Whose Degree Is It Anyway? Why, How, and Where Universities Are Failing Our Students (review)

This book presents an analysis of the current state of U.K. higher education from the perspective of a long-serving academic who has witnessed radical change in the management of and the values in this sector during the past 20 years.

The changes in U.K. higher education in recent decades are too numerous to list, but the essential fact for anyone outside the United Kingdom to grasp is that, despite much-touted independence at the operational level, U.K. universities, with one exception, are really part of a nationalised industry. In their various guises—ancient, established, and modern—all are directly funded through the Higher Education Funding Council in England or its equivalent in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

While the government does not directly control U.K. universities, it has considerable influence through its ability to set targets and provide related funding. Such targets include that 50% of school leavers (the equivalent of high school graduates) should go to university and that universities should no longer be the preserve of the children of the professional classes. In addition, and more related to the funding streams which either trickle or flow—depending on your perspective—into U.K. universities, is the highly developed “qualitocracy” that probes, inspects, and scores universities on the basis of their teaching and research. The neo-Stalinist metaphor is commonly extended so that the “qualitocracy” is operated by the “qualitburo” and those of us at the receiving end consider ourselves to be the “qualitariat.”

All of these factors, plus others, are explored in Naylor’s two-part book: Part 1: “Raising the Curtain on the Realities of Higher Education,” and Part 2: “The Questions That Need Answering.” The book is written with potential students and their parents in mind. Part 1 covers some of the manifestations of the U.K. government’s approach to higher education and to some of the issues that have reached the headlines in recent years.

It must be said that the “goings on” of U.K. universities rarely reach the news headlines; but one recent case, of an excellent state school student being denied a place at one of our ancient universities (“Oxbridge,” which is the collective noun for Oxford and Cambridge) and subsequently being offered a place and a scholarship at an Ivy League university in the United States turned the spotlight on the admissions system of U.K. universities. In point of fact, according to Naylor’s interesting analysis, it is very hard to prove systematic bias against state school students as too many variables have to be taken into account. For example, especially where interviews form part of the process, are independent school students just better prepared for interviews than state school students or, due to the selection processes that operate for the entry of children into independent schools, are these students, on average, cleverer?

Other issues explored in Part 1 include assessing the quality of teaching and research and the effect such assessments have, through the generation of league tables, on the fortunes of schools and departments. The problem with league tables is that, at the institutional level, they are composite; they are made up of the scores of different departments and a student choosing to go to a top-rated university to study humanities may not realise that the chosen university’s place in the league table is due to its excellence in engineering.

Students and their parents are not stupid, of course, and they can inspect league table scores for individual disciplines and schools. However, the score most often used to place departments in a league table relative to departments in other universities is usually its research rating. Naylor worries that excellence in research may not equate to excellence in teaching and even argues that the relationship between teaching quality and research quality may be reciprocal.

Naylor is...