Should UK Universities Be Friendlier To Credit Transfers?

The principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford is calling for United kingdom schools to follow the US university admission methods that fight ‘snobbery’ by accepting credits from less-prestigious institutions.

According to a major educator, stopping college students from poorer backgrounds from gaining degrees using credits accumulated at other institutions constitutes such snobbery. Sir David Watson, principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford, says the Uk must adopt the “much messier system” of university admissions utilized in the US in calling for a nationwide construction that enables college students to transfer credits between different courses and universities.

Watson says that a third of all college students in the US transfer institutions just before graduating, taking their credits with them to their new university in accordance to a report he wrote for the Leadership Basis for Higher Schooling. Furthermore, Sir David says that virtually all students in Uk universities are enrolled by means of the so-known as “royal route”, in which they have to enter the 1st yr of an undergraduate course irrespective of their prior knowledge of higher education, typically holding a number of robust publish-sixteen qualifications.

Watson, who is a professor of larger training at Oxford, also warns that United kingdom universities positioned higher up the “institutional status ladder” are more reluctant to acknowledge learning elsewhere, portion of a damaging “institutional protectionism”.

According to Jack Grove of Occasions Larger Schooling, a report published on November 22 says that although there is no information to clarify how many used prior credits in the direction of students’ degrees, about 43,000 of them entered the first year of a full-time undergraduate program in the United kingdom in 2011-twelve having currently studied for a greater schooling qualification.

Nevertheless, the sector’s use of credit score transfer was “feeble” and that “conservatism, snobbery and lack of imagination” prevented its wider use, in accordance to Sir David.

“The lack of an successful credit framework inhibits the UK’s progress in direction of a genuinely lifelong learning society, a purpose more and more recognized as crucial for social, cultural and financial factors,” he says.

The lack of a thriving credit score transfer method, which operates effectively in several elements of Europe, was “arguably the most significant single piece of unfinished company in United kingdom higher education”, he adds.

A member of the Dearing report committee, which called for credit transfer in 1997, Sir David, suggests that changing course curricula to incorporate credit score transfer poses several hazards and troubles, but these could be conquer. In addition, he explains that students may enroll in a less well-known course to gain accessibility to a distinct course later on on, recognized as the “Trojan horse” ploy. Nevertheless, universities will not be in a position to recruit large numbers of adults who are unwilling to commit themselves to a extended stretch of full-time education without an successful credit transfer framework.

The adoption of this scheme “will mean taking widening participation significantly rather than just pretending that the conventional ‘royal route’ will abruptly open up for new sorts of student”, Sir David advises.

Should UK Universities Be Friendlier To Credit Transfers?