POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH IN ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Vice-Chancellor, University of Manchester
May I exculpate myself straight away from one thing that Jennifer said: that I have tried to make sense of current policies. I don't think anyone can make sense of current policies and I would not want you to hold that against me! As I said to the recent combined trade union rally in Manchester, the only thing more worrying than present Government policies is the absence of any clear alternative policies from any likely alternative Government. So, to start on a fairly gloomy note, I think that reality conditions the scene in which we find ourselves. There is however one very good piece of news, which is that in the present discussions with Dearing and elsewhere, as on previous occasions, you should not underestimate the wholehearted support that colleagues in Humanities receive from colleagues in Science, Medicine, Engineering and so on. I have worked at senior levels now for fifteen or sixteen years. Whenever there has been financial pressure, whatever might happen locally, my experience has been that our most senior colleagues have never failed to understand the needs of the Humanities and the obligation on the scholarly community as a whole to make sure that Humanities do not get less than their fair share of the inadequate funds available. And another note before I begin: I hope there will be time during questions afterwards to consider the issue of a Humanities Research Council, which is back on Dearing's agenda.
I want to talk rather briefly about my Report in general, because we are now virtually at the end of the consultation period and I know fairly clearly what is going to happen. One thing about chairing any national review is that the group that writes the review has no role whatever in the subsequent consultation period. Lots of people have written to me and said would I seek to achieve this, or modify that. The day you hand in the report your role is finished. Other people carry out consultation exercises and the decisions, which are now imminent, will be made by CVCP and SCOP on the one hand and Funding Councils on the other. I think they will be made next month.
The review was set up for two purposes. Essentially, it was to look at one or two funding questions. I am not going to talk about those today, except for one. But it soon became clear that the fundamental issues in postgraduate education in the Humanities areas, as in others, are to ensure that the student's experience tallies with what he or she is looking for, that it is of appropriate quality, and that appropriate safeguards are in place both for students and for colleagues. Colleagues are, for example, entitled to believe that the student has reasonable rather than unreasonable expectations of what a particular postgraduate programme is offering, so that chances of a successful outcome are maximised.
The funding point I will mention — because it was rather misunderstood by one or two of my Vice-Chancellor colleagues, and produced a brief flurry of correspondence in the THES — was that there has been a very rapid increase in the number of taught Masters courses in this country, in various guises, over the last few years, and that that growth has been almost entirely unfunded. Unless you are running a taught Masters where every penny of the cost is being borne by fees paid by students, then the funding for those courses comes from elsewhere. Bear in mind that every one of us in this room has argued — and will continue to argue — that the unit of resource for undergraduates is inadequate and is falling, that we tell Government every year that it is not giving us enough for undergraduates, that a 3% 'efficiency gain' is intolerable and that we cannot teach undergraduates properly at the current level of resource. Yet simultaneously the sector is taking more and more wholly unfunded postgraduate students, not compelled to by anybody — not even asked to by anybody, except ourselves, and maybe by our institution's short-term policy objectives. That circumstance was driving down the unit of resource for undergraduates faster than any act of Government policy. So, playing an unusual role, the Funding Council asked us to consider whether it should ask universities to stop further undermining our own units of resource. The Funding Council could, clearly, cap us — that is, forbid us to take any extra home taught postgraduate students. That represents a huge part of the constituency, given that 80% of postgraduate students are on taught Masters courses. The research group, which I will come to in a moment, are a minority and are heavily concentrated in a relatively small number of universities. Taught Masters are spread right across the system, and in every city I looked at, the new university has substantially more than, often double, the number to be found in the nearest old university. So this represents a very interesting and different distribution of student numbers.
So we were invited in effect to recommend capping. We did not do so, as you know, despite the bizarre misunderstanding in the THES, because that would wholly constrain institutions' own missions and would prevent them from using opportunities, from developing taught Masters as part of a build-up to meet local needs or, in some cases, to attract more PhD students, or whatever. And also I believe passionately, very conservatively, that institutions should have as much autonomy as possible. So what our recommendation actually says is that institutions must decide how many taught postgraduates they admit, and that the financial consequences of that decision shall fall wholly on the institution itself. In other words, local decision-making carries with it local responsibility. What was happening before was that certain universities were massively expanding their taught Masters courses. That was pushing down each year the average unit of resource, which was then passed back to the whole of the sector. So it was not open to any institution to maintain its unit of resource by not recruiting, because other institutions were recruiting, and over the system as a whole that was reducing substantially the resources available for each student. So what we said was a compromise, which no one has criticised (once they have read it properly): that the Funding Council's resource for taught Masters should be fixed, probably from next year on, with a minimum number of taught Masters students that a university needs to admit; that is, the minimum number will be the funded number for, say, this year. After that, universities can recruit more if they wish but their total money from the Funding Council will not change, and therefore the unit of resource in that particular connection will not change either. That means you have two ways of recruiting extra postgraduates if you want to (and if you don't want to, you don't have to). One way will be to charge fees. Universities are charging up to £17k a year for 1-year taught Masters courses and as little as a few pounds, especially for part-timers — that is a local decision. Or you can continue to cross-subsidise from your undergraduate tuition. But that is your decision, and the effect falls only on your institution. That seemed to us to combine the maximum of local freedom with the minimum scope for the University of X's decisions to affect adversely the University of Y. It gives a university the chance to stabilise its postgraduate numbers, if it wishes to do so on academic grounds, without knowing that it will still be caught on a financial treadmill because other institutions have not reached the same decision. I am satisified that that was a reasonable recommendation, and I have seen, as I say, no significant criticism.
Within a month of our being set up, it was clear that three-quarters of our time would be spent on quality and on standards, in the broadest sense. I will start by focusing on quality for students, and quality of provision. Firstly, there was the question of students' unclear understanding of the kinds of courses that were on offer. In only a handful of cases has that unclarity arisen through deliberate intent by institutions to mislead. That is a press canard, as so often. What is crucial is that the word 'postgraduate' is a polyvalent term. It means both postgraduate in time and postgraduate in level — and some people have failed to understand this. The huge variety of taught postgraduate provision varies widely in level, but it is all postgraduate in time: that is, everybody on course has either done a Bachelor's degree or has experiential learning of a comparable standard. So to use the example that we use in our report, which is particularly clear: there are courses called MSc in Information Technology, or slight variations on that, which are either for people who got First Class Honours degrees in Computer Science in a first-class university, or for people who have never seen a word-processor in their life but on graduation decide that their employability will be enhanced if they have some basic IT skills. A student, particularly an overseas student, is entitled to know with crystal clarity which of these courses is suitable for him or her. Our report does not suggest that either of them does not have a place in a rich and wide postgraduate sector. They clearly do, and it is clear that students want them, but what we said was that each postgraduate offering needed to be described. Whatever other publicity material we write in our prospectuses, there has to be a box that indicates in terms of a limited set of parameters the expectations the course has of the student before entry, the level aimed at on graduation, the course length (though that is increasingly less relevant), its credit value for universities that are now in some sort of credit transfer scheme (the majority), the proportion that is based on personal research, and so on. We suggested specific parameters: others will amplify them as the Report is taken forward. All these things, which are fairly objective, need to be specified so that a student, and above all an overseas student, can choose a course appropriate for his or her needs. There are significant numbers of mismatches at the present time; as I say, not through malevolence but very often because of inadequate reading by the student of not always very full material. In some sense, that is the student's responsibility, but people are often recruited at rather short notice in rather hectic recruitment fairs, so we need to have very clear specifications. I think that recommendation is very likely to be fully endorsed, and then the detailed work will have to be done.
More controversial, and not likely to be fully acceptable, was the hope that maybe we could standardise nomenclature as well. We were not naive enough to believe we could do that fully and we had a long debate about postgraduate diplomas. When I graduated, there was a clear distinction between a postgraduate diploma and a Masters. One was almost always a wholly taught course. The other may or may not have had a taught element but certainly had a significant dissertation element as well, and an individual External Examiner. In an ideal world, one of those two MScs that I described to you would be called a postgraduate diploma, and everyone here will acknowledge that. What was put to us very forcefully was the need for worldwide competitiveness, the existence of worldwide marketplace pressures, and the fact that that particular battle is lost. Throughout the world, students who have Bachelor's degree expect their next year's qualification to be called an M-something. We would be disadvantaging ourselves with regard to the whole sector — Australia, Canada, South Africa, all the big anglophone quality systems — if we were to seek to insist that all the postgraduate years which did not involve personal research were called postgraduate diplomas. I regret that, but Realpolitik suggests that the advice we got was right.
So what I am hoping will be accepted now, in England (a slightly different nomenclature might, of course, be appropriate in Scotland; this is not a problem), is that we should reserve a very small number of generic names for those Masters programmes that consist of 50% or more personal research — say (to be radical!) MA and MSc, and maybe MSocSci. All the other Year 4s should have Masters with quite specific labels that are not MA or MSc or MSocSci. That fits in well with the 4th year in many science and engineering courses, where the battle is already lost, and you find MChem, MEng, MPhys, MMath. Let us take, for instance, a Languages example. An MA in French would mean, as it always has, a course lasting 9 or probably 12 months in which there might be a taught element but at least 50% or more of the assessment would be based on a personal piece of work. You might also have an intensive postgraduate French language course that would have been a postgraduate diploma but might now be called an MFr or MFrLang. There is a clear difference in this analysis between someone who gets an MSc in Accounting, which will be a personal research degree, and someone who gets an MAcc, who might be someone who read Economics, wished they'd read Accounting, and then wanted to do a one-year conversion course, perhaps similar to the final year of a different undergraduate programme (e.g. in Accounting). I think that is the nearest we shall get to sensible nomenclature, and it won't be universal — one or two things like Oxford MAs are not going to change . . . .
Many of our colleagues, in many universities, would want the description and the labelling tied into credit accumulation and transfer value. I think that is likely to be recommended. It clearly won't be required, because you have to look at the reality of the situation. Some universities have not gone down that road, and at least a few never will.
In short, then: I think that over the next eighteen months the sector will move completely to the provision of accurate descriptions, and as far as it can to a more consistent nomenclature, and I think that the descriptions will become part of what is audited by the visits by the new single-quality agency. You will have noticed that we have not suggested any more quality bodies, any more visits, any of those things that irritate you as much as they irritate me. What we have said is that under the new arrangements (under which the assessors come only every eight years, which means that if you get a poorish teaching quality assessment it will be eight years before you can put it right — I have all sorts of reservations about that) any department which claims to have significant postgraduate work will be assessed at the same time, but separately, on its postgraduate activities. I think all of us here recognise that you could have a department that was first class in its treatment of undergraduates but less so with its postgraduates, and vice versa.
The last area I want to address today is postgraduate research, where there was some controversy which I think has now died away. Firstly, the need for accurate descriptions extends also to MPhils and PhDs — the battle for which is not lost, and I think we can save those descriptors. The reason there is a problem is that we got a lot of letters from all over the world, and quite a lot of them focused on alleged deficiencies in British PhDs. The major complaint related to a non-problem, or at least one that is easily solved. There are many overseas governments and scholarship funding agencies that want a taught doctorate. These sent their students for British PhDs and then complained when they didn't get a taught doctorate. Brazil especially produced many complaints, based on a clear misunderstanding of what a British PhD is, particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences, but to some considerable extent also in the other disciplines. We have recommended strongly that the name PhD be reserved for programmes where, though there is increasingly a taught element at the beginning to introduce research skills and training, the overwhelming majority of the assessment is based on a piece of personal research (done over 2 years for an MPhil or 3/4 years for a PhD). Another track ('taught doctorates') would then be open for some disciplines to develop — probably few in the Humanities, so I won't dwell on this today, but those of you engaged in managing institutions at another level may think this is an important point. There is a demand both at home and overseas for people to pursue a genuinely advanced professional project culminating in a piece of work that is not personal research in the PhD sense. It might, for example, be a full-scale analysis of a professional problem they are facing, or a comparative analysis of two or more ways of tackling a particular set of managerial or professional issues. Head teachers, for example, might want to write about how they manage their school in a professional framework, or in comparison with another school. Provided the levels and standards are appropriately specified, I have no difficulty in saying that alongside but quite separate from PhDs there could be 3- or 4-year professional doctorates in professional disciplines where there is clearly a demand, and where appropriate criteria can be met. That probably would not apply much in the Humanities, but certainly might in some of the Social Sciences.
There is a substantial overseas market for universities that run high-quality professional doctorates in certain disciplines, so that those students who currently have to go to America for them can come to Britain if they choose. There is an opportunity there.
We then said that whereas it was proper, given reasonable safeguards, proper prospectuses and proper descriptions, for recruitment of undergraduates and taught postgraduates to be handled in a variety of ways, including overseas recruitment fairs, we were most anxious to find that some universities recruit PhDs at such fairs, in twenty minutes, through administrators who, though highly professional in their own areas, cannot really know whether the student is capable of or suitable for a particular PhD programme. Equally seriously, they cannot know whether their institution has the resources, human and otherwise, to carry out the supervision of that student effectively. There have also been incidents — and some of these were justifed complaints — where certain conditions attaching to such programmes were not fully spelled out in that recruitment process: in particular, the type of additional courses a student might need to take (in, for instance, English language) and the total cost of his or her programme (including any English language tutition, any bench fees, and so on). Our recommendation is absolutely clear: that students should not be admitted to research programmes without the clearest possible understanding of what the student wants to do, in broad terms, and is capable of doing; and conversely, that the university specifies that it has the library or laboratory facilities appropriate for that particular topic, that it has the supervisor, and that it has ready appropriate alternative arrangements if that supervisor falls ill, leaves or whatever. Those recommendations are likely to be fully accepted. Of course, we all know of extreme cases, in the Humanities more than anywhere else, where there is only one supervisor or one archive collection in the field of research, and all these rules will have to be applied with commonsense. But in general, it is the Department that must take responsibility for admitting a student, and has then a clear obligation to the student — provided that he or she fulfils her part of the bargain — to get that student through to a PhD. The fact that the supervisor leaves, for example, and washes his or her hands of the student, is simply not acceptable. There were one or two instances of that.
The most controversial of our recommendations concerned the question of where the Funding Council should put its money in respect of the Quality Research sums that relate to postgraduate research students. You will recall that all postgraduate students are funded through the teaching model, subject to the capping arrangements that I mentioned just now, and that research students are also funded through the Quality Research stream of the research funding part of the model. Nothing that we have said affects the great majority of the funding of taught postgraduates — except that if you choose to take any more students now you will not get more money until such time as generous public funding returns. But in respect of research we were put under two conflicting pressures, and our recommendation was a compromise. And like most compromises done in haste it doesn't entirely work.
We said that postgraduate research money should only go to departments graded 3 or more. That would have meant £2.4 million (a small sum, but the principle is important) would have been taken from departments that had PhD students and were graded 2. There is no money of any kind for departments graded 1, so they are not relevant here. That satisfied nobody, for two opposite reasons. The big sciences said it was a weak recommendation and money should only go to departments above grade 3. (If I can caricature: we had letters saying postgraduate research money in science should only be in grade 4 departments, only in grade 5s, only in starred 5s, or only in UCL!) Conversely, in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the view was taken (I think rightly, and I discussed it with the British Academy three or four weeks ago), that what is important is a high-quality supervisor and access to appropriate research facilites, which may be in next-door institutions. In Manchester, we practise such sharing, and all good supervisors can arrange access for their students to the John Rylands Library. So what I hope the Funding Council will do (this must be their recommendation, not mine) is say that a broad cut-off at grade 3 has no relevance, and any decision should be based on the presence of appropriate supervision and appropriate equipment resources. If these are not available (as they won't be in, say, Astronomy except in two or three universities), then that should justify the limitation on funding studentships in that area.
I think that's right; but I also think the discussion will pale into insignificance, because the real issue must be how much research money there will be for grade 2 departments at all. I should end by pointing up that issue, because you ought to have a view on it. The Scottish Funding Council has said publicly that under no circumstances will the money given to grade 5 departments fall, whatever the outcome of this exercise. Now remember what happened last time. In 1992, institutions like LSE, which had had all 5-graded departments in 1989 and kept them all in 1992, lost money quite significantly. If you have a capped sum of money and there is grade drift, then anyone who consistently scores 5 will go down. The only way to offset that is to have more and more research-active staff. In 1992, John Ashworth and others became very vocal. In the British system, you never get anywhere in the short run but people do hear you; and it is interesting that the Scottish Funding Council has said that this time there will be no drop in funding for grade 5 departments. If you note that two things have happened, one, that many departments have genuinely got better, because people have worked very hard in the last few years (grade drift), and two, there is a fixed sum of money to distribute, and you decide that the really good departments must not get less, then the consequences are clear. The English Funding Council have not said this publicly, but they are under the same pressures. The money to maintain those 5-graded departments has to come from elsewhere. I assume that is why the 3a/3b division was put in, to give the Funding Council flexibility in the light of the out-turn. My information is that the drift has been about a third of a grade on the results submitted by last week. That must mean a lot of pressure on departments rated 2 and 3b if you intend to sustain the funding for 5s — let alone fund starred depts higher. That is another policy decision that has not been taken.