BBC Targets IIU

[Armando Ramos]

A very interesting article by John Kersey on the IIU situation, and how it relates to legitimate, independent education:

“Neither Irish, nor a university” – Some observations on the Irish International University controversy

Kersey concurs that IIU is "bogus":

Like some of its commercially-focussed American counterparts, IIU has no real academic life to it; it produces no scholarly output, undertakes no philanthropic activity, engenders no real benefit to society. Where it could, with effort and commitment, provide a determined alternative to the mainstream, it has been content to be merely a pallid and perhaps deceptive imitation of it, justifying the BBC’s “bogus” description.

He does a brilliant job explaining (for those not familiar with the controversy) how the state and its shills seek to drive the more efficient private sector out of the market.  

Today on both sides of the Atlantic there has developed a particular lobby group comprised of low-grade universities that are either owned by the state or under the direct control of accreditation agencies that are in turn controlled by the state.

The pattern goes something like this. The weaker the profile of a university is, the harder it finds it to attract students. Oxford has no problems in that regard. The former Peckham Polytechnic, on the other hand, cannot pick and choose with such ease, and it is likely that a high proportion of its intake will be from overseas, which of course carries higher fees and potentially a less demanding constituency which is seeking the supposed prestige of a British degree and does not much care which institution it is from.

As the university declines in standing, so it becomes more and more dependent on the state to allocate it funding and to assign those students for whom it would not have been a first choice. Indeed, most of these students would not be at university at all were it not subsidised by the state, which continues to advocate mass university education not for academic or humanitarian reasons, but because it reduces crime and unemployment.

The chief – indeed the only - strength of the low-grade state institution becomes ultimately that it is part of the state machinery and that its degrees are “degrees of the state”. It is these institutions that we hear pushing the line that “all state degrees are equal in standing” in the face of a disbelieving public. It is also these institutions whose graduates are frequently cited by employers as lacking basic skills and contributing to the “dumbing down” of university degrees.

The private college sector remains the hidden success story of British tertiary education, and it is a sector – unlike the mainstream of higher education – that is dominated by British entrepreneurs who are largely black or Asian in ethnicity. Dozens of institutions – the BBC reported over 60 in East London alone – operate without state subsidy and generate considerable profits through the supply of education on the open, unregulated market. Their customers are most usually overseas students who come to Britain seeking a year or more of productive study and cultural experience, aware that the “British brand” is a powerful marketing tool when they return home. They may be studying in small, undistinguished-looking premises over shopfronts and in unfashionable parts of town, but in contrast to the state universities, they can gain access to private education for considerably less money and often with fewer academic barriers to entry.

The demand areas for such institutions remain those that are most directly vocational, particularly business and information technology. Degree qualifications (especially the MBA) are highly valued, and some colleges partner with British universities to offer their awards. The smaller colleges, however, generally find that the fees demanded by the British institutions to franchise their degree programmes are unsustainable, and also that the British curriculums on offer are better suited to grand campuses and taxpayer-funded facilities than to students who are looking for a direct route to the assessment of their ability and to a pared-down style of study. Often those students are being taught by tutors who are earning little more than the minimum wage, without any of the security of tenure that their cosseted public sector counterparts enjoy. This may be education on a shoestring, but it is education nonetheless, and it serves the needs of many who experience it.

Into this situation have come overseas institutions such as IIU, and a myriad other counterparts, mostly from the United States, which fill the gap by providing degree franchises at an affordable price, thus meeting market demand. Some of these institutions are decent enough, while others are dreadful. None is Harvard, but Harvard is not what this market is looking for. These institutions, by contrast, are breaking a state monopoly and creating price competition. That is why the likes of Bill Rammell have seen them as a problem.

Well, for the public sector and for government, the answer is simple. The success story of the private sector must be eliminated, and there are two ways in which this will be effected.

Firstly, new legislation will make it all but impossible for most of the private colleges to operate without slashing their profits as they seek new arrangements with British universities. That will effectively shift the odds back in favour of the public sector monopoly. Many of the private colleges will probably go out of business altogether, especially if they do not have the facilities available to meet the expectations of their British university partners.

Secondly, in the process of introducing the new legislation, it would be mightily useful to discredit private sector degree providers as much as possible so as to deter students from seeing them as a viable alternative. Why not find a particularly indifferent institution to be held up as an example? IIU certainly seems to tick all the boxes.

Of course, in all these cases, there must also be victims. Bring them forth – those who spent their life savings on courses that they now believe (or have been told by the state propaganda machine) are worthless. The correct approach of caveat emptor is rejected in favour of that of presuming that consumers are merely gullible victims and that choice in the free market is too demanding for their meagre intellects. And the question of "worthless" is moot when graduates of the vaunted state system find themselves asking whether you'd like fries with that.

So the answer...is as follows: if you want to see an end to the IIUs of this world, or at least their relegation to their proper place at the bottom of the educational food chain, there’s an easy solution. Simply stop distorting the market through reinforcing a massive and aggressive public sector monopoly on higher education and providing it at extensively subsidised rates as if three years of study at the taxpayer’s expense were some kind of automatic right for today’s youth, regardless of their aptitude for university study. In short, stop providing a mass one-size-fits-all system and start thinking smart and thinking towards individualised education solutions.

If a free market is left to develop in higher education, the good and bad will be obvious for what they are, and the good will survive at the expense of the bad, which will fail and close. Fair competition is good for innovation and development, it’s good for institutions and it’s good for the public. Higher education needs to abandon the security of the ivory tower and realise that the free market is ultimately the best and most moral way to secure its future.

The private sector in higher education is currently squeezed into the small area that the state monopoly allows it to occupy – essentially a combination of niche providers and low-level outfits such as IIU. Take away the squeeze provided by the monopoly and the private sector will expand to take over the areas presently denied to it, including those where high quality is demanded.