Universities have been told to stop using deprived backgrounds as an excuse for their students dropping out or failing to get decent jobs.
John Blake, the new director for fair access and participation at the Office for Students, said that universities could not “shield” themselves from “legitimate questions” about the quality of their courses by hiding “under the bodies of disadvantaged students”.
The Government has put pressure on universities in England to cut the proportion of students failing to complete courses and drive up the numbers getting good jobs after graduating.
At 25 higher education providers fewer than half of students who start a degree can expect to graduate and find professional employment or further study within 15 months.
The OfS, which regulates universities in England, has proposed new thresholds which would require 80 per cent of students to continue to a second year of study, 75 per cent to complete their qualification and 60 per cent to go into professional employment or further study.
Universities not meeting the standards could face fines and restrictions on their access to student loan funding.
However, some institutions which are below the thresholds say it reflects the fact that they admit a high proportion of students from poorer backgrounds.
Speaking to i, Mr Blake admitted that universities serving a greater number of disadvantaged students had “taken on a bigger challenge”.
But he went on: “You can’t say, ‘oh look at us, we’re doing our good work by taking in these students’, and then not meet the quality challenge.
“I think sometimes people haven’t thought through how patronising that sounds.”
He added: “It’s not fair to shield yourself from legitimate questions of quality under the bodies of disadvantaged students… I don’t think anyone’s doing that consciously, but that is what it comes down to.”
Mr Blake said it was “absolutely the case that some people have left university with a damn sight less than they were promised”.
He said universities ignoring the fact that some of their courses fail to help students get on in life reflected the same “naivete” which had caused GCSE grade inflation in the noughties.
“[There was] a conviction that qualifications were themselves inherently valuable over and above the thing that they were supposed to signify, and that’s how you get a generation with rising English and maths GCSEs and very limited improvement in literacy and numeracy.
“That’s how you get a generation of people who are holding a degree certificate but not finding the job opportunities and the change in their life circumstances they thought they were going to get.”
Calling for universities to do more to help ‘level up’ schools, he rejected an argument from the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Louise Richardson, who in 2016 said she did not want to set up academies because “we’re very good at running a university, but we have no experience of running schools”.
“There are legitimate reasons why universities might think that their resources and capacity can be better shared with the schools sector elsewhere,” he said.
But he went on: “I don’t buy Louise Richardson’s comment, not least because Oxford University has a Department for Education, and if they don’t know how to run a school, I don’t know what on earth they think they’re doing.”
Pointing out that Oxford had “spun out the largest number of companies” of any university in the UK, Mr Blake said: “I mean they can spin out a company when they need to, but they can’t find people to sit on a school board?”
“I’m not saying they have to, but I don’t have time for providers whose excuse is ‘we just don’t fancy it’.”
