Further study could ease the pressure from graduating into a collapsing job market, experts say
Higher education experts have asked whether graduates could be shielded from the worst of the coronavirus recession by taking an extra term at university, funded by the government.
Speaking during a webinar on 11 May hosted by the Resolution Foundation think tank, former universities and science minister David Willetts queried whether universities would be able to offer an extra term for students graduating from university. He asked Universities UK president Julia Buckingham: “If the government provided the funding for that, would universities be able to deliver it?”
It comes after the Resolution Foundation published a report on 6 May exploring the employment prospects for those graduating in 2020, which found that past graduating cohorts had experienced “scarring effects” on their long-term job prospects by graduating in a recession, and warned “the depth of that scarring could be even worse this time around, given expectations for how the labour market will perform over the coming months”.
Buckingham said universities “would be very interested in having those conversations” about offering more study time. “I am sure that is something many of us would be interested in exploring doing,” she said, adding that postgraduate diplomas and other qualifications could be taken in a way that would “build up credits over time to a full qualification” to help upskill the population.
Willetts also said that although the coronavirus “is a disaster” for universities and graduates, “it is also driving innovation” in how education is delivered.
Buckingham agreed but said that while developments such as virtual reality technology meant students could take part in the same class from anywhere in the world, online education comes with a cost. “I think we need to be very careful not to fall into the trap that this is low cost and less labour intensive, because it is the complete opposite. It is very, very expensive and if you are going to do good online teaching it does involve people being online and that by definition is also costly. It is not just a question of bunging something on the web, which some people think it is,” she said.
Elsewhere, Buckingham said that while some subjects were harder to teach online than others, such as lab-based subjects, students should not have their tuition fees refunded. “My view is that if students have received the learning opportunities and they have achieved the learning outcomes that they should have done, then I would not support fee rebates,” she said.
In a House of Commons petitions committee hearing on 7 May, Buckingham warned that some universities would be at even greater risk of financial collapse if they were forced to pay back tuition fees to dissatisfied students.