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0:11
I’m very, very pleased to be able to welcome Professor Vikki Boliver.
0:18
I think she's probably known to a reasonable number of people in the room, but she
0:26
is a former student of the Department, having done her DPhil with us between, now I have to look at my notes, 2001 to 2005. And we were just talking earlier on, I had completely forgotten, which is very shameful of me, that I was actually her DPhil examiner.
1:01
Anyway, after leaving us she had a brief period at Bath Spa University and then on to the University of Durham where she is now Professor of Sociology. So yes, I'm very, very happy to welcome you, Vikki, as our first plenary speaker. And the floor is yours. Yeah, thank you very much, Colin. And thank you for saying that my PhD was good enough to receive a DPhil, I will be forever indebted to you for that. I should also actually say a huge thanks
1:37
to Anthony Heath, who was my supervisor and has just given me such a lot of support throughout the PhD process and ever since really, he’s given me lots of opportunities, lots of good advice, lots of support. So really grateful to Anthony, Colin, and so many other people in the Department who have just been fantastic. I was really pleased to be invited to come and speak today to celebrate
2:01
the 25th Anniversary of the Sociology Department. As Colin mentioned, I joined the Department as a DPhil student in 2001, so I think I was among the third cohort of students admitted through the newly minted Department. And as I was thinking about putting this talk together and reflecting back on my time at Oxford, I thought I’d have a little look for some photographs from that time. Yes, some of you may recognise yourselves, all dolled up for a night out at the Sociology
2:38
Department party. This is pre-smartphone, so perhaps mercifully there aren't that many
2:48
documents of record of how we all dressed and looked back then. But you can see Anthony
2:55
popping up in the background there and also Rob, who's going to be speaking later and many others who are here today or joining online. Right, enough nostalgia for a moment. So, what I want to talk about today is a paper that I'm almost finished with, although after I've had your questions and comments, I'm sure I will no longer feel that it's almost finished. But it looks at specifically the case of England, but in international and comparative context.
3:29
And it's looking at the degree to which higher education, some years ago and today, could be said to be commodified or decommodified and I've put a spoiler in the title of my talk. I'm going to basically talk to you about the hyper-commodification of higher education in England and it was mentioned earlier that one of the real sorts of wonderful things about Oxford Sociology is that it attempts to solve puzzles. I'm not going to attempt to solve a puzzle today.
4:05
I'm actually going to do the other kind of thing that good, Oxford-specifically, sociology does, which is to take something that everybody already knows through experience and common sense, and pull together the data to evidence the fact that you are correct in your hunch that higher education in England is not merely highly commodified, it's actually hyper-commodified compared to practically everywhere else. So, I'm going to prove you right with data, with some
4:37
graphs and there might even be a regression model there because I know you like that sort of thing. So just to kind of step back a little bit, I've already said that we already know that higher education in England is really commodified, and we know that there's been a massive shift from the public purse to the private individual of absorbing the costs of higher education. We know that we have a very high tuition fees regime in England, and we’d be forgiven for
5:09
thinking that that's kind of just the way it is. And forgiven for forgetting that it hasn't always been this way. I want to take us back, let's say 60 years or so, to a very different way, nationally within the population and on the part of government, of thinking about education generally and including higher education as something that citizens had increasingly a right to expect. And we think of primary and secondary education as something that absolutely
5:43
everyone has a right to get educated to that level. But back in the early post-war decades, it was also thought increasingly and there was quite a strong political commitment to this, that there should be a rolling out of the right to education to encompass higher education. So if you think about the Robbins Committee and the Robbins Report that paved the way for the first substantial wave of higher education expansion in this country in the 1960s, it was
6:20
very clear in the reporting of that Committee and in the policy that followed it, that paved the way for the 1960s Robbins expansion, that higher education was seen as something that should be progressively rolled out to enable as many people as possible to participate in it. So very early on in the Robbins Report, it says “We’ve assumed as an axiom that courses of higher education
6:47
should be available for all.” With a little caveat around it, of course, that those who are qualified by ability and attainment to progress to higher education, and who want to do it, so we're not going to force everyone like we forced them to go to secondary school. But anyone who's capable of doing it, who's got the requisite qualifications and who wants to do some higher education really
7:09
should be able to do it, and that was the driving principle behind the Robbins expansion. It has also been something that's a principle that's been repeated in subsequent policy that's brought about subsequent waves of expansion. So, the expansion in the late 1980s and 90s had also a lot of the
7:32
same sort of political rhetoric around it. You know, we should widen access to the widest pool of possible people. This wasn't peculiar, or particular to England and the wider UK, that higher education was being seen as something that ought to be a right of citizens. So, you have in the same decade, the UN International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights, to which the UK and many, many other nations were signatories, saying that it should be a
8:05
commitment of liberal democracies that higher education should be equally accessible to all, again on the basis of capacity. And going quite far in saying that states ought to do all they can to make this possible, including by increasingly making higher education free to access without cost to the individual – it is something that the state should assume responsibility for funding, on the basis that it has many, many public benefits as well as benefits to private individuals.
8:41
If you fast forward to 2015, there's something similar but slightly diluted that currently stands as a kind of axiom that many nations, including the UK, are signed up to. So, one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals around education, post-compulsory education including tertiary or higher education, says that by 2030 there should be equal access for all to – and note – now it's affordable education rather than for free or increasingly free education. So,
9:23
there's definitely been a shift in the degree of consensus and support for the idea that higher education should be a right of citizens and that we should remove the financial impediments to engaging in it. So, I think it's useful to think about where national higher educations sit and how they are characterised in relation to this idea of free education and the citizen’s right to access
9:54
it. And so, in this paper we use a concept that many of you in this room will be familiar with. I think this book by Esping-Andersen might perhaps still be required reading for the MSc programmes, is that right, Colin? Esping-Andersen's book, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, uses various concepts including decommodification to look at the extent to which the state takes responsibility
10:26
for, and has a commitment to, ensuring the welfare of its citizens. This book, by the way, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, I looked up on Google Scholar how many citations it has to date, does anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many times this book has been cited? Someone give me a number: have a guess. Two thousand, three million. You're closer. No, you're not quite closer, but 47,727 times. I last looked last week, so it's probably closer to the three million now,
11:05
but this has been an extremely influential work and that's why it’s still very much on the reading list. And Esping-Andersen talks about this concept of decommodification and essentially says if you think about a fully-fledged, well-functioning democratic society and this perhaps requires it to be a prosperous one as well, what you would hope to see is that the collective and the state takes on responsibility for making it possible for people to have welfare, have a good life, to
11:45
live a good existence, to access services, to have sufficient income and so on, even when the market fails or regardless of what the market is doing. And those who have read Esping-Andersen’s work
12:06
will know that when he was looking at the extent to which nation states do or do not decommodify
12:17
the citizenry, he mostly focused on things to do with income replacement due to being out of work. So, he looked at sickness benefits, for example, or unemployment benefits or retirement income provisions. But even in his early work he did reference education as something that a highly decommodifying state would step in to cover the costs of and to cover the lost income while studying. He says here, “A minimalist definition must entail that citizens can freely opt out of
12:55
work under conditions when they themselves consider it necessary, for various reasons, even educational self-improvement”, when that's necessary for them to participate fully as a citizen in democratic life. Now one of the things that Esping-Andersen did with his work was to develop a typology of different, what he called, welfare regimes. Basically, three broad ideal types. He looked at a range of nations and roughly classified them as to where
13:34
they would sit in terms of these types of welfare regimes. One of them he labelled the liberal type of regime, and the country that we live in is a good example of this and as I show in a moment in relation to higher education, it's a really good example of this. Liberal regimes are ones that rely very much on the market, for people to access the goods and services and the income and support that they need. And the state sees its role and plays a role, only intervening when
14:16
things really go drastically wrong for people, and often only for the most disadvantaged people in society. The state will intervene for them to replace what the market hasn't provided for them, and often in a very stigmatising way, often in a very minimal way as well. Many of the social welfare policies are designed to, in a way, provide a safety net, but mainly to provide a deterrent to not picking yourself up and getting back into the market and trying to
14:49
have the market take care of your needs. So, you have the liberal regimes, typically the UK would be in there, the United States and Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, would be often characterised as liberal welfare regimes. Then somewhere in the middle, if you're thinking of the typology as having an ordinal aspect to it, would be the conservative regimes. These would be the continental European countries like France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal and Italy,
15:22
Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, are often grouped under the conservative regime, and here it's not the market that is to provide for people's welfare and services and goods and so on. It's very much the family. The family is the unit that provides for individuals in terms of their income needs, their care needs and so on. And Esping-Andersen argued that in these conservative regimes, where the state does intervene, it's usually to prop up these
16:00
traditional and hierarchical structures, particularly to prop up the family. And replacement of income and things like that, or provision of services such as childcare are only really made available when the family is really on its back and cannot actually provide for itself.
16:21
And then the third type are the social democratic regimes typically associated with the Scandinavian countries, so Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. When we're talking in terms of decommodification, these would be the most decommodifying welfare regimes in that it's very much a part of the ethos of government and the broad consensus and expectation of the citizenry that the state's role, a major role that the state plays, is to actually free individuals from the vagaries and
17:01
the mercies of the market and to free individuals from having to fall back on family to get their welfare needs met. So, in these states, typically social benefits and services are often universal rather than stratified or relying on people having made contributions in advance to a welfare system such as a pension scheme, and so on. Often rather generous benefits as well, it might typically at least aim to approach a replacement wage, for example if you're unemployed and so on.
17:44
Now I'm going to talk a little bit in relation to higher education about welfare regimes, but more about the idea of decommodification. It's worth saying a little bit though, about the welfare regime framework because it does have 47,000 citations and not all of them say that this book and this typology are marvellous, that it works beautifully every time, although actually very many of them do say that this is a useful way of thinking about how states provide goods and
18:18
services. Looking across the literature, I didn't read all 47,000 papers that have commented on the typology and the idea of decommodification, but having a quick glance across and making judicious use of literature review type published research, one of the things that often pops out as a kind of critique of this way of thinking about different ways in which states provide, is that sometimes it's been posited that there are actually four regimes, not three. Usually
18:58
that's involved taking one of the three regimes and saying actually there's two things going on there rather than that they're all wrong and we need to start again and actually there are four and they bear no relation to the original three that Esping-Andersen posited. So some people have observed that among those that are grouped as conservative regimes by Esping-Andersen, there's actually a subset that are rather different, often termed the Mediterranean group,
19:30
and at least one study has said within the liberal regimes that some of them are more radical because of the way in which they're more redistributive once taxes are being collected and transfers have been made. So, Castles and Mitchell say that the UK, Australia and Canada are radical in their very redistributive nature, given that they're liberal regimes. I think if they updated that study, they
20:01
might not use the term radical, I don't know. Or might mean something rather different about it. I guess I would just say in any case that Esping-Andersen obviously did not intend the regime classification to be a strict typology, he very much intended it as a set of ideal types, so a heuristic device to enable us to think about the range of axes that we could use, including decommodification, to think about how states play a role in the provision of services
20:36
and welfare. You know, roughly where are they and where do sets of nations cluster together, and we can say that they are broadly speaking distinct from others. So a couple of studies, maybe half a dozen or so, have applied Esping-Andersen's ideas and the three welfare regimes typology to looking empirically at higher education, and generally those studies support the idea that these three types of welfare regimes capture quite well the clustering of nations when
21:24
it comes to how higher education is funded, how it's distributed, how stratified it is, how much the state is involved in reducing the cost and providing for the cost of higher education. Now I point out one study in particular, because this is a study that we replicate for the present day, and this is a study by Willemse and de Beer, published in 2012, using data from 2007. And what they do is they take 19 countries depicted in this graph here and they have a bunch of measures
22:09
of how commodified or decommodified higher education is in those nations. They also measure stratification. I'm not going to talk about stratification measures in this paper partly because I'm a bit confused about how they ended up saying that the UK had a low level of stratification of its higher education sector, even in 2007. Something’s a little bit weird there. So, in some future work we are going to look at measuring how stratified higher education
22:40
systems are. As I say, for now we just look at how commodified or decommodified they are. But in this 2007 data paper they essentially find or argue for broadly three clusters of regime types when it comes to the decommodification and the stratification of higher education. Stratification accesses the X axis, so you'll see that it tends to split the liberal regimes on the left-hand side from the conservative ones in their models, and the UK's pretty sort of dead centre
23:21
within the cluster of liberal regimes. So, it's a pretty average liberal regime by their measure and at that time. And you'll see the Y axis is the level of decommodification. So, the liberal regimes, including the UK, are relatively low on decommodification, are relatively highly commodified, as are a lot of the conservative nations here as well. Maybe they're not as bad on average, but still the major dividing line is between the social democratic
23:55
regimes that are very highly decommodified and the other two sets of regimes where they're not so much. So, what we wanted to do in this paper is actually try and replicate and as I'll explain in a moment, slightly modify, Willemse and de Beer’s analysis to look at what the UK, or more specifically England, looks like today in terms of decommodification. And I mentioned at the very beginning that you all know already what the answer to this is because those of us
24:34
who've been alive long enough, and I think we all have in this room pretty much, will know that there's been a huge shift of the costs of higher education onto private individuals, essentially. So that graph on the left is showing you from 1990 through to the middle of the last decade
24:56
the amount of resources that universities get and where it comes from and you'll see the dark green
25:04
block is the government directly funding the capacity of universities to educate students and the light green block on top is students paying eventually out of pocket through student loans to cover those costs. And clearly you know with the beginning in ‘96 when tuition fees were first introduced of £1000. Oh no, they were introduced in ‘98, sorry. And I went to university the year before, so I've led a charmed life. And then through to
25:42
the introduction of £3000 per annum fees in 2006. So that would have been captured by the Willemse and de Beer paper. Now they are £9000 so you can see that by the last year in this data series, basically universities are being paid for by private individuals at the end of the day.
26:04
And you see something really similar when it comes to how students fund just being alive while being a student, right? So, I'm not quite old enough to have benefited from this, but some people in this room will have benefitted happily from maintenance grants when going to university. I believe they were first introduced with the 1944 Education Act as a little addendum to that, that students
26:33
would get maintenance to cover essentially lost earnings because they were full-time students all throughout the 60s, 70s and into the 80s. The real value of those grants was declining over time, but at least there were grants, and it was expected that students should be supported by the state financially while they're pursuing education. And then you get from 1990 onwards, the introduction
27:02
of student loans to initially part replace the maintenance grants and then ultimately completely replace it. And then you'll see that maintenance grants came back in for a very brief time in the early part of this century before just being got rid of completely even for the poorest students,
27:26
replaced as you know, by repayable loans, which are not decommodifying, they are temporarily decommodifying at best, but essentially you are indebted and you have to repay that loan for your maintenance and your fees at the end of the day, even though many people as we know, actually don't manage to fully repay those loans. They still carry them with them and pay interest on them for a very long time after taking them out. So, to go back a step, then, I'm just showing you
28:03
again the data from Willemse and de Beer’s paper for 2007, just with the decommodification measure rather than the two axes, just so you can see what the general pattern was that they found. So, the three clear things here are one, that the four Scandinavian countries do sit at the top of the decommodification index as, relatively speaking, highly decommodified nations. After that it's a
28:37
bit of a mixed bag, with liberal nations in red tending to be a bit less decommodified on average than the conservative ones, although there's not a massive line of demarcation between them. And you'll see England is sitting somewhere in the middle of the liberal nations on this measure. They're not particularly extreme in either direction. Alright, so my family would say this is like stating the bleeding obvious. I like to call it a hypothesis. The hypothesis then of this paper
29:19
is that if we replicate Willemse and de Beer’s analysis for the most recent data available, we will probably find that higher education has become much more commodified in England, not just much more, but much more than anywhere else. And I'm going to argue that it stands out as, as I've called the paper, a hyper-commodified nation with respect to higher education.
29:48
So, let's talk about the data then. So, I take no responsibility for these measures, I'm replicating Willemse and de Beer’s work, although I will actually take responsibility as I’ll explain in a moment for one of the other measures, because I think they kind of got it wrong in the way that they went about measuring. So, the measures that we have, I should say that we were looking at the same 19 countries including the UK or more specifically England, we've got the most recent
30:22
data for 2020 and we're going to compare that to how things looked in 2007. And the measures are: how much as a percentage of GDP or a nation’s spending is on higher education, and secondly, given all the spending on higher education that comes from both of the public purse and private sources, what percentage of it is public? The third measure is how much has the higher education sector been expanded to enable people to take up this opportunity to get a
30:54
university-level education, the fourth measure is how high the tuition fees are that students are expected to contribute to their education. And the fifth one is what's the average value of the student financial support package available. That's either the government is providing that money free of charge in the form of a traditional maintenance loan, or they are publicly backing a loan to students, and so are able to maybe charge a bit less than market rates, make it certain that
31:41
students can access these loans rather than having to go to a bank and negotiate. And it's the fifth measure that we kind of take issue with a little bit. What we suggest is that, if you're trying to measure decommodification, you shouldn't include repayable loans as an indicator of the state trying to decommodify, because obviously those loans get paid back, at least in part, by the individual who takes them out. So, what we do is we create an alternative
32:15
fifth element of decommodification where we just look at publicly funded, non-repayable grants.
32:27
And one thing we obviously want to do is check that by changing that measure, we haven't actually
32:34
massively changed how the picture looked in 2007 before we then compare 2007 to 2020. So, I'll show you what that looks like when we make that change. So, in terms of how we analyse the data, we do what Willemse and de Beer did, which is quite simple I would say, but we will probably do something a bit fancier later on. So let me know if you've got any ideas for fancy modelling strategies for this. But essentially all we do is we take those five
33:04
decommodification indicators and we convert them into z-scores to standardise them and then we average them for each of the 19 nations and that gives us our decommodification index. Then we use, first of all, just some correlation and then a bit of linear regression analysis, first of all to just see how our change of that fifth measure affects how things looked in 2007. So, the fact that we take out repayable loans from the equation. Are we doing violence to Willemse
33:43
and de Beer’s account of how things looked in 2007? And then we do something that's more interesting, we take our two decommodification indexes, both having taken student loans out of them. For 2007 and 2020, we look at how the countries lineup – are they basically in the same place or have any of them moved? And then the last thing we do is use a bit of just basic linear regression analysis, taking the decommodification index as the dependent variable. And we look at,
34:21
for both 2007 and 2020, how well do the three welfare regime types predict, or are associated with, decommodification, and more importantly could we say that in either 2007 or 2020, the England case is a substantively and statistically significant outlier compared to other nations. Let me show you first of all then what it looks like when we take the original decommodification index created by Willemse and de Beer for 2007 and we plot it against our
35:05
version for the same year, 2007, but we've taken student loans out of the equation and only used grants alongside the other four measures. The correlation between the two is really high – 0.995. The data points aren’t massively scattered round the line. I’ve highlighted the UK case, and I'll show you with regression analysis that the UK/England case isn't particularly hurt or distorted by the change that we made to the decommodification index. Essentially,
35:49
it’s the same picture as the original paper if we use our alternative metric. I might invite anyone to raise their hand if they disagree with me on that in case I need to try and persuade you before I go any further. Awesome. Always good to know. Changing that figure slightly has not massively altered the picture in 2007. So, the next thing I'm going to show you is, in terms of a bivariate
36:24
correlation to begin with, what it looks like when we compare our version of the index for 2007 with that for 2020. And this is basically how it looks. So still a reasonably strong correlation, it’s not like the whole world has gone upside down in the meantime. It’s 0.807. So, there has been some change, including some of the social democratic regimes drifting towards the conservative ones,
37:03
and an even slightly muddier picture when it comes to separating the liberal and conservative regimes. But the most obvious thing that jumps out from that analysis is the UK, specifically England, right down the bottom there. An absolute massive outlier by 2020, when it was just average liberal previously. Now it wouldn't be an Oxford Sociology seminar if I didn't show you a regression table where the coefficients are too small for you to read.
37:38
So here we go, you’re welcome, well maybe you can read them, I don’t know. So, here's what we do in this table. We've got
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three sets of analysis here. The first one is looking at Willemse and de Beer’s original 2007 decommodification index and we're using model one to look at whether the three welfare regime types
38:20
are distinguishing when it comes to predicting the decommodification level of the 19 nations in 2007. And then in model two, we add England specifically to see whether it’s a distinctive case, controlling for welfare regime type. So, what you see there is that in 2007, with the original formulation of the decommodification index, that what we saw in the graph really, that both the liberal and conservative regimes are way less decommodified, i.e. more commodified,
39:00
and there’s not a lot to separate them from each other. And in terms of the UK/England case being unusual or adding any more predicative power: it doesn't. There’s no significant effect of the UK on where the decommodification index comes out after controlling for regime type. The same is true for the use of our alternative measure of decommodification and for 2007, it's not the case that the UK case is a significant outlier. Come 2020, though,
39:45
the UK is both substantively and significantly an outlier case, being way less decommodified than any of the other nations, including the rest of the average liberal nations. So, I just want to show you one more regression table because I know you like them so much. This is just where we take the decommodification index for 2020 and we just look at the component parts of it, the five things that made up that overarching index, to see where in particular
40:22
the English case is anomalous, is an outlier. So, this layer here is essentially the model two from before but for each of the five measures that make up the overarching decommodification index. And what you’ll see is that it’s in particular the fourth component of the measure, the average level of tuition fees, that the UK is really an outlier nation. Like I said, you already know that but now here it is in black and white. We’re also borderline statistically significant on
41:01
how much of the spending on higher education is public rather than public plus private, and then also on the generosity of the grants system. Interestingly the English case is no different from the average liberal nation when it comes to HE enrolment rates, so it’s not even the case that by pushing the costs of higher education onto private individuals, we’ve got the benefit of more people going compared to other liberal nations – we haven’t. Alright so just to sum up.
41:41
Colin gave me some very good advice when I started lecturing – he said, whenever you give a lecture, all you need to do is tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them it, and then at the end, tell them what you’ve told them. So that’s what I’m going to do, that's carried me for 20 years. It works. So, I’m just going to summarise the key messages of what I’ve shown you. So, I would argue that the welfare regimes framework is not actually brilliant in distinguishing
42:09
between the liberal and conservative regimes, but it’s certainly useful in thinking about, in ideal types, where nations might lie when it comes to how commodified or decommodified they are, including in higher education. And I think the decommodification concept itself it really useful in conceptualising how the state plays a role in providing higher education to its citizens as a form of welfare. It's also something that we can measure, which we like to do in Oxford.
42:44
And it might be that there are better ways of measuring it than we've done in this paper but as I mentioned, our main aim is to replicate something for a later date.
42:54
So the key message really is that higher education in England has become so privatised that not only is it a very liberal nation in the welfare regimes typology, and very commodified, I’d say it now actually stands apart from all the other nations that we've looked at and possibly any nation that you might look at, as being a hyper-commodified higher education sector.
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