Higher Education

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a long-time member of Cambridge University.

We have heard eloquent praise for the Robbins report—a manifesto for university expansion in the 1960s, written indeed with a literacy and depth sadly lacking from its later counterparts. Today, higher education has expanded far more, but a present-day Robbins report would surely find that our system has not adjusted optimally to its greater scale and reach. In particular, it has stayed too homogeneous. Polytechnics were relabelled as universities in 1992, and 20 years later David Willetts created 10 more universities by a stroke of the pen. This uniform labelling sends the wrong signals, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, stated.

Nearly all universities still focus on three or four-year degrees. They are incentivised to pursue research and postgraduate courses, and they all aspire to rise in a single league table, which incidentally underweights things that really matter but are hard to measure, such as how rigorous the courses are, how well they are taught and how hard the students work. The entire system needs a more diverse ecology: a blurring between higher and further education, between full-time and part-time, and between residential and online. There also needs to be an expansion of transferable “academic credits” to facilitate movement between institutions and to allow mature students to re-enter the system.

I echo the concerns already raised about the fee system. The Government’s mantra is that “money should follow the student”, but it is clear that the market-driven choices of financially pressured students will not necessarily drive up teaching standards; nor will they necessarily raise levels of rigour and achievement. Instead, they may favour soft and cheap options. The current system is in any case not a free market: fees are in practice narrowly constrained; there are quotas, inconstantly applied; and the degree of central regulation and the strings attached to public funding through HEFCE and the research councils erode autonomy and increase the administrative overhead in all universities.

Some things surely have not changed since Robbins. It is still a public good as well as a private benefit for our brightest young people to receive a rigorous education, and widening access is rightly high on the agenda. I wish to say a word about this. Universities such as mine expend huge effort on outreach initiatives, but these welcome efforts are not enough to ensure real equal opportunity. Young people unlucky in their schooling or their home environment cannot be fully compensated just by summer courses, open days and so forth. Even if their potential is high, they still will not, at age 18, reach the bar for admission to the most selective universities. What is even sadder is that they then generally have no second chance, even if they catch up later. Worse still, their career prospects will have been hampered by the deplorable tendency for high-prestige employers to restrict their searches and their milk rounds to a favoured group of universities.

Here, we can learn from the United States. A substantial fraction of those who attend the “elite” public state universities, such as Berkeley, have come not directly from high school but as transfer students from a lower-tier college. I think that our most selective universities, including Oxbridge, should earmark some proportion of their places for students who do not enter straight from school but have gained academic credits by study at another university or online. This would enhance fair access and lead to a more diverse student body.

When America is discussed, there is undue focus on the Ivy League private colleges. They have huge resources and can indeed offer scholarships to needy students. However, to extol them as examples of fair access is to overlook the dark side of their fundraising success: the overt “inside track” they offer to the offspring of donors or alumni. Even in the most reactionary enclaves of Oxbridge, there would be repugnance at lowering the entry bar for privileged students. The debate there is, quite rightly, about the extent to which the reverse should be done.

Fair access opportunities are crucial but this does not mean that everyone who is qualified to get a degree should feel that they have to do so. If a degree becomes a mandatory entry ticket to too many careers, this will inhibit social mobility by stymieing the prospects of non-graduates. We also need more flexibility in the curriculum in universities. Our traditional honours degree is not appropriate for as many as 40% of the age group. Indeed, I personally think that it is too specialised for almost all students. The stovepipes of individual disciplines are gradually breaking down but this trend has not gone far enough.

And there is nothing magic about the level reached after three to four years. An American will say, “I had two years of college”, generally thinking this a positive experience. Some drop-outs may return later; others may pursue part-time distance learning. Even those who go no further should not be typecast as “wastage”. Now that we are living longer, in a faster changing environment the importance of mature students, part- time courses and distance learning will surely grow. These will never replicate the experience of attending a collegiate university, for which there will always be a demand. Perhaps we also need some liberal arts colleges which can match Oxbridge in their level of teaching and pastoral care. These need not be left to the private sector. However, they would still be a privileged minority. Indeed, as higher fees start to bite and lifestyles change, residential courses in many universities may face a squeeze and be trumped by online courses.

The Open University’s well tried model—distance learning supplemented by a network of local tutors—has huge potential for extending higher education’s global reach. It is good that many universities are collaborating with the Open University, supplying content for the FutureLearn platform. It is far better that it should do this than link with one of the American platforms. The Open University can have huge global reach. One hopes that the Minister will ensure that it has the resources to do so. None the less, the role of much hyped massive online open courses—MOOCs—should not be exaggerated. I think that these MOOCs will have the biggest impact on demand for conventional, vocational master’s degrees, catering for motivated and mature students who are in many cases are already indebted through their undergraduate years and find it hard to get further funding.

What about PhD-level education? Here we should surely welcome alliances and clustering so that PhD students in each specialised subject are concentrated in a few graduate schools. Echoing the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, these schools should not all be concentrated in the same few universities. Many academics bridle at this suggestion, so in making it, it is important to emphasise that concentration of graduate education should not necessarily entail an equivalent concentration of research. That is a distinction that is often conflated. Many who teach in the best American liberal arts colleges are productive researchers and scholars, but if they have PhD students, these students are based in another university. We should remember that the Robbins report said that all university teachers should do three things: research, teaching and reflective inquiry. The last of those three is getting squeezed out. The key point is that a student studying for a PhD needs more than just a good supervisor. He or she needs to be in a graduate school where courses are offered over a wider range. Without this second component, a newly minted British PhD will not have flexibility and range that is needed for their later career.

Finally, I shall say some words from my perspective at Cambridge University. When academics bemoan the managerial and instrumental view of education that dominates today, they risk being accused of living in an ivory tower, being arrogant, and disregarding their obligations to the public. I think that we should contest that. My Cambridge colleagues are strongly committed to teaching and to the welfare of their students. They are obsessively dominated by their research as well. Their choices of research topics are anything but frivolous. What is at stake is a big chunk of their lives and their reputations. They are surely delighted if their work has some social or economic impact outside academia. However, it is not always recognised just how unpredictable, diffuse and how long-term such outcomes are. That is why the REF has often been such a perverse incentive. Even in targeted medical research, it may take up to 20 years to develop a drug. To take another example, the inventors of lasers in the 1960s used the work of Einstein from 40 years earlier. They did not themselves realise that lasers would be applied in DVDs and eye surgery. It is by attracting and motivating talented individuals and letting them have their own judgment that funding agencies will best sustain high-quality universities and optimise the prospects for impactful discoveries.

Therefore, our leading research universities are major national assets. They are magnets for global talent, for the collective expertise of their faculty and for the way in which they are each embedded in a cluster of research laboratories, small companies, NGOs, and so forth to symbiotic benefit. The prime output from even the most research-focused universities is still the high-quality gradates they feed into all walks of life. They should be cherished for that reason, and their teaching quality sustained, too. There are all too few arenas in which the UK ranks as high in the world as it does in higher education. To maintain our competitive advantage, quality must be sustained across the system against growing international competition. The UK must be perceived as open and welcoming to talented students and faculty from across the world. We should realise that universities must be businesslike but that does not mean that they must be like businesses.