Full Economic Costing : Another cut on the way

If you’ve read any of my earlier posts, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of the Full Economic Costing (fEC) funding model that was recently introduced in the UK. In case you don’t know what this is, it is the way in which research is funded in universities. When a researcher wants money to carry out research, they will apply for funding from one of the research councils and the researcher’s university will include all the costs associated with the research. This will include any salaries (or parts of salaries), admin costs, estates and buildings, travel, computing and a sum referred to as “indirect costs”.

The fundamental problem I have with this is that I think it is not straightforward to separate the costs of teaching and research and that they are both an equally important part of an academic’s career. The risk, in my view, is that we will start to value someone’s ability to bring in money more than the quality of their research and teaching. There will be pressure for research to follow the money and also the possibility that teaching will suffer since the direct link between teaching and money is less obvious. This isn’t to suggest that the amount of money that the universities are getting is not appropriate, but simply that we should have a more holistic view of universities and provide the funding in a more general way (i.e., how much does a research university of a certain size need to cover the basic costs of operating).

However, I do think that some universities may have been interpreting the term Full very specifically and have been including anything that they possibly could onto a research grant. Typically a research grant that proposes to employ a junior researcher, buy some computing, pay some travel costs, and pay some of the Principal Investigator’s (PI) salary will be costed at £150000 per year (with the junior researcher’s salary being about £29000 per year). The university gets almost £50000 per year to cover indirect costs and estates and buildings plus another £15000 or so to cover part of the PI’s salary. I don’t want to suggest that a university wastes this money, but I suspect that it is – in general – more than the actual full cost of a typical research project (or at least more than the full cost that could be easily associate with a typical research grant).

I was listening to Radio 4 yesterday evening and they had – amongst others – David Willetts discussing the science budget. He made the point that even though the science budget will effectively see a 10% cut over the next few years due to inflation, he thought that there could be efficiency savings of order 10%. He highlighted, in particular, the possibility (suggested supposedly in a review by Bill Wakeham – a physicist from Southampton) that in fact universities have been including too many things in fEC research grants. Essentially what he seems to be proposing is that research grants are reduced by about 10% and that all of this will come out of the indirect costs. A consequence of this is presumably that the same amount of money will be going into universities, but more of it will be used to cover the direct cost of research and less to cover the indirect. Universities will therefore effectively see a cut in the money that they use to cover infrastructure and other non-direct research expenses.

My personal view is that universities made a mistake in agreeing to the fEC model. My understanding is that there had been a period when universities were supporting research with money that they felt should have been used to support teaching. I believe the initial idea was that some money would be taken away from universities (the portion that supported research) and returned (with some extra added) through research grants from the funding councils. Universities expected to gain money and hence properly cover all the costs of research and teaching. It is quite possible that the reverse will happen. The research councils could agree that the fEC costs are too high and that there should be some kind of cap on the level of non-direct costs on research grants. Universities could therefore end up back where they started with not enough money to cover the indirect costs of their research activities properly. Personally I wish they’d thought more deeply about the consequences of the fEC model and not simply leapt at the possibility of getting more money.

Tuition fees – Do they really know what they’re doing?

Although not surprised, I am quite disappointed with the Browne report. I haven’t read it in detail, but at first glance it reads as something in which the outcome was essentially known from the beginning. There appears to be very little discussion of the fundamental reasons for the existence of a higher education (HE) sector, and it appears to assume that the current funding model has to change. The basic idea from the report is that tuition fees would be uncapped and that students would be lent the money to cover the tuition fees, and to help cover the cost of living. It seems unlikely that fees will actually be uncapped, but will probably rise to about £6250 per year with an additional £3750 per year for living expenses. Students will therefore accrue debts of about £10000 per year. If this does end up being the case, Universities will supposedly actually gain nothing, in that the government is likely to cut the HE budget by an amount equivalent to the extra amount that the HE sector will get through tuition fees. The main thrust of the Browne report is that the money lent to a student will only be paid back once the student earns more than £21000 per year and would be written off 30 years after the person has finished their degree.

Fundamentally I think it is wrong and I believe that a free market Higher Education (HE) sector will not be as effective as one that is primarily funded by the public and that is largely free to pursue excellence. However, rather than going into a long discourse about why I think this is the case, I thought I would present some basic consequences of the Browne report – assuming that it is accepted as the new model for funding the HE sector.

A little while ago I was playing around with distribution functions and managed to produce one that largely matches the income distribution in the UK. It’s shown in the figure below. It’s not perfect but it has approximately the correct mean (£25000), the correct median (£19000) and the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile incomes are very close to the actual values for 2007/2008.

The table below is taken from the Browne report and it shows the amount of money that someone will pay per month to repay the loan they were given to cover tuition fees and cost of living expenses.

At first glance it doesn’t seem unreasonable; the highest earners pay more per month than the lower earners. There are, however, a couple of things one can do straight away. The payment as a percentage of total income is straightforward. It is also likely that there will be interest, at about 2.2%, that will accrue once someone crosses the £21000 threshold. One can therefore calculate how long it will take for someone to repay the loan. These are both shown in the figure below. The solid line is the payment as a percentage of income, while the dashed line is the number of years it will take for someone to repay the loan, capped at 30 years after which the remainder is written off. Included in this calculation is the assumption that people’s salaries will rise with inflation at a rate of 2.2 % per year (for simplicity, the same as the loan interest rate).

What the above figure shows is that everyone earning, today, between £21000 and £32000 per year will repay for the full 30 years. Those earning close to £32000 per year will be paying almost 3% of their income for the entire 30 years. If we go back to the income distribution figure that I showed at the beginning of this post, one can calculate that about 45% of those in employment (about 15 million people) earn £21000 per year or more. Since slightly more than 40% of school leavers go to university, we can assume that almost everyone earning £21000 per year or more will have gone to university and will therefore be repaying a student loan. If this is the case, almost 5 million people will have their income reduced by between 1% and 3% for 30 years. If one considers those who will pay for 10 years or more it amounts to almost 9 million people. Someone earning £50000 per year will pay almost 5% of their income for 10 years in order to pay back their student loan. Almost half of all those earning £21000 per year or more will therefore effectively have their tax raised by 1% or more for 30 years, while 2/3 will have an effective increase of 1% or more for at least 10 years. Of course, inflation could be higher than I assumed and so the repayment period may reduce slightly, but it is unlikely to change things significantly.

One can also determine how much each person will pay. This is shown in the figure below. The full amount will only be repaid by those earning £32000 per year or more. Someone earning £32000 per year will end up paying more than £40000 over a period of 30 years, while someone earning £100000 per year will pay £32000 over a period of about 4 years. This illustrates that the middle income group will pay much more than the highest earners who will be able to repay the loan very quickly.

We can also use the distribution function that I showed at the beginning of the post to determine how much money the government can recover every year. It’s not necessarily exact, but here is what I assumed. Everyone earning over £21000 per year went to university and has to repay a student loan of £30000 pounds. Everyone works for 40 years after graduating, but the loan is only repaid for the first 30 years (any remaining parts of the loan are written off after 30 years). The fraction of people in a given income bracket who will be repaying at any given time is therefore the number of years those people have to repay for, divided by 40. It turns out that if this was already in place and people today were repaying a student loan, the government would recover about 8 billion pounds. Here’s where I have a problem. There are currently 1.2 million people at British universities today. If the government is lending them £10000 each, they are then lending £12 billion and recovering £8 billion. Unless I’m mistaken, this ratio will always remain the same. The government will only ever recover 2/3 of the money because at least 1/3 of those who go to university will not finish paying within 30 years and quite a lot of those are only paying back interest.

If I’ve got this right (which maybe I haven’t as I’ve been trying to do this while my son keeps clambering all over me) the government is about to cut the HE budget by about 4.2 billion and will recover this money by increasing tuition fees. The money for the increased tuition fees will be loaned to students, resulting in an increase in the effective taxation of about 2/3 of those earning above £21000 by at least 1% for at least 10 years after they graduate. Ultimately, however, the government will only recover 2/3 of the money lent which, in today’s terms, will amount to a loss of about £4 billion. Furthermore if they simply increased the level of taxation for those earning above £21000 by 1.5%, revenues would increase by £9 billion. I don’t know about everyone else, but I would rather pay 1.5% more in tax and have a publically funded HE sector, than pay something like 4% for 10 years after graduating (or 1% for 30 years) and end up with a supposedly free market HE sector. I’m of course ignoring that this is still £3 billion less than the £12 billion required for all the 1.2 million students so students would still need to borrow something to cover cost of living expenses and to pay some top-up fees.

Maybe I’ve made some kind of silly mistake or maybe my assumptions are too simplistic but it seems quite possible that – to reduce direct funding to the HE sector by £4.2 billion – the government is going to introduce a graduate tax that could result in some paying 4% more in tax for a decade after they graduate, and after all that the government will still end up paying £4 billion per year to the HE sector. Effectively the government will introduce a very complicated taxation system for middle earners who will lose significant amounts of money just when they’re trying to have families and buy houses and as a result of this, the government will effectively save £200 million. Am I stupid or are they?

Common sense?

Don’t know who wrote this letter to the Guardian a few days ago, but it does make a very good point. It’s along the lines of what I was discussing in an earlier post, although put somewhat more eloquently than I could manage.

Although I certainly wouldn’t be necessarily advocating turning back the clock, trying to simplify the system does seems quite reasonable. A few years ago, one of the things I really liked about working in the UK, when compared with the US, was that money wasn’t a major issue. I don’t mean that money wasn’t important, but simply that Academic researchers weren’t under a great deal of pressure to bring in money. They would still need money to carry out their research, but because the research money primarily covered direct costs, as long as someone was productive the amount of money they brought in didn’t really matter.

With the introduction of Full Economic Costing (fEC) this is all changing. Even a basic grant brings in a lot of money to the university, some of which covers the Principal Investigator’s salary. I think this is a very negative step and could well change the motivation of some researchers and become very divisive if a two-tier system develops – those with money and those without. One of the reasons why I think the UK has punched above it’s weight internationally in the recent past is precisely because academics were relatively free to pursue what they enjoyed, rather than being pressurised to do what is most likely to bring in money.

I certainly think that the system would be much simpler if universities were given enough money to operate, probably determined by the number of students and the quality of research (as determined by the Research Assessment Excercise). Researchers would then apply for funding to cover the direct costs of their research (plus some basic overheads). Together with being simpler, this would be a much more positive environment in which the UK could continue to punch well above its weight.

Ada Lovelace Day

Today is apparently Ada Lovelace day, a day when bloggers are meant to draw attention to the achievements of women in science and technology. Although I am aware of many women who have done and still do contribute greatly to science and technology, I had – embarrassingly – never heard of Ada Lovelace.  It turns out she lived from 1815 to 1852 and was one of the world’s first computer programmers, working with Charles Babbage on his mechanical computer.

The idea behind Ada Lovelace day is for bloggers to “tell the world about these unsung heroines”, but I wasn’t really sure how to do this. I probably don’t know enough about any scientist (man or woman) to really do them justice in this blog. What I thought I would do instead was to write something that would at least support what I think is the goal of Ada Lovelace day : to highlight – even today – how underrepresented women are in some areas of science and technology. Certainly in most physics departments – or at least in the ones of which I’m aware – the fraction of permanent posts taken up by women is small. In mine, it’s something like 10% and none of the women in my department are yet professors, although this is largely because most of the women in my department are early to mid-career and aren’t yet in a position to really expect a promotion to professor. I would, however, expect this to change some time in the not too distant future.

A simple interpretation of why women are so underrepresented in physics departments today is that in the past they were clearly disadvantaged in some way, either directly or indirectly, and it will take some time to redress the balance. It takes something like 30 years to change completely the personnel in a department and so assuming that 50% of all future hires are women, it will take about 30 years before physics departments have an equal representation of men and women.

It is, however, somewhat more complicated than this. Even in PhD programmes, there is still not an equal number of men and women. In most physics departments something like 30% of the PhD students are women. This is clearly not ideal, but is probably an improvement on the recent past and means that we should expect at least 30% of academic hires in the near future to be women. However, when one looks at the make-up of research staff (i.e., non-permanent) in Physics departments today, the fraction of women in these post is often less than 20%. This is slightly concerning because most research staff have been hired recently and so why the fraction of women in these research posts is significantly less than the fraction of women in PhD positions suggests something is wrong. If a smaller fraction of women, compared to men, choose to continue with their academic careers, this implies that we won’t improve the current 1 in 10 ratio anytime soon.

The fact that the ratio of women to men in research positions decreases as you move through the different career stages is well documented and is often referred to as the “leaky pipe” syndrome. There are probably a number of reasons for this but, I believe, that we are now in a position where the ratio of women to men on a research job shortlist is similar to the ration of women to men who apply for the job. I also believe that the number of women hired into academic jobs is consistent with these ratios. This suggests that there is no obvious bias in the hiring and selection processes today. Presumably something is discouraging many women from continuing their academic/research careers. I don’t know what this is (or even that my interpretation is necessarily correct) but I do think we should do all we can to reverse this.

There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be striving to have diverse and balanced physics departments. If there is something about academic careers that particularly discourages women compared to men then we should try to work out what this is and do something about it. Maybe it is seen as too competitive and aggressive. Maybe the methods we use to determine quality disadvantage women compared to men, although I think all would benefit from a more balanced – and less simplistic – view of what it takes to be a good academic and researcher. An organisation that is trying to help is Athena SWAN. They do this by encouraging universities and university departments to have responsible working practices that don’t disadvantage women or, in fact, anyone who has, for example, family responsibilities.

I don’t really know how to increase the ratio of women to men in physics departments, but I do think we should strive to do so. It is in no one’s interest to have a system that disadvantages one group of people compared to another. We should be aiming to give everyone (men or women) an equal chance to contribute to science and technology, now and in the future. We can continue to have an Ada Lovelace day that highlights the contribution of women to science and technology prior to the 21st century, but I would like to think that at some point in the near future men and women will be contributing equally and we won’t need to have a day that particularly highlights one group’s contribution.

Academic retrenchments

I’ve just seen the reports from the Time Higher Education about compulsory academic redundancies at King’s College London, Imperial College, and possibly also University College London. Although I think some redundancies may have happened in the past, this is still somewhat unprecedented. Until sometime in the 1990s most UK academics had tenure, meaning that it was virtually impossible for them to be fired or made redundant. This has now changed and all new appointments, or anyone who has been promoted, is now on what is known as an open-ended contract. This does mean that redundancy is possible, but – until now – academics have been effectively permanent.

One could argue that times are tough for everyone and if there are redundancies in other sectors, why shouldn’t it be true for academia too. This may be a valid point, but let me tell you a personal story that may put this into some perspective. Including my years as a PhD student, I have worked (I was fortunate to be fully employed for most of my PhD) in the academic sector for almost 20 years. I’ve worked professionally on numerous different continents, I’ve moved across the Atlantic a number of times, and my 2 children were born in different countries (they don’t even share a citizenship at the moment). Prior to returning to the UK, I had a tenure-track position in the US. What attracted me to academia was getting paid what I felt was a fair wage to do a job I enjoyed, that gave me some freedom, and that provided job security. Although I have largely enjoyed everything I have done with may career so far, in some sense I have sacrificed quite a lot to get to where I am today. In particular, I don’t live anywhere near my or my wife’s parents or siblings and my children rarely see their grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins. If 5 or 6 years ago, when I was evaluating my career options quite carefully, I had felt that academic jobs would be less secure in the future, I would have seriously considered alternative career options. Although I have no reason to believe that this will happen to me, if I was to be made redundant I would feel extremely cheated and deceived. In some sense, the sacrifices that academics make are made in return for job satisfaction and job security.

Although the above may illustrate why many academics may feel justifiably annoyed if faced with redundancy, it’s not really a strong argument for not doing it. Most people who are made redundant are probably more than justified in feeling annoyed and let down. The caveat, however, is how do you – in the future – attract people from all over the world to work in British universities if you remove what are the attractive aspects of such a career – job satisfaction and job security? This isn’t to say that those who take advantage of this job security and perform poorly shouldn’t risk losing their jobs. British universities may well have been soft on poorly performing academics, but in my experience the number of such people is really quite small. Compared to some academics I met while working in the US, most UK academics that I have encountered are extremely dedicated and hard working researchers and teachers. To a certain extent Britain already struggles to compete with the top US universities in attracting the top people. Introducing compulsory redundancies in some of Britain’s top universities is not going to make it any easier.

There is maybe one argument why making academics redundant is not quite the same as redundancies in other sectors. When an organisation is not performing well, making staff redundant reduces costs, allows the organisation to become more competitive, and ultimately may help the economy overall (not sure how true this is, but let’s assume it is for now). Those made redundant clearly suffer as a result, but hopefully find new careers when things improve. It’s not clear that the same argument applies in the University sector. Making redundancies now may save money (which is clearly the goal) but will damage the sector’s ability to attract the top people into academic jobs in the future. It’s therefore not clear that making redundancies will strengthen the sector in the long term. Academics also tend to become very specialised. I suspect that I would find it much harder now to find a job outside academia than I would have done 10 or 15 years ago. I’m probably either over-qualified or too expensive. Why hire me when you can probably hire someone younger who will cost less (even if I was willing to take a lower salary I’m not convinced that I would find work easily). What is more, when things improve it is unlikely that universities would then rehire those who’ve been made redundant. It is possible that academics find it harder to recover from a redundancy than those in other sectors, although in no way do I think it is easy for those in other sectors.

An obvious concern I have in making the above argument is that it will be interpreted as an arrogant academic arguing that we should be given special treatment. In fact similar arguments may actually apply in other sectors. The short term economic benefits of making redundancies may be destroyed by the reduction in loyalty and trust. So what is the reason for the introduction of compulsory redundancies in some of the UK’s top universities. Well, it is presumably a lack of money. Personally I don’t believe that now is the time to make cuts in the HE sector and we should be arguing that making such cuts will do damage to the UK economy as a whole. On the other hand, things will be very difficult for quite some time, so maybe we need to accept that some cuts are fair and necessary. Some US universities are actually introducing salary reductions and furloughs. Although I don’t think I get paid too much, I would be willing to accept a reduction in salary if it removed the need to make compulsory redundancies. With young kids I would also be fairly happy to work half a day less per week in exchange for a reduction in salary (although I would probably want to have an agreement that this wouldn’t be permanent). As a sector we should be doing everything we can to avoid making compulsory redundancies, but we also need to be careful not to end up being classed together with those in the financial sector who are threatening to leave the country if they don’t continue to get paid ridiculous salaries. I believe in the value of the UK HE sector and believe it has a very positive impact on the UK both socially and economically. I think that academics should be willing to make some kind of sacrifice to keep the UK HE sector world leading, and protect something that has been and should continue to be of benefit to everyone in the UK.

HE funding

Interesting speech by Phil Willis about Higher Education (HE) funding that makes a number of very valid points about how the current funding situation is likely to influence the HE sector and, in particular, those who are currently applying for places at HE institutions.

Although he has openly criticised the Russell Group universities’ take on the recent funding cuts for being somewhat over the top, he does feel that this is not the right time to be cutting funding to Higher Education. I probably agree that using scare tactics – especially ones that are probably not demonstrably true – is not going to convince the government to reverse the proposed funding cuts, even if this decision does verge on the insane. I do also agree that now is not the time to reduce funding for Higher Education.

What is of more immediate concern is the real possibility that, despite the increase in the number of applications for university places, Russell Group universities are likely to reduce the number of places that they fill. There seems to be two reasons for this decision. One is that universities generally have a quota that sets a limit on how many places they can fill. There is currently a threat that English universities will be fined £3500 for every student over this quota. The quota essentially reflects a maximum amount of money that a university can expect to receive. If this maximum also reflects a real limit on the number of places that can reasonably be accommodated, then a fine may also make sense. It’s not fair on students if there aren’t sufficient resources for them all to get the support that they need to perform well during their degree. On the other hand, there is probably some flexibility in most programmes. Fining universities for going a few percent over quota probably achieves nothing (and effectively reduces the available resources) and the threat of such a fine probably means that universities would rather reject potentially good students than go slightly over quota.

The other reason for this reduction in places this coming year is also probably because the actual quota is not on a single year, but a total over the first 2 or 3 years. Many universities over-recruited last year, probably as a result of the financial crisis and people choosing to go to university rather than look for a job (One reason for this over-recruitment is that universities use data from previous years to work out how many students will accept their offers. To fill 100 places universities may make offers to 800 applicants. The current financial crisis means that data from previous years is not really valid and so guessing how many offers to make is very difficult). Many universities are therefore worried that if someone notices that they are coping with more students than their quota allows, their quota may be increased without a corresponding increase in funding. Balancing their overall quota by under-recruiting this coming year (and maybe next year) may make some sense, but it does mean that students who would have been accepted last year and would be accepted in future years, will be excluded to match what might be a somewhat artificial quota. It is probably also largely correct that under-recruitment this year won’t really make up – in resource terms – for the over-recruitment last year. Students in different years generally don’t sit in the same lecture theatres and don’t use the same laboratory space. It would seem reasonable for universities to argue for an exception during what are clearly exceptional times.

Something that Phil Willis’s speech highlighted is that although there is a quota for local students (essentially UK and EU) there isn’t a quota for foreign students who pay their own fees. The under recruitment this coming year probably means that universities can fill what will essentially be spare places by making more offers to foreign students (assuming they can attract them). Having foreign students in our universities is, in my view, generally a good thing. They tend to be quite good students so have a positive effect on those around them, and they bring extra money into the HE sector (and in return hopefully get a valuable degree). However, the more foreign students in our universities, the fewer local students we can accept. Under-recruiting local students this year and effectively freeing up places that can be filled by foreign students seems wrong to me, especially if those being excluded would have been accepted in the recent past and would be accepted in the near future.

What is more, there must be some value associated with our graduates. It has been argued that Physics, for example, underpins something like 6% (~ £100 billion) of the UK economy. If we graduate 3000 Physics students a year each of whom work for 30 years, there will be something like 100000 Physics graduates in the UK economy at any one time. One could then argue that each graduate underpins about £1 million. This is clearly an oversimplification and increasing the number of Physics graduates isn’t going increase the UK economy by £1 million per graduate. Foreign students also, of course, bring new money into the UK, which is clearly a good thing. However, reducing the number of local physics graduates could, however, have a very detrimental effect on the economy since there must be some minimum needed to sustain this part of the economy. There must be a point at which increasing the number of foreign students – at the expense of local students – could damage the UK economy. The same must be true in other areas and reducing the intake of local students, particularly in the sciences, at a time when we need to stimulate the economy seems like a potentially damaging decision. It feels like another short-sighted decisions that will appear to save money in the short term (although even this may not be true) but potentially cost us in the long term.

I think I understand why universities are doing this. It may even be true that during these difficult financial times, predicting how many students will accept offers is very difficult. Over-recruiting again could be very damaging if we don’t have the resources to accommodate all the incoming students and so under-recruiting may well the sensible option. I do, however, feel that we will be disadvantaging students who won’t get a university place simply because of the year they finish school. Although I don’t necessarily think the current situation will lead to a sudden change in the ratio of foreign to local students, I do think we have to be very careful about the balance between foreign and local students. Foreign students do bring money into the UK economy now (in exchange for a good degree), but local students contribute to the economy for the rest of their lives. We have to make sure that we get this balance right.

As an aside, I believe that Phil Willis is not intending on standing again at the next election which is, I think, a great shame. From what I’ve seen, he’s been a very good chairman of the Science and Technology committee and I find his views very sensible and well informed. He also seems to be well regarded and has some influence. It is possible that his criticism of the cuts to research and HE funding could have some impact. I hope that we get a few more equally sensible MPs after the upcoming election.

Fair and balanced?

To be honest, I’ve been finding it difficult to write about the whole STFC crisis at the moment as I’m so resigned to the situation that I’m not really getting too worked up about it anymore. The recent article by John Womersley (the STFC Science Director) claiming that the prioritisation excercise was “fair and balanced” does, however, seem to require some kind of response. I don’t personally know any of the senior STFC people, but of all those of whom I’m aware, John Womersley is the one I’ve been most impressed with. Whenever I’ve encountered him, I’ve found what he says quite reasonable. His article claiming that the facilities cuts were “fair and balanced” has therefore been somewhat disappointing since it seems to be effectively toeing the party line, and once again missing some of the fundamental points.

His article starts by at least implying that the prioritisation exercise was largely a result of the global financial crisis. The decrease in the value of the pound has clearly had an impact on STFC finances, but as many people have pointed out in the past, this is not the primary reason why STFC has a financial problem. The CSR2007 settlement that STFC received was not sufficient for STFC to carry out all the programmes it had inherited from PPARC and CCLRC. This has even been acknowledged in a parliamentary select committee report, so why senior STFC people cannot at least acknowledge that this was a major part of the problem is beyond me. I do agree with the claim that the prioritisation exercise was required (i.e., there wasn’t enough money to carry on as before), I just don’t agree that the primary problem was the global financial crisis (although this clearly did not help).

The article then goes on to claim that STFC based it’s prioritisation on recommendations from independent advisory panels. These panels may well be independent in the sense that they weren’t manned by STFC staff, but they clearly weren’t independent in the sense that the people on the panels didn’t have anything to lose from this exercise. I suspect everyone on all the panels were involved with something that was funded by STFC and hence clearly cannot have been truly independent. As far as I understand the process there were five advisory panels : the Particle Physics Advisory Panal (PPAP), the Nuclear Physics Advisory Panel (NPAP), the Particle Astrophysics Advisory Panel (PAAP), the Near Universe Advisory Panel (NUAP), and the Far Universe Advisory Panel (FUAP). Each of these were made up of people from the relevant disciplines and essentially determined priorities in their own discipline. The recommendations then went to the Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics Science Committee (PPAN) which then interleaved these recommendations into a single priority list. Given the short timescale, this may well have been the best way to do this, but the claim by the Nuclear Physics community that they have been hit especially hard because there was only a single nuclear physicist on PPAN may well have some merit. It must have been extremely difficult to have been part of these panels and not have been very aware of how the decisions were going to influence projects with which you were personally involved (although I’m not claiming that everyone involved didn’t do their utmost to be completely objective).

The article also claims that cuts to the Nuclear Physics community will have no impact on the UK’s ability to build and maintain future nuclear power stations.  This isn’t my area of expertise, but this doesn’t quite seem right.  My suspicion is that a large number of the people who teach nuclear physics in Physics department today are STFC funded, or at least do research in an STFC funded area.  The ability to teach nuclear physics in the future must surely be affected by a large cut in STFC’s nuclear physics funding.

Although there are things in the article with which I disagree, the tone of the article is actually quite reasonable and the articles does at least acknowledge that this will be difficult for university departments. What I find most disappointing is the final paragraph of the article  that makes the standard statements about the importance of research for the UK economy and essentially seems to argue that the prioritisation exercise was a key part of making the case for future funding.  This may be true and it certainly would not have been good to have had a funding (facilities) council that developed a programme that it could not afford.  What I would like to see, however, is a senior STFC executive at least showing some annoyance at the fact that the STFC was funded at a level that forced them to impose these extremely damaging cuts.  If research is crucial to the future of the UK economy (and if physics does indeed pay its way in the sense that the fraction of the economy that relies on physics dwarfs the level of physics funding in the UK) then why are we not all (STFC plus the community) making an extremely strong case for increased funding in these areas.

I actually went to a talk by JohnWolmersley a few years ago, just before the STFC crisis started.  During the talk he hinted that a crisis was looming and that when we became aware of it we should all shoot outwards rather than inwards.  I took this to imply that we should all work together, rather than fighting amongst ourselves.  In general I agree with this, but this would only have worked if STFC had done some fighting itself, rather than lying down and accepting these cuts as if they were reasonable and just what we deserved.  In fairness, John Womersley (I believe) has worked in the US, so maybe he used the words “fair and balanced” in the Fox News sense, implying that he doesn’t believe they were in any way “fair and balanced”.  Maybe this is the beginnings of a fight back, but that might just be my eternal optimism at work.

Merry Christmas to one and all

I was tempted to write a new post about what appears to be the UK government’s view on how to fund Higher Education and research, but I can’t really be bothered. I’m feeling somewhat drained and others (here and here) have written about it more eloquently than I think I can at the moment, and have pretty much summarised my general views.

So, I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and a great New Year (or at least enjoys the break even if you don’t observe Christmas as such). I would like to think that things can only get better next year, but I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to believe that that will be the case. Maybe we need to consider enlisting some celebrities (Bono, Joe McElderry, etc.) since these seem to be the only type of people that the current crop of politicians pay any attention to. Maybe if Jordan says that Higher Education and fundamental research are important for the future of the UK, things will start to improve (maybe Jordan’s a bad example, but I couldn’t think of another celebrity name).

Degrees from 2 different universities

Not many people are reading this blog, which may actually be quite a good thing since it is turning into a bit of a personal core dump. Someone did, however, end up here after doing a search about whether or not they should get degrees from 2 different universities. I don’t know the answer to this, but it did remind me of some discussions I’ve had in my own department about attracting and keeping good PhD students.

A few years ago – prior to my arrival back in the UK – it was apparently fairly common to encourage students not to apply for a PhD place at the same university from which they got their undergraduate degree. The idea, which is probably quite reasonable, is that it would be advantageous to study at more than one university and if everyone does this, good students will ultimately be shared around evenly. This, however, seems to have changed a little. More and more departments are starting to offer PhD places to their own good students. This is probably because we have many more places to fill than was the case a decade or so ago. Trying to fill these places with potentially good students can be hard, and so if you can attract a few good students from different universities, and offer places to some of your own good undergraduates, you will do better than if you encourage your own students to go elsewhere.

Of course, the above policy will only work for a short while, since eventually all departments will be trying to keep as many of their own good students as possible. This may not seem to make much difference but I think it has the potential to make future generations very narrow. Not only do different departments focus in slightly different areas, they also have different research philosophies and practices. Exposing students to a wide range of different topics and different research practices and styles will help our future research leaders to have both a broad understanding of their general area, as well as a detailed understanding of their particular topic. It’s not that those remaining at a single university will not have a broad understanding, but it may be harder to gain that if they’ve never been anywhere else.

I should at least acknowledge that I actually did all my degrees at a single university, but did hold postdoctoral and faculty positions at a number of different universities and in a number of different countries. This too can help – I think – develop breadth and an understanding of different possible research styles. I do think that studying and working in different universities and countries can be very advantageous. It does, however, have some side effects and can disadvantage those who are not able to easily move around – although that is probably a topic for a future post.

Ignorant university leadership?

There is a report in the Times Higher Education that a group of 25 senior university sector figures met to discuss the objection by many in the academic sector to economic and social impact being included in research assessments. They claim to have completely “bought into the impact agenda”, but that there is a group of middle ranking academics/researchers who have “rather lost the plot”.

What these senior figures seem to think is that academics don’t want their research to have impact. This was illustrated by one speaker who was quoted as saying “take a large number of academics into a room and ask them to put their hand up if they wish their work to have no impact whatsoever … I have yet to see a hand”. This statement either illustrates that the speaker is completely ignorant of what drives academics, or it is a completely disingenious comment that intentionally misrepresents the debate in an attempt to make it appear that academics are selfish prats who believe that because they’re so clever they deserve to have taxpayers’ money spent on them without giving anything in return. Of course academics want their work to have impact. They debate is about the optimum way in which to achieve and measure impact.

There is ample evidence to suggest that in many cases impact from fundamental research, be it in the sciences or social sciences, occurs many years after the research is done and in many cases is totally unpredictable. Not only this, but this unpredictable impact can have immense value, much more than would generally be true of predictable research. This is the fundamental point. The argument being made by academics is that you generally cannot predict the economic and social impact of a particular research project in advance. Additionally, if you try to do so and make this an important factor in determining whether to fund research or not, you will drive research to become more predictable and significantly reduce the potential impact.

The only positive spin I can put on the view of these senior university figures is that they believe that including economic and social impact in the assessment of research activities is going to happen whether we like it or not. We may as well, therefore, just get on with it and make the best of it. If this is the case
then I think it is incredibly cowardly and simplistic. It may well happen, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be doing our best to illustrate that it may do immense damage and that if too much pressure is put on academics to illustrate the potential impact of their research, it will encourage predictable research that will have minimal impact. This will ultimately be a waste of taxpayers’s money and if anything we have an obligation to spend this money as wisely as possible. Accepting the impact agenda may well violate this principle.