A LIVERPOOL academic has branded comparisons of university degrees as “meaningless”.
Roger Brown, professor of higher education policy at Liverpool Hope, made his assessment in a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute.
Prof Brown said it was more important to ensure that all graduates reached a minimum standard – stressing that differences in degree standards at different institutions were almost “inevitable”.
And, in a frank assessment of higher education, he uses his report to warn that, at a time when universities are facing severe budget cuts, standards are at risk of dropping.
In his report, Prof Brown argues that, in the past, only a small proportion of people went to university, most of whom were from the same background with similar abilities.
And because degree courses were also more uniform, it could have been a “reasonable expectation” that courses could be compared. But, with more than half of young people going into higher education and from different backgrounds, he warned: “It makes little sense to seek comparability of outcomes, and indeed it would actually be wrong to do so.
“Given the extraordinarily high previous educational attainment of students attending, say, Oxford or Cambridge, the substantially greater resources devoted to them, the greater intensity of study that they undergo, and other factors, it would in fact be a surprise if the outcomes of students from those universities were no higher than those of students from other universities who have far lower prior attainment, resources devoted to them, and so on.”
“There are almost inevitably differences in the standard of outcomes of different universities.”
Attacking annual university league tables, he added: “It is meaningless to have a league table with Oxford at the top and some wretched university at the bottom, because they are totally different. It doesn’t tell you anything.”
But he acknowledged that, in a time of funding cuts, he said the sector must make sure that every degree provided a certain standard of value for money,.
Prof Brown said: “Standards are at risk” and called for the universities watchdog, the Quality Assurance Agency, to shift its attention “to the question of maintaining standards”.
Prof Brown’s verdict comes months after the university backed union calls to scrap the Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) used to formulate controversial performance tables.
Rather than testing every 11-year-old, the university’s Dean of Education, Prof Bart McGettrick, has advocated taking a 5% sample of a cross-section of pupils from different backgrounds – either on a school or geographical basis.
