Can Grit Save Higher Education?

American, Australian and British universities are facing a serious input crisis. The number of students capable of anything resembling a conventional university education is drying up and the spectre of extinction is haunting British and American campuses. London Metropolitan University is closing two campuses and cutting 400 jobs.  Twelve of those jobs will be managerial ones so the situation must be really desperate. Hull University has closed a campus at Scarborough. The Open University is closing several regional centres with 500 plus jobs at risk.

Meanwhile small colleges in the US are shutting down: Dowling College, New York, Burlington College, Vermont, Tennessee Temple University and no doubt more to come.

Many English speaking universities  have tried to cover the deficit by aggressively recruiting international students. That is helping a little and science and technology departments in the Russell Group, the Group of Eight and the Ivy League are becoming increasingly dependent on graduate students and faculty of East Asian origin or descent. But the number of students who can perform adequately at degree level is not infinite. There are signs that the Flynn Effect has run its course even in China and there seems to be an increasing large amount of test and credential fraud, plagiarism and ghost-writing associated with the influx of international students.

The problem is compounded by the pressure to admit increasing numbers of historically underrepresented  groups who may come with substantial loans and grants but are often inadequately prepared for higher education. Such students frequently find that attending classes with classmates who perform much better is a deeply painful and humiliating experience, all the more so since they have from childhood been steeped in a warm bath of self esteem and excused almost any anti-social behaviour.

The admission of increasing numbers of unprepared students can also have serious consequences down the road towards and after graduation. More students with poor ACT or SAT scores or failing to graduate on time, if ever, means that ranking scores will suffer, with serious consequences for applications and admissions, and that employers and graduate schools will be less welcoming.

So we have increasingly desperate efforts to find something, anything, that will predict academic success but where less able students can do just as well or better. The problem is that so far nothing has been found that matches the predictive validity of standardised tests that are highly correlated with general intelligence.

There has even been a serious proposal by a group of elite admissions officers to reward applicants for doing ordinary things like baby sitting or punish them for a lack of authenticity in their resume compliant extra curricular activities. Taken seriously this would effectively randomise university admissions and turn US higher education into a flat swamp of mediocrity.

The latest in a succession of attempts to find the really effective non-cognitive factor that will transform American higher education and achieve the holy grail of true diversity is something called "grit", supposedly discovered by Angela Duckworth a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a certified genius and author of an instant New York Times best seller. Grit is supposed to be a combination of passion and perseverance and is claimed to be important in determining job and academic success. It is allegedly a better predictor of success than IQ, health, good looks, or even social intelligence. It is, it would seem, "going to change the world".

Unfortunately, a thorough meta-analysis suggests that grit is almost the same thing as conscientiousness, a long established personality trait, and that its impact on academic success is modest and much less than that of cognitive ability.

And so the search for the Really Significant Non-Cognitive Factor continues.

David Cameron, Donald Trump, Leicester City, University Rankings and the end of deference

Recently there have several setbacks for the experts on both sides of the Atlantic. In May 2015 the pollsters, armed with all the techniques of scientific social science, got it very wrong about the UK general elections, drastically underestimating the Conservative margin of victory.

Now they seem to be doing even worse with Donald Trump. Pundits have queued  up to denounce him as a racist, misogynist, transphobic, xenophobic, anti-semitic, Ku Klux Klan appeasing liar. Successive ceilings above which he could not possibly rise have been declared only to evaporate and replaced by another. And yet he has won the Republican nomination.

Pundits, critics and mainstream journalists are now predicting that his campaign will implode. that he will never have enough money, needs the support of the party grandees, does not have enough support among women, Hispanics, gays or trans people, is a poor organiser, does not read from a teleprompter, has disgusting hair, talks in slow monosyllables, fails to grasp the nuances of various things and so on. Perhaps this time the army of the qualified and credentialed will be right and we will have another wonderful four or eight years of a Clinton presidency with Bill as the First Gentleman. Or perhaps not.

Then there is  Leicester City winning the premier league title, against 5000 to one odds.  At the beginning of the season was there anyone who predicted anything other than relegation?

The press has had a multitude of stories about the experts of various kinds who have been humbled by Leicester's rise. John Micklethwait of the Economist has recounted how every year but the last he bet on the team winning the premiership title (later on the story was betting that they would come top of their division). Had he not forgotten to do so so this year then he would have have won 100,000 pounds.

I too have a story about the perils of underestimating Leicester City. A few decades ago I was the owner of a complete set of LCFC autographs some of which I got from from my father who went around the town as an inspector for the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance and occasionally got souvenirs from the organisations whose books he helped tidy up.

I got Gordon Banks's by queueing up at Lewis's in Humberston Gate and Jimmy Walsh's, then Leicester's captain just arrived from Glasgow Celtic, because he lived down the road in a semi detached now worth 130,000 pounds (Jamie Vardy's car is more than that) although I had to suffer the public embarrassment of being called a wee laddie by Mrs Walsh.

But at some point in the early or late seventies after Leicester left Division One, I gave the autographs away to somebody I can't remember. Today four signatures from that era plus Norman Wisdom are worth 275 pounds on ebay. That was an error even worse than selling an authentic vinyl copy of the Dylan Royal Albert Hall bootleg, now worth thirty, for ten dollars.

And of course we have the Brexit vote. It is unlikely that that there has ever been such unanimity about any matter of public concern from the various components of the dominant elite. Nearly every vice chancellor, all the managers of the premier league plus an imposing array of pop stars, rock stars and film stars have admonished the great unread (some of whom probably don't have passports!) that no decent person could possibly even dream of voting Leave.

The universities further elaborated on the perils of Brexit. Think about all the money that we get from the EU for research. The merit of this argument may have been blunted by the revelation that the field that got the most from the EU was Education.

The polls conducted with the latest markers of rigour such as sample sizes and margins of error, appeared to confirm that the British electorate was fully aware of the wisdom of their intellectual betters.

But clearly the academic elite had absolutely no idea about what was going on in the minds of over half of the population just as they had no idea of what was going on in the minds of Republican voters.

One wonders whether the economic catastrophe supposed to follow Brexit will actually be so catastrophic. A fall in the value of the pound or the FTSE index is not really a problem if you don't have any shares or pounds to start with.

It is possible that even the university rankers may also be suffering a loss of credibility. Last year the "revered" QS reported that the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University were overtaking the Ivy League, a claim that met with some scepticism even, or especially, in Singapore, and the universally "trusted" and prestige dispensing THE rankers do not seem to have received very much support for their pilot projects in Africa and the Middle East.

Perhaps the age of deference to expertise is coming to an end.

Article in the Japan Times and an Unsuccessful Comment

Here is an article published in the Japan Times. followed by a comment which I attempted to post.

Todai tumbles from top of Asia university rankings to seventh place

LONDON – The University of Tokyo, locally known as Todai, lost its crown in this year’s Times Higher Education Asia University rankings released Monday.

After occupying the number one spot for the past three years, the University of Tokyo came seventh in a list of Asia’s top 200 universities. Times Higher Education described this year’s results as “challenging” for Japan and blamed a lack of funding and poor international outlook for the country’s position.

Singapore achieved unprecedented success in this year’s rankings by taking the top two places, with the National University of Singapore at the top and Nanyang Technological University joint ranked second with Peking University, the highest-ranked Chinese institution.

A total of 39 Japanese universities made it into the top 200, with 14 listed in the top 100.

Kyoto University (11th), Tohoku University (23rd), Tokyo Institute of Technology (24th) and Osaka University (30th) all made the top 30, with four more ranked in the top 50.

Phil Baty, a Times Higher Education rankings editor, said, “Japan claims almost a fifth — 39 — of Asia’s top 200 universities in this year’s table, making it the most-represented nation, in joint place with China.

“However, while the list proves Japan has strength in depth, the majority of its universities appear in the bottom half of the table; just 14 Japanese institutions make the top 100, compared with 22 in China.

“Furthermore, Japan’s top-ranked institution — the University of Tokyo in seventh place — has been knocked off the number one position after three years at the helm. It is Japan’s only top 10 representative. Meanwhile, China, Singapore and Hong Kong have two, while South Korea has three.”

Baty notes that the past few years have seen a shift in the balance of power from West to East in terms of higher education funding and performance.

Comment

Todai fell from 1st place in last year's THE Asian rankings to 7th this year, while Nanyang Technological University rose from 10th to 2nd. Changes in International outlook and funding levels could not have had such a large effect in the space of just 12 months.

It should be noted that this year THE did a recalibration of the weighting of its indicators. That for research and teaching reputation, in which Todai does much better than Singapore and Hong Kong universities, was reduced from 33% to 25%.The weighting for industry income, in which Todai has an average score and Nanyang Technological University an almost perfect one, was increased from 2.5% to 7.5%.

In addition, THE has changed the process of collecting and analysing citations data, including not counting large-scale multi-author projects, in a way that has worked to the detriment of the University of Tokyo and to the advantage of the Singaporean universities.

The recommendations of THE should be taken with a big bucket of salt.

See University Ranking Watch