Chasing Data — an Exclusive Thirst
In higher education, there is a curious and important fascination with evidence based policies. I’d like to explore how this value might have limited worth.
As a scientist and engineer, I am keen that we use evidence to inform our decisions. However, we must consider what “the evidence can tell us” and what we inevitably, and necessarily, miss. This is especially important when we consider equity, and equality, diversity & inclusion related policies and approaches.
The more I explore “following the science” I realise that this is an exclusive narrative that lets us choose what we deem is acceptable and unacceptable evidence, when frankly the evidence exploring human experience is on shaky grounds and can easily be misinterpreted. Furthermore, the evidence often hides the intersection of experience, and the plight of the most excluded.
In this, I am often left having conversations where we immediately discount individual lived experience, perhaps with a pithy “the plural of anecdote is not data”. Yes I know this. I also appreciate that anecdote and lived experience provides us with a different form of data, it contains depth which can inform our values and highlight how we can build inclusive policies.
Many may know that Imperial College London has, just this week, introduced a fee for applying for post graduate taught courses.
You may also know that, alongside >250 other people, I think this is a terrible idea. In our open letter to College seniors, we have provided evidence and values-based arguments to underpin our case.
You may not know that I have a number of on-going discussions with multiple colleagues, on multiple platforms, by people who are justifying the (new) (pilot) fee. There are a range of curiosities being explored.
In response to this, my current employers have (it seems) relabelled the programme “a pilot” when they were asked for comment by Sophie Inge, of Research Professional:
An Imperial College London spokesperson described the new fee as a “pilot” introduced “to help cover some of the administrative and staffing costs associated with processing the large volume of masters applications that Imperial receives”.
This was later supported by an update to the Imperial College website (retrieved 06/10/202):
For 2021–22 entry, we are introducing a pilot handling fee for MSc and MRes courses to help cover some of the administrative and staffing costs associated with processing the large volume of MSc and MRes applications that Imperial receives.
Now a pilot implies there will be evidence and evaluation of that evidence to inform policy, and this evidence will decide whether the fee stays, goes, or is changed. Indeed, Imperial proudly makes 46 references to evidence in it’s Learning and Teaching strategy.
Perhaps in contrast, the language is subtly different in the Imperial’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, where there are no such direct mentions.
This might be direct nod to the idea that evidence of inclusion, equality, and diversity can difficult to manage and collect. How do we understand whether the most marginalised, who are at the ‘edges’ of our thinking are actively included? This is a critically important point.
As an example, in the UK we are in the middle of a racial reckoning, in light of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the spotlight of racism and ethnicity/cultural heritage based exclusion and marginalisation in our society. Efforts to understand anti-Black racism within pathways in UK academia continue to highlight that there are small numbers of Black people engaging with our system. Access to data for post graduate taught courses is not easy, and so we can look at the undergraduate focussed widening participation strategy states:
“the College aspires to increase the number of Black students admitted to the College each year from 63 to 126 over the next five years.”
In 2018 according to our own statistics we admitted 2,685 undergraduate students, so 126 students is an aspiration to raise this grouping to 0.6% of our (undergraduate) population.
Why do I stress these numbers? As a College we offer a central admissions service, yet broadly once initial eligibility decisions are made by the Registry each admission is passed to an individual Department Admissions Tutor.
One of the major criticism's of the post graduate application fee is that it may reduce overall workload, but that the impact of this fee will disproportionately impact applications from lower socio-economic class and with regards to the previous explore, there is often a co-correlation of ethnicity and socio-economic class.
Even with this caveat, it is also well known that using ethnicity as a proxy for wealth is problematic. This continues to supplement our unconscious bias that ‘all Black people are poor’ (they are not) and that lower socio-economic is not found within other ethnic groupings, or intersects with other parts of identity, e.g. students from the so-called ‘global south’ or LGBTQ2S+ people who have been cast out from their families. Yet, we have no data on socio-economic class at post graduate level, beyond lived experience and anecdote.
Every person who is affected in this way is uniquely marginalised, and yet we assuage guilt through creation of elaborate and complicated waiver programmes. Each of these has the allure of addressing financial imbalance. However, Dr Andrew highlights my discomfort with this idea well:
Next, we continue to have conversations that centre our arguments on the “majority”, perhaps obscured through some crude table that renders a lived experience unreported.
In the limit, we are left simply sampling the “survivors” — i.e. those who were in a position to even bother with engaging. This is likely not for want of trying. My DMs are filled with tales of people who only looked at courses without fees, who didn’t have the time or energy to look further, or didn’t have the money, or did not have the access to use a credit card, and more.
So we return to the question, what is the evidence on which members of the College have informed themselves? How will they “monitor the impact closely over the coming year.”
At this point I should perhaps share that I was a MSc Course Director for five years and I handled admissions for the programme. We trained 92 students during my tenure, and I must have read around 600 applications.
In reading the paperwork, there were occasions I would understand an individuals journey, their personal hardship, and their motivation for joining us. Yet, plainly these were rare as the application paperwork does not provide space for this assessment, nor time for my understanding of it, during each time I’d open the folder of new PDFs.
I can reflect that often I wouldn’t see hardship, partly as students had developed great skills at hiding it. Though it was also because each of their hardships were unique and new to my experiences.
Typically, I’d learn of the hardest issues when the student would be in my office with problems or perhaps we would be discussing issues with grades. For a few cases, I’d find out they had been doing fast-food shift work at 2am the night before just to make ends meet.
In other cases, I’d find out the currency had fluctuated badly, or a supportive relative had died, or a pre-existing (or new) medical condition had flared up, or a (literal) war had broken out that meant they had to fly home to rescue relatives.
Each of these moments, where I would get a personal understanding of the individual student’s history, takes place at least a year after the admission decision. Even then, I am only starting to learn of the impact of what the education we provided has afforded them several years after they have graduated. In this, I recognise that I have no idea what impact I have had on those we did not admit.
This story vents a bit. It highlights that the data lies, it tells mistruths, or simply it forgets. This is both intentional and unintentional.
The data forgets more when it intersects with the reality of the lived experience of a human being. We should not forget this when we are making policy decision.
I’d suggest education has the potential to be a great equaliser in society. It can also sustain our society imbalance and continue to perpetrate great harm on society through marginalisation and sustained inequality.
But what do I know, I’m just a cog in the machine…
Ben is currently a Reader at Imperial College London, though soon he’ll be off to newer pastures. This decision is entirely uncorrelated with views echoed in this post.
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