Quote of the week: Stefan Collini on assessing universities

Image by Luke Jones, CC BY 2.0

Writing in the London Review of Books (Diary, 10 May 2018), Stefan Collini complains about new ways of measuring universities, including his (Cambridge):

Last year the government introduced a new wheeze. Universities are now awarded Olympic-style gold, silver and bronze medals for, notionally, teaching quality. But the metrics by which teaching quality is [sic] measured are - I am not making this up - the employment record of graduates, scores on the widely derided National Student Survey, and 'retention rates' (i.e. how few students drop out). These are obviously not measures of teaching quality; neither are they things universities can do much to control, whatever the quality of their teaching.

Whatever the relationship of university teaching to the first two metrics, the third is another matter. Mr Collini states that teaching quality is not in any way linked to students dropping out, and that universities have no control over it. Perhaps at Cambridge the undergraduates are so grateful to be admitted that they put up with whatever teaching they are offered, and will remain there regardless, but it would be reasonable to assume in lesser institutions some causality between quality of teaching and retention rate.