Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 71)
WEDNESDAY 23 FEBRUARY 2005
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
DRISCOLL, PROFESSOR
JOHN TARRANT
AND PROFESSOR
DAVID VINCENT
Q60 Jeff Ennis: I have a further
supplementary on this issue. I would like to ask John and Michael
what their current access rates are. I know it is going to be
very difficult to predict what the future rate is going to be
because of all the different criteria and interplay of the different
factors, but will your access rates go up under the new regime?
If they would, what would be the ideal access rate for your college
or your university?
Professor Tarrant: In the present
situation, the best way I could describe it is to say that we
estimate that about nearly 60% of our students will be eligible
for some state support under the new bursary scheme. As that is
limited to a residual household income of, I believe, £33,000—but
you might correct me on that figure—it does suggest that
we are drawing in a majority of our students from households that
are on relatively modest incomes and at least worthy of state
support under the present regime—although I do concur about
part-time students, and we keep coming back to that. Will that
increase? Not as a result of the Higher Education Bill alone,
no, but you know as well as I do that my university and all universities
like mine are developing other policies to wider participation
in different sorts of ways.
Q61 Jeff Ennis: Are you going to
mention Barnsley College, seeing as we have mentioned Huddersfield!
Professor Tarrant: I do not believe
the higher Education Bill will make a significant difference,
and, if it is significant, my view is that it will be positive.
Professor Driscoll: I would broadly
agree with that, with the proviso of what needs to be done in
the school sector—but I will not say any more about that.
In my own university, which is not untypical of CMU universities,
about 38% of students come through poorer backgrounds and will
be eligible for bursary support under the mandatory scheme. I
do not have any view about the limit on that. I am old-fashioned:
I adhere to the Robbins principle that all those who can benefit
from higher education should have the opportunity to go there.
I actually believe that it will benefit society and the economy
as a whole in this country if we stick fast to that principle.
What that number is, I do not know. I happen to think it is probably
considerably in excess of 50%, the 50% target. My university spans
an area of North London where participation rates in higher education
range, on the one hand, in parts of Barnet, at something like
75% of the age cohort, down to one area in the east side of our
catchment area where the constituents. . . . One of your parliamentary
colleagues, David Lammy, whose constituency is Tottenham, is famous
for saying that more people in Tottenham go to prison than go
to university. That cannot be right. When the numbers of the participation
rate in Tottenham rises to the participation rate in Barnet, I
think we will be getting to the sort of level of access and participation
that we need in this country.
Q62 Jeff Ennis: When the new arrangements
were first floated, it seemed that everybody was anticipating
that students would be looking in the future at the variable level
of tuition fees. That is out of the window now because everybody
is going to charge £3,000—which some of us in this
room actually predicted, shall I say. Instead, we are now turning
to a system where the students will not be looking at the tuition
fees but will be looking at the bursaries that are on offer. Is
that what we are looking at now under the new system?
Professor Driscoll: Yes. There
is a cash-back arrangement—like going to the supermarket
or whatever. This is not about a market working—I go back
to a point I made earlier. For many universities, when they look
at their catchment area, they are not looking over their shoulder
at the university down the road and whether they will be under-cut
with a bigger bursary; they are considering the attitude of the
students in that university to debt and a fear of debt. Work that
has been done suggests that in poorer backgrounds debt aversion
is higher; that the middle-classes are more confident about taking
on debt. If that is true, the only way that universities which
draw on a large proportion of students from poorer backgrounds
can mitigate the impacts of the higher debt supplied by deferred
fees, is in fact to give a bigger cash-back in the form of a bursary.
So, again, they are under pressure, because of the local market
circumstances that they face, to divert funding that should be
going into providing for the student experience, in terms of staff
student ratios and equipment, into student support.
Q63 Jeff Ennis: How do you think
the diversity of the bursary schemes that students will be looking
at will affect clearing? Do you think we also ought to have some
sort of bursary system rather than all these mix-and-match approaches?
Professor Driscoll: Yes, we should
have a central bursary scheme. We pressed ministers very hard
on this. In fact Mike Sterling and I—
Q64 Jeff Ennis: Are you still making
representations on that?
Professor Driscoll: Yes, we still
are—and we have never given up on that. Mike Sterling is
the Chairman of the Russell Group. The Russell Group are prepared
to agree that the grant should be top-sliced for the whole system
in order to provide for a national bursary scheme. Instead, we
have a situation with those universities where the largest number
of students from poorer backgrounds (a) will have a greater proportion
of their fee income diverted into bursaries, and (b) will have,
because they have large numbers, larger administrative costs.
The estimates I have from some other colleagues that have been
submitted as part of the evidence show that as much as 50% of
the additional fee income will get diverted into bursaries, and,
secondly, that administrative costs could run to as much as three-quarters
of a million. This is iniquitous and it just adds to the problem
of the diversity by funding that seems to be part of the current
higher education system.
Q65 Chairman: Do some of you colleagues
not say, "Look, come on, this Michael Driscoll, he really
wants universities to run like a nationalised industry: he wants
everything to be run centrally, he does not want to have diversity
between universities or big differences, he wants everybody to
be the same and he wants it to be administered centrally."
Surely one of the refreshing things about the new changes is that
it does shake up the system and allow a great deal of competition
between you all and you can all devise different ways of meeting
those challenges. Some of you can use the challenges to get the
administrative costs down rather than up. Do you not feel a bit
like an Eastern European state bureaucrat?
Professor Driscoll: Nothing could
be further from the truth. It is quite the reverse. What I want
from this higher education system in the UK is a level playing
field. What we have is state-imposed diversity by funding. That
is what I would like to get rid of. Whether it is a free market
or, if we are not going to have a free market, let us have a fair
arrangement but we have diversity driven by prejudice, by snobbery,
in our higher education system and it is that which needs to be
got rid of so that every kid in every school has an equal chance
of going to university that is as well supported in terms of its
staffing levels, its library and equipment levels as any other
university. At the moment, we have a highly divisive and discriminatory
system and it is getting more so by the day. This is state driven.
Give me autonomy. Great, we will seize it, but that is not what
is on offer.
Professor Tarrant: Debt aversion
is an issue but this is not like a normal debt. We all have a
responsibility for explaining that and, once that is understood,
we will diminish the debt aversion problem. Secondly, we have
a state bursary scheme. It was introduced as part of the Higher
Education Bill. What we are talking about are bits on the top
of that. I am quite prepared that universities should compete
with each other. We do a lot already. Let us not imagine that
we do not, but let that competition be on things like quality,
employability and so on rather than the ability to pay bribes
for students to come to their university. There are bursary proposals
out there of six plus thousand pounds a year. That is vastly more
than the money which is coming in from that student through the
introduction of fees. It is only possible in those universities
that expect there to be few people to win them, whereas in universities
like mine I expect 50/60% of my students to need bursary support.
Therefore, I can give them less. That does not seem to me to be
a fair basis of competition, where the university has relatively
few poor students and can therefore afford to give a large bursary.
That seems to me to be inappropriate competition. If that university
gets the student because it offers a higher quality course or
better employability or more appropriate courses, terrific. We
are in that business. We have been in that business for years.
We will stay in that business but do not let the competition be
around whether one university can give £10,000 as a bursary
and I can only give £1,000.
Q66 Jeff Ennis: What about the impact
of the varied bursaries?
Professor Driscoll: I suppose
we do not know but one might envisage a chaotic situation of a
Dutch auction occurring in August overlaying the existing post-qualification
and clearing system that we have in the summer. We look forward
to that with some dread.
Q67 Mr Chaytor: Professor Tarrant
drew attention earlier to some of the issues of the further education
colleges providing HE and indicated that this was an unfortunate
byproduct of the Act, but is it not the case that this is one
of the purposes of the Act because it is part of the effect of
introducing a more market driven system? Is not the reality that,
at the moment, there are too many universities and too many departments
and a mismatch between supply and demand and, if potential students
do their degrees in their local FE college with equal quality
of teaching and they can do that cheaper and the fee is lower,
why should that not be allowed to happen?
Professor Tarrant: Firstly, I
do not think there is an over-supply of universities. My university
applications have gone up 20% this year. That does not reflect
an over-supply in the traditional university sector, I do not
think. More importantly, on this question of the market operating
in further education, I agree that in principle that is what appears
to be happening but it is not that easy, unfortunately, because
the further education colleges, although they may be partly at
least responsible for the delivery of higher education, are not
responsible for the award of the qualification and the monitoring
of quality. What they are doing is running courses on behalf of
universities, including a large number for the Open University.
Those universities are validating those programmes, are saying
they are comparable to the programmes operating in the university
concerned. My own university works with a very large number of
FE colleges and there is then the question of who sets the fee.
If the universities set the fee for their courses being given
in further education colleges, which you would think was a principle
that might be reasonable because they are their courses, the college
may well end up with a variety of fee levels—more likely,
a variety of bursary levels to support, because that is where
the competition is going to be, not in fees. Conversely, if the
college sets the fee, a university like mine that may have a foundation
degree programme, for example, operating in ten FE colleges will
have the same course under ten different fees and bursary regimes.
Neither is satisfactory. What is critical in this is that the
Association of Colleges has recommended that all FE colleges hold
their fees constant for the first year at least. What they have
not appreciated is that the universities that are validating those
programmes are going to look at them and say, "Are they still
comparable with the courses in my university where I am charging
a £3,000 fee?" In other words, I am getting £1,800
a student extra to teach the programme in universities. FE colleges
are not getting that extra money. Are they going to be able to
maintain comparability of standards? The answer is I do not think
they are. Maybe for a year it will be all right but after that
it is unsustainable. If the colleges set their fees and the bursary
support, firstly, if they do not raise the fee there will not
be any bursaries for the students going through FE colleges which
will seriously affect the widening participation but, more importantly,
all those courses will have to be revalidated. The university
will have to examine them all again and say, "Are you providing
a comparable course? Can we put our degree title on your programme?"
Many of them, I fear, are going to say no after a period of time
and that is the unintended consequence.
Q68 Mr Chaytor: But if you are arguing
that the course fee needs to be the same regardless of whether
it is taught in the university or—
Professor Tarrant: Not necessarily
the same.
Q69 Mr Chaytor: Or broadly similar?
Professor Tarrant: No. There has
to be a comparability of experience and quality of programme.
It may be delivered more cheaply in the FE college but not that
much more cheaply.
Q70 Mr Chaytor: There is no point
in doing it in the FE college if the work cannot be done more
cheaply, surely. Why does not the university just keep the course
to itself? Why subcontract out if it is not a way of driving down
costs?
Professor Tarrant: There is a
whole host of reasons why FE colleges might wish to deliver HE.
Some of them originate from the college but from a more national
perspective they are hopefully accessing different students, students
who would not be able to or willing to travel to their nearest
university. Many of these colleges are in towns and communities
that are some considerable distance from universities. Many for
social reasons are not allowed to travel, so there is a whole
host of reasons why higher education should be delivered through
further education, of which I suspect money is the least important,
quite honestly.
Q71 Mr Chaytor: Why should those
students be expected to pay a higher level of fee which is largely
designed to cover the vast infrastructure costs of the university
itself if they are not attending that university?
Professor Tarrant: The high level
fee is supposed to cover the necessary increase in the teaching
costs of students. That is what we were told very clearly when
the High Education Bill went through. Universities are under-funded.
The only way to close that gap is through charging student fees.
I am not suggesting that the student experience in the FE college
will be the same as in the HE college but the academic experience
must be.
Chairman: Thank you very much. It has
been a very good session. The only problem is it has suggested
at least two new lines of inquiry that the Committee should set
its hand to but thank you very much.
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