Today we release our latest report, Trends in History in UK Higher Education (2022). It investigates UK-wide trends in university enrolments and outcomes, with a focus on history undergraduates, and aims to provide historians with a detailed picture that can support advocacy for the subject.
The publication is timely. Right now, arts and humanities staff at Bishop Grosseteste, De Montford, Dundee, Huddersfield, Roehampton, Sheffield Hallam, and Wolverhampton are under threat of redundancies. There have already been programme closures and/or staff cuts in history at Sunderland, Kingston, London South Bank, and Goldsmiths, and no doubt new announcements at other universities with follow in coming months.
Trends in History provides historians with clear and accessible evidence to back up existing assumptions. This includes how history provision is highly concentrated in the largest institutions. Almost half of all history students (by full-time equivalent, FTE) are taught in the top quintile (by market share) of institutions that offer history. This share has grown gradually since the lifting of the student numbers cap in 2015/16 and seems set to increase.
The report also illustrates the growth and contraction of history enrolments across institutions over a five-year period. This reveals two key findings. First, that there is a strong positive correlation between the change in an institution’s history FTE numbers and the change in its overall FTE numbers. Second, that decisions to reduce staff numbers or close history programmes appear to be ideological. Roehampton proves instructive here. According to HESA data, between 2014/15 and 2019/20 history enrolments increased from 120 to 255 FTE. Yet as of May 2022, all history staff are at risk of redundancy as part of a university-wide restructure.
These findings are significant. They suggest that historians have limited power to prevent or reverse declines in recruitment to their department – and thus top-down threats – independent of the wider collective of their colleagues. A key element to fighting off threats may therefore lie in building cross-disciplinary (or, in resourcing terms, cross-departmental) relationships of collaboration and solidarity.
In addition to analysis of enrolments data, the report synthesises evidence on ‘employability’ and post-degree incomes. The notion that history (and arts and humanities subjects more generally) does not have ‘value’ in this way, whilst STEM subjects do, is shown to be wholly and demonstrably false. Analysis of the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data set, for example, suggests that women history graduates can expect lifetime earnings very similar to that of computing graduates and, for men, to physics graduates.
The report ends with reflections from historians from a small cross-section of institutions. While a small sample means we must be wary of generalising, these suggest patterns that align with the quantitative data analysed in the report. This includes the highly concentrated nature of history provision, with effects being felt most keenly in terms of workload. It also includes the ways that employability and the skills agenda may, in time, reinforce perceived differences between more prestigious and less prestigious institutions, as seen in econometric models of lifetime earnings. While employability is increasingly important across the sector, it is in post-92s that we have seen the most sustained and innovative efforts to embed employability as integral parts of curricula.
Overall, the report raises important questions about the effects of the increasingly binary system of higher education, in which there are ‘over-performing’ and ‘under-performing’ institutions for the arts and humanities. This includes threats to unfunded research time in pre-92 non-Russell Group universities (as discussed in this recent History UK blog post), as well as the implications of discourses around ‘employability’. Staff in institutions under threat of cuts and contractions are already contending with demands to refocus programmes on ‘vocational’ history and the ‘applied humanities’, and the implications of this for staff and students, or for the discipline, have yet to be realised.
Most importantly, Trends in History reinforces the need for sector-wide discussions on history provision, not only in terms of enrolments and outcomes, but of workloads and curricula. What do sustainable history programmes look like, and how might these best meet the needs not only of future students, but of staff and wider communities? And how might historians build strategic alliances across the university (including within university governance) to ensure that the solidarity is there when plans to cut or restructure are raised.
We need to move beyond issuing statements and holding discussions. Trends in History provides a key step in building an evidence base to support action.
Over the next few weeks, we will post a series of blog posts discussing key themes and issues arising from the report. If you would like to contribute a blog post (perhaps providing a view from your institution) please get in touch with us via historyuk2020@gmail.com.
Optimism is in short supply amongst academics, so I apologise in advance for this blog, but recent, overdue announcements mean that the sector is going to endure a period of austerity now that the government has decided that it is only willing to bear a much lower cost for English undergraduate provision: the implications of what has been set out go beyond teaching to challenge the conditions for research in subjects like History.
Reforms to student loans aim to steer students towards professional & vocational subjects
At the end of February, we received the long-awaited official response to the Augar review (published in May 2019, but commissioned by Theresa May in early 2018).
With an end to one form of uncertainty, sector management and policy bodies expressed unseemly relief as it became clear that the maximum undergraduate tuition fee chargeable to home students would be frozen at £9250 for another two years. Augar’s recommendation of a reduction in the basic per student “unit of resource” (fees plus teaching grants) had overshadowed the last 12 months; rumours suggested that it was receiving serious consideration; instead, the Department for Education and Treasury will simply allow inflation to erode the value of its undergraduate financing in the short-term — with no promises for the future.
You would have difficulty finding any acknowledgment from those same sector representatives about the trade-off, since it falls not on cash flowing into their institutions, but comes from the pockets of future university leavers and existing borrowers. For those starting in 2023/24, the repayment period on loans will be extended to 40 years before write-off and the repayment threshold will be lowered to £25,000 before increasing in line with inflation.[1]
This has the effect of vastly increasing the amounts repaid by lower and middle earners. You will have heard much more about the decision to drop the interest rate, but this move will only benefit higher earners: those who would currently repay more than they borrowed.
The government had the gall to suggest that this new settlement was “fairer” and even “just”, but the head of the normally sober Institute for Fiscal Studies labelled this “truly horrible” in its distributive effects. Its modelling suggested that: “Low-to-middle-earning graduates could be made about £20,000 worse off over their lifetime by the changes; the highest earners could benefit by £25,000.” See: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/15955.
The loan scheme aside, the deal gets worse once you realise that there was no announcement about reform of student maintenance support.[2]
These reforms are cynical, but they are also consistent with a desire to “nudge” applicants away from the default of a three-year, full-time degree in subjects such as History and to encourage students to take shorter technical, vocational and professional courses.[3] With the reduction in interest rate and the extension of the repayment period, it will make more sense to reduce one’s exposure to debt and, as a result, one- or two-year courses gain in attractiveness. Income contingent repayment terms originally meant that the headline tuition fee could not function as a “price”, since it did not signal clearly to those who took out loans what they were likely to pay. That is not now the case.
These reforms will begin to change decisions about university beyond the changing popularity and experience of A-level History. In the very short run, there will probably be a late rush to apply this year or to cancel deferrals as for the majority it will be much more expensive to start in 2023/24 than to do so sooner. But after that, I would expect choices to shift the other way.
How far will History’s fees go as inflation bites?
There is a further dimension to consider. As the maximum undergraduate tuition fee continues to be frozen at £9250 pa, university management is likely to become less keen on “classroom” subjects, such as History: so-called Band D subjects which receive no additional teaching grant to supplement the undergraduate fee.
As a subject, History’s undergraduate funding benefited in 2012 as the new £9000 fee represented a large increase on the circa £6000 received from fee plus grant in the preceding years. But since then, there has only been one increase, to £9250. Vice-chancellors are now limiting their complaints to sniping over the likely real terms value of the 2023/24 fee compared to 2011/12 (contrast their silence over what graduates will have to repay in future).
Early in the last decade, from the perspective of university management, it made financial sense to recruit increasing numbers to business, law, arts, humanities and social science subjects (Band D): there was a clear surplus to be made, which could then be used to cross-subsidise other activities like higher-cost subjects, capital development and staff research time. As the value of the fee continues to decrease in real terms, that surplus vanishes and the priorities of university top brass – capital development and STEM – mean that unfunded research time becomes a general problem.
That is, in a hypothetical History department where recruitment had stood up over the last decade, inflation would mean that original surpluses gradually reduce to break-even and could, over time, come to be seen as loss-making — depending on how central costs are distributed (think increasing energy prices). At institutions where recruitment is not so strong, the question will be whether fees cover departmental costs and, in particular, the component of staff salaries devoted to research.
Further Casualisation? Further Internationalisation?
In this financial context, the viability of a History department’s research culture will now largely depend on the institutional ability to ramp up casualisation further or increase the recruitment of international students (for whom there is no limit on what universities can charge). In practice, there is limited scope for increased international recruitment in some subjects, which will, in any case, be monopolised by the “big beasts” in the sector. In a report this month, the National Audit Office pointed out that “many providers’ medium- and long-term financial forecasts depend on assumed continued growth in overseas as well as domestic student numbers”.
The risks, moral as well as geopolitical, of building a “business model” of charging as much as you can from as many students as you can recruit should not need stressing. But without international students, there is a difficult question about how “unfunded” research can get done.[4]
The sector is financially uneven. The median income for established universities is between £200-£250million per year, but some receive less than half that and others are more than four times larger. Oxford and Cambridge bring in over £2billionsome years. The bigger, more prestigious institutions will increasingly be able to dominate the market for international students and reinforce their historic advantages. Along with these size disparities, there are significant variations in financial performance that are masked by aggregate sectoral figures: worrying numbers of institutions are running persistent and sizeable deficits.
As management come to view unfunded research time as a drain on limited resources, a new binary system will likely emerge, one which sees fewer institutions operating with sustainable research in the arts, humanities and social sciences than was even the case before 1992.
While the squeeze on unfunded research will be apparent across the board, pre-92 universities offer contracts with higher amounts of time for research.[5] Some of these have not fared well in the last five years since undergraduate student number controls were fully removed. High-profile cases include SOAS and Goldsmiths. Wholesale review of research time would potentially be as destructive for them as the current pension dispute. As a result, some institutions may become more prone to consider closing departments seen to be underperforming financially, rather than recognise that they have become teaching-led institutions.[6]
Things could move very quickly in the next few years, and it is important that representative bodies like History UK establish a picture of what is going on in relation to research time, contracts and student and staff recruitment across the sector. While the government talks up efficiencies and market competition, it is important to establish what is being sacrificed to that end. Whatever form the next round of struggle takes, it needs information as ammunition.
Andrew McGettigan writes on higher education financing and university finances. His book The Great University Gamble: money, markets & the future of higher education (Pluto) appeared in 2013. He is an expert on student loan accounting and university business models. Although he mainly works on private commissioned reports, his writing has appeared in London Review of Books, the Guardian, and the Observer as well as the industry press.
Notes
1. Those who started after 2012 have “Plan 2” loans, the current repayment threshold is to be frozen at £27,295 pa for two years before increasing in line with RPI. Borrowers are required to repay 9 per cent of earnings over that threshold. Outstanding balances are written off 30 years after leaving university. Interest accrues at between RPI and RPI plus 3 percentage points depending on earnings. See: https://www.gov.uk/repaying-your-student-loan/what-you-pay.
2. Once again, the family income threshold determining access to additional maintenance support has been frozen. It has been stuck at £25,000 since 2008! In a separate earlier analysis, IFS pointed out: “had it risen with average earnings, it would now be around £34,000.” (https://ifs.org.uk/publications/15940). And that would roughly double the number of students in receipt of extra maintenance cash today. Coupled with a below inflation increase in loan entitlements (2.3%!) and ballooning rents, it means that current students are being treated very poorly. In effect, the result is more students trying to earn in term-time, studying less and relying more on commercial lending and, according to the IFS, facing “genuine hardship”. A whole chapter of the Augar report has been ignored. Instead of using higher loan repayments to increase support for those studying today, potential future funds have been sucked out of the sector. At the end of March, with the Chancellor’s Spring Statement it became clear how the future savings on higher education — by making former students pay more back — had enabled many of the measures that were announced.
3. The government is preparing to transform the financing further in 2025, when the Lifelong Learning Entitlement is meant to be launched. At this point, loans will be available for individual modules. The Office for Students is backing a fully fledged pilot in 2022 with some individual modules now designated for student support at 22 institutions. None is a History course. See: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/skills-and-employment/higher-education-short-course-trial/.
4. The Office for Students even recently concluded that the improved ability of London institutions to “recruit globally” represented such a significant benefit that it was no longer appropriate to recognise the “extra costs of operating in London” via the London Weighting grant payment for home students. As a result, the latter — in 2020/21 worth an extra £240 per History student per year in inner London (£150 in outer) — was abolished with a stroke of a pen at the start of 2021/22, saving the OfS £64million per year, which was then funnelled into subjects considered “strategically important”. See: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/consultation-on-recurrent-funding-for-2021-22/.
5. The national contract originally negotiated at post-92 universities seems to present research time as “personal development” and suggests it is done outside of the maximum 38 weeks of term-time and roughly 9 weeks of leave. (See: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/1970/Post-92-national-contract). The latter is not agreed at all post-92s and will also come under increasing strain, with Falmouth and Staffordshire even proposing to employ all new staff at subsidiaries to avoid local government pension schemes.
6. The government’s preference for “strategically important” subjects has been laid down in recent years; there is no guarantee that this won’t also play out in funding decisions resulting from the latest REF.
Sharing historical research on social media has become increasingly prevalent, particularly over the past two years with the shift of much scholarly life to online fora. Indeed, it is now something many historians are expected to undertake, either as individual researchers or as part of public engagement and impact. In this event, our two expert speakers will reflect on their own experiences, outlining the challenges, benefits, and issues raised by sharing content via social media.
Joe Vaughan is Digital Editor and social media manager at The Museum of English Rural Life (@TheMERL, Twitter). By producing highly engaging social media content about the museum’s collections, he has brought the history of rural England and its people to a global online audience. His work has received recognition and praise by international media, including The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. He lives and works in Reading.
Dr Sarah Hall is Public Engagement and Events Officer for the AboutFace Project, based in the Department of History at the University of York. She has established a social media and website presence for the project, which researches the emotional and cultural history of face transplants. Sarah is also the curator of a new project connected to AboutFace, the Museum of Faces, a virtual museum tackling social issues pertaining to the face. While navigating the challenges of dealing with sensitive topics on social media, Sarah is a passionate advocate for knowledge exchange in public engagement, and prioritises the development of creative strategies for developing this on social platforms.
When: 3 – 4pm, Wednesday 22nd September
Where: The event will take place over Zoom
This post is written by Caroline Sampson, Development Manager: National and Networks, The National Archives.
The National Archives’ (TNA) Higher Education Archive Programme (HEAP) and History UK came together recently in a Research Resilience event to look at emerging practices to support academic research and researchers wishing to use archives. While the disruption caused by the pandemic has clearly shone a spotlight on the barriers caused by service closures, restricted access and so forth, it is clear that some of these obstacles don’t surface solely during a global emergency, but can beleaguer the work of researchers on an everyday level too.
While it was great to hear the experiences of those who shared the work they have been doing over the last 18 months or so to try out creative new ways of facilitating research, it’s clear that this is part of an ongoing journey to explore exactly what barriers academic researchers experience and what opportunities there are to address these. What the pandemic has done is raise awareness of the extent of the difficulties and provided a testbed for creative solutions.
To make real headway with this, it is vitally important to bring academics and archivists together so that each group can understand the needs and challenges that the other faces. HEAP has attempted to do this in a variety of different ways but I’m left with a feeling that we have never quite managed to pull this off. You might find it useful to have a look at the Guide to Collaboration for Archives and Higher Education that TNA and History UK co-created in 2018.
If archivists don’t have a good understanding of the problems researchers are experiencing and of the changes that they would like to see, their attempts to redesign workflows will fall short of what’s needed. If researchers haven’t understood where the pinch points and constraints lie for archivists, they can’t use their voice to advocate for resources to bring about change.
So, a genuine call to arms! How can we get these conversations really working and get the right people talking to each other? If you have any thoughts, send them to me at caroline.sampson@nationalarchives.gov.uk
In the meantime, I thought it would be useful to share links to interesting resources and articles to read.
Digital Archive Learning Exchange (DALE)
The archivists amongst you might enjoy looking back at some of the events TNA’s DALE network have put on since the start of the pandemic. DALE was set up to support archivists as they explore digital challenges, build capacity and improve digital skills across the sector. Anyone is welcome to sign up for DALE events.
‘This time, it’s on the house’ – a webinar exploring how a range of services have continued to reach audiences during the pandemic
‘Strictly on the Download’ – digital preservation in action’: a webinar exploring how services are utilising digital preservation tools and resources to take next steps in delivering effective and high quality projects, and to think about the needs of a new generation of digital researchers.
‘Engage! Producing outstanding digital resources’ – The event included sessions on accessibility, demonstrating impact, developing online content for children, and running a remote volunteering project.
TNA blogs and articles
TNA has also shared a number of blogs that showcase different ways of working during the pandemic. Not all relate to academic research but the learning and experimentation may well prove transferable and / or spark ideas for new models of service delivery.
It really does feel as if we are on the cusp of bringing about one of those “once in a generation” shifts in how we redefine the interface between archives and research. Over to you! What should it look like? How do we persuade decision-makers and funders to sign up? What do we do next?
History UK is seeking to commission a research study on undergraduate History provision that will help support its mission as an independent body monitoring and promoting History in UK higher education. News of staff cuts and course closures at a number of universities have contributed to a fear that History is under threat, particularly in post-92 universities. Yet there is little publicly available or accessible data that can provide a more detailed picture for History and support History UK’s and staffs’ advocacy for the subject. With this research study, History UK wants to build an evidence base relating to current trends and future directions of History provision. This will inform the development of a toolkit for historians, providing accessible guidance on what kinds of data is available, where to find it, and ways of using it.
History UK invites Expressions of Interest (EoIs) in this research consultancy by Friday 30 July 2021.
The objectives of this research consultancy are to:
Scope the availability, accessibility, and uses of relevant quantitative and qualitative data relating to History provision in UK higher education over the last five years.
Collate and analyse quantitative data on History and History joint-honours degree programmes.
Provide guidance on how History staff can be enabled to understand, use and respond to this data.
We envisage that the research consultancy will involve desk-based research, including analysis of HESA data, though we are willing to consider other / additional approaches. The research itself should be organised around four provisional research questions:
What are the regional, national, and UK-wide trends in recruitment for History and History joint-honours degree programmes in UK Higher Education?
What does graduate outcomes and employability data reveal about different types of History graduates, and what are its limitations?
What arguments are being made for the feasibility of History provision in UK Higher Education at university and national levels, and what evidence is being used?
How can History staff use data to advocate for History in their own universities, as well as among History’s different stakeholders?
The research questions will be finalised in consultation with the research consultant, and we will welcome suggestions for changes that will make the findings more useful for History staff.
The expected outputs and deliverables are:
Executive summary (2 pages maximum).
A report presenting the findings of the research and recommendations.
An appendix including all data and sources used.
Presentation to the History UK Steering Committee highlighting key findings (online).
Timeframe and budget:
The deadline for EoIs is Friday 30 July 2021.
The precise timetable will be negotiated with the research consultant, but we anticipate outputs 1-3 being delivered by Friday 5 November 2021.
The presentation to the History UK Steering Committee will be arranged at a mutually convenient time, likely mid-November 2021.
The maximum budget for this project is likely to be £8000.
Eligibility:
The research consultant should have relevant expertise in the analysis of higher education data, as well as a familiarity with higher education policy.
There is no requirement for a background in History, though an understanding of the context of History and/or the humanities in higher education may be an advantage.
The research consultant may be employed at a higher education institution, but they must be able to work as an independent consultant.
The research consultant should have the right to work in the UK.
The Expression of Interest should include:
Personal statement and up-to-date CV.
A short statement describing the proposed approach and timeframe for the research.
Budget for completed delivery of all stated outputs and deliverables, including salary, data access charges, and any VAT (if applicable).
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