A damning, and no doubt accurate, assessment; an excerpt:
Over the past 30 years, successive governments, from Thatcher to Blair, to Cameron and May, have imposed a set of perverse incentives on universities. Their effect has been to degrade and devalue the quality of British degrees. Academic standards have collapsed. In many institutions, it is the students who now educate the universities, in what grades they will tolerate and how much work they are willing to do. “We have got to protect ourselves from complaints,” says Natalie Fenton, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. “It’s an endless process of dealing with students who haven’t been able to buy the grade they wanted"....
The proportion of students getting “good honours” – a First or 2:1 – has leapt from 47 to 79 per cent: at 13 universities, more than 90 per cent of students were given at least a 2:1 last year. And Oxbridge is leading the charge: 96 to 99 per cent of its English, history and languages students get “good honours”...
For Thatcher..., universities were run as archaically as the public utilities. The academy needed to be governed by the market and measured by its metrics. “Before Thatcher, universities were… run for the benefit of staff with government money,” said Terence Kealey, a professor of biochemistry and former adviser to Thatcher, upon news of her death in 2013. “She was determined to introduce a much higher level of accountability for public funding and greater accountability for students as customers,” he recalled.
In 1985, the Thatcher government published the Jarratt Report, which stressed that “universities are first and foremost corporate enterprises”. The problem, the report argued, was “the tradition of vice-chancellors being scholars first and acting as a chairman of [an academic] senate carrying out its will”, rather than “leading it strongly”. Scholars should not run universities – business leaders must....
Why does management impel lecturers to grade up? Because universities need good grades to rank highly in league tables. First released in 1993, league tables are now the prime driver of where students apply. There are three key league tables, including those compiled by the Times and the Guardian. They all result in similar rankings, producing an analogous handful of extremely limited and obscurely calculated data points. What is clear is that grades are critical to a university’s ranking. They affect it both directly, as one of the main measures of performance, and indirectly, through a crucial survey of final-year students. Employment prospects, another major part of the rankings, are affected by grades too. Good honours are now so common that many graduate employers will not take students without at least a 2:1. Grade inflation begets grade inflation.
The data in the tables is impossible to verify or calculate independently. The Guardian’s, for example, has since 2008 been entirely constructed by one man: a contractor who also works at Kingston University. These league tables are given credibility by the newspapers that publish them, without those papers having either the desire or ability to affirm their legitimacy. They are not overseen by universities or government. There is limited academic research to verify the accuracy or relevance of any of the data in them. And yet, they direct the decisions of hundreds of thousands of students year after year.
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