Abolish UE and brace for inequity
The following commentary is provided by Dr Michael Johnston, senior lecturer in the School of Education at Victoria University of Wellington.
Earlier this week, the New Zealand Productivity Commission released a report making a number of recommendations for tertiary education policy in New Zealand. One was to abolish university entrance (UE) and to leave universities to establish their own entry requirements. The report articulates various reasons for this recommendation, all of which require careful critique before any move to enact the recommendation is made.
The Productivity Commission notes that UE is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for entering university: attaining UE does not of itself guarantee a student can study at university; universities are already free to set their own requirements for entry into courses and degree programmes. Furthermore, from the age of 20, New Zealand residents can enter university irrespective of UE attainment and universities also have provisions for admitting younger students without UE under special circumstances. This is not a strong argument for the abolition of UE. A large majority of students entering university do have UE, and any additional requirements are usually for particular science or mathematics courses, or to manage enrolment in over-subscribed programmes.
A stronger argument, if it were true, would be the claim made by the Productivity Commission that UE does not reliably indicate the likelihood a student will succeed at university. However, in response to the Productivity Commission, Professor Stuart McCutcheon and Chris Whelan of Universities New Zealand have already noted that UE has proven to be quite a reliable predictor of university success; New Zealand universities’ 84 percent qualifications completion rate is quite possibly the highest in the world. Conversely, the risk of failure at university is considerably greater than average for students who enter without UE.
A more compelling argument for abolishing UE is the Productivity Commission’s point that its requirements constrain course design options for schools, particularly for those with high proportions of students intending to attend university. UE requires 14 Level 3 credits to be attained in each of three approved disciplines as diverse as Chemistry, Physical Education and Te Reo Rangatira. The claim is that, were it not for this constraint, schools would have more freedom to take advantage of the flexibility of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) to assess cross-curricular or multi-disciplinary courses.
While I am certainly supportive of using NCEA much more creatively than is typical at present, I am far from convinced UE places unduly onerous constraints on schools in this regard. The 42 credits from approved disciplines constitutes about two thirds of the credit requirement for NCEA Level 3 and about half of a typical Year 13 assessment load. So there is plenty of room within this requirement to run courses that cross disciplines. Additionally, in my view, notwithstanding UE, much more flexibility for the use of NCEA could be garnered with a more expansive conception of course design and assessment — but that is a topic for another article.
The Productivity Commission asserts that universities enjoy a high cultural status disproportionate to their social and economic contributions. It uses this assertion to support two further arguments for the abolition of UE: that among tertiary providers only universities have a statutory provision for entry requirements, exacerbating their undeserved status; and that students who attain UE might be dissuaded by the high prestige of university qualifications from following other tertiary or vocational pathways. While both of these arguments are plausible, no hard evidence is proffered in the report to support either.
It is well beyond the scope of this article to analyse the deservedness or otherwise of the status of universities. However, while this high status persists, abolishing UE would either be ineffectual or damaging to social equity, depending on what the universities do to replace it. Several scenarios are possible.
The universities might all agree to implement a requirement similar to the existing UE. This would essentially be the status quo for students and schools; the only real difference would be that universities, rather than the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, would process NCEA results to determine university eligibility.
Another possibility is different universities could set different criteria, albeit still based on NCEA results. This would probably retain constraints on Level 3 assessment in schools, with an additional complication: students and schools would have to contend with multiple eligibility criteria instead of just one. Of course, as the Productivity Commission points out, some universities already have additional requirements for entry into specific programmes, but under this scenario a veritable labyrinth of requirements would become possible.
To my mind, the most troubling scenario would involve universities abandoning the NCEA system altogether and running their own entry assessments. This would be a terrible blow to the status of NCEA and would result in an exacerbation of educational inequality. Because of the high cultural status of universities — deserved or not — schools in affluent communities would come under pressure from those communities to prepare students for the universities’ entry assessments in preference to working towards Level 3 NCEA.
Schools with lower proportions of students proceeding to university — which tend to be those serving less affluent communities — might be less likely or able to gear themselves to prepare students for the universities’ assessments, thus increasing the extant structural barriers to university participation for students from those communities.
Under this scenario, NCEA would be relegated to a second-class status. It is clear from the Privacy Commission report that this is not what its writers would want. But all too often, education policy in New Zealand has been implemented with insufficient consideration of its implications, resulting in outcomes quite different from those the policy-makers had intended.
This commentary was originally published on Newsroom.co.nz