Education vs. transferable skills

In recent years it has become standard practice in most UK university courses to emphasise the 'transferable skills' that our students are supposed to gain by studying for their degrees. The term 'transferable skills' seems to mean a diverse range of skills that will supposedly be useful to the students when they seek employment in the job market, and includes such things as: presentation skills; the ability to develop and sustain an argument in an essay; facility in the use of standard IT tools; quantitative skills at an approriate level; and various other things. I've always been a bit sceptical about the merits of highlighting such skills, for two key reasons:

(a) I usually have no idea what career any given student might wish to pursue, and hence cannot judge what particular 'skills' might prove useful to him or her. And in any case, students who do have a fair idea what they wish to do (or who have sought advice from the Careers Service), will be able to work out for themselves what 'skills' they need to acquire - and they are the ones who surely have the incentives to make sure they learn what they need. It seems to me that students should be treated as young adults, and that we should refrain from spoon-feeding them material we think ought to be useful to them - for how can we know?

(b) More importantly, I hold the old-fashioned view that universities are fundamentally about educating people, not really about the inculcation of generic 'skills'. By education, here, what I mean is in part the transmission of an established, and often still evolving body of knowledge in a given subject area or discipline; and in part, encouraging critical and analytical thinking about that body of knowledge. This is a difficult, challenging and frequently exciting task, especially when students come up with unexpected questions that lead to novel lines of argument, or when you (the teacher) realise in the middle of a lecture that a supposedly standard argument is actually not quite right - as I have sometimes experienced.

Not long ago, when I was culling and binning lots of old material in preparation for moving office, I found myself thinking again about this issue of education vs. skills. For I came across some of my old lecture notes from the early 1980s. They were hand-written - no word processors then, and I had evidently not chosen to have them typed up by the departmental office. More interestingly, while they were obviously a bit dated, they were entirely about economics. There was not a word about skills, transferable or otherwise, nor even anything about course or lecture objectives, nor statements about what wonderful new things the students would be able to do after following my course. Yet despite these shocking lacunae, I thought they were pretty good lecture notes - they stood the test of time surprisingly well.

This made me think that a lot of what goes into our teaching material these days - almost everything except the core academic content, in fact - is not there because it necessarily makes our teaching better than it used to be, but more often it is there to tick the boxes of the various teaching appraisals to which our universities are increasingly subject. So called transferable skills are thus part of the game we play with those who evaluate our teaching, and I remain quite sceptical of their benefits for our students.

Just to be clear, by the way, I should add here that I am not against skills in general. But to a large extent, it does seem to me that the skills we teach through our courses are mostly quite low-level skills that anyone with the right incentives could learn for themselves quite rapidly as and when they needed to do so. I think a university education should transmit high-level skills such as flexibility and adaptability in the workplace; the ability and willingness to learn new things; and initiative and independence. These are surely far more important for people throughout their lives, whatever they end up doing.

How many people should go to university?

Now that a new government is about to take office (though we don't yet know its exact shape), it seems a good moment to think about this question, since for at least the last decade it has been government policy to aim for 50% of the relevant age group going to university (or other higher education). In Scotland, university participation has exceeded this target for some years, while in England and Wales participation has been in the low 40s percent. How far does this make sense, should there be a target at all, and if so what should it be?

There are two arguments for going to university. The first is the personal one, namely that it is a wonderful, life-changing experience, during which students mature - they learn (we hope!), they change, they discover and develop their abilities and talents. And they do all this in a setting that offers tremendous freedom, tremendous opportunities (and risks), and lots of independence.

The second argument is more practical and mundane, namely the claim that the job market needs more and more graduates, and that an important task for the universities is to help the country satisfy that evolving labour market demand. Part of the argument here is the observation that the structure of the labour market is changing: away from agriculture and industry towards ever more complex services; from low skilled to higher skilled occupations; from manual work towards more intellectual work. The changes are actually quite complex, and are not always as dramatic as the popular media would have us believe - thus there are still lots of manual jobs needing to be done. The evolving situation in the job market is often summed up in the phrase 'the knowledge economy', though our understanding of what this means is itself also constantly evolving!

For individuals, one of the signals that the economy needs more graduates is the job-market premium such jobs offer. One can debate how to measure the rate of return on a university education, and the result depends on the course that is studied and a variety of other factors - but on average, gaining a degree does enhance lifetime earnings quite markedly. On the other hand, this calculation does not imply that all graduates will do well financially. Some take jobs that were not previously thought to require a degree-level qualification - so they get the personal benefit from going to university, but society doesn't get the putative economic benefit.

None of the above implies that the target of 50% participation by young people in higher education is the right one, though it pretty certainly implies that the country needs many more graduates than it was getting 20 or 30 years ago, when participation was still not much above 15% of the relevant age group. So to help us think about more clearly about participation rates, what questions should we be asking? Here are three questions:

1. How many graduates at various levels does the economy actually need, both now, and with some probability in the next 5-10 years? (This is an attempt to pin down some concrete projections about how the labour market is really behaving, rather than continuing with vague statements about 'national needs').

2. What proportion of young people can truly benefit from a university education?

3. What scale of university system can the country afford, and how should it be financed?

The questions are inter-related, of course, and raise a whole lot of other issues to do with 'access to university' (an aspect of question 2), views about the job market, priorities in public spending (linked to question 3), and many other things - to be discussed in future postings. My own provisional view is that to aim for 50% participation is probably too ambitious, both in terms of how many people can benefit (Q2) and in terms of what we can (or are willing to) afford (Q3). Hence if I set a target at all I would set one rather lower than 50% of the age group.

It will be interesting to see what view our new government takes about all this, especially as higher education was hardly mentioned in the election campaign, and only figures quite briefly in the various manifestos (see the first posting in this blog).

Metrics and research impact

When the Research Excellence Framework (REF) was put forward as the new approach to assessing research in UK universities (replacing the RAE), it was widely claimed that it would offer several advantages over its predecessor, most notably:

• it would be a less costly system to run;
• it would measure the volume and quality of research better than before by making extensive use of metrics; and
• it would find ways of evaluating the impact of research carried out during the assessment period.

In this note, I consider each of these in turn.

Cost of the exercise

So how costly is costly? I have seen estimates produced by HEFCE and others suggesting that the former Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) cost around 1% of the funds eventually allocated as a result of the exercise (namely the QR funding stream discussed in an earlier post). To this one might want to add another 1-2%, perhaps, to allow for the costs incurred by individual institutions in preparing their submissions, and other institutional costs. This gives 2%, possibly as much as 3% of the research funds allocated using the RAE. Not a trivial sum, but not terrible either, especially when one compares it with the reported costs incurred by the ESRC and other research funders when they allocate responsive-mode research funding by evaluating individual research project proposals. The costs involved here are apparently around 20% of the research funds actually paid out. Two conclusions follow:

(a) The RAE wasn't all that costly, so it is quite hard to believe that saving money was a key reason for shifting to the new REF;

(b) If we really are worried about the costs of allocating research money, there should be more concern about the responsive mode as it is a lot more costly; and it would be far more so if evaluators and reviewers were actually paid for what they do.

Measuring research using metrics

As originally understood, 'metrics' in the REF referred to some of the more widely used citation indexes, and databases that logged publications in a wide range of outlets, supplemented by measures of journal quality and impact. The hope was that using such publicly available resources would save on costs by making it less necessary for institutions/units of assessment to assemble all their output data for themselves. On closer investigation, this approach turned out to be less appealing than initially thought. For even in the sciences and engineering, publications coverage was incomplete and in the arts and humanities the general picture was pretty hopeless. Citations, too, were incomplete, and reflected very much the different research practices of different disciplines. The situation might evolve, of course, but for now it seems that in many subject areas these fancy new tools might only be usable as supplements to what was already being done. Moreover, it quickly became evident that once metrics of some sort were agreed, they could give rise to lots of undesirable game playing, such as colleagues citing each other multiple times. If such distortions were thought to be widespread, the whole approach could be discredited (after all, people do respond to incentives!).

Research impact

The latest idea, quite a silly one in my view, is that we should pay a lot of attention to the 'impact' of our research - and hence look for ways of measuring and evaluating this impact. Impact on what, one might ask. Fundamentally, I suppose, we ought to be interested in the impact on 'knowledge', hard though that would be to judge. In my own area of the social sciences, we are supposed to think about the 'impact on society', and more specifically, in economics, 'impact on the economy', and sometimes even 'impact on UK exports' (yes, seriously!). This is such a ridiculous idea that I find it hard even to discuss it seriously, but let me try, at least briefly.

First, the impact of a piece of research is something that takes time to become apparent, sometimes decades, so evaluating research impact over as short a period as 5-10 years is generally nonsense. Second, within any research group, e.g. an academic department or School, there is a normally a very wide distribution of research output, with 2 or 3 individuals often producing more than half the output of the group. Moreover, for any of these highly productive individuals, their own output will vary a good deal in quality and (potential) impact - for most good researchers are lucky if they produce more than a couple of really startling ideas in an entire career. A lot of what they do simply builds on and develops earlier ideas. Given these normal features of quality research, an insistence on measuring impact, as currently proposed, will result in a lot of artificial and trivial indicators of impact being developed. Thus we might measure the number of invited lectures a researcher gives, the number of radio broadcasts, the number of TV appearances, and so on - these are the sort of measures already collected for the old RAE, part of the 'esteem' aspect of research. But none of this gives much of a clue as to the longer term social benefit of the research concerned - but the trouble is, I'm not sure that we can often say much about that until long after the research has been done.

It would probably help if those who are keen on measuring the impact of research would try harder to explain what it is they really want to measure.