4 The future sustainability of the
higher education sector: further issues
35. As we said at the beginning of this report, we
had been intending in this inquiry to examine a wide range of
issues in this inquiry in addition to the international aspects
of higher education. We have touched on some of those issues in
this brief report, but they would all benefit from a more detailed
discussion.
36. On the structure of the sector, for example,
Professor Richard, as we mentioned earlier, spoke about the variety
of universities and the discomfort that the sector seemed to display
about it, in contrast to the US, which has a much greater degree
of comfort with the idea of diversity within the university system:
"What I see happening in the UK is you have
an array of universities doing rather different things and many
of them doing [them] very well; then you spin it through 90 degrees,
you rank order everybody and then you are suddenly saying: Cambridge
is up here and Anglia Ruskin, which is in the city of Cambridge,
somehow ranks much lower than Cambridge. Well, actually, Anglia
Ruskin does things that Cambridge University cannot do and does
not do and vice versa, and we have got to get more comfortable
with the idea of ourselves as an eco-system."[45]
37. This echoes a comment made by the previous Chief
Executive of HEFCE that, in relation to universities, the English
"do have a genius for turning diversity into hierarchy".[46]
This issue of the structure of the HE sector—how different
institutions differentiate themselves and what role, if any, the
Government has in shaping the structure—was one of the main
subjects that we sought evidence on at the beginning of the inquiry,
along with the funding of universities and, perhaps most fundamentally
of all, what the role of universities should be over the next
ten years. On this last point there are vital questions to be
addressed: what do students want from universities; what do employers
want from graduates; and what should the Government, and society
more broadly, want from the HE sector?
38. We recommend
that our successors on the committee that scrutinises the Department
for Innovation, Universities and Skills should continue our inquiry
and report on the issues of the structure of the HE sector; university
funding (including levels of investment in research in comparison
with competitor countries); and the role of universities over
the next decade.
45 Q 750 Back
46
Education and Skills Committee, Fifth Report of Session 2002-03,
The Future of Higher Education, HC 425-II, Ev 119 Back
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