Higher Education: Reform

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow]

My Lords, I shall go back even further than the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, to the Robbins report, which 50 years offered an articulate vision appropriate to the 1960s. Today, higher education has hugely expanded, but some things have not changed, and we should still temper the managerial and instrumental view of higher education with an appreciation of its intrinsic value. It is still a public good as well as a private benefit for young people to receive a rigorous education.

Our system should have become more diverse as it expanded, but that has not happened. Nearly all universities focus on three or four-year degrees; nearly all offer at least some postgraduate degrees and aspire to rise in a single league table. A latter-day Robbins would surely have set out a blueprint for a more diverse “ecology” of institutions, with more flexibility, more collaboration and a “credit system” that facilitates student transfers between them.

The Government hope that the mantra “the money follows the student” will bring this about. But even if, when the dust settles, the system is more diverse, the transition will have been more painful and wasteful than if it had been planned. And it frankly is not clear that the market-driven choices of financially pressured students will drive up teaching standards and raise levels of rigour and achievement rather than favouring “soft” and cheap options.

Let me mention two trends that a latter-day Robbins might commend. First, the Open University’s well tried model—distance learning supplemented by a network of local tutors and so forth—has vastly more potential in the era of the internet and smartphone than when it was founded. Indeed, because distance learning will erode the benefits of the traditional “mass university”, there will, I think, be a deepening bifurcation between, on the one hand, institutions that really offer personal mentoring and, on the other, the OU model. The serious downside of the current funding system is that the OU charges fees of £5,000. That is inflexible and a major disincentive to the kind of people whose educational horizons the OU has raised during the past four decades.

My second comment concerns graduate-level education. There are immediate concerns, as already mentioned, about whether UK students are being unduly deterred by lack of funding. But there is a structural issue, too. We should welcome the trend to concentrate PhD-level education and encourage alliances and clustering of university departments. In doing this, it is important to reassure academics that this need not entail an equal concentration of research, especially in the humanities. Many who teach in the best American liberal arts colleges are productive researchers and scholars, but if they have graduate students, those students are based in another university.

Students aspiring to a PhD need more than just a good supervisor; they need to be in a graduate school where courses are offered over a wider range. Without this second component, newly minted British PhDs will not have the flexibility and range that is needed for their later careers.

Overall, current disruptive changes could foreclose rather than facilitate the needed restructuring. Once quality falls, it will be nearly impossible to restore, especially because we are networked in a worldwide system where other countries are strengthening their grip. To ensure that our universities continue to be a magnet for talented students and faculty, the Government must at least be mindful of these concerns.