not another book about the higher education crisis!

Talk of crisis is everywhere in higher education. There are so many different crises: crises of funding,¹ crises of leadership,² mission³ and governance,⁴ crises of access and inclusion,⁵ the student debt and graduate employment crises,⁶ crises of the humanities and social sciences,⁷ and even crises of morality.⁸ These crises are not usually linked to the education that is offered by universities but, when they are, it is more about universities failing to produce employable graduates⁹ or students failing to learn much from their time at university¹⁰ rather than a careful examination of the educational role of university education.¹¹ However, despite the almost-overwhelming sense of crisis that characterizes popular literature on universities, the title of this introductory chapter is meant literally: this is not another book about the crises of higher education.¹²

My argument is not that universities face an educational crisis or are completely failing their students. There are many students who gain a great deal from their time at university and are transformed by their experiences. Instead, my argument is that we need to refocus our attention on the educational purposes of studying for an undergraduate degree rather than becoming fixated by the economic value of such a degree. Economic considerations of the value of higher education have over-reached themselves and have begun to distort debates about the educational value of university education. To be clear, this does not mean that the economic value is not important, it is just that it does not help us to develop a sense of what a high-quality university education looks like.

Why has this happened?

As global demand for and participation in higher education have risen, so have the costs involved in providing this education.¹³ In this situation, it is clearly right that debates about how to fund higher education have come to the fore, with different countries taking different positions on the extent to which this is funded by governments and the extent it is funded by students through loans and support from their families.¹⁴

However, what is problematic is the way in which the issues surrounding the funding of higher education have come to dominate debates about the quality of higher education. This has largely been led by societies in which students are expected to make a significant contribution to the costs of their higher education, such as the United States and England.¹⁵ The rationale for students meeting these costs is that they will end up earning more than if they had not studied for a degree and therefore the investment in higher education is worth making.¹⁶ This is often presented as an argument for social justice: given that a much greater proportion of socially and economically privileged people tend to access higher education then why should poorer people fund the education of the rich through their taxes which are used by governments to fund higher education?¹⁷ It is not the intention of this book to consider these arguments about funding in-depth, although it is worth noting that these arguments often ignore the ways in which having a greater number of graduates in society who act as nurses, social workers, doctors, engineers and perhaps even academics, politicians and policy makers benefit everyone in society.

What does concern this book is the way in which economic arguments have come to be the dominant voice in debates about the quality of education provided by universities. What has happened is that the economic justification for students paying for more of their higher education has morphed into an argument for measuring the quality of higher education. Justifying engagement in higher education as a sound economic investment has led to a sense that the higher the quality of your higher education, the greater the amount of money you will earn after you graduate. These arguments have not just become common in societies in which students pay the costs of their education. Even in countries where there are no tuition fees and students receive generous living allowances from their government, the amount that governments pay for higher education is often justified in terms of the ways in which higher education prepares the future workforce for the benefit of individual graduates and wider society.¹⁸

The argument in this book is that the educational purpose of a university education is not to prepare someone for their role in the future workforce. Rather, the educational purpose of a higher education is to bring students into a transformational relationship to knowledge that changes their sense of who they are and what they can do in the world. This undoubtedly prepares them to make a contribution to society, including through their contribution to the labour market but this is a by-product of the central educational purpose of a higher education rather than its driving force. This book will show the mess we get into when we lose this clear sense of the educational purpose of higher education and suggest how we can put these purposes back into the centre of thinking about university education.

What is wrong with understanding the value of a degree in purely economic terms?

If we only understand the value of a degree in economic terms then we tend to focus on the extent to which those who have graduated from university earn more than those who have not. A position is created in which those who earn the most are assumed to be the most able and the institutions that produce the highest earning graduates are seen as the highest quality. The problem with this is that it ignores how much, around the world, educational and employment outcomes are strongly shaped by social privilege.¹⁹ This creates a vicious circle in which social privilege is mistaken for ability. Those with the most privileged access to education unsurprisingly tend to perform the best academically and are labelled as the most able. They then tend to choose to attend the most socially prestigious universities not primarily because of the quality of the education that they offer but because of the prestige associated with attending such institutions. This privilege and prestige then help the graduates and the universities to have excellent employment outcomes. In this way, we end up in a situation in which social privilege is mistaken for academic ability and institutional prestige is mistaken for educational quality.²⁰ This argument needs to be handled carefully. The argument is neither that the socially privileged students lack ability nor that prestigious institutions do not offer a high-quality higher education. It is simply that social privilege does not tell us anything positive or negative about students’ abilities and that institutional prestige does not tell us anything useful about educational quality. It is like judging the quality of a wristwatch by the colour of its strap. Social privilege and institutional prestige do not tell us anything useful about the ability of students or the quality of degree programmes, in the same way that the colour of a watchstrap tells us nothing useful about the quality of the watch.

If social privilege is mistaken for academic ability and institutional prestige is mistaken for educational quality, then this creates a situation in which it is assumed that there is nothing educationally important that happens at university. As I explain through the course of this book, this matters because it ends up undermining the raison d’être of university education and instead positions it as merely a form of social selection.

Why does a commitment to university education matter?

There are many grandiose claims for the importance of a university education. Sometimes, for example, higher education is seen as the way to transform society.²¹ However, higher education is far more likely to reflect and reproduce inequalities in society than it is to transform them.²² Too often it appears that there is a belief that if we can get a few poor students into some elite institutions then we are well on the way to transforming society.²³ To be clear, this can be hugely personally transformative for these students and their families and it can also be deeply alienating.²⁴ However, changing the life trajectories of a few individuals will not transform inequalities in society.

This is because universities are not separate from society but are an integral part of it. The best we can hope for is that higher education plays a role, in partnership with other societal institutions, to help to mitigate some of the unfairness in societies. If this is to happen, then we need to be clear about what it is about the education offered by universities that can contribute to these kinds of changes. There also need to be far more partnerships between universities and other social institutions to support graduates to use their education to play a transformative role in society.²⁵ It is important to be clear that none of these matters are all or nothing. Higher education is never wholly reproductive or wholly transformative: it is always reproductive in some ways and transformative in others. We can move between considering the reproductive and transformative effects of a university education in order to get a sense of whether higher education’s reproductive or transformative effects appear to be most dominant at a particular point in time. The focus in this book is on what kind of university education is most likely to contribute to a fairer world whilst recognizing there will always be a tension between the reproductive and transformative impact of university education.

A similar kind of tension can be found in our thinking about the different actors involved in higher education. We can move between heroic and villainous narratives about the impact of what they do. Policy makers can be positioned as either heroically trying to ensure that universities take their educational responsibilities seriously or villainously trying to create a marketized higher education system in which universities endlessly compete with each other for money and prestige. University leaders can be positioned as heroically producing and sharing knowledge with society in the face of the unreasonable demands of policy makers or positioned as villainously seeking to create self-interested and self-aggrandizing narratives of the wonders of their institutions that bear little relationship to reality. Academics can be positioned as heroically fighting the demands of the commercially orientated university in precarious conditions of employment or villainously pursuing their personal academic brand by over-publishing and not taking their teaching seriously. Students can be positioned as heroically facing financial hardship to pursue their love of knowledge or villainously insisting on their absolute right to be spoon-fed knowledge and protected from any intellectual challenge. Commercial university rankers can be positioned as heroically telling students the truth about the quality of different degree programmes in the face of unresponsive universities or villainously creating meaningless measures by combining incommensurable and misleading sources of data.

Such narratives are beguiling and you will even find some of them in this book. Whilst they clearly over simplify complex reality, they usefully reflect the tensions in the ways that the different actors undertake their roles. In this way, they can be helpful in thinking about what we are trying to achieve and what we are trying to avoid. In this book, the intention is to try to contribute to the development of a vision of an inclusive, transformational higher education system rather than an elitist, reproductive one. It is important to be clear that this is not a task that can be completed by one book or one writer. It is something that needs to be argued over by those committed to university education. It is a long-term collective project that moves through many iterations of hope and despair. The important thing is to argue over the educational purposes of university education so that we can have a clearer sense of what we are trying to achieve and how this might be accomplished.

Who is this book for?

As the preceding discussion illustrates, this book is for anyone who has an interest in higher education, how it educates students and the impact these students have on the world once they graduate. In the final chapter, I consider the implications of the book’s argument for university leaders, those who work in universities, students and policy makers. However, the book could also be of interest to family members of those involved in higher education who want to think about what university education could be. The key point here is that the book does not assume that the reader has an academic interest in higher education but simply that they have an interest in thinking about how university degrees contribute to the education of students.

An important and related question is: to which of the many global higher education systems is this book relevant? It is important to be clear that the argument has developed in relation to my own experiences of examining what counts as a high-quality university education particularly in the UK, as well as other countries in Europe and South Africa. However, the literature drawn upon to support the argument is from many different countries and includes internationally comparative studies. All of the literature was published in English and this undoubtedly limits its scope given the significant literatures on higher education that are published in other languages. My sense, based on discussing the nature of a university education with researchers and reading research from around the world, is that the issues highlighted resonate in many countries across the world and are of global significance. However, the ways in which these issues play out will vary between higher education systems with different elements in the foreground at any particular time.

Two examples are helpful in making potential differences clear. First, for simplicity, the focus is on undergraduate education. Clearly universities offer other forms of education and the relative importance of undergraduate education differs between higher education systems. The broad educational principles are relevant to all these forms of higher education but how they play out in practice will vary between educational settings. Second, commercial university rankings are far less significant in some countries than in the United States and the UK and, similarly, not all higher education systems have clear institutional hierarchies. However, there is also evidence that stratification between types of university is an identifiable element across all higher education systems in which over half of young people access tertiary education including those typically considered more egalitarian such as Norway and Finland.²⁶ It is for th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figure
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Not another book about the higher education crisis!
• Part One: Challenging myths about university education
• Part Two: A case for university education
• Appendix 1: Lewis Elton: A personal reflection
• Appendix 2: David Watson’s scholarly legacy: Towards a conscience for higher education research
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint