Higher Education Funding

Lord Tarassenko Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tarassenko (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a great honour and privilege to address this House for the first time. I must first thank noble Lords for their warm welcome, and the officials and staff for their guidance and advice. Everyone has made great efforts to pronounce my name correctly. It may be a very common name in Ukraine—my paternal grandfather was born in Kharkiv—but it is much less common in these parts. For the record, I should add that my maternal grandfather was born in a small village in northern Brittany. I also thank my two supporters, the noble Baronesses, Lady Blackwood and Lady Royall, each of whom does much to ensure that the University of Oxford maintains its excellence in research, teaching and innovation.

Within five years of arriving in this country from France, aged 13, I was privileged to be offered a place at that very same university to study engineering science. Ten years after leaving to work in industrial R&D, I became a professor in the same department. Looking back, I value the freedom I was given to pursue research into machine learning before it was even called machine learning. Sceptical colleagues would tell me that learning from data using neural networks had no future; today, machine learning research in our higher education sector is world leading, especially in its application to fields such as healthcare, with access to uniquely valuable datasets.

The exam question before us today is how we address the current challenges of higher education funding. As already noted by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, according to the QS rankings, the UK has four of the top 10 universities in the world and 15 of the top 100. It is from the perspective of these research-intensive universities that I will tackle the exam question.

I have had the privilege of supervising 70 PhD students during my academic career. For the first 25 years, 60% of my research students were British; in the last 10 years, 20% were. We should of course be wary of small-sample statistics, but other data from Russell group universities confirms this trend: there has been a clear decrease in the percentage of UK-domiciled graduates going on to doctoral studies since 2017, when the first home students to have paid £9,000 per annum in fees were graduating from English universities.

We should not be surprised: which English student with a first-class degree is going to want to stay at university for a doctorate and accumulate further debt when they already have £50,000 of debt at age 21 or 22? For STEM subjects, the stipends to support PhD students are much lower than the sums a bright student can earn for doing almost anything else. The reduction in the number of UK-domiciled students studying for a doctorate as an unintended consequence of the introduction of the £9,000 tuition fee in 2012 should not be ignored in any discussions about increasing the tuition fee beyond £9,250.

To help ensure that the UK still has 15 universities amongst the top 100 in the world in 10 years’ time, we should promote further the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship within our research-intensive universities. In March this year, the previous Government welcomed the Independent Review of University Spin-out Companies and accepted all its recommendations. Much of the report was about sharing best practice in the setting up of spin-out companies and attracting seed and growth capital. Less noticed was the recommendation that all PhD students funded by UKRI should have the option to attend high-quality entrepreneurship training. The world famous Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT is unequivocal: entrepreneurship is a craft that can be taught.

The first employees of spin-out companies set up by university professors have often been their PhD students, but there is now a growing trend of spin-outs, with university IP, or start-ups, where there is no university IP, being founded by PhD students. The annual survey of Oxford students for the last three years reveals that between 20% and 22% of them now see entrepreneurship as a career path.

The competition for talented students is global, and we need more graduate scholarships to recruit not only the best international students but also those talented home students from lower-income backgrounds. The few graduate scholarships that are available are highly competitive, and there are many UK students with excellent first degrees who miss out on them and are unable to accept a PhD offer; the maximum doctoral loan available to them is insufficient to cover the cost of doing a graduate degree, being lower than the sum of the tuition fees and living expenses.

Growth in innovation activities can make a major contribution to the long-term viability of our higher education sector. It requires a growing population of students with a PhD, from whom many of the innovators and entrepreneurs of tomorrow will come.