Well, that was underwhelming.
Having been alerted by the Times Higher Education last Friday to expect some real insights into how to address the crisis in part-time higher education (a 40% decline in new part-time enrolments since 2010), the IPPR’s report devotes just 4 out of 156 pages (between pages 83-88) to the concerns of the 35.7% of England-resident students who study part-time in higher education.
The first of these few pages are recycled statistics and a fairly shallow analysis of material already published elsewhere. To be honest, I think that even I’ve done a better job of covering the core issues surrounding part-time study than this think-tank has managed by assembling a range of HE experts. (See here and here, for example).
Page 87 consists of its recommendations for part-time study, which (paraphrasing) are:
- We don’t understand why part-time enrolments have declined so much in the last two years, so we can’t make any concrete recommendations.
- It might be a good idea to extend loans to part-time students already holding a degree – but only for ‘strategically important’ courses. A timid suggestion, even though the report offers evidence in a footnote that part-time students across all subjects are likely to overpay their loans by 8.5%.
- We probably need to reform the whole system surrounding part-time study, but we don’t really have any ideas about how to do it. The decline in part-time study has been the “unexpected consequence” of the reforms in HE that introduced the £9,000/year tuition fee cap aimed primarily at 18-21 year olds.
Unexpected consequence? They’ve clearly never canvassed the views of Open University students, that’s for sure.
And that’s it. No wonder these recommendations on part-time study didn’t even rate a mention in the top 23 the IPPR lists on its summary page and all that the mainstream media seem to think the report is about is reintroducing polytechnics.
And as for mature students? It’s not encouraging. The phrase “lifelong learning” is used just 3 times in the entire document.
I’m so disappointed that I really can’t face reading any more of this report tonight, but I do want to have a proper look at what they’re suggesting for postgraduate HE. If anything, this is in an even more dire state than part-time study. Maybe I’ll have calmed down enough in a couple of days to read and write about it then.
But on the basis of what I’ve read so far, I’m not holding my breath. This report seems far too easy for BIS to dismiss by damning it with faint praise – which is exactly the strategy the department seems to be following at the moment.