Rankings needed in a credible education system, visiting academic says

In a modern society, an education system must rank students as well as educate them - and the jury is still out on whether NCEA will achieve the former, argues UK education policy expert Alison Wolf.

Professor Wolf, from the Management Centre at King's College, London, said if the system did not provide rankings, the players would set up their own systems to do so, and they might be less fair than a national, public one. "Getting an education is not just about learning. It's also about ranking students to give universities and the labour market some way of differentiating between them. "A qualification system can lose credibility very quickly if it does not do this, and then employers and universities will start to use other measures.

"It's not surprising that some New Zealand schools are introducing Cambridge International Examinations; and tertiary institutions may also start setting up their own entrance tests if the national system does not give them the information they need to select students."

Professor Wolf said the tertiary education system also needed to differentiate between tertiary qualifications and institutions to give them value.

An egalitarian system where institutions were not differentiated was unlikely to succeed once a society moved into a mass tertiary education system.

"We have to stop pretending that all tertiary education is the same and recognise that differentiation between universities occurs. Not all universities can be really good."

Professor Wolf suggested that was occurring in New Zealand with Auckland University well-regarded overseas and Otago's medical school seen as the country's best.

The Tertiary Education Commission's Performance Based Research Fund programme was "a way of creating differential".

Professor Wolf is the author of the controversial book Does Education Matter? (Penguin, 2002) in which she argued that a preoccupation with economic growth had narrowed and distorted society's idea of education.

Speaking to Subtext, Professor Wolf said governments wanted more people in tertiary education and were tailoring policies to that end, helping an explosion in enrolments. A result of that policy was a downward pressure on resources, a pressure to teach more students and reduced spending per-student.

Resources per-student had halved in the past 25 years in the UK and good teachers were being sucked from secondary schools to fill the increased tertiary teaching needs.

"It is very likely we will be educating more people but not as well as we used to," she said.

A sign of this was the increasing number of first-year university students in remedial literacy classes.

However, Professor Wolf said mass tertiary education systems were now a fact of life in most developed countries and this would not change. Once there was a large number in tertiary education this encouraged others, to ensure they would not miss out on the jobs they saw as only available to tertiary-educated applicants.

"There is a classic and well-recognised enrolment graph which starts off growing very slowly and then it takes off, and no politically conceivable level of fees will dissuade people from going."

Income-contingent student loans - with maintenance bursaries for very poor students - were the best way of funding tertiary education. The loan scheme had worked in New Zealand and other countries were implementing similar schemes.

Professor Wolf said it was not surprising a skills shortage arose when tertiary education was subsidised, as employers were more likely to employ students with qualifications rather than invest in apprentices.

"If the system biases choices, don't be surprised to wake up one morning and find you have a shortage of skills."

She said the situation was not remedied by the government creating training places but by it acting "like an employer" and offering incentives to get people to train in particular areas.

Alison and Martin Wolf in New Zealand

Alison Wolf visited New Zealand as a guest of the New Zealand Business Roundtable along with her husband Martin Wolf, the associate editor and chief economics commentator of the Financial Times.

The Wolfs were in New Zealand for nearly two weeks in August and September giving presentations and holding meeting with government officials and other education representatives.

A public lecture - Does Education Matter? - by Professor Wolf in Wellington on 8 September was attended by more than 100 people. She argued that if countries were less preoccupied with education for economic growth, they might get better education and more growth.

Professor Wolf also met with representatives of the Tertiary Education Commission and Workbase, the national literacy organisation.

Martin Wolf gave an address at Victoria University on 7 September tracing what he saw as the decline of the British universities from the 1960s to today. He described the mass university system as having all the ailments of a nationalised industry; an underpaid and demoralised workforce, chronic under-funding in terms of the proportion of GDP allocated to university education; and a reliance on international students to balance the books.

He also gave the NZBR's Sir Ronald Trotter Lecture for 2004 in Auckland. It was attended by more than 200 people including senior politicians and business leaders.

Resources

More information on Does Education Matter? is at this Penguin Books web page and this web page.

Alison Wolf's 8 September presentation is downloadable is as a Powerpoint document.

Martin Wolf's 7 September presentation is downloadable is as a Powerpoint document.

More information on the Sir Ronald Trotter Lecture is at this web page.