Higher Education: Funding

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Wednesday 27th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, I, too, welcome this report for addressing the key issues of the teaching component of higher education and student finance. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Broers, who was an excellent vice-chancellor at the University of Cambridge. I declare an interest. Like other noble Peers, I have been a professor at universities, including Cambridge and UCL, in various countries. From this experience, I can well understand that excellent students do not necessarily want to go to excellent universities. All universities are very peculiar places, as was slightly implied by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and each one is peculiar in its own way. We should not assume that everybody wants to go to the particular peculiar one that is supposed to be the best. This should be welcomed, not deplored.

This report takes forward the 2006 Act. The report responds, in a sense, to the questionable assumption, which has been addressed by others, that there are not enough funds for a largely state-funded university system. This position is not held by most other European countries. I am sure we can all agree with the positive remarks in the report’s introduction about the research leadership of UK universities. However, the report also criticises quite strongly some teaching and other aspects of our universities. These are partly structural and relate to the proposals for university funding. I shall return to that in a moment.

The fundamental point that we need to discuss is how to ensure that a large proportion of UK school-leavers and all suitable mature students have excellent higher education. I approve of the egalitarian thrust of the report, given its essential assumptions. However, to have this wide involvement without the fear of debt, government funding must have a high priority. As the noble Lord, Lord Broers, said, this funding must also match and be integral to the maintenance of universities’ other roles. As the noble Lord, Lord St John of Fawsley, said in his rather unorthodox intervention, universities are for more than research; they are also places of knowledge. If you have been in industry—or, as I was, head of the Met Office—you know that one of the most valuable things about universities is that they are centres of knowledge. It is not something that universities often recall, but their knowledge is usually more valuable than their current research, although sometimes the research is important as well.

All parties have contributed to the tremendous progress in higher education in the UK since the 1960s. At that time, many able school-leavers certainly did not go to university, as I saw when I worked in industry. Now we have figures of 40 or 50 per cent. Furthermore, in the UK, we have a very high level of course completion. Many of the courses in the United States have a completion level of around 30 per cent. That is a very strong feature of the UK system.

The report emphasises how higher education policies are vital for the interests of the UK. One aspect is our competitive position, relative to other EU countries. If we cease to subsidise courses, many of them, as is reported in the Sunday newspapers, will go to the Netherlands and Sweden. I am a visiting professor in the Netherlands, which has very good universities.

However, the report also sees it as being in the UK’s interests to maintain certain specialised subjects, such as engineering, science and languages. I welcome the prominence of engineering. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, is a distinguished engineer and Professor Julia Higgins was also involved with his report. Engineering does not always get such prominence in government reports. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Browne, on that point. As a student, I benefited from a scholarship from the Institution of Civil Engineers.

Observers from other countries and UK employers are not particularly impressed by the structure of courses in English and, I believe, Welsh universities. I am surprised that this point has not been made. It is interesting that around the world almost no new universities are set up on the English or Welsh model. Some are based on the Scottish model, which is excellent. We should be cautious about that. The reason is that our courses are exceptionally narrow. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield pointed out, it is the narrowness of British higher education courses that many countries find extraordinary. Employers also find it extraordinary. It means that people entering technical employment have absolutely no idea of the history, politics or culture of the country that they are working in. We need specialist and generalist education. This is not, I am afraid, a point that I find most academics agree with. As the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Clifton, said, we certainly need a more fundamental discussion about higher education.

One might imagine that financial incentives to universities and students could provide a basis for more general higher education courses. This is even more necessary now that AS-levels are to be de-emphasised. I was very impressed as a schoolboy when I heard CP Snow speak to us at Westminster School, around the corner, about his visit to Russia in the 1950s. There, physicists and mathematicians also had to take literature papers. He reminded us that the kind of question a top physicist or mathematician could answer in Russia in the 1950s was: “Discuss the character of Natasha in War and Peace”. Would you find that in any other country?

At the other end of the political divide, in the United States first and second-year students of literature have to take courses in astronomy and geology. In Arizona State University, which I have been to recently, dance majors have to take mathematics. This really causes trouble to my mathematical colleagues. Nevertheless, it happens. We are miles away from that but we discussed it in England. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cambridge University thought scientists needed to know a bit of culture and vice versa, so there were lectures at 5 pm, which of course did not last very long.

In the 1960s, we also had a whole batch of new universities. I was at Warwick, where we studied Enquiry and Criticism to enable people to learn more generally. Keele had Plato to NATO, as the Times called it. These all petered out; they all said that there was not enough time, which is ridiculous. That is why people are not using the British model of university. I noticed an absence of this perspective in the speech by my noble friend Lord Giddens, who quite rightly commented that it is very important to maintain humanities and social sciences as well as technology, but in the United States, it is the fact that humanities professors have to teach people in other faculties that gives them a funding stream that enables those pure knowledge departments to survive. You have a philosophy department because the philosophers are teaching scientists. It is not rocket science in terms of economics, but we are a long way off it.

Another welcome feature of recent developments in the university world is the increasing number of students studying and researching for second degrees. Funding is called for on page 41 of the report. Will the Minister assure us that the withdrawal of government funding for teaching will not reduce taught graduate courses in universities? They are nothing like as extensive in the UK as they should be. People have been moaning about this since the 1960s. There is a much smaller number of specialist graduates leaving universities, as our former Prime Minister, Mr Brown, emphasised on many occasions.

While commending the report, there are some big issues about the health of the higher education system in England and Wales which needs to listen to more radical ideas than those one currently hears in university common rooms, Whitehall and Parliament.