Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 23 FEBRUARY 2005
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
DRISCOLL, PROFESSOR
JOHN TARRANT
AND PROFESSOR
DAVID VINCENT
Q40 Helen Jones: Yes. I would like
to ask some questions of David Vincent, if I may, specifically
about the OU—since it was the institution that Harold Wilson
said was going to get him through the Pearly Gates
Q41 Chairman: He came from Huddersfield
as well.
Professor Tarrant: That will get
him through the Pearly Gates!
Q42 Helen Jones: What did you understand
the assurances from the Government to be prior to the passing
of the Higher Education Act?
Professor Vincent: If we take
it back to where we were in the middle of that debate, the debate
was premised on the conclusion which everybody shared which was
that the higher education sector was under-funded and some additional
or new source of income for this sector had to be found. The solution
found was that students should be the source of that income, and,
to prevent the loss of poorer students from the system, it would
be the structure of loans and grants which John has just been
talking about. We were excluded from that structure—the
OU was; the entire part-time sector was. There are no loans, there
are no £2,700 or pro rata grants, for poorer students
coming in in 2006 for the OU or for the part-time sector. We will
be exposed in the higher education economy from 2006 onwards to
the same inflationary pressures as the rest of the system: we
have to employ high quality staff who are NUT staff, as they are
in the full-time sector; we need to modernise the university and
our IT, as the rest of the sector does. We have all those costs.
We have been denied through this Bill this additional source of
income, so we made this case and we were given a general assurance
that something would be done for them. I have not come here to
complain fiercely against ministers at this moment. They decided
that the Funding Council should deal with the issue and told it
to do so, the Funding Council has moved very slowly, and we are
still awaiting the outcome. The other point I would want to make
is that the solution to the problems of the part-time sector can
partly be dealt with by increasing the support to students and
ideally including part-time students in the full-time system.
But, because of the point I was making to Andrew earlier on, that
can never be the full solution, because all mature part-time students,
even if they have access to additional grants, the calculations
they will make about the value of their education will be such
that we will never be able to put up our fees by the amount that
the full-time sector is expected to.
Q43 Helen Jones: You do quite a lot
of market research, I understand, in the OU. Can you tell us what
fees currently you think your students would bear. What level
would you get to before you started to see a very high drop-out
rate? Or have you already reached that?
Professor Vincent: We have been
putting our fees up for the last seven years by above inflation.
We have put them up by 34%, I think, in seven years, and we are
this year and next year going to put them up by about 5%. We have
very, very extensive market research, which we have built up over
many years—because we have always been in the market—which
suggests that that is close to the limit. In the extreme case,
the most recent research that we have done would suggest that
were we simply to put our fees up pro rata to £3,000,
we would only have 10% of our student body left. Certainly the
gap that we have to travel between what we now charge and the
point at which we start to see a very substantial decrease in
students is very narrow.
Q44 Helen Jones: I see from your
evidence that over half your students are unemployed or from semi-skilled
occupations. These are precisely the people, as we said earlier,
that the Government wants to get into higher education. Have you
done any research specifically among that group about the effect
that fees have now on their participation rate or in their staying
at the course once they have started it? Do you have any evidence
to offer the Committee on what would help attract more of those
people to study through the OU and keep them there? Having done
some studying when I was working, it is extremely difficult to
do, even if you have been used to studying. For someone coming
in without that background it is very difficult indeed. What would
keep your students there and what will attract them in?
Professor Vincent: The answer
to your first question is that when we did our market research,
we did assess the results against the income of the students that
we were inquiring about, and there is some movement by the income
of the student. The wealthier students obviously are less deterred
by high fees, but there is only about the top fifth of our student
population who would be able to afford some movement in fees,
and, even then, it is not very great. In answer to the question
of what would attract more students into the system, in 2006 full-time
education will be free at the point of use—like the NHS.
Part-time education will not. Each student coming into the OU
will have to pay the whole of his or her fee upfront before they
start. Getting rid of that anomaly will probably make the biggest
difference to the OU and to the part-time sector more generally.
We have to collect our own fees, we cannot farm that out to a
student loan agency. We have to chase our own bad debtors. We
have to impose this burden on every student that comes in through
our doors.
Q45 Helen Jones: What would be your
estimate of the cost of doing that?
Professor Vincent: Over three
years, as the system builds up, were we to receive pro rata
the exchequer income that is going to the full-time sector, it
would amount to about £48 million.
Q46 Helen Jones: We have a very high
rate of women's participation in higher education generally but
yours is even higher than that of the rest of the system, is it
not? 58% of the students are female, is that correct?
Professor Vincent: Yes.
Q47 Helen Jones: Have you done any
research specifically into what would happen to those students
if they could not afford to meet higher fees? I am thinking particularly
that women are less likely to be able to move around if they have
caring or family responsibilities. Have you done any research
specifically amongst those students?
Professor Vincent: I do not think
I can give you data on whether women would drop out faster than
men if we put our fees up—which I think probably is the
question which you are asking me. I assume that they would, for
the reasons you have put forward. It is all about choices which
your students have. Are they free to move to universities outside
their area? Are they free to adopt different modes of learning?
To the extent that they are carers in a home, clearly their choices
are very limited, and it may well be that distance part-time education
is the only avenue they will ever have to gaining a degree.
Q48 Helen Jones: Do you have any
evidence for us on the gender breakdown of the different subjects
that people are studying?
Professor Vincent: I think the
OU is very similar to other sectors: the sciences have large male
contingents and the civil sciences and the humanities are very
substantially female. We see no difference with us.
Q49 Helen Jones: Andrew was talking
about the rate of financial return. I have to say, as someone
whose first subject is English, that I am not convinced this is
the only reason to go to university—I have never found an
economic value in being able to read Chaucer, but I think I would
be much poorer as a person if I could not. What research have
you done amongst your students about the balance between those
who are doing something purely with a view to advancing their
careers and those who are studying because they want simply to
study a subject: they are interested in it, they want to expand
their knowledge of it?
Professor Vincent: Those categories
are not mutually exclusive. That is the first point. One chooses
a subject at university because you have a passionate interest
in it and also because it will have some impact on your career.
Professor Vincent: I would want
to explain it in terms of the negative. There is some perception
that Open University exists for recreational learning among the
late middle-aged and the late middleclass. Most of our students
are in their thirties and forties, half earn £19,000 or less,
so for all of them the economic consequences of what they are
doing in taking on a degree I think matters very much to them.
We have done a segmentation survey on the demand for our students.
It demonstrates that the bulk of concern is about their career
development and its outcomes but I do not think we can separate
completely the two sides of the motives for undertaking a degree
at OU—or anywhere else, for that matter.
Helen Jones: Speaking as someone who
wants to do a science degree when I retire, I will sit back.
Q50 Valerie Davey: Before we leave
this early part of the questioning, I was hoping to come back
to Professor Driscoll. You mentioned earlier that the CMU accepted
the package because of the overall increase which was coming from
the Government and this was the only route. Did that include the
additional billion which the Treasury was putting in alongside
this Act going through, from Treasury direct into university funding?
Professor Driscoll: Are you talking
about the science funding?
Q51 Valerie Davey: Essentially, yes.
Professor Driscoll: No, that was
seen as something quite separate, over which there might be other
discussions about how that would be distributed.
Q52 Valerie Davey: It was the extra
billion going in, apart from ... You have accepted that?
Professor Driscoll: Yes, but the
issue was really around a package in the HE Bill to do with fees.
I think that many of my colleagues felt that was the only option
on the table and it was that or nothing, and, given that most
of our institutions are extremely hard pressed, have massive amounts
of backlog maintenance, unpaid staff and a deteriorating environment
in which students are able pursue their higher education, we had
to support it.
Q53 Chairman: That situation did
not arrive in 1997, though, did it?
Professor Driscoll: No, this is
a situation that has been building up for a long, long time. Within
this country we spend a lower proportion of national income on
higher education than many other—
Q54 Chairman: If you listen to HEFCE
these days, they paint quite a rosy picture of just how much money
is available to universities compared to where you have been in
the recent past.
Professor Driscoll: I think that
is true. There is certainly quite a lot of money to some universities—it
is principally research funding into a smaller number of elite
universities. But for most of our universities, and universities
represented by CMU, it is not a rosy picture at all, (a) because
we have lost money to support applied research and (b) because
many universities feel that they are under pressure to divert
fee income, which was meant to go into paying the salaries of
staff and into the infrastructure, into supporting bursaries.
Q55 Chairman: Jeff is going to lead
us on to that in a moment, but from some of your quotations I
get a feeling that you would rather like all universities to be
uniform and everybody to get the same. You have made some pretty
pointed remarks about Oxford University and there did seem to
be a bit of class envy in that. Would that be fair?
Professor Driscoll: I would not
call it class envy. If there is any envy—
Q56 Chairman: Well, classes within
the university!
Professor Driscoll: If there is
any envy, it is about the support for students, wherever they
study and whichever institution they study it in. It is a fact
that Oxbridge has a turnover of something like five and a half
times that of a typical CMU university for the same number of
students. The whole infrastructure, the libraries, the equipping,
the IT infrastructure, the staff/student ratio and so on are different.
How is it that similar students from similar backgrounds should
be able to benefit from a comparatively luxurious environment
compared with the rest? That seems to me to be wrong. Their parents
pay taxes. I think where we need diversity in education is in
diversity of approach and styles and coverage; not diversity that
is driven by a massive inequality in the support for different
universities and different places in which students study.
Q57 Chairman: Some people would say
that Oxford University and the likes of it have been doing it
for 900 years and they have built up a competitive advantage,
would they not?
Professor Driscoll: I do not think
it is about competitive advantage. Certainly if you get into a
situation where your turnover is that much higher than everybody
else's, yes, of course, you then have everything going for you.
But that has resulted not only from 900 years of building up endowments
and things like that, it has also resulted from massive, massive
post-war investment by taxpayers through governments to those
institutions for their capital infrastructure . . . And, for every
student, they still get college fees, they still get, on a revenue
basis, a higher unit of funding than the rest of the sector, and
to my mind that cannot be right. If that smacks of envy, then
I am only too happy to plead guilty on behalf of my students.
Chairman: Jeff Ennis. We are moving on
to bursaries.
Q58 Jeff Ennis: Just before we come
on to bursaries, I do not know whether our witnesses are familiar
with an article which appeared in Times Higher Education Supplement
on 11 February, which states that Michael Sterling, coincidentally
chairman of the Russell Group: "predicted there would be
a training up of well-qualified poor students into elite universities
and displacement of well-qualified middleclass students. He did
not believe there would be any additional poor students entering
the system overall." I wonder if our witnesses have any views
on that statement.
Professor Tarrant: I think he
is wrong. Perhaps I could go back to my own position on the Higher
Education Bill. As soon as the state bursary was raised from £1,000
to effectively £3,000, I changed my position on the Higher
Education Bill because at that time I became confident that, once
students understood the effectiveness of the bursary upfront and
the deferred fees, students from poor backgrounds would be better
off. I maintain that position and I hope—maybe I am naïve—that
will be reflected in widening participation in higher education.
There is a lot more we have to do as well, but I think it will
be a positive benefit and not a hindrance.
Professor Vincent: Could I turn
that answer upside down and make the obvious point that the key
factor is the scale of support for students and that is not going
to the part-time sector. Whilst the Funding Council has been asked
to do something for us, it cannot deal with support for students.
That is a DfES issue and there is no sign whatsoever that the
Government is going to do anything in that area.
Q59 Chairman: I think you are all
persuading us that for this Committee to look at the position
of part-time students would be a worthwhile small inquiry.
Professor Tarrant: Yes.
Professor Driscoll: I agree with
my colleagues but I would add the rider that in the current circumstances
virtually every person in a college or school who is qualified
to get into university can get a place at the moment, so the issue
really is about getting more people in a position where they can
secure a place. I have to say I think it has been a very sad day
for the education system that the Government have decided not
to adopt the Tomlinson recommendations because I think they would
have done a great deal to—
Chairman: Professor Driscoll, I have
to say that you are sitting in a parliamentary building and the
Secretary of State has not made that announcement. You have two
hours to wait. But I hear what you say.
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