Higher Education

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, on calling it. I agreed with every word he said, and it took me back to when the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, initiated the arts debate. We rely on our elder statesmen on the Benches opposite to remind us, again and again, of what is valuable and good in our country.

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, not least because I spent some time in the north-east recently, working on a project with Newcastle University and four other universities called Creative Fuse, bringing together technology companies and creative companies. In fact, I think I am getting an honorary degree from Newcastle University—I am not sure if I am allowed to say that in public. I spent some time as Culture Minister understanding the incredible work that Newcastle and Gateshead have done on culture, turning Newcastle and Gateshead into a tourism site. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, played an absolutely vital role in that.

That leads me to universities. I could make a whole speech on the incredibly important role that our universities now play in culture. They were the saviours of culture as I set about slashing the culture budget. They supported many museums and performing arts institutions. The university of my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, is supporting the archive of the British Museum, and universities all over the country do that.

I could do a challenging speech on higher education. There is a part of me—probably based entirely on huge ignorance—that regrets that the university marketplace is not more competitive, with a variety of lengths of degrees and a variety of levels of tuition fees. However, I am sure I would be put right if I dared to venture into that territory.

I am now a stuck record, having followed the brilliant speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Bilimoria, as well as the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. In fact, the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, came on my yet to be award-winning Times Radio show to defend overseas students. He broke off from a lunch in Paris, and was incredibly articulate at a moment’s notice, to defend overseas students. I want to follow him, and the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Shipley, in doing the same.

We have around 600,000 overseas students in the UK at the moment. That is pretty much the number that we predicted in 2013. There is not suddenly a surge in overseas students, and we have been through Covid and Theresa May to get to the figure that was predicted. However, there is no real policy on overseas students and no established consensus on how many overseas students the UK should host. If we had the same proportion of overseas students as Australia, we would have a million studying in the UK. We should be proud of the fact that, alongside Canada, Australia and the United States, we are the leading nation in the world for higher education for overseas students.

The number of potential eligible students around the world is growing by about 4% a year. If this was a business, you would be salivating at the prospect of increasing your customer base every single year, and thinking, “How do we attract more?” It is a myth that international students displace domestic students. In fact, the number of domestic students at our universities—84%—is the highest level it has ever been.

However, we need to update the data on how we measure overseas students because students are changing their behaviour and becoming more sophisticated. If you want to study for a master’s degree overseas, you apply for three or four different visas in different countries to ensure that you can move seamlessly into the one that accepts you, which could be in one of three or four countries where you have made an application. We tend to measure overseas students on the basis of those to whom we have granted visas rather than those who have come into the country to study. One of the reasons why we are popular is that we offer a shorter master’s degree than most of our competitors.

We need to think carefully about which countries are sending overseas students. A few tend to dominate at the moment—India, China and Nigeria. We might need a broader range of countries to hedge our bets in the future. However, we cannot be complacent. We might find it very easy to be rude about overseas students and put forward these silly arguments about how it is immigration by other means or how they are being attracted only because they are cash cows, but we should remember that many other countries are dying to have our kind of higher education market. For example, Turkey is emerging as a key player in the higher education market.

I wanted to take part in this excellent debate simply to make the point that overseas students are a massive asset for our country, a massive part of our economy and, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said so eloquently in his brilliant speech, a massive part of our soft power.