They keep on knocking but they can't come in

A number of colleges of higher education are trying to become universities. But the entry rules are being tightened following public concern about standards. One of these colleges even has the power to award research degrees - and wonders why it is not allowed to call itself a university. Lucy Hodges reports.

For most of the Nineties, Bolton Institute of Higher Education has been seeking university status. Ever since Luton and Derby slipped under the wire in 1992 and were allowed to become universities - in spite of never having been polytechnics - Bolton has sought to join the top people's club.

With 8,000 students, of whom 40 per cent are part-timers, Bolton is strong in technology, particularly textile technology. It has the power to award its own degrees. Indeed, it has been granted the power to award research degrees, and currently has 100-150 registered research students. Last year it graduated around 15 PhD students. But when it first applied to become a university in 1993, the then education secretary, John Patten, stalled its application while he changed the rules. He introduced a new rule: that colleges that had been given degree-awarding powers should have to demonstrate a record of no fewer than three years of successfully maintaining degree standards across their subject areas.

Recently, Bolton applied for a second time to become a university. The relevant committee of the standards watchdog, the Higher Education Quality Council, approved its application. But last year the council was replaced by the new Quality Assurance Agency. That new body takes a more aggressive stance on standards, and forwarded a recommendation to the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, which overturned its predecessor's decision. It advised that Bolton's application be turned down.

There the matter rests for the moment. Blunkett is being besieged by Bolton's Labour MPs. A small delegation, including the college principal, Bob Oxtoby, will be meeting the Education Secretary in the coming weeks in the hope of persuading Blunkett to send a favourable recommendation to the Privy Council. But Oxtoby says: "Hopes of a positive outcome are fading. I think the Secretary of State will find it difficult to go against the advice he is getting from the Quality Assurance Agency. We are interested in putting our side of the story, and we need to know what the future holds.

"Part of our case is that the original committee took such a long time and went into it in great detail - and then to have their decision overturned, in what must have been a matter of minutes, came as a surprise."

A number of higher education experts feel Bolton has been treated shabbily. When its first application was made, it found the ground shifting under its feet. When the second application was submitted, it won support initially, but then found that support melted away. Its misfortune was in just missing the boat in 1992 when, it is generally agreed, the prevailing mood was to wave institutions into the university fold without bothering how much research they did, or whether they had a track record of anything very much.

As one commentator put it: "It's very sad for Bolton, because they're being judged by criteria which, if they had been applied in 1992, would have disqualified many former polytechnics from becoming universities."

Since that time a feeling has grown among vice-chancellors of old universities that too many institutions were allowed into their club. That perception has been fuelled by reports such as Sir Ron Dearing's, which sounded some alarm bells on standards, and newspaper stories about grade inflation. Problems at Thames Valley University, where student work had not been marked for a long period and an order - later rescinded - went out to inflate students' marks, have not helped either.

It was against that background that the Quality Assurance Agency came into being. It has greater powers than the former quality watchdog, and a tough-talking chief executive, John Randall, who says: "There was clearly a concern that standards in a number of areas of higher education were at risk. The agency was created out of a recognition of this concern, and the need to act to deal with lingering doubts about any institution of higher education. We are competing in a global market-place, and anything that suggests that standards are slipping in the United Kingdom doesn't just damage an institution, but the whole system."

The new agency is taking the issue of degree-awarding powers and university status very seriously. Sir Ron Dearing was similarly inclined. He said in his report: "We do see advantage, after the rapid developments of recent years, in a period of relative stability in the number of universities, with the award of university status used more sparingly, related less to the achievement of the present numerical criteria and more in recognition of a distinctive role and characteristics."

At the same time Sir Ron made clear that he did not want to disappoint the small number of institutions which were very close to satisfying the present criteria for the award of university status, "and which might feel themselves aggrieved were the rules to be changed now". He therefore recommended to the Government that it do nothing in the medium term. But in the longer term the rules should be changed to put less weight on numerical criteria, and more on what a university is supposed to be.

Under the current rules, institutions have to jump through the following hoops: they have to have more than 300 students, in five out of 11 academic subjects; a total enrolment of more than 4,000 higher education students; and at least 3,000 students on degree-level courses.

To win the lesser prize of degree-awarding powers, institutions have to have a track record of running degrees that are validated by other universities. According to advice from the Department for Education and Employment, the track record should be a minimum of three cohorts of students undertaking the course and graduating from it - that is, five years.

In his report, Sir Ron called for a review of the arrangements for degree- awarding powers. The Government is expected to agree to that later this month, when it publishes its long-awaited White Paper on lifelong learning and its response to Sir Ron's report. Sir Ron also said that the Privy Council should be able to remove degree-awarding powers in cases of serious abuse.

All of which goes some way to explaining why the Quality Assurance Agency took a tougher line on the Bolton application for university status. Finding that Bolton had received an unsatisfactory grade 1 out of a maximum of 4 for learning resources, in a recent teaching quality assessment, and another poor grade for mechanical engineering from an earlier period, it decided that the institute could not demonstrate a track record of maintaining standards. It also listened to advice from the quality assessment division of the higher education funding council, which is now subsumed into the new agency.

The old HEQC committee had taken a more lenient view, deciding that Bolton had learnt from these poor grades and had the potential to do better in the future. Therefore it should be awarded university status. According to John Randall, the HEQC's advice has gone to Blunkett together with the new agency's recommendation. "We weren't seeking to suppress in any way the conclusion reached by the degree awarding powers committee," says Mr Randall.

A footnote to the whole saga illustrates just how far the new machinery has changed. Unhappy with the power delegated by the HEQC to its degree- awarding powers committee, the board of the new agency has decided to delegate much less. The result is that a number of members of the old committee have resigned, including its chairman, John Stoddart, vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, hoping to be granted university status one day, are a number of other colleges, notably Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, which has just had its application for research degree-awarding powers heard (and is thought to have won the support of the new agency for those powers), and Nene College, a former teacher training college in Northamptonshire, which is preparing to apply for the power to award research degrees. Both colleges can already award their own taught degrees. Roehampton Institute in south London is also interested in applying to join the university club, as is Chichester Institute of Higher Education.

The reason they are all queuing up is that becoming a university lends valuable status, though it also brings unforeseen headaches, such as being bottom of the university league table. A spokesman for Nene said: "We recognise that university status is more than about title. We're proud to be providing students with a higher quality campus experience, and have invested nearly pounds 55m in our campus over the last five years. We're sure that, when the lengthy process of admission is finally completed, the new university of Northampton will not be a `bottom of the league institution'."

But for someone like Tony Higgins, chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, it also helps, for clarity's sake to have degree-awarding powers go hand in hand with university status. He says: "UCAS works and will work with any institution offering degree courses, but it makes life confusing when we try to explain to people in the UK, and particularly students internationally, that you can get a perfectly good university degree at a college of higher education."

Professor Peter Scott, the new vice-chancellor of Kingston University and a member of Bolton's academic advisory committee, agrees that the present picture is confusing. "It's pretty clear that the Government doesn't want any more universities, and is taking a hard line on colleges calling themselves university colleges. I would be much more relaxed about that. There's a sense in which colleges that are not universities are at a big disadvantage when the quality of the degrees they offer is practically the same."