Tampering with selection? Education Inspectorate: “We find that shocking”
The Higher Education Act is outdated, warns the Education Inspectorate, and that has all kinds of consequences. Students’ language skills are not good enough, internships could be better, and co-determination is weakened.
“We are quite disappointed,” said Inspector General Alida Oppers during an interview on The State of Education, the Education Inspectorate’s annual report released today. “This is the third or fourth time that we are writing this.”
For several years, the inspectorate has been warning that the Higher Education and Research Act is squeaking and creaking. Or in more diplomatic terms, the law is outdated. Politicians need to get moving, is the message.
“The warning that hangs over the report is that we need to watch our step,” Oppers said. The problems with students’ language skills, monitoring the quality of programs, and the fragile support for co-determination ... It’s all well known. But when will something be done about it?
Take quality control, for example. In the past, politicians often found themselves sending reassuring messages: all higher education programs are accredited by the quality assurance body NVAO, so they are all in order. “But is just accrediting the programs enough?”, Oppers wonders aloud.
Hopeful
According to her, Minister Dijkgraaf understands the criticism, as he has been working for months on a comprehensive forward-looking study. “What we find hopeful is that he wants to look at how higher education functions on a fundamental level. That is new. We are full of expectations about what it will yield.”
Sitting next to Oppers is Susanne Rijken, superintendent of higher education. Together they underscore why the Higher Education Act has become obsolete. “It dates back to a time when there were hardly any international students and digital education did not exist,” says Rijken.
Problems with internationalization did not arise then. Accreditations don’t really address that issue either, just as there are more blind spots in quality assurance. For example, hardly any attention is paid to internships, while, according to the inspectors, there is still much potential there.
Political choice
There are also plans to leave quality control more to the universities and colleges of higher education themselves through “institutional accreditation.” They would then have to inspect the quality of their education themselves, while the government would only check to see if they are doing it properly. “It’s a political choice,” Oppers says. “For example, it then becomes more difficult for the government to say: we want to look more closely at language proficiency or internationalization. But if you don’t consider that so important, then you can also leave it to the institutions themselves.”
Politics defers some issues - social safety and student welfare, for example - to co-determination. But will that work? Participation in decision-making is also suffering, according to the inspectorate. Few students know what a “program committee” is or what it deals with. Rijken comments: “We observed this 10 years ago. Everything has been tried, everything has been thought of: how do we get students excited about participation? Yet it remains the same.”
The inspectorate writes that there are “alternative options for the organization of co-determination, perhaps more appropriate to the present time.” Maybe consider new forms of “citizen participation” via digital solutions, Rijken speculates. The main point is: things need to change fundamentally, because the system is not working well.
Shocking
This will not happen by itself, the inspectorate notes. Institutions are eager to continue down the same path. Just look at how selection works in higher education. Those selection procedures are poorly substantiated, the inspectorate reported earlier this year. Basically, everyone just does what they want, while programs tinker with equity in their selection process.
“We find that shocking,” Oppers said. “One of the problems is that programs often don’t consider the impact on equality. What is the bias in their procedure? To what extent can they justify their choices? They find those to be difficult questions. And meanwhile, more and more selection is happening!”
Shouldn’t the inspectorate act, then, if the quality of higher education is suffering? “With The State of Education, we hold up a mirror,” Oppers says. “But we are not the ones who can solve the problems. The institutions and programs ultimately have to do that themselves.”
