EXCALIBUR
UK Universities – The Great Unsung Government CRM Success?
I’ve been having a lot of fun lately, praising people who don’t want to be praised. I’m still wondering whether I’ve wasted my breath, though. As some of the ideas of CRM spill over – perhaps “slop over” would be a better term – from the private to the public sectors, I’ve had to struggle a bit to find some successes. After all, if all attempts end in disaster, it’s pretty hard to motivate people. At first, it was a bit like looking for an oasis on the moon. Everywhere I looked, things were arid.
Schools? A story of over-directive resourcing, quality declining rapidly but unadmittedly, discriminatory admissions to higher quality establishments based on money or postcodes, and the end product – don’t ask!
The health service? The same story, except for embattled managers who are told not to stick their noses into the hallowed practices of medicine.
Housing? The real national lottery.
And then a cheeky thought struck me – perhaps universities, where I have spent half of my working life, might qualify? The closer I looked, the more I laughed and, you may think, the more ludicrous my proposition became.
Higher education seems to be the one part of public sector provision where the providers are most willing to admit (at least privately) to declining standards. They have no choice, really. You can’t expect to move from just over 10% of the population getting higher education to over 40% and expect standards (of staff as well as students) to be maintained as you carve your way down the IQ joint. The process is probably higher quality, but the output certainly isn’t unless measured by value added (not easy).
The staff in higher education are mostly professional miseries. Sometimes I wonder if they are all sociologists, quick to explain the inevitable nature of failure, and deeply pessimistic about the nature of society, about their working conditions (they all work far harder – well, that’s not difficult – when I started my teaching load was 5 hours per week, 25 weeks a year) and about their pay (well, it has fallen in real terms quite substantially, reflecting the fact that we want them to do a lower quality job so we don’t need such bright people). We’ve encouraged staff to stay by the absurd Research Assessment Exercise, promising them academic stardom if they publish at least one deeply boring paper a year – the more boring it is, the higher the chance of getting published in a journal that few will read – because the judges are their senior peers or super-bores) To cope with this, the number of deeply boring (reviewed by peers = bores) journals have proliferated. So our academic staff are more and more qualified at least in one respect – to bore.
Don’t suppose the students haven’t spotted all this, despite the fact that the average university student is much thicker than before (for demographic reasons). They know that most of their tutors are not that bright and pretty disorganised, and that some of them are so inarticulate that the only reason for attending a lecture is that the lecturer will give away the exam questions. Better to go away and read one of the few decent books. Even better, crib your essay off the web from the brightest students or even from essay writing companies. The pervasiveness of continuous assessment together with the supposed vigilance on plagiarism is a nice way of keeping results levels high even though candidates are thicker.
A nice description of success? Yes. Because governments of both parties agreed that to catch up with such stars as Korea and Japan, we needed more of our students to get higher education. So we simplified the proposition. It will all be called university.
Gone is the second class polytechnic or college of higher education. They are all universities now, with a single admissions system (there used to be two). Gone is the possibility of not getting in. Pleaces were available for all. And if you wanted to study engineering, a certificate in dog stroking was enough.
The marketing communications was simple – above the line – it was “get a degree or die” – never mind the kind of degree. Below the line it was – apply to UCAS and when, because you got it wrong, you haven’t got a place, the great clearing house will sort it all out for you.
Overall, the system is hungry for students. And at what productivity! We have increased the productivity of the system dramatically, so that the real cost of higher education has fallen significantly (in line with quality?). Ratios of students to staff have soared. Institutions that couldn’t or wouldn’t play the numbers game were squeezed – some nearly going bankrupt. Here, the recipe for success was to hire a good private sector finance director who really understood the government’s game and forced the economies on their senior academic colleagues, while bamboozling them with the numbers.
Because failure rates were monitored closely, courses had to be made easier, and that meant changing the product. Biology became sports science or life sciences. Geography became environmental science. Economics became business analysis or died. Engineering became – well engineering, which is why no-one applies. No wonder industry has to retrain them.
However in CRM terms, this was all a big success. The customer – the student – meekly obeyed. Parents helped them. Students applied in large numbers, despite having to bear a higher proportion of the cost. This was partly because no-one can conceive of future debt realistically. Students also learnt to play the job application game and, of course, they were helped by the general healthiness of the employment situation – no criticism of that, definitely a good thing – which meant that even if they hadn’t got a degree, they could have walked into work (I know these days things are a little tougher). They now all understand, unlike earlier generations of students who walked into their first jobs – that writing a CV is a useful first step in applying for a job.
Why didn’t all the staff run away? Because those who were in at the beginning didn’t see it coming! These frogs were well and truly boiled! By the time it was too late they had been ground down by the system into badly dressed no-hopers, not much distinguishable from their students, hoping to survive until they were retired early.
And the employers, sadly, because they were under pressure, took the possession of a degree as a first filter for job applications, thereby supporting the whole charade.
So, the recipe for government success in CRM, as evidenced by higher education, is……
