CANCELLED Talk: The New Higher Education Settlement (Keele, 20 October)

I’m afraid I’ve had to postpone this talk owing to ill health. (12 October)

The New Higher Education Settlement: Does it Add Up?

This summer’s White Paper for Higher Education, Success as a Knowledge Economy represents a new settlement for English universities and colleges.  The White Paper heralds an intervention in settled notions of institutional autonomy and academic freedom as powers will be extended to establish a market for quality.  The three-pronged justification for this reorientation is degree inflation, student dissatisfaction, and employer complaints about graduate abilities.  Lurking in the background a further dimension has become clearer – the government as investor has not seen the expected return: an increase in graduate salaries.  At the same time, the expansion of undergraduate places over the last two decades has not been accompanied by the predicted increase in British productivity, despite successive governments’ faith in the generic value of a degree in human capital terms.

In this context, the government has commissioned research into the ‘value add’ of particular degrees and institutions which will dovetail with the development of new metrics and measures for the later phases of the teaching excellence framework, including tests for generic learning gain.

This talk will outline these developments and the contours of the next decade of HE policy as it is motivated by the government’s economic and financial considerations and what the resulting new ‘financialised’ framework will mean for the sector

Date: Thursday 20 October
Time: 1-2pm
Venue: Keele Hall – The Salvin Room      Keele University

The talk is free and open to all.

More details here