Jonathan Woodhead argues that minimum university entry requirements are a bad idea
One of the many unresolved higher education issues in the government’s in-tray is whether students should have to meet minimum entry requirements to access student finance for university courses. This was originally floated in the Augar review, which is now more than two and a half years old (although it is almost four years since former prime minister Theresa May launched the review at Derby College in February 2018).
Let us be clear what the review actually said in relation to this, in recommendation 3.7: “Unless the sector has moved to address the problem of recruitment to courses which have poor retention, poor graduate employability and poor long-term earnings benefits by 2022-23, the government should intervene. This intervention should take the form of a contextualised minimum entry threshold, a selective numbers cap or a combination of both.”
Assuming the government still believes that the sector has many courses with poor retention and poor employability—and that a selective numbers cap is unviable politically (a cap on aspiration?), never mind to the public—it would seem that a “contextualised minimum entry threshold” may be one of the options it decides to run with when it finally responds to Augar.
Historically, from the Robbins report onwards, access to undergraduate higher education and student finance has required two A-levels and five GCSEs (including maths and English passes). As access to higher education has widened over the past 20 years, other measures have been used in addition to the ‘standard entry’. These can include foundation years, foundation degrees, Btecs and other vocational qualifications.
Age limits
A minimum entry requirement would not impact the Russell Group and other selective universities as much as institutions undertaking the heavy lifting in widening participation due to their broader entry criteria.
One thing the Augar review fails to make clear is who would be subject to the minimum entry requirement and at what level. It says “contextualised”, but within some contexts it would be catastrophic for widening participation efforts. For institutions such as Birkbeck and the Open University, minimum entry requirements would be profoundly damaging if they were placed on students of all ages.
The Office for Students categorises mature students as those over the age of 21 and, as a bare minimum, 21 must be the upper age limit for any such requirements.
Many 21-year-olds are working or living independently or are already in further education. If a minimum entry requirement were set at a level 4 grade (in old money, a high C or above) at GCSE level, five years would elapse between GCSE results and applying for a university place aged 21. That is a long time on someone’s learning journey and the propensity to learn can change markedly in that time. Students over 21 will have had varied work and family experiences, which will influence how successful they could be in higher education.
Birkbeck excels in taking these students. Jeff Porter, who left school at 16 with few qualifications and worked on the London Underground as a tube driver, leading passengers to safety at Edgware Road during the terror attack of 7 July 2005, took an MA in politics with Birkbeck and later a PhD. With no age limit on minimum entry qualifications, he may never have gone on to these academic achievements.
Retaking GCSEs
In many cases, those under 21 will have the time and ability to resit their GCSEs and should be encouraged to do so. Since 2013, the government has stated that students should seek to resit GCSEs before age 18.
But evidence suggests that if a retake is not conducted soon after the exam was initially taken then the failure rate is high. According to Department for Education figures reported by the BBC, 77.3 per cent of students in England do not attain a C grade in English or maths when they resit an exam after the age of 16, which can lead to a cycle of retakes and a lack of motivation. Is it really necessary to have a grade C in maths and English to study arts-based courses, many of which undertake entry by interview or audition?
It is also unclear whether a minimum entry requirement would apply only for full-time undergraduate courses or would include part-time courses, for which the provision of maintenance support is much more recent. Again, as a minimum, I would hope that part-time courses would be excluded.
For some applicants and students, a high level of maths and English ability is required in order to succeed on their course, but could this be developed in other ways than a cycle of GCSE resits?
One answer here could be foundation years, another aspect of the Augar report on which we have yet to hear the government’s response. Augar stated that he would like to see financial support for foundation years phased out over a two-year period and replaced by access course routes offered by further education colleges. But it cannot be right to remove foundation years and introduce minimum entry requirements for undergraduate courses at the same time.
Recent Office for Students data show that students undertaking foundation years are more likely to go on to study for a degree (79 per cent) than those on access courses (62 per cent). The vast majority of the former are based in university settings, where there is a clear pathway to undergraduate study, rather than in a further education setting. This should be evidence enough.
Counting the cost
What it will finally come down to is likely to be money and the need to reduce the cost of the student loan book. May hinted as much at the Augar report launch, pointing out: “Many students never pay off their loan in full, with taxpayers covering 45 per cent of the cost.” This percentage is set to grow and with relatively low wage growth over the past few years is unlikely to improve any time soon.
Other (welcome in my view) student loan products are on their way, such as the ‘lifelong learning entitlement’, which looks set to award loans for modular study at levels 4 and 5. But how a minimum entry requirement fits into these plans remains unclear.
Rather than tighten entry criteria for student loans, especially based on little evidence, it might be wise to look at other measures, such as repayment threshold levels, to make the loan book more affordable to the taxpayer in straitened times.
Jonathan Woodhead is policy adviser at Birkbeck, University of London. He writes here in a personal capacity.