Reflections on Higher Education in the US and the UK

Prof. David VandeLinde, Vice-Chancellor, Bath University, on 17 May 2001

Prof. David VandeLinde has been at Bath University for nine years, coming from Johns Hopkins University in the United States where he was Dean of Engineering. At the time of his lecture he was finishing off his term at Bath University and about to take up the same post at Warwick University. During his period of office at Bath student numbers had increased by 40%, £90 million of construction work undertaken, 150% increase in sponsored research income attained and a new campus opened up in Swindon. The University now features regularly in the top ten University league tables.

The university systems are very different indeed. In UK, all universities bar one (Buckingham) are state supported. In the US Universities are funded in very different ways: there are about half-a-dozen nationally funded institutions, e.g. the military academies; all of the states fund State Universities, e.g. University of California is very much a public institution whose employees are civil servants; the other institutions are private, Harvard, Yale, Princeton for example. If you list the 100 best universities in the world, most are in the US. If you list the 100 worst, all are in the US! The US system is a very unregulated system. Who regulates MIT for example? nobody, it lives or dies on its reputation. There is no Quality Assurance Agency; there is no Research Assessment Exercise.

Prof. VandeLinde had been in education most of his adult life. "I believe deeply in higher education. I can't think of any other organisation that impacts more, in both the short and the long run, the young people of the country, giving them the best opportunity to develop their lives, so that they can contribute to society in the coming decades, at the same time as pushing the frontiers forward, whether it be in philosophy, sociology, physics or anything, so that we can understand the world around us better, and have greater influence on it. In addition, the spin-out businesses add to the community and economic advantage."

Research and consultancy are closely associated.. All US Institutions fund their academics for either 9 or 10 months of the year. The other months' salary tends to get written in to all grants and funding contracts with other agencies. This does mean that all academics need to be entrepreneurial. A grant proposal to the US National Science Foundation would include 1/2/3 months' salary and the indirect costs over that period. The same would happen to any grant proposal to IBM or the Ford Motor Company. In the UK, consultancy is often used to augment a salary when actually doing work in a university; in the US consultancy is usually done outside the university. Commercial activities are broadly similar, though they had an earlier start in the US.

Both US and UK universities have intellectual property agreements with their staff. There is an advantage for academics in the States as there is a greater availability of venture capital. There has been a greater risk-taking aspect there, due to the success of the Boston area, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and, particularly, Silicon Valley.

The private universities have significant endowments Harvard is a special case but has endowments worth $20 bn. Most universities would have $1-2 bn and would draw down 5%, giving about $50 million per annum for expenditure. The tax laws in the UK and the US have converged and are now very similar. There is an attitude in the States where people will take a percentage off their salary and give it to a trust or endowment with the attitude - "Well the government aren't going to get their hands on that!" Johns Hopkins raises about $300 million a year in charitable giving but spends $30-40 million to raise that. This is a 10:1 leverage. There are 200-250 working in the department raising funds, cultivating links etc.

Institutional autonomy is much greater in the US there is no such thing as national pay
bargaining, although many universities are unionised and they have local pay bargaining. VandeLinde found national pay bargaining a difficult concept as there is no national paymaster. Terms and conditions of service between the countries are not greatly different, the biggest difference being the 9/10-month contract aspect. Anyone can start up a university although the diplomas written will only have worth according to the standing of the university. Degree awarding powers are similar, though there are accrediting bodies who come around every ten years or so. There are regional accrediting organisations, East Coast, middle states, and West Coast, which operate, in a similar fashion to the Engineering Institutions' accrediting courses here. What happens in the UK is probably on balance more rigorous and better than what happens in the States.

Vision and mission of US universities are more diversified than in the UK. When Britain had Universities and Polytechnics there was more diversity. Nowadays, all UK universities seem to have the same kind of mission. In the US, State Universities have to admit anyone who gets the right grades; in the UK this would translate as having to admit everyone who obtained three `Cs' at A level. The US has Colleges that only offer first degrees; some are scientifically based; some are liberal arts based. Admission policies for some colleges are quite strict, like Swafamore College, which is about as difficult to get into as Harvard.

Strategic planning is very much the same in both systems but US state universities are subject to the whims of state legislatures, which can raise or lower budgets probably more capricious than whatever HEFCE or the DFEE do. Interstate migration of students is sometimes used where vice-chancellors try to pressurise state legislatures into increasing funding. That is absent here so far, but the situation with Scotland could turn out similar. There appears, in Britain, to be a growing movement where the regions are more interested in their own universities, which is a positive development.

Accountability is a global phenomenon today. Twenty years ago in the UK the government handed out the money and assumed the universities did a good job, and the same was true in the US, although financial audits were carried out. The Research Assessment Exercise in the UK has been very good but has had some perverse side effects. People have been pushed to publish more papers and more frequent papers rather than publish the more seminal paper. As far as teaching is concerned, ask any academic and they will tell you that the most hated organisation in the country is the Quality Assurance Agency. The reason for this is that it requires an enormous amount of work and, what it actually tests (how well you keep records) is not what it purports to test (how well you teach). Currently there is a lot of pressure to change the system. At the moment, Inspectors come into the universities and look at it `sideways' at each one of the academic units. They should come in and look at university systems from the top to make sure they check quality, and then do sampling and spot checking to make sure the systems are actually implemented. With the current system, the University of Bath improved its record keeping and so achieved the highest TQA scores of any university in the United Kingdom. All the recent marks have been 23/24 out of 25.

A few years ago neither UK nor US universities paid much attention to ethics. For students the problem of plagiarisation has taken on a new dimension with the World Wide Web. Fortunately, universities too have search engines capable of monitoring this eventuality! Research ethics have changed dramatically over recent years. There have been some flagship cases both in the US and the UK of bad practice in research ethics. There are now ethics committees, which look at what sort of research should be done, e.g. tobacco. Nottingham took a large gift from a tobacco company to set up a chair in the business school in ethics. Is it the source of the money or what the money is going to be spent on that is problematic? With research there is often a conflict between ethics and academic freedom.

League tables brings out the fact that most people, in Europe anyway, don't realise that the "Ivy League" is an athletics conference, it is not a group of US Universities that are seen to be good. There are some of the best universities in the Ivy League and there are some mediocre ones. The Ivy League is only in the north east because people play sports regionally so Stanford or Cal Tech could never be in the Ivy League. The UK has many rankings: The Financial Times, The Times and The Telegraph all produce tables. They are not very sophisticated at present and the standard error is probably plus or minus five places. People living in the Avon Valley often do not realise how unique it is, outside London, to have two universities in the top ten within a dozen miles of each other.

One aspect of UK higher education that Prof. VandeLinde did not like was degree classification, and he thought that most UK vice-chancellors were of the same opinion. The decisions taken by the examination board is going to affect the graduates for the rest of their lives. Postgraduate funding bodies will usually only fund a student who has obtained a first or upper second. There is very little calibration from university to university today. The degree classification probably doesn't mean anything unless you know which university it came from. It is an unnecessary burden to put on the academics and students. Benchmarking is another feature that is coming to the fore and this stifles innovation and

it is to be hoped it goes away.

The single biggest difference between the two systems is that the US system is much more liberal in its approach and the UK system is much more vocational. In Bath the Biology Department for example put forward a four-year Masters programme in biology. Every single course on that programme, bar two, was a biology course. But, five years on, only fifty percent will be employed using their biology. Is it really right to take fours years out of a young person's life and disappear in the biology department and never see any other part of the university? In engineering a similar situation exists, largely pushed onto the departments by the professional bodies. In the US it is much more common for courses to require half a year to be taught in different departments, by their staff, engineers for example would be required to take half a year in the humanities or social sciences.

In patterns of study the UK, historically, used to have no continuous assessment but final exams at the end of the year, and particularly at the end of the programme. The US always worked on a semester system with exams at the end of each semester and, except the best universities, no exam at the end of the course.

The best way in Prof. VandeLinde's view was to have continuous assessment; to grade each module independently; and then to have a final examination for the course, and to weight these two marks together. The continuous assessment enables the student to have feedback, so they can see how they are doing, and makes sure that no single result is life-threatening. Final examinations make sure that the student has actually become a graduate.

Robert Draper