UK needs to raise its game to compete

How can UK universities become more globally competitive? At the graduate level, one way would be to follow the US, where a minority of universities have strong graduate schools.

Even though many British universities may offer masters courses in specific subjects, I believe the UK should concentrate graduate education at the PhD level and encourage alliances and clustering in specialised areas. Many academics bridle at this suggestion, so, in making it, it is important to emphasise that concentration of graduate education need not, especially in the humanities, 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 graduate students, these are based in another university.

The key point is that in some fields at least a researcher can do distinguished work alone. But a student aspiring to 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 necessarily have flexibility and range that is needed for graduates' later career.

We know that a few universities in the UK attract the lion's share of research funding – and will have graduate schools spanning all faculties. That is likely to be true whatever system prevails. But despite the trend towards concentration, I think it is crucial to avoid formalising the hierarchy, and to retain a system that allows excellence and new graduate schools to sprout and bloom anywhere in the system.

Let me give an example. Leicester University is world-class in genetics and in space science. That was not planned. Outstanding young researchers in these two fields happened to have jobs there and had the enterprise to build up major research groups.

The system that prevailed in the 1970s allowed that to happen. And one could quote other examples where groups that are now well-established owed their impetus to one or two individuals. It is important that selectivity should not be so harsh that such opportunities are choked off in less favoured universities.

Oxbridge

Let’s consider Oxford and Cambridge. To a typical businessperson, the organogram of Cambridge (and, even more, of Oxford) looks nightmarish: an intricate matrix of colleges and departments. This has its downsides. But it has genuine advantages over a ‘cleaner’ system of line management. Academics feel less ‘pushed around’. As their careers develop they can find a niche, an optimum individual mix of teaching, research and administration.

Universities need to be businesslike; so does a hospital, so even does a church. But that does not mean they should be like a business – indeed the inchoate ‘partnership’ model we have here is remarkably cost-effective. It is through this flexibility that Cambridge retains the dedicated institutional loyalty of hundreds of highly able (and opinionated) people despite very un-stratospheric financial rewards.

A key challenge is to ensure that Oxford and Cambridge remain accessible, without financial hardship, to those who can benefit from them most and to those who will, through their education, serve society best in their future careers. In the US, the top private universities can provide sufficiently generous means-tested support to ensure that students can attend without undue financial hardship. The funds come either from endowments, or via the partial recycling of very high fees charged to students from wealthier backgrounds.

This is helped by a culture of voluntary giving and a system that supports it. Endowment of bursaries should be a priority in Oxbridge’s fundraising. It is right that the universities are under pressure to widen their pool of applicants. We all know of people who could certainly have got into Oxbridge but were discouraged by their teachers from aiming high enough, or inhibited by misperceptions about the student experience in these universities.

But these efforts are not enough to lead to a socially just system. The killer fact, and the most intractable, in the access agenda is that half the UK’s young people do not receive the quality of teaching at school that allows them to qualify for the most competitive university courses. It is imperative to remedy this disparity. But it will be a long slog and in the meantime UK universities should select some fraction of their intake from those who have taken foundation degrees or earned some ‘credits’ from elsewhere.

This would be reversion to an earlier system. For instance, over a hundred years ago JJ Thomson came from Owens College, Manchester, to read mathematics at Cambridge. Indeed, for those who initially did not gain entry to a Russell Group university because of disadvantaged schooling, it could become a common practice to transfer after one or two years at a less selective institution.

Teaching, reflective inquiry and research

The British higher education system must encourage and foster what Robbins identified as the big three: teaching, reflective inquiry and research. All universities will benefit if academic staff engage in the latter; however, only some universities will become specialised centres for research, attracting graduate students and scholars in a given area. Higher education is a ‘driver’ of social mobility, but this will be inhibited until high-quality teaching at school is available across the full geographical and social spectrum – and that will take time.

In the meantime, the most distinguished academic institutions could widen access by admitting able students who have earned their spurs in the less competitive institutions – indeed, we should strive for greater mobility and flexibility, and a wider range of opportunities for acquiring ‘credit’.

There are other policy issues that merit wide debate. How much more ‘global’ should Oxford and Cambridge become? At the faculty level they are in a global market and are making more academic appointments from abroad – and that is surely good. Their postgraduate student body is already highly international and graduates are a rising proportion of their overall student body. A welcome development in my own college is an increased proportion of well-schooled undergraduates from the enlarged EU, from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic etc. The rules allow virement between home and EU students.

But Oxbridge’s undergraduates are still primarily from the UK – and the non-EU fraction is currently ‘capped’. Do these universities have an obligation to keep things that way because of their traditional role in British society? Or should they be relaxed about what might be called the ‘Wimbledonisation’ of Oxbridge: fully opening up to foreign students (as the London School of Economics, for instance, has done) thereby recouping higher fee income, and achieving higher academic standards by attracting worldwide talent to the student body as well as the faculty, and accepting that the Brits might end up being relegated to maintaining the infrastructure facilities?

Be that as it may, we must recognise that Britain’s leading universities are among the institutions in the UK (the BBC is another) that are widely admired and worth protecting. And we must also recognise that they are part of a higher education system that needs to evolve, where modern technology offers huge opportunities but where restructuring must be carefully planned rather than hurriedly implemented.

There are all too few areas where the UK is as high as number two in the world; the UK surely should not jeopardise any that remain. Indeed, Oxford and Cambridge would rank even higher in international comparisons if the ‘league tables’ gave proper weightings to teaching and the student experience, rather than having a focus on research, especially in science.

Even to retain its international competitiveness, the UK needs to raise its game. Instead, it is spending a smaller fraction of its GDP on higher education than other comparable countries – and less than South Korea and other emerging economies. Its universities should be a springboard to the nation’s long-term prosperity and social harmony. The UK can surely afford to sustain them – indeed it cannot afford not to.

As President Obama said in another context: “When a plane is struggling to gain height, it does not make sense to throw out an engine.”

* Lord Martin Rees is astronomer royal and emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. This is an extract from the pamphlet University Diversity: Freedom, excellence and funding for a global future published by the Politeia think-tank. He will be debating with Universities and Science Minister David Willetts on 12 December on whether British universities can keep ahead in a global future in connection with the recent launch of the Council for the Defence of British Universities, of which he is a member.