Universities: heading for a crisis
Starting the new academic year was never going to be easy, said Chris Stokel-Walker on Wired. But just as universities in England thought they were getting to grips with the complexities of “social distancing, sanitising and digital teaching”, along came a double-whammy. First up was A-level results day, on 13 August, when thousands of students woke up to find that they’d missed the entry requirements for their preferred undergraduate course, because Ofqual’s algorithm had lowered nearly 40% of teacher-assessed grades. Then, four days later, came Education Secretary Gavin Williamson’s “screeching U-turn”. Following Scotland’s example, he said students would be able to keep their higher, teacher-assessed grades. He also removed a cap on student numbers at English universities, so a larger cohort could be accommodated this year.
The volte-face will have come as a relief of sorts – but it also created more chaos, as students who had lost their first choice places, owing to being downgraded, scrambled to retrieve them, said Kate Devlin in The Independent. Some were lucky; others were told the place had been filled, and there was no more room on the course. There were winners and losers among universities, too. As students with raised grades decided to trade up, top universities found themselves “awash” with undergraduates: indeed, some are now so oversubscribed, they have had to ask students to defer their places. (A few, including Durham, are offering financial incentives to do so.) But, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out, this is likely to leave lower-ranking universities and less popular courses with too few students (something the cap was there to avoid) – which in these already difficult times could be “financially crippling”.
The vexed question is what happens next year, said Ross Clark in The Spectator. Next year’s A-level grades will presumably not be awarded by teacher assessment – so how will universities “choose between a deferred applicant” who may have had their grade inflated in 2020 and one who took their exams in 2021 after missing at least a term of school? Perhaps the Government will have to inflate their grades too, to make it fair. And how will universities widen access, when thanks to lost teaching in lockdown, the gap between private- and state-school pupils is likely to get ever larger? As for students, they face not only less fun, in this socially distanced era, but less contact with teaching staff, in return for their £9,250 a year tuition fees. All in all, it’s clear that a crisis in education is brewing.