University courses are to be tagged with their drop-out rates, graduates' future earnings and the number of contact hours students can expect with tutors. The move, which will be modelled on a food-labelling system, is part of a consumer revolution in higher education to be unveiled this week by Lord Mandelson, the universities secretary.
Students should be treated more as paying customers and given better information about the quality of their courses before they embark on a degree, the new government framework for universities is expected to say on Tuesday.
The plan aims to set out the future priorities for universities before a major shake-up of the student funding system. It is also expected to recommend greater business involvement in universities and new admissions systems to identify talented applicants from poorer backgrounds in an attempt to break middle-class domination of the top institutions.
Surely this will be a very crude method of assessing courses. It will be fine if the information is detailed enough for prospective students to make an informed choice, but not if it reduces the courses into a figure that may well be unrepresentative (in either direction) of the quality of any given course.
The fact of the matter is some things cannot be quantified, such as the student experience. It has been shown in the past that there are students dropping out for a huge amount of reasons, and the quality of the course is not really that high up the list.
Wes Streeting (National President of NUS) said;
"There needs to be very good data included otherwise universities will offer more hours in huge lecture halls and cramped seminars when fewer hours with smaller groups would be much better. The benefits may force universities to drive up quality but it is riddled with risk."Transparency is good, but don't over simplify the information.
JR
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