Following a New York Times expose last week and the analysis from my colleague Jim Dickinson this morning, it’s becoming clearer than ever that the sector needs to get to grips with franchised provision, before the regulator comes knocking.
There are urgent questions to answer on public information, finance, quality and more about this “opaque corner” of higher education, as the NYT described it, in which courses are taught at one kind of institution (in this case, a for-profit higher education provider) and either franchised out or validated by another (for example, a university).
At Wonkhe, we have struggled to write about this issue – on several occasions, we have faced legal threats aimed at silencing the discussion. So the New York Times deserves credit for delving into this issue in the public interest.
In England, before student number controls were removed, franchising was a comparatively modest affair. Then universities minister David Willetts suspected that the kind of innovation or geographical distribution that might be delivered by a franchisee was being hampered by universities that wanted to keep all the available funded places to themselves.
