Sunday Posts

The UK Government's proposed Higher Education Bill, which, among other things, makes it easy for For-Profit Universities to get degree-granting status, is expected to face steep opposition at the House of Lords ( see this story ). This is a long-awaited move, and many For-Profit operators, primarily from the US who are having a terrible time at home, are looking forward to this bill. UK Higher Education has a global reputation - arguably an average UK university is better regarded globally than an average US university - and being able to grant an UK degree is indeed a big prize when mass Higher Education is expanding so rapidly in Asia and Africa. Now, one could regard the House of Lords' stance as a retrograde one, and see this as a battle of entitlements - a few privileged people, retired academics among them, fighting for their corner, but this will be a mistake. The expansion of For-Profit Universities is likely to affect UK Higher Education - its effectiveness at home a...

Yesterdays rather innocuous news that the University of Law has been bought over by the Global University Systems means more for British Higher Education than it appears. It may be the start of a wholesale transformation of British Higher Education, for good or for worse. For the uninitiated, the University of Law is one of the few private universities in the UK, and the only For-Profit one. It evolved from the College of Law, which was a Not-for-Profit entity, and which was bought over by Montagu Provate Equity, a PE fund with more than 4 Billion Euro worth of assets under management. Montagu buy-out eventually led to the transfer of University charter to a For-Profit entity after some hiccups, justifying the £200 million price tag. However, while this was one of the biggest PE deals in Education, it was also illustrative how little PE investors understand education. The valuation seemed to have solely based on the University license, which was not immediately available, but it ...

Election results are in. Tories have won, with a result better than their own dreams. They have got Vince Cable and possibly Ed Balls (who is getting a recount). Fear has triumphed over Hope. Nationalism is back - with UKIP and SNP, English and Scottish nationalists, triumphing in two different ways. Here are seven things that can happen now. 1. Scotland can leave the UK. UK Map looks like yellow top, blue bottom, more or less. The next Conservative government will have no MPs from Scotland. SNP must be smiling for more reasons than one, because it makes another referendum a possibility. 2. UK can leave Europe. David Cameron is tied to the pledge to have an In/Out referendum. The nationalism that sunk Labour this time will be alive and well. Without UK, EU will perhaps be stronger. But, for UK, as Gordon Brown wrote yesterday, that is possibly the North Korea option. 3. Immigrants can now leave the UK, as the xenophobia can now continue unabated and destroy British industries ...

Private Higher Ed in the UK, as well as Higher Education in general, took a huge hit from the last General Elections. The Coalition government, over the last five years, effectively destroyed the business model of UK Higher Ed, and replaced it with a badly thought-through model that was stillborn. On the private Higher Education side, which was largely dependent on International students, the ever-changing regulations and poor implementation were catastrophic, allowing only the very crooked and completely dishonest to survive. In a way, the last election and its aftermath demonstrated fully how politicians can damage a whole sector. Hence, with another election due next week, it is worth thinking about what this might bring. In this discussion, the policy towards International students must feature prominently. Several reasons for this. First, the Private Higher Ed in Britain was always dependent on International Students till the last government changed it and made it dependent ...

With elections seven weeks away, the UK Higher Ed community is presumably anxious. Last election marked a decisive turning point for the UK Higher Ed sector - the Cameron Government pursued twin strategies of an inadequately thought through funding reform and a plainly disastrous clampdown on student immigration - which would have long term consequences for the sector as a whole. With the UK political debate becoming more vicious and backward-looking, the UK universities, many of whom are among the best among the world, can be understandably worried. In the last five years, Higher Education has become more global, except in the UK. Now that the major parties are all united in an UKIP-inspired fear of Europe, this may turn out to be proverbial nail - and start the eventual long term decline. One could reasonably expect some lengthier, weightier reviews of the impact of David Camerons five years in office on the UK Higher Education sector coming out in the next few weeks. However, ...

Les Ebdon, the Head of the Government's Office of Fair Access (OFFA), called for Universities to look beyond the grades and admit pupils based on 'academic potential'. ( See story ) But would that solve the problem? The problem he is trying to address is a usual aspect of British life, students from 20% of the 'affluent' postcode areas are 8 times more likely to go to one of the top 24 universities in Britain than others from plainer areas; and, when everyone takes into account all universities, the lucky winners of 'postcode lottery' are still 2.5 times more likely to get an university offer. What follows is that in most of these 'good' postcodes, house prices and rent have grown significantly over the last decade (and remained sturdy through the recession) and only people with a certain wealth and income could afford to live there. Add to this the fact that almost all white collar jobs, not just the elite ones, where you went to university ma...

The recent comments by Dr Stephen Jackson, the Head of UK's Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), making the case for a different kind of regulatory power to oversee private sector Higher Education in the UK, is significant ( Read the interview here ). Apart from the basic point about the visa fraud and criminality in the education sector, it is important to recognise that the Private Sector Higher Ed is really a different 'beast', and needs special attention. Besides, the Private Sector Higher Ed in the UK is really very different from most other comparable countries, and has so far been regulated quite badly using borrowed frameworks and out of date ideas. The comments made here point to some fresh thinking, though the proposed scheme may remain extremely difficult to legislate and implement. In context, it is rather unfortunate that this conversation is happening in the context of visa fraud (see the back story here , and here ), which will focus hearts and minds along t...

The Immigration Minister, James Brokenshire, made a statement in the parliament yesterday regarding the government's response to the widespread visa fraud uncovered by BBC Panorama earlier this year. ( See post ) The measures are rather extraordinary in scope, though those who have seen the BBC Panorama programme would agree that the brazenness of the scam was mind-boggling. If anyone thought that the issue of student visas are now settled, after thousands of private colleges, bogus and legitimate, have been shut down, they have been proved wrong. Several universities, including London Metropolitan University, have been scarred by the experience ( see story here ). The aim of the government was to close down every college except the Highly Trusted ones (a category of sponsors defined by the new immigration rules) by 2012, but this has obviously failed. The fact that this issue keeps coming back indicate that a serious rethinking, rather than rhetoric, is needed.  The d...

It was a standard ministerial speech, but what Matthew Hancock, UK's Minister of Skills, said yesterday should be noted. Not that the ideas are anything new, educators like Ken Robinson has been talking about them for years, but this amounts to a Ministerial acknowledgement of some sort: That skills education needs to change fundamentally. ( See the transcript of the speech here ) The key idea that makes this speech notable is an acknowledgement that the education divide must end. Mr Hancock's point is to eliminate the divide between academic and vocational education, and the labelling that comes with it. As the credo of skills education spreads beyond Europe, this is an important message. One must acknowledge that this is a common refrain among Skills educators: They almost always complain being treated as 'Second Class Educators' by their Higher Ed colleagues. Mr Hancock, being the Minister of the department, may have only been giving voice to it. I am not claim...

Times Higher Education reports that two private colleges in London has received more money in public funding than the London School of Economics and School of Oriental and African Studies. ( See story here ) While we may argue on the merits of giving public money to private providers, as is the case in myriad public services, even the staunchest free market advocate may accept that this is perverse. One can't even argue that this is market forces at work: There is no way to explain why British students will prefer almost unknown institutions over the better known universities, except that we have managed to craft a system which has created all sorts of wrong incentives for over-recruitment. It seems that despite all the warning signals of the student loans scandals from the US, the government in England has managed to create a system and break it within barely two years. Indeed, one would argue that stories such as these is a mere case of jealousy of the public sector. But th...

The private colleges in the UK, and I am talking about the ones which are small, mostly run by owner-operators, and privately funded, have taken a terrible beating in the last couple of years. The British Government's across the board clamp down on student migration, the burden of which fell disproportionately on private colleges, made their business model disappear overnight. Some enterprising ones survived the onslaught by adapting quickly to the new student finance regime established in 2012, where the government made money follow the student and opened it up for private sector, even For-Profit, institutions.  This strategy has had some stunning successes, as the quick climb of numbers of students opting for private institutions, as opposed to a Public University, show. The success was primarily because the private colleges, leaner institutions without a mandate for public duty or unionised staff, could afford to charge the students lower fees compared to the universities....

Between May 2010 and September 2012, that's little more than two years, I took on a job which was unlike anything I did before, or will ever again do: I chose to work for a mid-sized private college, offering professional and higher education in the City of London. This was unlike anything I have done before because, at the time I joined, the college was going through massive, even traumatic, change: I was brought in as a part of that change, and spent rest of my time trying to take advantage of the change to drive more change. I shall possibly never have to do the same things again, because, private colleges in Britain, at the time, was mostly proprietary, and small businesses in terms of sophistication and strategy, but was suddenly exposed to a massive market expansion due to the growth in demand in emerging markets: This was a combination of a rather immature enterprise into a fast-growing market, not a rare event, but one that usually occurs once in a while for a given indust...

London Metropolitan University, one of the bigger and popular universities in London, had its license to recruit international students temporarily suspended on 20th July. This is a result of an audit of the university's management of its international students, reportedly carried out last March by UK Border Agency. The university has now disappeared from the UKBA's sponsors' list, despite reassurances that a follow-up audit has already been carried out, and the university would be reinstated 'next week'. The chat forums are now abuzz with students complaining, and being right in the middle of the recruitment season, this is bound to hit the university, and the international students who opted to come to it, quite hard. For UK Border Agency (UKBA), it may indeed be a case of over-reaching its mandate. Let's be clear: The rationale behind the current, tough visa regime was to weed out 'bogus colleges'. No one denies the fact that there was widespread a...