What Plan B means for universities and why higher education risks becoming less diverse
In the past 24 hours, Boris Johnson has fielded accusations related to “gatherings” in and around Number 10 during last winter’s lockdown, has caused his party to be fined nearly £18,000 for failing to be straight about a refurbish to his grace-and-favour flat, and has become a father for the [checks notes] umpteenth time.
But for anyone still able to concentrate on logistics, it is worth taking a closer look at Plan B. The prime minister announced extra measures to deal with an expected Covid-19 surge caused by the Omicron variant on Wednesday evening, and details of how they would affect universities were released by the Department for Education yesterday morning.
The upshot is: not much change. Face-to-face teaching should continue despite the general message to work from home where possible, and there should be no move to put more teaching and learning online as a result of the work-from-home instruction. Nor should universities “significantly limit the wider activities offered”.
Face coverings are recommended for students, staff and adult visitors in corridors and communal spaces, and universities may want them used in workshops, labs, offices, libraries and teaching spaces, especially where ventilation is poor, although all is up for negotiation. General guidance for Plan B also includes an exemption for singing, so as long as you are belting out Gaudeamus igitur while returning your library books, you are golden.
The university guidance recommends regular use of tests and says that students should be encouraged to get vaccinated. But in the event of a Covid outbreak, “the default position is that higher education providers will remain open, with non-educational facilities and activities reflecting wider restrictions in place locally”. So go to your seminar but don’t expect the finance office to be open to sort out your fees and loans.
Communication and contact
The guidance also includes a section on the need for effective communication. This says that higher education leaders should “encourage an atmosphere within their institution that supports actions people can take to keep themselves and others safe”, and should “maintain consistent messaging and guidance”, which does suggest a willingness on the part of government to learn from its own mistakes. Indeed, writing for Research Professional News this week, Vickie Sheriff draws parallels between communication by ministers and by universities.
As far as social contacts go, the Department for Education’s instructions are eye-catchingly brief: “There are no legal limits on social contacts in England.” Given the current news cycle, it would hardly look good to be limiting end-of-module Christmas parties or—as apparently happened last year—fining students thousands of pounds for gatherings while revellers were partying hard enough at Conservative HQ to damage a door.
Higher education providers are also instructed to ensure that their students are safe and well looked after during quarantine periods, which follows criticism that international students in particular were left feeling neglected during previous lockdowns.
What international students want
With many universities already drawing to the end of term, the guidance is likely to have limited effect, so the real issue will be what happens next term.
Will the face-to-face instruction continue if Omicron does push up case numbers and thereby numbers in hospital? Going on past form, the government will make a pronouncement on the first day of term and then reverse it within 24 hours.
This becomes particularly significant in the light of the end-of-year report published yesterday by Quacquarelli Symonds—the higher education think tank behind the QS World University Rankings—which shows that face-to-face teaching remains a significant draw.
Since February 2020, QS has surveyed more than 115,000 prospective international students from 194 countries, 34,880 of whom were considering studying in the UK.
In July and August this year, 71 per cent of respondents said their plans had been affected by Covid-19. While many chose to defer overseas study, few said they had decided to abandon it altogether, although in recent months 14 per cent said they had changed their study abroad destination.
QS suggests that this has often been to do with legal restrictions; many were unable to study in Australia or New Zealand, for example, because these countries had closed their borders.
And the report says that “a consistently large proportion of prospective international students saw the closure of campuses and cancellation of in-person teaching as a barrier to them pursuing international study as planned”. The surveys repeatedly showed that just under a third of prospective international students were uninterested in beginning their studies online, although around half were OK with this.
Covid cases and vaccines
Respondents also seem to have become more relaxed about coming into contact with the virus. The proportion claiming that few or no cases of Covid-19 in their chosen destination would encourage them to travel decreased from 36 per cent in March and April to 24 per cent in September and October.
Prospective students have consistently perceived New Zealand to be “more welcoming” as a result of how it has handled the coronavirus. Other popular study abroad destinations, such as the United States and the UK, were seen as less welcoming on this front, but vaccination distribution has changed things. The UK is now considered “more welcoming” by 35 per cent of respondents, compared with 20 per cent at the beginning of the year.
While 86 per cent of prospective international students now say they are willing to receive a vaccination and 64 per cent feel that students should be required to have a vaccine passport, inconsistent rollouts between different countries make such passports impossible for some. Almost a quarter of respondents continued to insist they should not need one.
Rises and falls
The report also includes the thoughts of international education experts on what might happen next.
Angel Calderon, principal adviser for institutional research and planning at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, suggested that hybrid ways of working would remain but that the call for face-to-face interaction would stay strong. He also predicted a lower number of Chinese students studying abroad in future, with the peak period for these students likely to have been 2019.
While demand for study in the UK is likely to remain high, he suggested that the country would experience some volatility because of “increased instability, Brexit and the weakening standing for some universities. The next two years will be key to determine the extent to which the UK is to remain competitive.”
According to Ucas end-of-cycle statistics published yesterday and touched on in yesterday’s Playbook, numbers from China seem to be holding up so far. While international applications fell overall, pushed down by plunging European Union numbers, applications from China rose by 15 per cent, more than the overall 12 per cent rise in international applications from outside the EU, although the rise in the number of acceptances was smaller.
The EU figures were dramatic—a 50 per cent year-on-year drop in EU citizens placed in UK institutions, with applications and acceptances down from every EU country except Ireland and Portugal.
The falls were particularly stark in poorer eastern European countries, where prospective students are likely to be most deterred by having to pay high international fees after being entitled to home fees and loans when Britain was part of the EU. Applications from Poland fell more than 70 per cent, compared with a 30 per cent drop in those from France, for example.
Concerns about diversity
One effect of this is likely to be a decrease in diversity, not only in national but also in socioeconomic terms.
This has been a concern for a while. In last year’s report, Ucas warned that without intervention, progress on widening access and participation for traditional three-year, full-time undergraduate programmes could stall because of increased competition for the most selective courses caused by an increase in the number of 18-year-olds.
Between now and 2026, when demand is predicted to grow most sharply, the number of applicants is expected to top one million from around 750,000 this year, with more growth expected until the end of the decade. When selectivity increases, widening participation tends to suffer.
“That’s the stiffest headwind widening participation is facing,” Richard O’Kelly, head of analytical data at Ucas, told Playbook.
He said that while the proportion of disadvantaged students achieving places at university had remained stable since 2015, it had not improved, which was a concern. Fewer than one in four young people from the lowest-participation groups enter university, compared with one in two from the highest.
And while the latest data do not appear to show much of a Covid effect yet, the worry is that disadvantaged young people have missed out more than other groups earlier in their education, which will feed through into later application cohorts, with further knock-on effects on future diversity.
Mature students
In this context, it is also worth considering what has happened to mature students, a group that has declined sharply since the introduction of higher tuition fees.
Last year’s figures recorded the biggest single-year increase in numbers of students aged 21 and over for more than 10 years, which O’Kelly suggested was linked to concerns about the jobs market, combined with the “Whitty effect”—a surge of interest in nursing courses. Nursing accounts for one in four mature applicants.
This year, numbers of acceptances have gone down but the fall is concentrated in the 20-to-24-year-old age group and is linked to lower numbers of this age group in the population and the fact that increasing numbers of this age cohort will have already been to university at 18. Numbers of acceptances in older age groups have increased.
There is plenty more to dissect in the Ucas data, and the admissions service will be publishing more analysis on subject choices next week. For anyone involved in politics at the moment, though, that might seem like a very long time from now.
And finally…
A week after calling Durham University students “pathetic” for walking out of a talk by columnist Rod Liddle, Tim Luckhurst is to “step back from some duties” while the university investigates.
Luckhurst, principal of South College, apologised after the incident, which sparked student demonstrations and, in the words of acting vice-chancellor Antony Long, caused “distress and anger across much of our community”.
According to the BBC, Luckhurst will not attend external events on behalf of the university until the investigation is complete in mid-January. It will be carried out by Jane Macnaughton, the university’s deputy vice-provost for research.
In a statement announcing the investigation, Long said: “We are wrestling with issues that speak directly to what it means to be a university.” No pressure, then.
On Research Professional News today
Chris Parr tells us that more than 100,000 18-year-olds in the UK were accepted on courses at high-tariff providers in 2021, and a paper reveals that doctoral researchers in the UK may be at increased risk of developing anxiety and depression compared with graduates who are in other types of jobs.
He adds that a Higher Education Policy Institute report says the government should focus less on making sure the student loan repayment system is “ultra-progressive” and more on how it can offer fairness to taxpayers.
Face-to-face teaching in universities should continue despite the prime minister’s order that people in England must work from home if possible as the Omicron Covid-19 variant spreads across the UK, the Department for Education has said. Fiona McIntyre reports.
Sophie Inge covers news that a leading research institute has called for urgent investment in cancer clinical trials after the number of patients taking part in the studies plummeted during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The University of Cambridge has announced the launch of the Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science and the Public, which it says will “foster global conversations about ethical issues raised by science”. Mico Tatalovic reports.
Vickie Sheriff says researchers need to appreciate the art of storytelling.
According to Robin Bisson, research groups have given a lukewarm reception to two agreements on R&D policies adopted by EU member states and have raised concerns that nations have been left in the driving seat for delivering on key targets such as increasing investment.
Private profit from public investments shows a need to reform the intellectual property system, says Massimo Florio, while Jean-Pierre Bourguignon writes that Europe must not let Covid-19 wreck the prospects of early career researchers.
This year, despite the pandemic, ambitious projects blasted off in search of a brighter future, while experts have called for more funding for the European Universities Initiative, says Craig Nicholson.
He adds that university groups have warned that European Commission plans to create a coalition to drive reform of research assessment need to be backed with appropriate funding and other support, and more than 20 European health organisations have said that the UK must be allowed to associate to the EU’s Horizon Europe R&D programme as a matter of urgency, as the ongoing delay is putting vital research partnerships at risk.
In the news
The BBC reports that a student who was stalked at university has called for change, a public inquiry is asking people to share their experiences of being spiked, student accommodation rent in Scotland has risen by a third in three years, and a Durham college principal who called students ‘pathetic’ has stepped back from some duties.
In The Guardian, UK students are paying 60 per cent more for halls of residence than a decade ago, a Durham college head has stepped back after calling students ‘pathetic’, outsourcing the Turing exchange scheme to Capita risks selling students short, Columbia University in the US is threatening graduate workers with replacement if they continue to strike, and an article looks at how Durham University turned itself green.
The Financial Times has a weekend essay on whether the UK must choose between science and the arts.
In The Telegraph, rent for university accommodation is said to be unaffordable, with students living on £38 a week.
Comment pieces in The Times say that the British Council is being let down by penny-pinching and that it’s polarising and patronising to talk of BAME. Entrepreneurs have said that an arts degree is no barrier to a career in technology, and an academic has been locked out of a lab over a fossil feud.
The Belfast Telegraph reports that sky-high rent is leaving many students with a meagre £29 a week to live on.
The day ahead
Advance HE is holding an event on findings from its student experience surveys.
There is a debate in the House of Lords on contemporary challenges to freedom of speech and the role of public, private and civil society sectors in its upholding.
Universities Scotland has responded to the Scottish government’s budget for higher education.
Unipol and the National Union of Students have published a survey on accommodation costs.
The Playbook would not be possible without Martyn Jones, Chris Parr and Fiona McIntyre.
Thanks for reading. Have a great day.
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