Protecting the value of a degree in the age of AI. With Phil Newton

I think it is worth taking a step back to talk about where this all comes from, which you alluded to earlier.

Change can come from the bottom and it can come from the top.

But I think by top, we have to mean the incentives provided to the higher education sector by the government in the UK.

The current situation, I think, actively works against doing assessment in a more rigorous way.

The situation is pretty simple.

The current financial model of higher education in the UK is that most of the income to UK universities comes from tuition fees.

Three quarters of that comes from domestic tuition fees.

Domestic tuition fees were capped when they were introduced almost 15 years ago.

So their real-time value has gone down by almost half.

So universities have seen a significant drop in their income.

At the same time, the cost of keeping the lights on and the lecture theaters warm has gone through the roof.

So universities can't raise their tuition fees for domestic students.

Instead, though, they can recruit more students.

And that is essentially what has been the main strategic priority of UK universities, particularly in England, for more than a decade.

Recruitment is driven by league tables in large part, and league tables are driven by a number of metrics of which two of the most important are the NSS.

So how happy are your students? And one of the metrics in the NSS that consistently comes out performing very poorly is assessment.

And that leads to a perception that students don't like being assessed.

They don't like having as many assessments.

And so that pulls against the idea of doing assessment properly.

And then more problematically, I think, is this metric that's called the percentage of good degrees.

So essentially, the more two ones and firsts the university awards, the higher up the league tables it goes.

And so universities are incentivized to basically up their marks.

And that has led to this huge spike in the numbers of first class and two one degrees that's awarded, this principle that's called grade inflation.

And I think the simple statistic is that in the mid-1990s, between 5% and 8% of degrees awarded were first-class honors.

And at the moment, it runs somewhere between 25% and 30%, so a 400% or 500% increase.