UK: Minister rounds on university reform critics

Universities Minister David Willetts (pictured) insisted last week that Britain's universities will be stronger after higher education reforms and will remain world-class in 10 years time.

Willets said that the coalition government faced the challenge of saving money in ways that drove reform and innovation in higher education.

"The big challenges of globalisation have yet to happen," he said on Monday at the launch of Blue Skies, a collection of essays on the future of higher education published by the new Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning.

"They are ones in which the UK will play a far more significant role than it does now."

He pointed out that the UK had just passed the cross-over point at which the number of students accessing British higher education abroad (410,000) exceeded the number of overseas students studying in the UK (406,000).

Stressing the central role of students in planned reforms, Willetts said that at the heart of an upcoming white paper on higher education there would be a process that would "transform the incentive for universities to offer a high-quality student experience".

In his article in Blue Skies, Willetts wrote that a more responsive system should put greater emphasis on teaching quality, an issue frequently raised by students during his visits to universities. Students wanted regular feedback, a decent number of contact hours and access to the famous professors in their department.

The minister believes that letting new providers into the system will be the single most powerful driver of change.

"The very fact that universities don't get so much grant money and that money will follow learners opens up the system. But we also intend to move towards a single regulatory regime for providers of different types," he wrote.

"This is likely to be of interest to the global higher education providers that already operate in many countries, as well as home-grown specialist institutions and perhaps even new liberal arts colleges."

Jamie O'Connell, Marketing Director of The Student Room, an online community, suggested in his article that the imposition of higher tuition fees in England would mean that "for the first time, UK universities will be in competition with overseas universities for 'typical' UK students, not just 'top-end' students that may have always deliberated between Cambridge or Berkeley".

Dr Wendy Piatt, Director-General of the Russell Group, which represents 20 leading UK universities, said graduate contributions provided more incentives for institutions to improve quality and their responsiveness to students' needs, as contributions encouraged students to be more demanding of their universities. They would also facilitate a more diverse market in higher education, where different models of teaching and learning could be efficiently supported.

She argued that student contributions freed up public funds for research but that research funding should nevertheless be concentrated on institutions with the necessary critical mass, quality of research and excellence in provision, and which are best placed to compete with the rest of the world, rather than trying to spread limited funds too thinly.

However, this view was strongly contested in an evaluation of research funding published last week by leading think-tank million+, which concluded that if the government concentrated even more research funding on a small number of universities it would hamstring its own objectives of promoting innovation, as well as economic growth at the regional or national level.

Les Ebdon, Chair of million+ and Vice-chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire, said: "Funding regimes continue to favour older and larger research departments and universities. However there is no clear relationship between the size of an academic research team and the excellence of the outputs they produce."

Removing funding from modern universities would kill off research that has been recognised as internationally excellent and transfer funding to the south and southeast of England, where the universities with larger research departments are based, he said.

In a separate interview with The Guardian, Ebdon also argued that many universities felt that once they had taken the cost of new access agreements and central funding cuts into account, they would be getting less from home students than they are at present and this would make them even more interested in attracting international students.

Willetts gave no clues to the timing of the white paper. When publication was delayed in February, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills gave June as the new date for its release. But since then the picture has become complicated by the decision of the majority of universities to levy the maximum £9,000 (US$14,530) tuition fee for most if not all of their courses, rather than this being the exception.

* Blue Skies: New thinking about the future of higher education and associated material can be explored here.