Higher Education in England - Term Paper Example

Contemporary issues facing higher education in England Introduction The Higher Education sector in England is very diverse. It encompasses the full range from world class research universities to specialist conservatoires and colleges of art and design. Higher Education in England has attracted long-standing and world-wide respect; and a good number of English institutions have established pre-eminent positions in their specialist fields against prominent international competitors. The quality of teaching, the standard of research activity, increasing enterprise and entrepreneurship has become the mark of this sector. To advance these latter activities, universities have established strong collaborative ventures with regional development agencies, governmental offices and a range of private, voluntary and public sector organizations. Higher Education Institutions make significant contributions to the local economy, directly through the labour market and, indirectly, through student spending in the community, and also contribute to the social and cultural life of their regions through support for minority communities, theatre, cinema and the arts. We will discuss a few issues Higher education faces like the Government’s strategies, Funding of Universities and the academic pressures faced by students. The Student Population The higher education sector consists of some 170 institutions catering for a rich diversity of students from both local as well as overseas. The student body is growing in size and character with an increase of over 39% between 1995 and 2003 to a current total of 2.2 million students. Such growth is unprecedented and has been managed against a steadily declining unit of resource for teaching which only levelled off in 2002. Unprecedented increases in the teaching function have presented universities with a range of financial and academic challenges during the last decade and have stimulated wide spread curriculum renewal, new modes of teaching and learning, and significant investment in the professional development of all categories of staff. The most recent challenge with respect to students will be the introduction from 2006 of differential fees for full-time students from the European Union. This is likely to stimulate an even more customer and client responsive culture in the sector. Even so, some institutions and courses make a loss on every student they teach; hence cross-subsidy is necessary and much teaching and research has been at the expense of investment in infrastructure. Margins across the sector are paper thin. Many of the students now entering the English universities come from family backgrounds and geographical regions which have been traditionally under-represented in higher education. Despite the increasing and more diverse student population course completion rates continue to be high and record numbers graduate with a gradient of awards from foundation to doctoral levels. England completion rates are amongst the highest in the world. Finance and Unit Costs Universities derive their income from a number of sources with the bulk coming from the Funding Councils (39%) and grants from the UK Research Councils (17%). The course fees received from the students make up some 25% of income and approximately 19% of total income is self generated through consultancy, business contracts and spin off companies. Virtually all institutions worldwide face considerable cost pressures as they seek to satisfy rising student demand within constrained state budgets. Unit costs per full-time student have fallen significantly from around £7,600 to £5000 in the period 1989 to 2003. Few outside higher education appreciate that the value of higher education and training exports from the combined England universities totalled £4017M in 2002, a sum which clearly demonstrates the sector’s contribution to the national economy. There is every expectation that this amount will continue to rise as our institutions continue to attract students from overseas and track and contribute to the growth of global knowledge-based economies. The Higher Education Workforce The higher education sector employs 2% (450,000 people) of the workforce in England and employment is spread across the whole country with notably large clusters in London and the South East (19% and 12% respectively) and the North West (11%). Employment opportunities within the sector have grown by 11% since 1994, in line with the general trend in England, but with marked growth in associate professional and technical jobs, such as research assistants and laboratory technicians. Despite this, academics, including lecturers and researchers, still account for half of all jobs in the sector. In terms of demographic profile, the Higher Education workforce is slightly older than the workforce in England as a whole, largely because employment demands higher entry qualifications. Significantly, 16% of the workforce is over the age of 55 compared to 12% in the population as a whole. Over the next decade replacing these retiring employees will become a major challenge for the sector, particularly in some academic/professional disciplines and in business schools. The last issue is of particular importance as academic salaries have deteriorated significantly against other bench mark occupations making it particularly difficult to recruit in such fields as law, business management, accountancy and IT where there are comparable private sector jobs. Governance, Quality and Standards Higher Educational Institutions are not public sector institutions. They are “not for profit” organizations established by a mixture of statute and acts of the Privy Council. They can be categorized into the ancient Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, universities, university colleges and specialist colleges. Higher Educational Institutions are complex organizations producing a wide range of products and services. As such, arrangements for their internal management vary, as do job titles of senior level posts and portfolios of responsibilities. All Higher Educational Institutions, however, have well founded governance mechanisms. The Council is chaired by the Chair and most of these belong to the Council of University Chairs. Most Higher Educational Institutions have a Chancellor or similar titular head. The management structure of a typical Higher Educational Institution is composed of a Vice-Chancellor or Principal with a second tier of Pro Vice-Chancellors. Increasingly universities may have Deputy Vice-Chancellors leaving the VC to focus more on external issues. With regards to their internal structure, institutions are generally organized around Faculties/Schools or subject disciplines (such as humanities or mathematics). Faculties and Schools maybe headed by a Dean who increasingly has budgetary responsibility and frequently some other cross-institutional responsibilities. Although the majority is autonomous bodies, university level institutions are subjected to regular external scrutiny in a variety of ways. The quality of their research output and teaching is reviewed periodically through a national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and the work of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). The focus is now almost entirely at the institutional level. Other professional, statutory and regulatory bodies provide forms of public assurance with respect to course accreditation and graduate entry to the professions. Observers coming to the sector for the first time are often struck by the complexity and extent of the sector’s regulatory framework. Despite this weight of scrutiny, evidence from all external sources indicates that higher education in England enjoys secure standards and is generally providing students with a cost effective, high quality experience which they have said they value. Overseas students, many of them postgraduates, make particularly favorable comparisons between the quality of their programmes in England and their experience as undergraduates in their own countries. Funding Issues An explosion in numbers of part-time students is a striking feature of Higher Education in England. The abolition of maintenance grants forces more students to combine work and study, and makes postgraduate study less feasible, because of the scarcity of funding for higher degree courses. Women are gaining more degrees than men at every level, except the PhD. This is due at least in part to the relatively greater availability of PhD research funding for the subjects favored by men, notably men scientists. The massive change in student funding has been too rapid, too fundamental, for students and their families to cope. Students from less affluent backgrounds have been hardest hit. The excessive drop-out rates from the universities most prepared to accept them indicate that the Government will not achieve its objective of Higher Education for half of all young people unless it gives students more money. The banks have lost interest in advertising student bank accounts. This suggests that students whose main income is from repayable loans are not attractive commercial propositions, and that banks are not expecting attainment of a degree to propel the average graduate into permanent employment with a high income. Complexity bedevils the present system, which is in urgent need of simplification. The expectation that undergraduates will rely on loans also fosters a functional approach to education, in that course choices are more likely to be linked to employment opportunities, and not to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Works Cited http://www.cihe-uk.com/docs/MentoringOverviewofsector0505.pdf http://www.hesa.ac.uk/ http://www.shef.ac.uk/cuc/ http://www.hefce.ac.uk/ http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reportinfo.asp?report_id=3731 Read More