How should universities choose whom to admit as students? Simply on merit? Or should they use their power to promote greater social mobility? And should they be forced to do so?
These are the questions that lie behind the controversy concerning the appointment of the new head of the Office for Fair Access, Offa.
It’s not usual for the hiring of the head of a quango even to be much noticed never mind cause a ruckus at the top of government. But the decision of Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, to appoint Professor Les Ebdon to run Offa has done just that. The Education Secretary, Michael Gove, and the Prime Minister himself are reported to have objected, but Mr Cable has faced them down.
So what’s the problem?
Offa is a quite recent quango. It was set up by the last Labour government when it introduced university tuition fees back in 2006. It set a target of 50% of young people going to university and it was worried that the fees and the increased student debt they entailed might deter students from poorer backgrounds from applying to university. It believed too that the more prestigious universities were in any case biased in their selection of students to those from better-off backgrounds, especially those who had attended public schools.
Its concern was that if such universities used only exam results, both at GCSE level and A level, to select their students, then bright pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds might be excluded simply because their schools had been less successful in helping them to realise their potential as measured in exam results. Offa was intended to offset this tendency by encouraging universities to broaden their criteria of admission so that more students with inferior A level results but a lot of potential might be selected rather than ‘privileged’ students with higher grades but perhaps less potential.
The very principle of Offa was challenged from the start. Critics said that universities should base their decision solely on merit or, at the very least, be left to devise their own criteria of admission. The whole concept of Offa, they said, involved promoting social engineering at the expense of academic excellence and academic freedom.
When the Coalition Government came to power it raised the cost of tuition fees to £6,000 a year, with a provision that in some circumstances, universities could charge as much as £9,000. It gave Offa the power to adjudicate whether or not any particular university could set this higher fee. Offa also has the power to impose fines of as much as £500,000 on any university it deems to be making insufficient efforts to ensure pupils from poorer backgrounds have a chance of gaining a place.
The political controversy about Professor Ebdon’s appointment first arose when the House of Commons select committee that monitors the work of the business department ‒ and has the power to vet such appointments ‒ declined to endorse Professor Ebdon for the job. Four Conservative MPs and two Labour MPs voted against, and the others abstained. The Tories in particular feared that he would 'level down' universities by being over-eager to impose targets of broader access on the more academic universities.
Their suspicion seems to derive from Professor Ebdon’s background. He is a prize-winning chemist who is currently the vice-chancellor of Bedfordshire University. He was formerly the chairman of Million Plus, a think-tank representing new universities, such as Bedfordshire. Many of these universities evolved from polytechnics, less academic institutions of higher education, which were turned into universities by the last Conservative government. Most of the enormously increased numbers of students at university today go to such universities, many of them from families which have never had a member at university before. Professor Ebdon has said that it is these new universities which 'are doing the ‘heavy lifting’ in terms of social mobility'.
His opponents believe that Professor Ebdon will be far more concerned with social mobility than academic excellence. Philip Davies, a Tory backbencher, has said that his appointment would bring 'social engineering forward and merit backward'. Another Tory MP, David Nuttall, attacked Offa itself as being an 'expensive and unnecessary quango encouraging social engineering'.
Many of those who take this view believe that universities should be concerned only with excellence and therefore should select students only on merit. Some argue too that any attempt to tinker with such a criterion by allowing proven merit (measured in exam results) to be trumped by the wish to promote social mobility risks lightening the pressure on academically less successful schools to raise their game. Any action to promote greater mobility, they argue, should be taken much earlier, long before students are applying to university.
The Russell Group, the body representing the older and more academic universities, is also believed to have lobbied against Professor Ebdon’s appointment. They deny that their admission policy is one that looks solely at exam results. Malcolm Grant, the provost of University College, London, said: 'We try to be as well informed as we can about the socio-economic circumstances of the candidates to help identify academic potential.'
Oxford and Cambridge have long been accused of unduly favouring pupils from public schools. They claim, however, to have gone to great lengths to reach out to the state sector to encourage applications from pupils from comprehensive schools. Nonetheless, almost half of their students come from public schools even though only 7% of pupils of secondary school age attend public schools. And Cambridge has estimated that even with the best will in the world only 62% of the students with the required qualifications to study there come from state schools.
What Russell Group universities seem to fear is that Professor Ebdon’s zeal for promoting greater social mobility may lead him to want to impose such state school admissions targets on universities like Cambridge, and then use his powers to penalise them if they fall short. This, they fear, could lead to a fall in such universities’ academic standards. It would also, they argue, be very unfair to highly qualified candidates from public schools that would be denied places as a result.
Professor Ebdon himself has sought to allay these fears by saying he wants to work with the older and more academic universities and that 'hopefully' he would not need to use his powers to fine universities or cap their fees. He added, however, that 'if you then say that you will never press the nuclear button, you do not have a nuclear button'.
What’s your view?
- Do you support the appointment of Professor Ebdon or not?
- Do you support the very existence of Offa, or not?
- Do you think its powers are too great, not great enough or about right?
- Do you think universities should select their students solely on the ground of merit or not?
- Do you think policy on universities should be as much about promoting social mobility as about academic excellence or not?
- Do you think the top universities have done a good enough job in giving a chance to candidates from more deprived backgrounds who may have more potential than their exam results imply, or do you think they favour candidates from public schools too much?
- Do you think Professor Ebdon’s appointment threatens academic excellence or not?
- And, finally, do you think it’s a good idea that we should be trying to send 50% of young people to university or not?
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