Examination of Witnesses (Questions 573
- 579)
MONDAY 23 APRIL 2007
PROFESSOR JOHN
BRENNAN, PROFESSOR
PHIL BROWN,
MARTIN DAVIDSON
AND PROFESSOR
BERNADETTE ROBINSON
Q573 Chairman: Can I welcome Professor
John Brennan, Professor Phillip Brown, Mr Martin Davidson and
Professor Bernadette Robinson to our proceedings. It is always
a great delight to have such a talented group of witnesses. Sometimes
I have to pinch myself and say, what if we were paying the consultancy
fee of this lot for two hours, and then it makes more value, even
more, the time we have with you. Normally we give people a chance
to say something in their own defence before we get started, before
we sentence, but that is a humorous way of saying if you want
to say a couple of things, to get us started, you can, otherwise
we will go straight into questions?
Professor Brennan: I have jotted
down a couple of things, which I will mention, in terms of where
I am coming from, on this. One is essentially a comment about
globalisation, and perhaps one can argue that globalisation may
be more about becoming better aware of differences rather than
about removing those differences. In relation to that, I should
say that most of my own research focuses on UK higher education
in a European context and my comment there is that there are huge
differences between the UK HE system and its linkages to the labour
market and the linkages in other countries; so I am not sure we
are in a process of convergence.
Q574 Chairman: Are we better linked,
or are they?
Professor Brennan: We are linked
rather differently and I think I would summarise it, there has
been a lot of indicators, UK graduates appear to find less immediate
relevance in their higher education to their employment. The second
thing is a comment about international league tables. There has
been some interesting work done in Germany which looks at national
rankings based on productivity per researcher, as opposed to taking
an institutional frame. That is quite interesting because you
get a rather different set of league tables if you do it that
way; in other words, the broad message from that is that how many
top universities a country has might not be, at the end of the
day, all that significant, that there is productivity of higher
education systems which are not necessarily dependent upon a hierarchical
system of individual universities. I thought that was perhaps
worth saying. Probably just the other thing to say is that, whilst
I recognise that the focus of this afternoon is looking very much
at internationalisation, it seems to me that for all universities
global, national, regional and local functions interpenetrate
each other, so I am not sure that internationalisation can be
completely separated from these other levels.
Q575 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Professor Brown?
Professor Brown: I am from the
University of Cardiff. I think one of the things I would like
to talk with you about is our understanding of globalisation and
the global economy. For the last three years I have been interviewing
corporate enterprises, 20 of them in detail, across seven countries.
We have had 180 interviews. We have also spoken to senior advisers
in China, India, Korea, Singapore, Germany and the US, and on
the basis of the evidence that we have collected and the trends
I think we have identified then I think I would like to challenge,
for example, the Leitch Review's actual title, that is Prosperity
for all in the global economy; that assumes a win-win scenario,
that there are no losers, and there are losers. The sub-title
is World Class Skills; that assumes that the key to this
is skills and also I would like to challenge that.
Q576 Chairman: We will come back
to that; that was very interesting, Professor Brown. Martin?
Mr Davidson: I am ready to answer
your questions, Sir, when you want me to.
Q577 Chairman: You know that the
Committee is going to China, and Beijing, and your team have been
very helpful in planning our visit and making it worthwhile. Professor
Robinson?
Professor Robinson: Just to say
a word on my background, I am fairly ignorant about higher education
in Europe. I spend six or seven months of each year in China,
working mainly in the west but also in other universities, so
I do not come armed with a lot of facts and figures but maybe
some perspectives from in-country, in China, and maybe Pakistan
and some other countries, about the experience of higher education
when students come here to participate in it. I come from Nottingham
University, which has the largest number of Chinese students in
the UK and which also has over 90 research projects ongoing with
China at present: a lot of connections there with China for our
university.
Q578 Chairman: Can we start the questioning
then. Is it not a fact that if you are looking at the international
higher education it is not totally different from any other competitive
marketplace product, is it? Surely it is clear that we must retain
our high quality, keep our reputation for high quality, if we
want to attract students to come here to study, and to make sure
that experience they have while they are here, of one year, or
three years, or longer, is of the very highest quality. That will
bring people back, will it not? Is it not as simple as that; or
is it more complex?
Professor Brown: Obviously, you
need to have very high standards of educational quality within
the UK to compete internationally. The issue is, however, what
others are doing, instead of what we are doing, and are we all
doing exactly the same thing, in which case where is our competitive
advantage. I think the second question would be do you treat higher
education simply as a commodity, how do you understand the idea
of the public good, should that be restricted to a region or to
a nation, what does that mean within an international context,
where is the public good and where is our understanding of higher
education there, if we see this purely in terms of yet somewhere
else to trade internationally. I am not saying we should be doing
that. I think we should and we have to think in those terms, and
the reason why we have to think in those terms is because everybody
else is. Whether we like it or not, when you talk to those people,
as you have, you know much better than I do that they will give
you the spin about, "Of course, we see this in `public good'
terms," but underlying it is competition, a competition for
places and students and research and technologies and we have
got to be part of that game. I think there is a broader agenda
which we also need to take into account here; if not, we narrow
down far too much, I think.
Q579 Chairman: Could it be bad for
British higher education to go too far down this route then; could
we be undermining the quality of the product for our own students,
who are in the UK and in Europe, by filling too many places with
foreign students, for example?
Professor Brown: I think we could.
It goes back to that issue, does it not, of what is the public
good, what is the purpose of higher education; is it there primarily
for people within the UK, or is it there also for international
students. The University of Oxford has been talking about reducing
the number of places for home students, needy students, because
of the problems of funding; so you have to link the funding issues
also alongside these broader questions about the overriding purpose
of higher education, I would suggest.
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