Universities

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, we should welcome this debate on the excellent and thought-provoking report from UUK. It recommends that the long-term goal should be 70% of young people with qualifications at level 4 or above, to be achieved via flexible co-operation between higher and further education. I declare an interest as a member of Cambridge University, and I will focus on the university sector in my comments.

How best can our universities adjust? Despite their manifest general quality, there is currently a systemic weakness: their missions are not sufficiently varied. They all aspire to rise in the same league table, which gives weight to research as well as teaching. Most of their students are between 18 and 21, undergoing three years of full-time residential education and studying a curriculum that is too narrow, even for the minority who aspire to professional or academic careers. There is a contrast with the US, where there are several thousand institutions of higher education: junior and regional colleges, huge state universities—several are world class and some are highly innovative, such as Arizona State University—and the private Ivy League universities, supplemented by liberal arts colleges that offer top-rated undergraduate education but no PhD courses.

We should query the view that the standard three-year degree is the minimum worthwhile goal, or indeed the most appropriate one, for many young people. The core courses offered in the first two years are often the most valuable. Moreover, students who realise that the degree course they have embarked on is not right for them, or who have personal hardship, should be enabled to leave early with dignity and a certificate to mark what they have achieved. They should not be disparaged as wastage; they should make the positive claim, “I had two years of college”. Vice-chancellors should not be berated for taking risks in admissions nor pressured to entice them to stay, least of all by lowering degree standards.

There are many 18 year-olds of high intellectual potential who have had poor schooling and other disadvantages, and who do not have a fair prospect of admission at 18 to the most competitive universities. To promote fairness and diversity, therefore, universities whose entry bar is dauntingly high—Oxford and Cambridge in particular—should reserve a fraction of their places for students who do not come straight from school. This would offer a second chance to those who were disadvantaged at 18 through their background, or their choice of A-levels, but who have caught up by earning two years’ worth of credits online, at another institution or via the Open University. Such students could then advance to a degree at Oxbridge in two further years.

Moreover, everyone should have the lifelong opportunity to upgrade—to re-enter higher education, maybe part-time or online. This path could become smoother, indeed routine, if the Government were to formalise systems of transferable credits across the UK’s whole system of tertiary education. Incidentally, since I have mentioned league tables, let us not overrate salaries in those tables. If a talented young artist can be enabled to pursue their vocation as a career, after suitable courses, that is surely good for society even if they only just earn the living wage.

What makes Oxford and Cambridge unique assets to the UK is that they combine the strength of top world-class research universities with the pastoral and educational benefits of the best American liberal arts colleges. It is unrealistic to raise 10 more UK universities to the top of the international research league, but we could surely counterbalance the unhealthily dominant allure of Oxford and Cambridge to students, and promote regional balance, by boosting the funding of some of our smaller universities so that they can emulate US liberal arts colleges, and Oxbridge colleges, in offering high-quality intensive teaching.

Let us hope that the UUK report catalyses reform. As other speakers have said, higher education is currently one of the UK’s distinctive strengths and certainly crucial to our future, but it must not be sclerotic and unresponsive to changes in needs, lifestyle and opportunities. A rethink is overdue if we are to sustain its status in a different world.