by David Craig
Within many universities, the drive away from academic excellence towards corporate managerialism has been led from the very top. It is not simply that vice chancellors have failed to safeguard academic standards; often their reinterpretation of their role has actively fostered the decline of academic culture and values within universities. Professor Geoffrey Alderman expressed it thus:
“...vice chancellors … see themselves ... as business managers intent on achieving ‘market share’. In this quest, academic standards are viewed as subordinate and, hence, dispensable. In particular, vice chancellors have permitted and indeed encouraged the decline in academic standards in the desperate search for (a) increased income from ‘full cost’ fee–paying international students, (b) more favourable student retention rates and (c) .. higher positions in various ‘rankings’ or ‘league tables’.”263
Moreover, given an evident decline in academic standards across the whole Higher Education sector, it might seem difficult to justify an average salary of over £272,000 a year. Even more pertinently, what is the rationale for vice chancellors who leave under a cloud of mismanagement and financial crisis receiving enormous pay–offs, such as the £265,000 handed to a vice chancellor who left their university in crisis in 2010?264
The reality is that many of the financial crises in UK universities have been directly linked to executive mismanagement. Often the actions of senior management have precipitated or worsened financial problems. The most obvious example is that of London Metropolitan University, created in 2002 from the merger of two troubled universities, London Guildhall University and the University of North London. In 2009, the university’s vice chancellor resigned following a series of accounting errors which left the university £56 million in debt. The chair and other members of the university’s board of governors were forced to resign by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The university’s audit committee also departed. The Guardian reported that: “The university is facing up to 550 job cuts among its 2,300 staff, following the revelation that it had been overpaid for students who failed to complete courses. It is understood to be taking a £15m funding cut this year and is in negotiations about how it will pay back a further £38m.”265
Apart from the scale of the debt, the most notable point was the requirement for HEFCE to force the resignations of senior management. This not only showed a whole system of institutional governance failing to provide checks and balances against mismanagement, it also highlighted an executive unwilling to accept any responsibility for their failures.
The crisis at London Metropolitan might have been the biggest to hit the Higher Education sector to date, but it was not an isolated incident. There have been plenty of other instances where the massive financial rewards offered to vice chancellors have signally failed to attract “individuals able to run complex, multimillion–pound organisations”. The 160+ UK universities and Higher Education institutes lose on average at least one vice chancellor a year under a cloud. This does not include a number of other vice chancellors who retired “more quietly” shortly before or after crises hit their universities
Date
University
VC Departure
2015
Sussex
Vice chancellor to step down after disciplinary proceedings against 5 students collapse, requiring compensation and apologies.
2014
Durham
Vice chancellor resigns soon after a vote by the university’s senate over whether to reduce his powers.
2014
Plymouth
The university suspended the vice chancellor after they spent £95,000 on seven handcrafted chairs for graduation ceremonies.
2013
East
of London
Vice chancellors and two pro vice chancellors resign following the closure of the university's Cyprus campus.
2012
Canterbury Christ Church
Vice chancellor resigns suddenly and without explanation from the university.266 267
2011
Wales
An undercover investigation showed payment for bogus qualifications. The university declined to comment on the subsequent departure of the vice chancellor.268
2011
London School of Economics (LSE)
(Director) Vice chancellor resigns over the LSE’s links to Libya.269
2011
Abertay Dundee
The vice chancellor disputed that he had retired following suspension. He pursued an employment tribunal claim. The university refused to make public the reason for his suspension. 270
2010
Gloucestershire
Vice chancellor resigns/retires early following a financial crisis, senior resignations and industrial tribunals.
2009
East of London
Vice chancellor was suspended following allegations of a lack of leadership and vision.271
2009
London Metropolitan
Vice chancellor resigned in the wake of accounting mistakes which created a £56m deficit.272
2009
Leeds Metropolitan
Vice chancellor resigns avoiding suspension for bullying allegations.273
2005
Ulster
Vice chancellor resigns following an investigation into allegations of lax financial management, bullying and attending meetings drunk.274
2002
University College London
Vice chancellor quits after a letter of no confidence from senior staff.275
1999
Lincolnshire and Humberside
Staff called for the resignation of vice chancellor, claiming "gross mismanagement" 18 months after an 80% vote of no confidence.
1998
Thames Valley
Vice chancellor forced out after the QAA reported that the university could no longer be trusted to safeguard the quality of its degrees.276
1997
Glasgow
Caledonian
Vice chancellor sacked for “gross misconduct”.277
1996
Swansea
Metropolitan
Vice chancellor resigned following revelations about lax academic standards.278
1996
Portsmouth University
Vice chancellor resigned following an inquiry into expenses irregularities.279
1995
Huddersfield
Vice chancellor left after a 98% vote of no confidence and the removal of elected staff members from the governing body.280
Figure 3 - Vice chancellor departures 1995-2015
Many of the senior managers who have left their universities in “difficult circumstances” were amongst
the best paid. For example: “In 2007/08 (the London Metropolitan vice chancellor) received a salary of £330,000. The average vice chancellor pay for that year was £194,000” and “in 2009/10 (the Gloucestershire vice chancellor) received a salary of £399,000. The average vice chancellor pay for that year was £213,000.”
Neither of these vice chancellors “successfully” ran “multimillion–pound businesses”. More accurately, they ran publicly–funded organisations into the ground. The problems of Gloucestershire and London Metropolitan are only the most visible examples which contradict the argument that you have to pay such high salaries to recruit the best possible talent for senior management roles within universities. Whatever the case, it is doubtful that any other public–sector employees have seen anything like this rate of salary increase. The average vice chancellor now earns £100,000 a year more than the prime minister and the highest vice chancellor salaries are in excess of £500,000 for non–elite universities.
CHAPTER TEN: EMPLOYERS: “WHERE’S THE BEEF?”
Whilst individual universities can do little about the state of the national economy, collectively they have failed to prepare many of their graduates for the post–expansion labour market. Rather than adapting their support and guidance to the new conditions, they have continued to operate on the basis that all graduates will get jobs simply by virtue of having degrees. This issue was mentioned time and time again by the graduates interviewed for this book: “The system doesn’t prepare you for the sheer amount of work that you have to do to get a job after your degree. I really wasn’t expecting it to be this hard.” Engineering graduate
Expansion has itself undermined many undergraduates’ career preparation as the sheer size and scale of universities now make it difficult, if not impossible, to offer more intensive and focused careers advice formally to all students during their study. Resources spread ever more thinly within universities only exacerbate these problems.
One of the central arguments for expansion has been the alleged need of UK employers for more graduate–level skills. This proposition has looked increasingly threadbare as employers have regularly raised concerns about both the quantity and quality of UK graduates provided by expansion. Already by 2004, the President of the British Chambers of Commerce was calling for more school leavers to start jobs rather than degrees, noting that:
“The drive to get more and more students into university is having a damaging impact on both business and students. Rather than following the route to university, young people should consider the excellent opportunities available to them through pursuing vocational routes of learning. Business is suffering from an acute skills shortage, which is a barrier to raising productivity and competitiveness.”281
Since 2000, UK business organisations have produced research outlining four specific issues that have undermined employers’ confidence in expansion. These include an oversupply of graduates both generally and in specific subjects; graduates lacking basic skills such as numeracy and literacy; graduates unable to think and act independently; and graduates lacking basic subject knowledge. In 2013, a YouGov survey of 635 employers found that 52% believed that either none or few graduate recruits were actually ready for the work place.282 Worryingly, many post–expansion graduates appear to agree with this assessment. A 2011 survey by Totaljobs.com found that:
“Half of all recent graduates believe their university education did not adequately equip them for the world of work, and a quarter wouldn’t recommend Higher Education to those currently studying for their A– levels.”283
If employers and graduates are now raising the same questions about the effectiveness of post–expansion degrees as preparation for the modern workplace, then why aren’t universities or indeed the government listening to them?
The supply and demand of graduates
Rather than meet employers’ repeated demands for more STEM graduates, expansion has seen our universities produce a massive surplus of graduates in subjects such as journalism, social work, forensic science and sports science for which there is limited or shrinking demand from employers. In 2012, our universities had three times more sports science students than physicists and three times as many English students as chemistry students. Whilst English teachers can be useful occasionally, it is hard to remember a desperate shortage of them during the last two decades that threatened our economic success and required their numbers to double. In 2012, we also had about 10,000 more students doing design studies than we had studying maths, physics and chemistry combined.
Business organisations have been issuing warnings about UK universities oversupplying graduates in questionable subject areas for a number of years. In 2004, the CBI described the British economy as:
“…under serious threat as its world–class science base is eroded while it faces strong competition from new, as well as traditional, international rivals. The mismatch is such that some British businesses are recruiting from overseas. Competitors such as China, India, Brazil and parts of Eastern Europe produce hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers each year.”284
Employers have also voiced concerns about the quality as well as the quantity of the STEM graduates that our universities produce. Many employers who are looking for STEM graduates have become so concerned about the quality of UK graduates that they now focus on recruiting international graduates instead. In 2008, the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) stated that: “Of the 217 employers surveyed, 25% are now actively marketing their UK vacancies to overseas graduates in order to ‘recruit the very best talent that is available.’285 Underlying these concerns are familiar issues about both the curriculum shrinkage within UK degrees and their failure to stretch the brightest UK graduates to their full potential. In 2008, the Oxford professor of mathematics Marcus De Sautoy described a similar recruitment pattern amongst financial firms in the City of London:
“The great majority of the mathematicians they rely on are recruited from overseas. Countries such as China and India have realised the crucial role mathematicians play in the success of their economy and are pumping out fantastically competent mathematicians that increasingly fill the hole left in Britain. The cost to the UK economy since 1990 of not raising homegrown mathematicians totals £9 billion.”286
Such warnings echo over a decade’s worth of research into what UK employers want from university expansion. Specifically, a higher quantity and quality of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) graduates. For example, the Confederation of British Industry’s 2015 Education and Skills survey found 52% of employers struggling to recruit experienced STEM staff and 42% experiencing similar difficulties in recruiting STEM graduates. In the same survey, 40% of employers complained about the content of STEM qualifications and 34% about the quality of STEM graduates.287 Problematically, this demand for STEM graduates is only likely to increase in the future. In 2013, the Social Market Foundation produced a report which suggested that an ageing workforce will leave around 100,000 STEM vacancies a year in the labour market of the future. To fill a gap of this size, UK universities would need to produce an additional 40,000 STEM graduates annually.288 But, in spite of the Great Expansion, it looks like Southern European, Eastern European and Asian universities will have to produce these STEM graduates for us.
This research also points to a growing interest in degree subjects which require graduates to think logically and analyse complex data. Research into this area consistently shows that employers also want graduates who can think independently and creatively and who have learnt how to learn. Finally, they want graduates with ICT skills, strong literacy and numeracy, who are motivated, hard–working and flexible. Instead of meeting these requirements, expansion has:
Fuelled growth in soft subjects, such sports science, dance and drama, for which there is little or no demand.
Reduced in absolute or relative terms the annual supply of STEM graduates.
&n
bsp; Created a massive oversupply of graduates in areas where there is low and/or static demand from employers (e.g. law, psychology, photography).
Evolved a factory model of Higher Education which discourages the independent and creative thinking employers want in favour of a mechanical approach to learning.
Failed to address the problems that many school leavers have in literacy, numeracy or subject knowledge.
As a result, there is a large and growing gap between what universities are supplying and what employers actually need. But the most fundamental issue, and one which has been routinely ignored by policy–makers and universities, is that our labour market simply doesn’t need the number of graduates that expansion is providing. Research by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in 2008 found that: “There are currently 10.1 million graduates in the UK but only 9 million graduate–level jobs.”289
Other investigations into the UK labour market have consistently identified skills shortages for employees with vocational qualifications equivalent to A–levels, rather than degrees. In addition to STEM–level graduate skills, what employers really need are school leavers with specific vocational training in areas such as care or retail. This is not just the case for today’s labour market, it is likely to be the case for the labour market of the future, too. In 2013, the Telegraph reported on research from the US government which predicted that:
“…just one out of the top nine occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade requires a degree. The picture is truly dire for graduates: only 5 of the top 30 fastest–growing occupations expected to create the most jobs by 2020 require a degree and 10 of the top 30 don’t require any kind of qualification. Among the top 10 fastest–growing are retail sales staff; food preparation; customer service reps; labourers and freight, stock, and material movers; lorry and van drivers; and various healthcare aides.”290