Inspectors to root out ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees

Students’ courses should lead to graduate job, says minister as universities face watchdog inquiry

EIGHT universities are under investigation by the higher education watchdog for offering poor-quality degrees.

The institutions will be subject to an inquiry by the Office for Students (OFS) which could result in fines or student loan funding being withdrawn.

It is the first time the regulator has dispatched inspectors to universities to assess the quality of courses and comes amid mounting concern that students are not getting value for money.

Degrees with high drop-out rates and low rates of graduate employment are being targeted by the OFS for scrutiny, as well as those which are substituting face-to-face learning with substandard online classes.

All the courses under investigation are business and management degrees, five of which have a drop-out rate of more than 40 per cent.

The investigation may result in these courses being barred from receiving student loan funding that would most likely render them financially unviable.

Whitehall officials are concerned at the cost to the taxpayer of the increasing number of pupils who take up a place at university but fail to earn enough to pay back their student loan.

Ministers have been particularly critical of so-called Mickey Mouse degrees that saddle students with debt but add little to their job prospects, and have previously accused universities of running “threadbare” courses in a rush to get “bums on seats”.

Michelle Donelan, the university minister, said it was “completely wrong” to think that sending more students to university will boost social mobility.

“There is a [link] between quality and social mobility. We need to ensure [students] can choose a course and it will lead them on to a good outcome. “That is real social mobility,” she said. “For too long we have got obsessed with the idea that if you get people to university that is a social mobility job done; whereas, that is completely wrong, it is lazy social mobility.

“Real social mobility is about getting them to complete their course and getting them into a graduate job that they wouldn’t have done had they not done this course.”

Ms Donelan said this was the first wave of university course inspections and more would follow in June and July.

Susan Lapworth, interim chief executive of the OFS, said that students had been through an “exceptionally” difficult time during the pandemic.

Ms Lapworth warned that while most courses have returned to normal, some universities and colleges were “selling students short”.