Research ‘impact’ and the university as market place: The perspective of a postgraduate taught student

With all this talk on research ‘impact’ – an elusive concept of worth supposedly measurable with statistics, percentages, and economic figures – will anyone stop to consider the impact this not-so-subtle shift toward the market place actually has on academia, and more importantly on the attitudes of students?

Simon Jenkins, in his guardian article published this morning, does just that albeit from a very worrying angle. His conclusion:

“If I were an academic I would stop pretending I was “investing in the nation’s future”. I would stop using such language. I would try to give students what they want for their money, usually a well-rounded education and a mild sense of obligation to society, and tuck my research into my spare time. That would be my “rate of return”. As long as universities play the investment game, they will find students and taxpayers alike asking to scrutinise their accounts.”

Jenkins argues, then, that employability should be any university’s main concern, and the way to achieve that, apparently, is value for money through increased taught contact hours. The rise of tuition fees to £7000-9000 per year is central to this debate, with students supposedly feeling that too much time to twiddle their thumbs doesn’t justify the amount they pay for a degree course. Universities occupy a position of accountability to provide students with “an education that stimulates them for three years and gets them a job.” Too much focus on research and scholarship apparently fails to fulfil these criteria. As Jenkins informs us, the universities minister, David Willetts, is calling for a “cultural change” that would reverse the trend of “too much time going on scholarship and not enough on teaching.” A cultural change? A change that wants to destroy the culture of academia more like.

Any student naive enough to think that employability comes from extended hours of school-child spoon feeding should quite simply not be at university, and for institutions and government reports to fuel this mindset through notions of ‘impact’ and ‘value for money’ is frankly sickening. The ability to think for oneself, to manage one’s own time, to explore one’s own research interests and form one’s own opinions on current affairs whether through scholarship or otherwise, is crucial, in my mind, to any notion of employability, and is one of the principle reasons I found university so rewarding, and actually wish to continue on into academia. In my view, the ‘impact’ of research should be untangled from the web of finances and investment talk. It should instead be revalued alongside the ability to change one’s circumstances, to free one’s mind.

“If university were an investment, where was the return?” The return is unmeasurable, so stop trying to calculate it. The return is right here, in posts such as these, in enthusiasm for research and scholarship passed down from equally enthusiastic tutors. The return is the enjoyment I get every day from being able to read engaging texts that make me go ‘huh, I hadn’t thought of it like that before,’ and then being able to justify my thoughts in prose that means something to others. The return is in the evidence that, no thanks to the current government, academia continues to thrive as a discipline.

Undergraduate study should not be marketed as the next stage on your employability checklist. Academia, or my current experience of it, gives people a voice that is recognised outside of statistical ‘impact’, it gives people the opportunity to develop their own interests, and to spend everyday studying something they love. That should be the focus in undergraduate brochures and prospectuses. But of course, that can’t be measured and so is often overlooked.
I used to tell my parents, when they frequently questioned my decision as they saw it to ‘get into huge amounts of debt despite the inevitable lack of “better” jobs when I finish’, that I wasn’t paying for the degree or for the chance of a higher income later, I was paying for the experience. Boy, was I right. I wish more people saw it that way. Yes, it might be quite an idealistic position. Yes, it might be quite naive. But I enjoyed myself. I gained skills I would not have gained otherwise, and more importantly, I opened my mind to possibilities I didn’t have the capacity to even dream of at home.

I don’t know what my future hold’s post postgraduate study, but I do know that in not looking for a material return on my intellectual investment, I’ll be a hell of a lot more satisfied than most.