…well, give them the hard word anyway. A Facebook discussion I had last night made me think more about the impact of Steven Joyce’s performance funding on universities. While we usually talk and think about non-university, sub-degree courses in relation to poor course or qualification completion, some university courses also have poor results, like law.

Law courses often have a high enrolment in their first year (when law courses typically only make a part of the student’s courses) and then a savage cutback in year two. This will possibly lead to many students having unsuccessful course completion in year 1 (although many may pass) but will certainly lead to low qualification completion (half to two thirds of students may be gone at the end of year 1). The current approach is based on some or all of the following reasons.

1. School marks are not always the best predictor of success at university and are often irrelevant to older students’ performance, so making decisions after a year of university academic performance gives a better indicator of future success.
2. Students won’t have studied law before, so it makes sense to allow them to trial it.
3. Since students have to take non-law papers in Year 1 as well, they can easily continue in and complete another degree.
4. Letting only a few students through raises the prestige of law degrees and law lecturers (but so does having 3 applications for each place, so let’s not overstate this)

Now if a university wanted to improve its completion figures, it would look at law and find technical and real fixes to the issue. On the technical side, a university could simply refuse to accept law degree enrolments until Year 2, thereby avoiding the huge non-completion figures for that degree. On the real side, they could find a better way to manage entry into their degree and find the people likely to make the best of the opportunity.

And if start looking at real ways, we quickly find a value for money angle. If year 1 law courses are rated at 0.33 EFTS, then subsidies will be about $1700 and student fees about $1,300 for a total of $3,000 (exc GST), If, say, 800 students enrol in year 1, but only 300 go on to year 2, the cost of the trial for the 500 that don’t go on is $1.5m. Now if we put $1.5m on the table each year, I think we could come up with a better way to test people’s aptitude and interest for a law degree, and maybe people could study something else in Year 1 that might have more long-term relevance for them. And that will be the real impact of Joyce’s performance funding – sure, a few courses will lose funding, but it’s the wider questioning of current practice that will generate the main results. Whether law degree enrolment practices change or not, reporting on and looking at completions will affect how tertiary education operates.

(And if you’d rather not look at law courses, Danyl at the Dim-Post has sparked comments on the broader issues.)