Higher Education (Student Visas)

Robert Syms Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bacon]

I certainly hope so. I hope that the Government understand, if they had not already, that two in five PhDs undertaken in this country are undertaken by overseas students. Damage that and we damage the research base of this country.

More than 2,500 scientists are working at the John Innes centre near Norwich, the Institute of Food Research, the Sainsbury Laboratory, the Genome Analysis Centre and the university of East Anglia cluster, which together form the Norwich research park. That is the largest concentration of food and plant scientists in Europe. The IFR was recently ranked in the top two of 36,000 worldwide research organisations for the influence and citation of its research.

UEA also has a growing medical school and a renowned school of environmental studies. Other growing sectors include offshore and other renewable energy, including tidal, biomass and biofuel energy production. In advanced engineering the area has more than 1,000 engineering companies, employing a skilled work force of about 10,000 people, which trade around the world with the likes of Boeing, Airbus, NASA and Toyota. Group Lotus, which is based in my constituency, is developing the next generation of high-performance cars using renewable energies, as well as being the catalyst for a large cluster of advanced automotive engineering businesses along the A11 corridor. Almost every Formula 1 team is supported by engineers based in Norfolk or is using engineering invented in the county.

[Mr Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument. This is a very competitive area because there are other countries, other language centres, and other colleges and universities to go to. Unless we get rid of the uncertainty, we will lose millions of pounds and thousands of students.

[Mr Bacon]

My hon. Friend is right because the uncertainty is already proving damaging, particularly on the language issue, as I will discuss in a second. In East Anglia, we see around us the huge potential for a new rebalanced economy that places relatively less emphasis on financial services and has growth in all these other sectors. We have the potential for a golden triangle between Cambridge, Norwich and Ipswich, where BT Martlesham has its own electrical generating capacity, because it uses more electricity for computing power than many small towns.

Where is the role of the universities in all this? It is nothing short of crucial. As the Minister knows, we need more skilled people—all Governments talk about the need for more skills. Our education system produces far too many people who are not equipped to go further, which was the subject of this afternoon’s Second Reading debate. Some people cannot study at university, because they do not have the basics in English, maths and science. We have a shortage of science and maths teachers, which is being made worse by a vicious circle: not enough students reaching the basic standard; not enough students studying those subjects at A-level; not enough good people therefore applying to university to study those subjects; and accordingly not enough graduates to become teachers to help solve the problem.

What is helping to break that vicious circle? The answer is overseas students. In many STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—courses are viable only due to the substantial proportion of enrolments from outside the UK and the EU. If we get all this wrong, we will damage the possibility of our economy recovering and rebalancing away from an over-dependence on financial services. One need only look to the United States to see the enormously important role of a vibrant university sector in driving economic growth.

In 2009, a study by the Kauffman Foundation on the impact of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which analysed the economic effect of MIT alumni-founded companies and their entrepreneurial ecosystem, concluded that if the active companies founded by MIT graduates were to form an independent nation, their revenues would make that nation at least the 17th largest economy in the world. The state comptroller of New York has estimated that college and student spending directly or indirectly provides nearly 500,000 jobs and generates more than $62 billion of economic activity. The comptroller of public accounts in the state of Texas has estimated that every dollar invested in the state’s higher education system eventually returns $5.50 to the Texas economy.

Why are those American comparisons interesting? The United States is the most successful higher education market in the world. It is No. 1, but which is No. 2? Where is the second-favourite destination?