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When A-level passes increase, our first instinct is to worry about `dumbing down'

FACED WITH a new idea, Americans instinctively say "that's great", even if subsequently they tell you all the drawbacks. The British - or English, because after today's historic elections the Scots and the Welsh have to be exempted - tell you, wearily, that it will never work and has been tried before, even if later they come round to the idea.

It's rather like that with academic quality. Americans, and most continental Europeans, unreservedly welcome evidence of higher standards. We, in contrast, treat such evidence with suspicion.

When the number of successful A-level students, and their average grade, increases, our first instinct is not to celebrate their success but to worry about "dumbing down". The same has happened in higher education. The Quality Assurance Agency for higher education is toying with a new system for grading teaching quality, the effect of which would be to depress the scores of universities and colleges.

At present they can score a maximum 24 points (four out of four in six categories) in Teaching Quality Assessments or subject reviews. Under the QAA plan these individual scores would be weighted, some counting for more than others, to produce a six-point scale. As a result a high score of, say, 22 could end up as an average score of 3 if the two deducted points had been in the wrong categories. The overall result is dramatically to depress British higher education's overall performance, and so reputation, which will be quickly pounced on by our Australian, American and European competitors in the market for international students.

Why are we planning to shoot ourselves in the foot? The first, and most trivial, reason is that the QAA is irritated by the way newspapers are using its scores to construct league tables of universities. These scores were never meant just to be added up to produce an overall score, which the QAA feels is misleading. As the source of the original data, the agency perhaps believes it has a responsibility to try to put the record straight.

The second reason is our instinctive scepticism about rising standards. Strange as it may sound, higher education institutions, especially some new universities and colleges, have been doing too well. Quality bureaucrats, ministers (New Labour ones, to their shame), and even some people in more stuffy universities (to their greater, but more predictable, shame) think it is too good to be true. So means must be found to mark the results down - rather as Chris Woodhead, the Ofsted boss, told his inspectors to do better, ie worse, in their reports on primary teacher training.

In the case of higher education this scepticism about rising standards is compounded by two special factors. The first is that even ministers who cling tenaciously to their soundbite headlines about all the extra money they are spending on colleges and universities know that the system is chronically under-funded. In most institutions costs are rising twice as fast as income. So how can standards be rising?

The second is that we (the political nation, that is, not the people) have still not come to terms with the development of a mass - or, as I would prefer, a democratic - system of higher education. In our secret minds higher education is special, for the best and the brightest, not for everyone. Accessibility and quality are inevitably at odds; more of the one means less of the other.

The third reason is apparent from the particular categories of teaching quality which John Randall, chief executive of the QAA, has suggested should be given greater weight. These are the ones that try to assess outcomes rather than process; what students have learnt to do as opposed to how they learnt to do it. This emphasis is consistent with the Government's growing emphasis on employability. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has already announced that performance indicators must be devised to measure graduate employability. It is difficult to object, in principle, to the idea that universities and colleges should be encouraged to place greater weight on the employability of their graduates. However, there are three practical obstacles.

First, the success of institutions in producing instantly employable graduates largely reflects their subject balance. Nurses get jobs more easily than sociologists. Second, institutions can cook the books when they report graduate destinations - or, to be more polite, their reports cannot easily be audited independently.

Third, measuring the proportion of people who have jobs six months after graduating makes less and less sense in today's fractured job market of portfolio careers. Far fewer graduates enter lifetime careers in their early twenties - because there are far fewer such careers than there were in the Sixties (when politicians and civil servants were students). Even measuring employment rates, say, five years after graduation would not provide a complete answer. Some of the most enterprising wealth-generators follow eccentric career paths. The fundamental difficulty is that employability is about more than just employment.

The writer is Vice-chancellor of Kingston University