The current furor regarding the validation of degrees at a distance by the University of Wales – a unitary institution accrediting degrees in the United Kingdom and abroad – is a sure sign that some form of regulation of higher-education quality standards is not only desirable but necessary. In particular, the problems at the University of Wales are likely to affect the international reputation of the blameless Welsh universities that are not part of the institution and this clearly cannot be right.
What happened is still unfolding but what is clear is that an operation to validate the degrees of some 20,000 students in 30 countries, an operation which generated more than two million pounds in overseas earnings, went badly awry. All kinds of alleged malpractices have surfaced from selling examination answers to the use of affiliated institutions overseas that were allegedly operating illegally. One commentator has suggested that the university was operating in what could best be described as a kind of sub-prime academic market.
The British Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and the Welsh government-commissioned McCormick Review have both issued condemnatory reports on the affair.
The wake of the affair will be a long one and no doubt in time its effects will lessen. But can any lessons be learned, even at this early stage? Some are, I think, obvious. First, the right kind of regulation is necessary. It has not gone unnoticed that the QAA was perhaps not as fast as it might have been to spot that the University of Wales was moving into more and more high-risk areas but that is easy to say with the benefit of hindsight. Second, in a globalized world, regulation still has to fit the local circumstances and this diversity can be very difficult to achieve at a distance. Few regulatory bodies are set up to operate outside of their home territory and fewer still can do more than follow processes when the institutions that they are involved with are present overseas.
Third, it might be that higher-education regulators need to specialize more. I am struck by how difficult it is for regulatory agencies to cover a multiplicity of circumstances: they often thrive best when their remit is well-defined and correspondingly easy to police. Like others, I wonder, for example, if it isn’t time for the Russell Group, an association of top British research institutions, to start up its own quality assurance operation. It would be dealing with largely similar universities with largely similar aspirations and standards and largely similar international footprints. The same might apply to other comparable elite groups around the world. Indeed a whole series of regulatory bodies might do better if they were to be broken down so that they had a better fit with their constituencies, rather than continuing as generalist operations. There are obvious risks of such an approach, most notably that these bodies become inward-looking, but these are surely surmountable.
At the same time, working with better defined constituencies would make it much easier to work out what the true costs of regulation actually were. There is a large economic literature which has tried to work out the real costs of regulation but very few of its insights have ever been applied to higher education, so far as I know. That is a pity.
