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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 285-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
MONday 19 February 2007
MS G TUMELTY, MR W STREETING, PROFESSOR M ARTHUR and MS T ALDRICH-SMITH
MR J HILLAGE, MS A VIGNOLES, MR K MAYHEW, MR P ELIAS and MR C GILLEARD Evidence heard in Public Questions 122 - 230
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 19 February 2007 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr David Chaytor Jeff Ennis Paul Holmes Helen Jones Fiona Mactaggart Mr Gordon Marsden Mr Andrew Pelling Stephen Williams ________________
Memorandum submitted by the National Union of Students Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Gemma Tumelty, President, Mr Wes Streeting, Vice President (Education), National Union of Students, Professor Michael Arthur, Vice Chancellor, University of Leeds, Chair of the National Student Survey Steering Group, and Ms Tabitha Aldrich-Smith, Corporate Affairs Director, UNITE, gave evidence. Q122 Chairman: The Committee welcomes the witnesses to our inquiry. Some of them have been before the Committee before and others are here for the first time. This is not a committee that tries to be unpleasant to witnesses; it seeks to extract information from them and it always does it in the nicest possible way. This is a very important inquiry into higher education. If you remember, 10 years ago at the publication of the Dearing report which had all-party support Lord Dearing painted a 20-year scenario and said that after 10 years he wanted a thorough inquiry to see how it was going. We have not heard that the DfES or anybody else is doing that, so we are undertaking it. This is a thoroughgoing, across-the-piece inquiry. We are now writing up our views on Bologna and getting on with the main part of the inquiry. There is no better way to start than with student satisfaction and experience, and that is what we want to get from you this morning. Perhaps I may ask whether one from each side would like to make a two-minute introduction; otherwise, we can go straight to questions. Ms Tumelty: Thank you for inviting us to be part of the panel. Obviously, this is something that matters greatly to our present and future members. When talking about student experience one tries to look at it in terms of expenditure. That is not just about money, which I am sure we will come to shortly, but about time. The expenditure of money and time encompasses quite a lot of it. In our opinion, what it really boils down to is that there is not really a homogeneous or single type of student experience and we need to break it down a little. It depends on numerous factors: the reason for entering higher education - what you want to get out of it - who you are, your background and whether entering higher education is a traditional thing or a first experience. As you have seen from the national student survey results, the higher education institution that one enters and the type of qualification, whether it is a foundation degree, access course or medical degree and so on, impact on the student experience. It also depends on where one lives, which is a matter we would like to deal with later, and the accommodation costs, whether one goes to the private rented sector, private hall sector, halls of residence or chooses to live at home. That may have an impact under the new funding regime. We would like to move away from the idea of students as customers and see them as co-producers of their education. That is a huge part of the student experience which inputs into academic representation and student representation and means the student taking an active partnership role with the institution or student union in what the educational environment is like, which is quite empowering. Obviously, the student experience needs to look at all aspects of student life: before one applies to university, the academic experience whilst there, teaching hours, contact time, quality of teaching, the pastoral support that is received, any extracurricular activities in which the student takes part, which are hugely beneficial, accommodation and health, graduation and beyond. One also needs to look at student experience with the benefit of hindsight. In summary, we want to see a movement towards an experience which does not depend on who you are and where you go. Professor Arthur: I have submitted a written report and will not repeat what is in it. From my perspective, the national student survey has been a very significant addition to the sector. I think it has been pretty successful considering how large and complex the project is. In particular, I believe it is the first time that the students of the nation have had a collective national voice. When the results come out each time it is very important for each institution to take the results and be seen to be responding to them. There is evidence of significant enhancement of education as a consequence of the results of the survey. That is particularly pleasing because it was designed to act as an opportunity for prospective students to see what other students on courses in universities were thinking of those courses, but because it is public, relates to a single point and is national there is good evidence that institutions have been responding to the findings of the survey. Ms Aldrich-Smith: I noted that at the beginning the Chairman referred to "each side". As a representative of UNITE, a student accommodation provider, rather than having "sides" in the sense of students and universities-------- Q123 Chairman: I meant to refer to sides of the room. It was not an ideological observation. Ms Aldrich-Smith: That is good, because I want to advocate the opening up of the higher education experience to business and the community as well. We believe that the higher education experience is about the academic experience. It is a social experience and independent living away from home is absolutely part of the whole transforming experience. When one is living away from home one is also working. Forty per cent of students work part-time during term time. One is living in a new community. Thirty-seven per cent of graduates indicate a preference to stay on in that community when they finish their studies. I believe that the higher education experience needs to be broadened to encompass those other areas, including businesses like ours which are committed to supporting the higher education sector. As for the debate about students as customers, we see them in that light because they are certainly our customers. Whether universities see that differently is another matter, but they are consumers of the education experience and we must think about them in that way, too. Q124 Chairman: I should like to open the questioning by asking Professor Arthur about the shortcomings of the survey. I looked through it again last night and noted that it did not cover all universities. It is a bit patchy. We know that there are over 100 universities and some are not there. I declare an interest as governor of the London School of Economics. I was intrigued to see that the LSE is not there. In addition, I was not quite sure whether this covered all students or only some. Professor Arthur: It is a survey of undergraduate students in their final year, so it does not cover postgraduate students at this point. To cover the postgraduate student experience would require a very different survey. It has been set up to cover the undergraduate student experience. The shortcomings are fairly obvious and they are the ones you mention. In order to report in the national student survey the current request is that 50 per cent of students on any one course should respond; it should be at least 20 students. The reasons for those thresholds relate to statistical advice when the survey was first set up about three years ago. I would describe that as a platinum standard of statistical validity, and inevitably a few institutions drop below that threshold. You are quite right that there are three institutions where the student unions have actively boycotted the national survey: the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Warwick. We have been working hard to try to persuade them to participate, and I think we have had some success this year - the proof of the pudding will be in the eating - with the University of Warwick. I would now describe the University of Oxford as being at least neutral and only the University of Cambridge has boycotted the survey this year. I believe it is a great shame that they have done that. This is an opportunity for those students to say nationally and in public what they want to say about their institution. Several issues concerned them originally: first, the invasiveness, if you like, of the survey on student time. We have listened to that issue and cut back the number of contacts we make with each student deliberately to make it more student-friendly. They were also concerned about reporting outcomes versus the level of expectation. They had the notion that the latter would be much higher at Oxford or Cambridge than at other universities. I believe that that is complete nonsense. The expectation of all students going to all universities is of a high standard. We have been working away at that. I am a little concerned about widening participation issues for those universities if they have students that come from low income families and go onto the website and cannot get information. I imagine that that would put them off. I have been using that line with students and vice chancellors. I have spoken to all three vice chancellors of those universities and am pleased to say that they are now much more supportive of the survey than they were originally. As to other limitations of the survey, certainly the first incarnation of the website was not good enough. We have recently recommissioned a new provider and the new website will be very closely linked to UCAS. The new website will be run by a combination of UCAS and Hotcourses so that students who go in through UCAS, select universities, look at entry criteria and are able to link up to the courses through the UCAS site can quickly go to the new website, which will probably change its name, and see what students think of the courses that they are looking at. That will be a great improvement. It is very much a response to the review undertaken this year by the quality assurance framework review group. Q125 Chairman: Mr Streeting, what are your views on the fact that some universities do not participate? Is this a conspiracy between the leadership and student unions locally? Do you think that all universities ought to co-operate? Mr Streeting: I am glad you have asked that question. I think it is important to highlight that in all three cases, and certainly in the case of the University of Cambridge, where I was present at the student union in the first year of the rolling national student survey, there was - who would have thought it? - an enormous degree of complicity between institutions and student unions in terms of opposition. Student unions were certainly prodded and pushed towards a state of active opposition, and it is important that that institutional perspective is also brought to light. It certainly was not the case that the student union avoided participating in or boycotted the survey in direct opposition to their institution. There was enormous complicity and it was deeply unfortunate. Professor Arthur has touched on an important point, which I made early in the academic year when the results were released, that in the case of Oxbridge they have particular issues to deal with in terms of the ongoing myths to do with the admissions system - the notion of the old school tie and secret handshakes. They will do themselves no favours when in future applicants click onto the UCAS website and find NSS student satisfaction data for almost every HEI in the country except Oxford and Cambridge. I believe that that sends a very worrying signal. NUS very much supports the national student survey and it was something for which we campaigned over a number of years. When the survey first arrived we still supported the concept. We were less sure about supporting this particular national student survey, but many of the problems in terms of the intrusive nature of the phone call and other methodological dimensions of our concerns have been dealt with. To elaborate some ongoing issues that need to be dealt with as we look to reviewing the NSS after three years, one matter the survey does not do is report the results of joint honours students in a meaningful way. Currently, there is very little distinction or opportunities to offer students on joint honours courses. For example, if I was reading history and politics at the University of Leeds I might be very happy with the politics component of the course but not necessarily the history part of it. I cast no aspersions on those particular departments; it is just an example. It does not help when reviewing the data to drill down to find out where the problems are and how the experience can be enhanced. Another area of outstanding concern that sticks out like a sore thumb is not the methodology but the level of student dissatisfaction in the areas of assessment and feedback. That is an area of concern which institutions in terms of the policy agenda locally as well as the sector nationally really need to address. Q126 Chairman: We published the pretty wide-ranging nature of this inquiry into higher education, but Ms Tumelty in her introduction and Mr Streeter just now have mentioned some interesting broader concerns. There is almost an obsession about student finance and fees in the written submissions. It is extraordinary that for a union that is supposed to represent students' right across the piece the only thing it wants to give evidence to us about in its written submission is fees. Ms Tumelty: The remit of the inquiry of the Committee is very far-reaching. There are many areas that we would want to contribute to if we did not have such finite research resources. To be fair, the issue of fees and funding is consistently prioritised by our membership through the democratic processes. I believe that we submitted something on Bologna as well. Q127 Chairman: Yes. We asked for that separately. Ms Tumelty: We do an extensive amount of work on this and that is why we are pleased to have this opportunity to come now. We will be able to follow that up by backing up all the research we have done on it, for example through the accommodation cost survey, some bullying research done recently, work on health and other matters that we do in the national student survey. Mr Streeting: The context is really important here. It would be unfortunate to suggest that the NUS is the only organisation in the sector talking about fees and funding. Q128 Chairman: I am just saying that your evidence concentrated only on that to the exclusion of all the other areas in which your students might be interested. Mr Streeting: If I am honest, I believe we were surprised to see fees and funding included in the inquiry at this stage, bearing in mind there is a review in 2009. It is absolutely right that we monitor evidence across that period and see how the system beds in. Without meaning to be too critical of the inquiry itself, at the beginning you made a comparison with Dearing. We and many other voices in the sector are concerned about the expansive nature of the review and short timescale in which to respond. Look at the volume of work and evidence that went into Dearing and all the staff support that went into it. It is almost as if the Select Committee set out to produce a "shearing" report but with a smaller budget and on a shorter timescale. I believe that it is totally appropriate for the NUS to focus on the big ticket issues such as fees and funding. Q129 Chairman: I quite like the reference to "shearing report", but the fact of the matter is that the Select Committee does things differently. It conducts its inquiries harder and faster, and it has a great deal of experience in doing them. If before we finish this inquiry you want to add anything to the evidence we shall welcome it. You have been around long enough to know that that is not a hard and fast time limit. Ms Tumelty: We shall definitely follow up the points raised today, put it all together and submit it to the Committee. Q130 Chairman: But you must have been encouraged by the way student numbers have held up in England over the past decade. Ms Tumelty: The NUS has always campaigned for the expansion and widening participation in higher education, long before it became politically expedient to do so by the university sector. Last week we welcomed the increase in applications. What we did not have at the time - I presume that they are now up on the UCAS website as of Friday - was the breakdown of the socio-economic groups, ethnicity, gender, class and subjects. Obviously, we have been preparing for this hearing. We shall look very closely at those figures and at where the impact, if any, will be. Essentially, all of the issues to do with fees, funding and sustainability of the sector are not just to do with admissions; it is concerned with a number of factors. Ms Aldrich-Smith: As to the broader issues, in a normal distribution curve UNITE tends to look at the tails to find the trends and what may be different. Certainly, within the student experience the service that one receives from university welfare services, availability of paid employment and careers services are some of the matters that students in the survey appear to be slightly more dissatisfied about in general. Overall, satisfaction is really high, but thinking about how we may be able to improve those matters as part of the student experience could be areas on which to focus, as well as the big ticket issues. Q131 Mr Chaytor: Mr Streeter, can you say a bit more about the complicity between the NUS and individual institutions in blocking participation in the survey? Mr Streeting: It was certainly not NUS complicity. I will hold up my hands and be honest. That was a decision we took during my year in office as president of the student union. Q132 Mr Chaytor: To clarify it, you advised your members at Cambridge not to participate? Mr Streeting: Our student union did so, yes. Q133 Mr Chaytor: You now regret that and would not advise any other student union in any other university to do that? Mr Streeting: Absolutely - and I am doing quite the opposite. When the survey first began we had a number of concerns about the methodology. To the full credit of HEFCE and Ipsos MORI, the whole way that the survey is approached has been constantly adapted and changed wherever possible without affecting the validity of the survey and ability to compare data over a number of years. Significant change has occurred. I am far more comfortable with the NSS as it stands now and am incredibly positive about the discussions that are taking place in the steering group about the forthcoming review and where we might go in future with an additional bank of questions. The survey has adapted and evolved. It is unfortunate that institutions have chosen not to take part. As far as concerned my university, there was a concern about the time implications and how useful the data would be, but one of the best things to come out of the NSS is not just the usefulness of the data to potential applicants but the fact it has acted as a catalyst to drive up standards in quality at an institutional level. To the credit of many HEIs they have seen the results and areas of concern, drilled down into the data and worked with the students union. Where that has happened we have had the most productive results in all sorts of areas, particularly in assessment and feedback. I hope that that is reflected in the future, but it has been a driver for improvement. Q134 Mr Chaytor: My next question to Professor Arthur is: are there specific examples where individual universities have taken on board the results of the survey and started to change their practices? Can one or two examples be quoted? Professor Arthur: Certainly. I am sure that we can also let you have written evidence in the form of a survey taken by HEFCE last year. Perhaps I may start with my own university. We have improved our induction process for students. We have started a new peer mentoring scheme where existing students help freshers. We have started a new and much more detailed campus-wide student survey asking questions of all three years so we have local information and can improve things before we get to the final year. There is a major review under way of our internal learning and teaching processes. To pick another example, the University of East Anglia comes to mind. They have increased the amount of anonymous marking that has been going on. It is very commonplace for universities to set up a specific action plan related to the results of both the 2005 and 2006 surveys. The results of both surveys are very similar, which is hardly surprising. We had the results of the 2005 survey only late in the year and the next survey starts before we can even change anything. I am expecting most of the improvements to emerge from this year onwards. I would encourage people to think in a five-year, not year-by-year, timeframe. A number of the things that universities are trying to change will take some time. I have here a list of about 10 universities which responded, and I shall be very happy to submit them to the Committee. Q135 Mr Chaytor: But your steering group has not actively recommended that there should be an action plan in response to the survey? Professor Arthur: No. The steering group is concerned largely with making the survey run and trying to refine it. It does not really have the power to do that. I think it is inevitable. I know that QAA will do this during an institutional review. It will have access to the results of the national student survey: they are in the public domain. I presume that it can also ask for access to the local results that are available only through the dissemination website. I anticipate that QAA will certainly be using the results of student surveys in their overall assessment of the quality of higher education institutions. If I was a member of the QAA I think I would be asking harder questions of the three universities mentioned just now - Oxford, Cambridge and Warwick - where the data is not in the public domain. I believe that there will be a consequence for those institutions that do not actively participate. That is another matter that hopefully will persuade them they should do so. I am delighted to hear that Mr Streeter is repentant about his earlier activities. Q136 Mr Chaytor: Ms Tumelty, in your opening remarks you referred to students as customers. How do you explain that the only university with an overall satisfaction score of 4.5 is one where all the students are customers, that is, the Open University? Ms Tumelty: In that case some of our feedback is concerned mainly with the style of learning and flexibility because obviously it is done part time. The quality of the teaching materials is obviously one of the key points that students have made. Other factors are student support and academic and non-academic feedback, and also whether the provision is flexible enough to fit in with their lives, which is another key issue. I do not quite understand what you mean by your question because obviously all of the students are customers. Q137 Mr Chaytor: Do you not see a relationship between these results and the fact that individuals who follow an OU degree are contributing financially from their own resources to that extent? They are putting a lot of their own investment into that degree. Does that have any relationship to the satisfaction of the student? Ms Tumelty: I think that financially all students now contribute significantly to their degrees, further education course or postgraduate courses, but it would be really sad if we lost the notion of learning for knowledge and learning sake as much as for future earnings, experience and everything else. If we go down the route of talking solely of customers there is a very different relationship with the institution. The relationship is not necessarily based on, "You give us this and we give you that." We would like to see them much more as students who are co-producers of their education and their education experience. Q138 Stephen Williams: Professor Arthur, the national student survey has 21 questions grouped around different themes such as feedback, teaching and learning and personal development. The outstanding statistic from the biggest grouping - assessment and feedback - is that 40 per cent of students are unhappy with what they get, which must be the largest finding in that survey. That must send shockwaves through the higher education world. Professor Arthur: It did not send shockwaves to the extent you might imagine. We already knew that from subject reviews. This is always the area that causes the greatest issue. It is very difficult to know precisely what is going on, but I suppose there is an expectation when students come from school of a very high level of feedback through the assessment process. Compared with the national curriculum where there is very regular feedback and a lot of help during feedback to get through to the next stage, going to university is rather different, so there is an adjustment to a different and much more open learning scheme. This finding just repeated what has already been found in the subject review. Having said that, one of the benefits of the national survey is that it really has lifted out that issue and shown how prominent it is, because in essence it was the lowest scoring sector of the national student survey in every single institution in the country. The prominence of the finding is now very apparent. This has led to a number of us looking at what we do in terms of assessment and feedback within our institutions and all sorts of new ideas have cropped up. If I think of my own institution, one school in particular has started a complete feedback week; it is a kind of open door policy for all the students in that school to come and get whatever feedback they feel they have lacked in the past. The view of HEFCE is that probably quite a lot more work needs to be done on it, and it has asked the Higher Education Academy to work particularly with HEFCE and institutions to try to improve assessment and feedback. I believe that if that starts to happen up and down the land it will be a tremendous outcome. Q139 Stephen Williams: In terms of how the questions are analysed, as I understand it the 21 questions are given equal weighting when the report is collated, yet research done by the University of Bristol, an excellent institution, found that assessment and feedback in students' own minds was not terribly important. Although it was the worst finding in the survey, in terms of how students ranked its importance it did not feature that high, but because all the questions have equal weighting it distorts the results. Is that something which HEFCE will look at as well? Professor Arthur: I believe that is a valid point. Any survey like this will be a balance between the simplicity of the survey and, therefore, the willingness of students to complete it - the survey takes between five and six minutes to complete - versus the complexity and level of detail that one might get back from the questions asked. We thought it particularly important to keep the questions identical for the first few cycles of the survey. These questions are jealously guarded, and we are very reluctant to add further ones unless we can be assured they will be of extra value, but over time the questions will be refined. As to weighting different outcomes, of course that would be possible. I think we would need to come back to what the survey was originally intended for. It was originally intended to inform prospective students about the quality of the course they were thinking of taking, or the quality of the institution that they were thinking of going to. Therefore, as the student is looking and comparing, say, French at Leeds with French at Manchester with French at Oxford, Cambridge or whatever, and pulling up the data there is at least a comparison of like with like across the various institutions that he or she is thinking of attending. In terms of the original intention of the survey, I think this is a reasonably valid methodology. By the way, what it was never intended to do was create a league table of the quality of institutions. If one wants to think of creating a league table one might wish to start weighting many different factors, but that was never the intention of the national student survey. It was intended to inform students, and it has had the wonderful secondary effect of creating greater enhancement of the learning, teaching and other aspects of student experience. Q140 Stephen Williams: Ms Aldrich-Smith, obviously UNITE's survey is a different one with different respondents. Did your findings bear out those of the National Union of Students? Ms Aldrich-Smith: Our survey has been quite consistent over the seven years we have done it in terms of how satisfied students are overall in during the 1990s. With the help of TNS we have had a look at other service sectors in comparison with universities overall. Universities are in the top 10 per cent of satisfaction when one compares it with other service sectors generally. Q141 Chairman: What other service sectors do you have in mind? Ms Aldrich-Smith: One thinks of hotels, for example. Q142 Helen Jones: You do not spend two years in a hotel. Ms Aldrich-Smith: Exactly. One is just thinking of the service sector in terms of business services and so on. One cannot compare it directly, but I believe it shows that a good level of customer satisfaction is being derived. Q143 Paul Holmes: Professor Arthur, if I may just refer to one health warning to be applied to the survey that you carried out, it is all to do with third-year students who are nearing the end of the course. An 80 per cent overall level of satisfaction is very good, but how does one allow for all the ones who drop out in the first and second years and who by definition are not satisfied with the course but do not get to fill in your survey? Professor Arthur: The short answer is that we are not sampling those students and have no easy way of so doing. The survey works off the HEFCE statistics submission, so it is really a survey of those completing their courses. The point is well taken that we will not be surveying those students who have dropped out. Q144 Paul Holmes: Do you know approximately the rate of drop-out in the first two years? Professor Arthur: I can tell you what it is for the University of Leeds: it is about six per cent. Most British universities have very high completion rates in comparison with overseas universities, in particular America where it would be considered an excellent performance if 70 per cent of students completed their course. We have a very high completion rate, but you are right that we will not be sampling that group. When the survey was first devised there was a notion that we should sample people six months after leaving, but getting hold of people and good response rates is an issue. Therefore, it is done between January and March in the final year, so the survey is active at the moment. Q145 Paul Holmes: But is it fair to say that people should not simply say 80 per cent are satisfied because they must allow for the ones who have previously left? Professor Arthur: The 80 per cent has a health warning. That represents 80 per cent of people scoring four and five and does not include the ones scoring three. Only about 10 per cent score at one and two. Therefore, it is at least 90 per cent who are pretty satisfied. Ms Tumelty: I should also like to give a health warning about the UNITE survey as well. When it looks at satisfaction there is an issue about methodology, in that the survey is done in the first month of the student's best year at university. If they are not highly satisfied and happy and excited to be there with loads of money and have not really started their lectures yet I would be really worried about those first experiences. That is our concern with the methodology. I do not think that it would necessarily pan out. It would be really useful if the study was done longitudinally to see the changes once the teaching and learning had taken place and money issues and work had started to kick in. Q146 Helen Jones: Ms Tumelty, there seems to be a contradiction between what you are telling us now and the written evidence you provided to us. What the NUS says in its written evidence is that it has chosen to focus upon those questions which are most pertinent to the student's experience, but what it actually focuses on is fees. You are now sitting here talking to us about lots of other aspects of the student experience. Do you not think those are equally important, and why do they not figure in your written evidence? Ms Tumelty: Obviously, they are as important. Our membership does prioritise fees and funding, but we are pleased to be here today and to be given the opportunity to speak. We shall follow it up with a written report. Q147 Helen Jones: Perhaps I may ask you a question on your methodology. Is it your membership or activists that prioritise fees and funding? What surveys have you done of your membership as a whole to see what the priorities are for them? Ms Tumelty: Obviously, we are a democratic organisation and students get involved through their student unions and then through their national union. We are looking at how to get a broader student involvement. If one looks at the democracy within individual student unions the majority of student unions through referendums and votes within their own institutions have taken positions on fees and funding. Q148 Helen Jones: What are the participation rates in those cases? Ms Tumelty: It varies dramatically. Mr Streeting: I imagine that participation rates are somewhat higher than you suggest with the line of questioning you adopt. Q149 Helen Jones: Can you leave us to adopt the line of questioning? Perhaps you can just give us the answers, because that is the way it usually works. Mr Streeting: It is really important to bear in mind as we look forward to the 2009 review that the system of funding and culture that that brings and the direction of travel that is applied to the sector will have an impact on all of those aspects of the student's experience. All of those things will be linked in terms of both demand and expectations, what institutions are able to provide and on which budget and where the funding is coming from, as well as all kinds of aspects to do with the market, albeit limited ones. If one takes student support, for example, and looks at the huge market in bursaries and the impact that that has on both take-up rates and choices, not just in terms of institutions but what students choose to do and how they spend their time and money when at university, I would say that funding is central to the student experience. Q150 Helen Jones: One of the matters on which you have not given us any evidence - perhaps you can do so now - is where that money is going. Very little is said in your written submission about things like teaching, contact hours and resources. Has the NUS any evidence to give us on the students' view on that matter and on where they think the extra money from fees ought to go? Ms Tumelty: Essentially, in terms of expenditure of that money we have recently carried out an accommodation cost survey with Unipoll, which we can certainly provide to the Committee. The vast majority of the money that students get particularly through student loans will go on those accommodation costs in the first year where rents in private halls of residence are significantly higher than university accommodation. Between 2003/04 and 2006/07 there has been on average a price hike of 23 per cent in private halls of residence. That is a significant figure. Therefore, that will account for about three-quarters of the student loan. Ms Aldrich-Smith: That is not the position according to us. It is a very simplified overall picture. If we go back to student satisfaction, we have seven years of longitudinal data in the student experience report. We also measure first, second, third and postgraduates. I can tell you that 53 per cent of first-year students versus 45 per cent of third-year students are very satisfied. We have quite a lot of data which we can submit in written evidence. Going back to the accommodation cost survey, within our student experience report one of the corporate providers - we are not just talking here about UNITE - is significantly lower than the university halls of residence. The difference is £10. We find that it is very different in different markets. Rent is really driven by different markets. One does not want to look at an overall cost. Although over the past five or 10 years we have driven this new choice for students, the market out there is very competitive. We find that both the private and university sectors are increasing the standards of their accommodation to match and keep up with our standards and also generally to improve it, because that is what students want. To improve standards they must spend money on the accommodation which translates to rents. Overall, rents are quite competitive. Corporate provision is an average of £70 a week versus a university hall of residence cost of £89 a week versus private rented accommodation of £77 a week. Q151 Helen Jones: I do not really want to get into a long debate on student accommodation costs. I am asking whether the NUS has any evidence from its membership of student views on where the extra money from fees should be spent. You mentioned accommodation, but all the evidence given to us so far tends to focus on full-time students following what I call the traditional model: they go to university at 18 and come out at 21 or 22. What about the experiences of part-time and older students for whom accommodation may not be an issue and who have very different needs? Can you tell us anything about their experiences and what they would like to see? Ms Tumelty: The varying needs of part-time students are often overlooked, and sometimes potentially by the student movement as well because of the levels of participation. I welcome the fact that you have raised the point. Often the most vocal concerns expressed by part-time students are to do with pastoral support, access to child care and other much-needed facilities. It is really to do with small things. For example, if you arrive in the evening is there anywhere to park your car? Is the path to your course or library lit? What are the library opening hours? Do student services have different opening hours to allow part-time students to use them? Do they open between six and eight? That is not often not the case. Often, some of the facilities that are used by the traditional student to whom you refer are not there to be utilised by the part-time students. Q152 Helen Jones: I used the word "traditional" as well, but the student body is changing radically, is it not? Therefore, when looking at the student experience do you agree that we need to look at very different types of experience? Having done both full-time and part-time study with a small child I can tell you that it is a very different experience and a different set of needs. Ms Tumelty: As I said in my opening, it is certainly not homogenous. We have to look at the needs and expectations of international students, part-time students, mature students and students of faith and of none. We are starting to pull together a lot of those experiences using a vast range of different local institutional data as well as national data. Q153 Helen Jones: If you have any information we would be grateful to receive it. Ms Tumelty: Absolutely. Q154 Fiona Mactaggart: The first question we asked - I do not think we have yet got an answer - is what students wanted from universities. Can each of you respond to that question and tell me how you know the answer that you give me? Ms Aldrich-Smith: Are international students covered by your remit? Q155 Fiona Mactaggart: They are covered explicitly by the terms of reference which the Committee sent out when asking for evidence. What do students want from universities? What should the student experience involve including that of international students? Ms Aldrich-Smith: I should like the Committee to know that we also did an international student experience with UCOSA last year, which I can supply if that is needed. What do students want? I believe that they want a quality academic experience and a social experience. What they are looking for are new experiences and a chance to live independently and try the experience of living away from home, managing their money and learning to live in a new community. I think that in particular they are learning new experiences in an environment which is the next step on. That is what our research shows. In particular, it is to do with independence and the desire to be treated as an adult. Professor Arthur: We survey our students as they come in and ask them why they come to the University of Leeds. The top issues are the academic reputation of the institution and learning from high-quality and world-class academics. They are looking for occupations at the end of their time at university which are fulfilling. They are not usually looking for highly paid occupations but jobs that are exciting and fulfilling. They are also looking for personal development. Mr Streeting: One of the matters that we have been exploring with the 94 Group, which as a group of institutions has a particularly proactive focus on the student experience, is how the ethos that has been adopted by groups of institutions as the sector expands is very different. Well informed students do the background reading and think about the institution and courses that they want to go to. Not only does that aid retention; students tend to be far more happy with the course. But when they apply to different institutions now students want different things. That is why we are seeing more part-time students. The way that higher education is delivered both in terms of degree products and different types of institution is changing, because student expectations are different. One of the things that we need to do is tie together how we take the cultures and different degree products that institutions are developing either individually or as groups and collectives, like CMU, the Russell Group and 94 Group, and think about how we provide accurate information, advice and guidance to students so they can make informed decisions. I am not entirely convinced that with all the information we provide to applicants - it is getting better all the time - it is necessarily broken down for students and explained what they can expect from, say, a 94 Group institution that is different from, say, a Russell Group institution. One thing that students do expect - more work needs to be done on this - is to think about students paying more and therefore expecting more, whether that is possible within the constraints of higher education funding and what improvements have been made as a result of additional income for HEIs and how that develops over time. That is something on which we shall certainly be focusing in the run-up to the 2009 review in terms of our research programme. Ms Tumelty: The sort of things I can talk about fall within stereotypical roles. To reinforce what Ms Aldrich-Smith and Professor Arthur have said, obviously academic experience is important. Teaching time contact hours is something that we hear about increasingly on the ground. That reinforces a recent report done by the University and College Union. The more contact time there is the better the teaching quality and the greater the opportunity to explore those ideas, but obviously one needs safe, secure and affordable accommodation, pastoral support, access to extracurricular activities, employability and career development, volunteering in the community and good local relationships with local communities which can sometimes harm that experience when there are clashes between local communities and students. One is talking about access to good health services, pastoral care and student support. Q156 Fiona Mactaggart: You are talking about different products. One of the striking features of the survey is that the university which seems to come top in most categories is the University of Buckingham which actually sells the product; it charges students the full cost of its product. Would not that approach, therefore, end up producing this differentiated product more efficiently? I am not necessarily advocating it, but it sounds to me as though it fits what you argue for. Would it not work better than the present arrangement? Mr Streeting: Absolutely not. I certainly do not believe in privatising our institutions. Institutional autonomy is often used too much as an excuse not to do things which are just and valid. Without tied funding through the state and that steer of public funding we would not have seen the widening participation of gender being pursued so actively and rigorously, where that is taking place, by the higher education sector. That is one pertinent, key example of how government policy can impact on the sector and produce positive change. I certainly would not advocate the University of Buckingham model for the rest of UK higher education. I think there is a vital public link there. This may be a theme to which we will return in later question, but too often institutional autonomy is raised as a barrier and excuse not to do things that need doing. Q157 Mr Marsden: Professor Arthur, very much on the back of what my colleague Helen Jones said about the experience of part-time and older students and the growth in the sector, to what extent do you feel that at the moment the survey adequately reflects the concerns of part-time and older students? We do not have a statistical breakdown of them by category - at least not in what has been submitted to us. Professor Arthur: Not in what we have submitted, but we have that breakdown. All part-time students and all the older age groups of students, if they are undergraduates and in their final year, are surveyed. That data is available through Paula Surridge's analysis for both 2005 and, very shortly, 2006. I am afraid that I cannot remember the detail, but I am more than happy to provide written answers to those specific issues. From memory, nothing particularly striking stands out. I seem to remember that the older one is the more likely one is to be satisfied. Q158 Mr Marsden: I am tempted to say that that is the triumph of hope over expectation. Perhaps I may press you a bit further. Clearly, as my colleague Helen Jones has said, the profile of the student body has changed and will change more significantly in that direction. Another aspect of the inquiry that has come up is the extent to which part-timers and older students can move in and out, ie issues of flexibility and portability. In the survey have you asked about those issues in terms of both existing courses in universities and when people perhaps need to take out a year and move on? Professor Arthur: No, we have not asked about that issue in the current 22 questions. It would be possible to start to introduce those sorts of questions. We have an additional bank of questions this year but they are not compulsory: institutions can ask to have them added. Q159 Mr Marsden: Do you think it would be useful to have such questions? Professor Arthur: Yes, I do. Q160 Mr Marsden: Ms Aldrich-Smith, you referred to the longitudinal nature of your surveys. What do your surveys tell you about satisfaction rates of older and part-time students? Are they getting better or worse or staying the same? Ms Aldrich-Smith: Our survey does not cover part-time students. In terms of older students, we find that they are less satisfied than the younger first-year students. That has held quite constant over time. There have not been dramatic shifts in satisfaction over the seven years we have done the survey. In terms of first-year students, they tend to be more satisfied and that level declines as they go through the university experience. Q161 Mr Marsden: Is there a particular reason why you do not look at part-time students at the moment? Ms Aldrich-Smith: No, apart from funding. Q162 Chairman: Presumably, they do not stay in your accommodation? Ms Aldrich-Smith: No, and that is another factor. Q163 Chairman: The same goes for people who stay at home and go to university, so you do not know about them? Ms Aldrich-Smith: Yes. To be clear, this survey comprises 1,500 face-to-face interviews and online interviews of all students, so they are not just from UNITE accommodation. They come from 20 universities across the country, so I am not talking here of UNITE customers but about a representative sample, although it does not include part-time students. Q164 Mr Marsden: Ms Tumelty, we have already discussed with you the focus of your written evidence as opposed to the broader issues that you have talked about today. Given that the student experience is more than just fees, although that is an important part of it, what are you doing in terms of either your activities or survey to ensure that students who live at home during their study period have as well rounded an experience as possible? Ms Tumelty: This has always been one of our concerns, and we have talked to the DfES about home students having that student experience. Q165 Mr Marsden: I am not asking you necessarily what the DfES should be doing; I am asking you what you should be doing. Ms Tumelty: We have seen a couple of examples of really good practice in some of our student unions where specific representation for home students has been introduced to try to build a little more integration and movement between home students and social experience, for example by way of clubs and societies. Birmingham University Guild of Students is one example. It now has an elected home student officer to try to bridge that gap. There has been more home student participation in that student union. That is something which we are looking at as a model of best practice that we would encourage other institutions to look at. Whether it is a staff member or an elected officer, it should be somebody. Q166 Mr Marsden: Therefore, as a union you are committed to spreading that best practice and putting greater focus on it. I ask because, frankly, in the past when NUS has come before the Committee it has been quite critical of its lack of focus in that area. I am not talking about you personally but about previous years. Ms Tumelty: Essentially, whilst there is plagiarism within academic establishments there is no such thing when it comes to really good student representation. We try to share best practice across the country. Where something works it tends to have a really good knock-on domino effect round the country as well. We shall be looking at that and taking it forward. Q167 Jeff Ennis: Representing as I do a fairly deprived constituency in South Yorkshire, obviously I am interested in the Government's widening participation agenda. I am just wondering whether any of the witnesses have any evidence about the success or otherwise of the Aim Higher programme and its impact on the student experience. Professor Arthur: I was not expecting the question and so do not have specific data, but my impression is that it has been a good thing and is beginning to be effective. For my own institution, the Widening Participation agenda data has remained unchanged following the recent introduction of fees, etcetera. We have seen almost no impact on WP at least in the first year. Q168 Jeff Ennis: As part of the survey are you able to identify students who have participated in the Aim Higher programme? Professor Arthur: I am not sure. Unless it is identified on the statistics we would not be able to do that. Q169 Jeff Ennis: Is it something that you believe may need to be looked at in future so that the Government can analyse the success of the Aim Higher programme? Professor Arthur: Certainly, it is something of which we have taken note. Q170 Jeff Ennis: Does the NUS have any comment to make on that? Mr Streeting: I certainly agree with that. One requirement is a proper review of the success of the initiative. Some things work better than others; some institutions have tried different things and have had different rates of success. Last week the UCAS figures were quoted by Bill Rammell in a comment in the Guardian. He noted the increase in students from lower socio-economic groups for this year, which is welcome, but one matter that surprised me was the level of glee about it given the great ambition of the Government in the Widening Participation programme. We have always supported it. In the context of the cat-and-mouse game about fees, admission numbers and that side of the debate I would not want to see the Government lose its commitment and become complacent about rather smaller increases given its overall, overarching and welcome ambitions on wider participation. Q171 Chairman: It must have been of interest to the NUS to see Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland not doing as well as England. Mr Streeting: It is interesting. There is an interesting Northern Ireland dimension as well. With the restoration of the Stormont Assembly hopefully, we will see what decisions the elected Members in that area take in the field of higher education funding given our views. Q172 Paul Holmes: On the wider issue of the student experience, when I went to university in 1975 - a long time ago - I was told not to work during term time to earn money and certainly not during vacations because that was for wider reading, but in your submission you point out that these days on average 40 per cent of students work in term time and among working class students it is 55 per cent, and they work longer hours. What effect does that have on the wider student experience, quality of degree, result and that sort of thing? Ms Tumelty: That has been one of our key projects this year. We have found that there has been a 50 per cent increase in students working over the past 10 years. Bill Rammell says that it is a good thing that students work, and we believe that getting that well-rounded experience where one takes on a bit of extra work is a good thing. On average students work 14 hours a week and one fifth of them work over 20 hours a week. Full-time students who undertake that amount of work believe that it has a detrimental impact on their studies. Obviously, there is lack of equality. If one is working 20 hours a week and sitting next to somebody in a lecture theatre who does not have to work there will be an impact. It is those students from lower socio-economic backgrounds who have to work a bit more because they are not getting additional money from their parents. Q173 Chairman: Is there data on that? Ms Tumelty: Yes. Q174 Chairman: Are working-class students from poorer backgrounds forced to work or, as some may suggest, is it the case that all students want to spend more money clubbing and having a couple of pints? Ms Aldrich-Smith: Sixty-seven per cent of students work to buy basic essentials, so in some way there is a need to work, but we have quite a big chapter on this. The Committee may want to review it. There are three main reasons why students say they work: to be able to continue studying, which is an important reason; to have a more enjoyable studying experience because they learn from their work; and to gain experience so it looks good on their cv. Students think about why they work and they manage it. They say that one of the things universities could do better is help students juggle their part-time work commitments with their university courses. Ms Tumelty: We have done a report with the TUC called All Work and Low Pay. It is based on a comparison of official labour force service statistics over a 10-year period. We have that report and are quite happy to send it to the Committee. It reveals some interesting things. On the back of that we have been quite pro-active about trying to encourage students to become members of trade unions so that their rights are protected off work as well. They tend to work in the low-paid sector of retail hospitality with poor conditions where rights are not necessarily upheld all the time. We are also doing some proactive work in that area. Chairman: I am sorry that we have been pushing you to answer briefly which seems scandalous given the quality of the evidence we have, for which we are very grateful. I bring this session to an end. This has been a very good session and on the way home it will make you think of all those things you should have told the Committee if you had had more time. Keep in touch. We want to make this an extremely good inquiry, whether or not it is called the "shearing" report. Memorandum submitted by the Institute for Employment Studies Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Jim Hillage, Institute for Employment Studies, Ms Anna Vignoles, Centre for Economics of Education, Institute of Education, Mr Ken Mayhew, Director, Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE), Mr Peter Elias, Institute for Employment Research, and Mr Carl Gilleard, Chief Executive, Association of Graduate Recruiters, gave evidence. Chairman: Before we start, I am embarrassed that, as in the case of the previous session, we have such a distinguished group of witnesses before us. We have even more witnesses this time and so the management process in an hour is difficult. Please accept our apologies that we are trying to crowed into the timetable as much oral evidence as we can. Mr Pelling, who has a very important meeting with the GLA after this hearing, will begin the questions and then must leave. This is not intended as a discourtesy. Q175 Mr Pelling: In the view of the witnesses, why did the Leitch report adopt the approach of benchmarking UK skills needs for 2020 against international competitors? Is it an unusual approach to take to analysing skills? Mr Mayhew: As a preliminary comment, I do not know why Leitch did it; that is their business. My reaction is that it is not unusual, but it is a very dangerous thing to do. It is dangerous because the skills and educational profiles of countries are so very different, so to try to get an aggregate picture to show that one country is better or worse than another can be very misleading unless you are extraordinarily careful about bilateral comparisons. For example, we look worse than some comparator countries in the proportion of people with level 4 qualifications. If one looks at the selfsame countries this country is better at level 3. One then finds other comparisons where it is exactly the reverse. Benchmarking is a crude start, but it is only that and it must be accompanied by rather more sophisticated analysis of the economic needs of each country which may be different. Mr Hillage: If one sets oneself the task of identifying how this country can be world class, which Leitch did for himself or had set for him, one has to survey the world and see where it fits. As I understand it, if one sets oneself that task however one measures it most of what are called the developed economies or whatever in the world will have 40 or 45 per cent of their adults going through higher education and have some kind of level 4 or equivalent, taking all of Mr Mayhew's points about equivalence degrees. That maybe why they set that as a benchmark. Ms Vignoles: In fairness to Leitch, they considered the evidence on rates of return as well as benchmarking approaches. In terms of the evidence of rates of return to degrees at least it lines up. The UK is exceptional in the highness of the return generally but specifically to degrees, so that is consistent with the idea that we still have a long way to go and we can expand further without causing an oversupply. Q176 Mr Pelling: Does it matter that Leitch did not really analyse our needs in terms of the economy's demand for high-level skills? Mr Mayhew: In my view it does. I think there is a huge range of uncertainty as to what the demands might be. Mr Elias has much more evidence than I on this, but there is an array of evidence, which is sometimes in conflict, about just how effectively our present stock of high-level skills will be used. We have ambitious expansion targets and therefore we have to think very carefully about usage. I cannot resist just one comment on rates of return. I totally take Ms Vignoles' point, but the OECD figures on comparative rates of return show quite a strong correlation between how high the rate of return is to level 4 and how widely dispersed the earnings dispersion is anyhow, which is capable of many interpretations. Mr Elias: It is a very complex picture. We cannot simply talk about comparisons on the international side looking at the demand for high-level skills or skills more generally; we must also consider the supply. When we have countries like India and China producing every year millions of high-level graduates for whom English is the language in which they have had their education, or is their first foreign language, we can see that, comparing the wage costs of graduates from these countries, there is often a great incentive for employers to take advantage of the new multinational approach to the employment of graduates. Q177 Chairman: Does it matter that we nitpick over this? Is there not a level at which politicians have to say it is commonsense that we must have more graduates? I remember interviewing Sir Michael Bischard and asking him about the 50 per cent target for students going into higher education. I asked whether it was based on international research or any research or whether it was just a good round, sexy number. He grinned. There was no evaluation of that 50 per cent. Everybody thought it was a good idea. Ms Vignoles: It matters because targets drive behaviour, resources and ambition. If one focuses on the 50 per cent target as a uniform aim one misses the point that when drilling down in the data one sees downturns in the value of certain types of degree by particular subjects, or for more recent graduates there is a slight downturn in the return on their degrees. It is that kind of evidence on which one needs to focus when asking whether one should expand further rather than some arbitrary target, surely. Q178 Chairman: I thought research showed that we had three million lower skilled jobs that would disappear in a very short time and we would have only about 600,000 jobs for less skilled people. Surely, it is commonsense to push people on to higher skills, is it not? Mr Mayhew: One could question those particular demand projections which are very dangerous. To go back to your specific question and to add to Ms Vignoles' point, it matters for two reasons: first, there is an opportunity cost of such an expansion because it is still largely a publicly-funded system and public money can be spent in other ways, not least on other bits of the educational system; and, second, it matters because the degree of expansion must affect the product that universities provide. Today the typical university student ceases to be the same person that he or she was 20 years ago and, with further expansion, there will be a difference in 10 years. That is not of itself necessarily a bad thing, but it means that university institutions must look very carefully at the nature of their product and what they are offering. Q179 Chairman: It sounds a bit like "more" means "worse", as Amess would say? Mr Mayhew: I would not dare to suggest that, but "more" means "different". Q180 Mr Pelling: I want to turn from the supply to the demand for skills. The Treasury and DfES have said that evidence suggests the supply of skills is not the key issue; rather, it is necessary to stimulate demand. Do you agree with that view? If so, what is the evidence that supports such a postulation? Mr Elias: The question is: is it appropriate to stimulate the demand for high-level skills? Q181 Mr Pelling: Rather than be concerned about supply, should we be addressing it from the other end? I suppose the question is: is it possible to stimulate demand? Mr Elias: I do not think it is possible to formulate ways in which externally we can stimulate the demand for high-level skills. What we observe is that the demand for high-level skills has changed very significantly over the past 20 years. We have seen types of work change quite significantly over the period and high-level skills are being employed in many different ways compared with the past. If one takes a typical job like a personal assessment, 20 or 30 years ago a PA would essentially have been the same as a secretary. He or, most probably, she would have been a good typist and looked after someone's diary. Now a PA is essentially a graduate-level job. It requires good software skills and a high level of organisational and interpersonal skills. Effectively, one is deputising for the person whose assistant one is. That is a very different job. That has happened because there are people who are willing to step into that role. The job title may not have changed, but the content of the job has changed dramatically. There are many other examples of jobs which 20 years ago were not graduate jobs but now are. People say that that is simply because there are more graduates around, but our research indicates that in many cases that is not so. These jobs have changed significantly and graduates are using high-level skills, whereas before they were not. Mr Gilleard: I agree with everything that Mr Elias said, but today it is also about multi-skills. It is the skills that are made redundant, not people. A graduate emerging from university in 2007 is likely to be working for another 45 or 50 years. No one in this room can predict what kind of employment we will have in 20 years' time, never mind 45 or 50 years, but the one thing we can guarantee is that everybody who graduates this year will have several jobs, if not several careers, and need constant retraining. The kind of skills that employers look for is the ability of individual graduates to manage their learning, careers and lives. We have to get that message across to graduates because ultimately they are responsible. It was very interesting to read in Leitch the point about attitudinal change. We have to get across to people that it is their careers and lives and ultimately they must take responsibility for it. We provide them with the means, but it is their future. Mr Hillage: That is not exclusive to graduates; it may be true of everybody. As to stimulating demand, one can do it mechanistically by requiring people to have level 4 skills or skills that they did not have before and thereby raise the number of people, as we see in some professions where a degree is now a requirement, whereas before it was not, and what was previously training has become a degree level. Q182 Chairman: One increases the number of doctors, teachers and nurses. Judging by Oxford, a number of graduates want to go into the City and become very wealthy. Mr Mayhew: Perhaps I can provide one small compilation of facts on the question of demand and make a general observation. I think that in the second school survey which was based on a representative survey done in 2001 respondents were asked whether they needed their degree to get their job and whether it was fairly essential to carry out the work competently. As a result, 13.4 per cent of the sample replied in the affirmative. If one added non-degree level 4, at that time it was 22.7 per cent of the sample, which was an increase on a similar survey conducted 15 years before in 1986. But it raises the issue that, given we are increasing the stakes in terms of the percentages, we have to look carefully at utilisation and how good it is. My very brief general point is that it is important to stimulate demand for high-level skills because the 50 per cent and all the rest goes back to the high skills vision first espoused in the States, then here and elsewhere in the OECD. It is all about as big a percentage of our employers as possible competing internationally on high-value added output and high-skill intensive production processes. Beyond the narrow area of education, in terms of the country's competitive strategy, if you like, it is very important that we keep an eye on that. Q183 Fiona Mactaggart: I want to return to Mr Mayhew's point about people taking responsibility for their careers. Are the universities at present equipping graduates to do that in the required way? If Mr Mayhew is right that we need to compete on a high skill vision, are we doing the things that we need to do to achieve that? Mr Hillage: First, looking at the survey data, the average graduate who comes out of university these days compared with 10 or 15 years ago is far more aware of the labour market and is career conscious. I do not think that university necessarily does that; the student goes in and comes out like that. Second, I do not know whether university gives graduates the equipment to do that, but bear in mind that university is the one major educational intervention that graduates will have in their lives, but as we and Mr Gilleard say they are likely to have many more. What one needs to be able to do for the rest of one's life one will not necessarily be able to get all in one go. The key point is that the individual needs access to opportunities to develop those high-level skills through either formal or informal learning in the work place or otherwise. I am not sure that universities are gearing themselves up to getting people back in at a later stage with short course or various other things to enable them to develop their skills over a period of time. Ms Vignoles: We may want to move away from the idea that a degree is a homogenous thing. The evidence we received when looking at graduates in non-graduate jobs, for example, suggested that those who ended up in such jobs were less skilled; they were less literate and less numerate than their peers who managed to secure graduate-level jobs. That suggests two things: first, all degrees are not the same; second, potentially there are HEIs which are not fulfilling their remit in terms of producing employable graduate-skilled individuals. Mr Gilleard: I believe that today universities are doing a lot more to support their students. One of the initiatives is a personal development plan which every student is supposed to have where he or she can reflect on the learning experience not just in the academic sense but also in the extracurricular activities that they might undertake. I believe that that is very important. Whilst universities have endeavoured to do more, I think that the demands of the world of work have increased yet again and more is to be done. Certainly, the employers I have talked to are uneasy about that; they feel that too many candidates coming forward for a career - I am sorry to say this to Mr Hillage - do not understand what the company expects of them, even though it is very easy to find it out through its brochure and website. They do not prepare as well as they might do for the process. They do not necessarily understand that they are in a competitive situation. Very often, when they go through that process they show that they have not really grasped what it is the employer is looking for. I find that quite frustrating. Earlier we talked about diversity and wider participation. For me, the best equal opportunities initiative that you could have in a university is to level the playing field by making sure all your students really are equipped to cope and compete for the jobs out there. Mr Hillage: I do not really disagree with Mr Gilleard. Certainly the younger students are more aware of why they are going and what they want to do in the labour market, but that does not mean they are very good at doing it. Mr Mayhew: As a personal observation rather than evidence, in my experience I have found myself sitting on the executive committee of my university's career service. I have been immensely impressed by the professionalism of that service and some of the other better ones. Equally, I have gained the impression that there is huge heterogeneity across the university sector in the effectiveness of careers services, and I believe that it would really be worth looking at that. Mr Hillage: We have strong evidence of that. Q184 Chairman: It is very surprising. You said that universities were different. If one looks at the league tables of employability of graduates they certainly are different in terms of the number of people they get into employment. Mr Mayhew: But that may be inevitable. What goes in does come out not totally unchanged, but my impression is that some career services, whatever the level, need to be looked at. Q185 Chairman: Mr Mayhew, if I may tease you a little, you come from a university that, as the evidence in the first session suggested, colluded in the non-participation in the student satisfaction survey. Is that because you are concerned and worried about what "'more' means 'different'" means? Mr Mayhew: I bear no responsibility for my employers. Q186 Chairman: Or your students? Mr Mayhew: I bear a bit of responsibility for them; nor am I here representing them. The honest answer is that I do not know. Local surveys are done within the university. Q187 Chairman: But do you think that people at Oxford should become involved in the survey? Mr Mayhew: I do not see why not, and I do not know why the authorities in their wisdom took that view. Q188 Chairman: You have the right connections here, but some are still excluded. Mr Elias: We are working on our vice chancellor. Mr Mayhew: I think that whatever the level of the university for the different types of degrees that are coming out I suspect that there is a lot of evidence that some career services at different levels do a superb job for their students and others are not so good. I think that it is something worth looking at. Q189 Fiona Mactaggart: Listening to your evidence, I am just wondering whether, going back to the issue raised by Mr Pelling about the supply side, there is an issue about the relationship between employers and universities and whether, instead of a student starting at school, going to university and then heading towards employment, there is an argument for encouraging employers to value higher skills and prepare students for further employment and create opportunities for relationships with employers before students go back into universities. I am just thinking about that as a response to what has been said. Perhaps you would respond to that thought. Mr Gilleard: I think that is a very good suggestion. In particular, newer and smaller businesses that traditionally have not recruited graduates may shy away from taking graduates; they may think that they are taking on too much, and it is only by having the experience of a student working for them that they may see the value added that that individual brings to the organisation. That is a two-way process because it is also good for the student to get insight into different kinds of organisations and what they have to offer. As a personal view, if I had my way I would not want anyone leaving a sixth form to go straight to university. I would like that student to have at least a year's experience that could be of any kind - it could be voluntary work or paid employment - for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the one to which you have just alluded. If you ask employers what are the key tick points on an application form when looking at vast numbers of applicants from universities for jobs work experience comes very near the top of the list. If it is relevant and it is structured work experience it probably comes first, probably before a first from Oxford. That is how important employers value it. The downside is that too many employers are not providing sufficient opportunities for students to take up those placements. Q190 Helen Jones: Is there any evidence to show that employability does not just relate to the quality of the graduates - earlier someone said that what comes out depends on what is put in - but also the type of courses? I have particularly in mind that a lot of the newer universities offer directly vocational degrees. Are their employment rates better than some of the others that do not, or is it a patchy picture across the whole sector? Mr Elias: At the moment our evidence is particularly thin. We have tended to rely rather a lot on information based on first destination vivas of higher education which, as the Committee knows, is a survey conducted shortly after leaving higher education. My colleague Professor Kate Purcell of the University of Warwick and I have done a survey of those who graduated in 1995 looking at them three and a half years after graduation and those who graduated in 1999 and looking at them four years after graduation. We are trying to find a match between what kind of courses they have taken and what the outcomes are in terms of jobs, salaries, their satisfaction and so on. These surveys have been quite informative and we have published the results elsewhere. The problem is that we have always been rather limited in terms of how many organisations we can contact. We were also rather concerned that we had a small sample, often only about 10,000 graduates. With those concerns in mind, we persuaded the higher education career services unit to fund what is now the largest tracking survey of applicants for higher education that has ever been conducted in the country. This covers all those who applied for higher education in 2006. We will track them for six years, and probably after that, although we have funding for six years. We are following them from the moment they apply to higher education backed up with the statistical information from UCAS. Already we have 122,000 students signed up for this survey, so it is on its way to becoming very successful and important. That will provide us with a lot more information than we have had hitherto. It will allow us to address the employability agenda, because we can look at what particular institutions do and at the effects of outcomes associated with that. We can look at small groups in the population, for example those from particular parts of the socio-economic structure who have not previously been well represented in statistical information, and, quite importantly, those from ethnic minority groups or religious affiliation groups. Again, we have had great difficulty in the past in collecting that kind of information and pursuing it rigorously. The answer to your question from my perspective is that we do not have very good information at the moment but over the next year or two we expect that situation to change dramatically. Ms Vignoles: We do not have good information on the employability of specific vocational subjects, but we have information on the wage premium and employability associated with broad-brush academic subjects at degree level. As you might expect, the return to a degree for males taking arts degrees is virtually zero which contrasts with fairly substantial returns in the field of medicine, chemistry, engineering and science. There is a lot of information out there that can tell you which particular subjects are highly valued at least by employers. Mr Mayhew: One very specific piece of evidence - I do not know how relevant it is to your important question - is that one of my students did a little thesis which basically involved talking to a careers officers at a variety of universities across the spectrum. At one post-1992 university he found one interesting matter, which may or may not be of general application. This university put on an array of quite specific vocational courses as well as more traditional academic courses. What he found was that in relation to a course on estate management, which brought in the obvious employer recruiters, the recruiters had gone to that university because historically that establishment had put on such courses, but they were now recruiting people not from the vocational course but the general academic courses because they thought that that signalled they were the sorts of persons they wanted to train. Whether or not that is of general application I do not know. Q191 Chairman: This inquiry into the future of higher education is a very serious one. This is an interim inquiry into Dearing 10 years on. From the point of view of your competencies, what issues should we not fail to cover when writing up a report which we hope will be a serious one? What should we not ignore in this inquiry from your point of view? Mr Mayhew: Let us put the right numbers to one side at the moment. One obvious issue that picks up something said by Leitch is that basically that report said expansion could not continue without expansion of foundation degrees which are a relatively small percentage of the whole and without a significant initiative on participation by the over-30s. If you accept the Leitch target numbers as sensible given the structure of demand in the economy - or even if you do not - it raises some very profound issues about what a university by 2020 will look like and how heterogeneous the sector would need to become as compared with what it is today. Ms Vignoles: I reiterate the point I made earlier. Higher education now represents a continuum of experience and it is a very diverse sector, but we still tend to turn to policy solutions that are applied to the sector as a whole. No doubt this is not a subject for today, but when one is thinking of the current flat fee, for example, that does not apply particularly well if one has an HE sector that is extremely diverse, whatever one's views on fees. Mr Elias: Even if we do not expand the higher education system further than it has already expanded the output of graduates over the next three years will continue to rise because of what has happened in the past. Messages will start to flow back to those who want to enter higher education and there will be a lot more information in the future in the age of the Internet and surveys being available online and so on. People have access to a lot more information that can help inform their decision-making. I believe that we will see much better decision-making when people have more information about how they might participate in higher education and what it will cost them. They will become more discerning in their choices in terms of the way in which they expect higher education to be delivered to them and the relevant costs and their prospects having participated in it. I believe that that is all positive, although it means that we need to keep a close eye on the kind of information that is being generated and prevent a polarisation within our higher education system between what would become the elite institutions and the rest. That is something that must be looked at very carefully. I am very concerned about issues to do with social class and participation in higher education. Targets and opportunities have been missed. What is happening at the moment will not help to address that agenda in any significant way. As a result, we see the possibility further down the line in terms of future generations of increased polarisation in society as between those who have had access to higher education and have resources and those who have not had access and have limited resources. Any way that we can act now to prevent that kind of polarisation arising in future is extremely important. Q192 Chairman: The results last week of the recent changes in terms of the introduction of fees and with it grants and other stimuli looked rather good, did they not? Mr Elias: In my book, "rather good" would be a much more significant change than that which we saw. Q193 Chairman: But we are doing better than Scotland and Wales, for goodness sake. Everybody was saying that Scotland and Wales were doing so much better than us. It has not happened. We have an increased number of applications, particularly from kids coming from more socially deprived backgrounds. Mr Elias: Yes, but the scale of those increases is not very significant in my view. Q194 Chairman: Why? Mr Elias: Because if we want to bring about a true widening of participation we have to see a much faster rate of increase particularly of young people in higher education than we are seeing. Q195 Chairman: But perhaps that takes us back to Mr Mayhew's point. We will need a massive expansion in foundation degrees and post-30 higher education involvement. Would that not be part of the answer? Mr Elias: I hope it is. At the moment I simply hope rather than base it on the firm expectation that it will happen. We need more evidence in future and we must collect more information and find out whether these very recent changes have a profound impact on the social class distribution of applicants to higher education. My view is that they do not. Mr Hillage: I want to endorse the point made by Mr Mayhew. The key point is that the changing nature of higher education will lie in the way it adapts, if it can, to facilitating greater participation by adults who already have some experience of the labour market and some qualifications but want to enhance their skills and maybe their qualifications, not necessarily doing a full degree. The question is whether higher education can link into that need. At the moment I believe that about one or two per cent of employers' continuing professional development needs are met through higher education. There is an enormous market for professionals, managers and so on to continue to develop their skills and higher education is not tapping into it. Therefore, there is a market and resource opportunity. That means that higher education and employers have to link much more closely together in a far more strategic way than they do now. The evidence is that at the moment it is very much ad hoc and can be quite successful but it does not last very long; and it is certainly not embedded throughout the universities and institutions. Mr Gilleard: My shopping list is slightly different. I should like you to look at preparation for university particularly with young people coming out of schools. I think that the information, advice and support available are generally inadequate. A recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Personal Development showed that one third of graduates regretted the choice of degree they had taken. Imagine spending three years reading a subject in depth that you really do not have your heart in. That may explain some of the issues. I think that the foundation very much starts in the way one prepares one's commitment to go to university and what one hopes to get out of it. That should continue from the first term in university. My second agenda item is better engagement with employers. Mr Hillage has mentioned the training of postgraduates. There is a vast market for that. I also believe that we can invite employers into our universities - almost force them in - to help us develop a curriculum. Two weeks ago I received a phone call out of the blue from someone who had been charged by his university to build a new business studies block. He wanted an employer's perspective on the design. My father was an architect. I could not build a cardboard box. The more I got into it the more I realised that one could create an environment in a learning institution that could be more reflective of the world beyond. We will take that further. The thought is that anything that is developed in universities should seek some engagement from employers. My key point is that it is a degree-plus. Far too many graduates still believe that the degree is what matters. A very high proportion of final-year students abandon the search for a job until they have their 2:1, as if that is some sort of magic grade or attainment. They forget that employers have plenty of candidates with a 2:1. What is important is what they have in addition to that. Linked to that is a return to Dearing's employability agenda. Colleagues with whom I have worked on the enhanced student employability team would never speak to me again if I let anyone get away with the notion that employability is about getting a job. That is the trouble with the first destinations report; it is about the first job. Whether or not that job is appropriate is not considered. To be employed is to be at risk; to be employable is to be secure, and that is what we should be aiming at for the next generations of graduates coming out of our universities. Q196 Jeff Ennis: Mr Gilleard, is a degree just a signal of potential? Is that what employers are looking for? Do they just want the status of someone with a degree to be considered for a particular type of employment and it does not really matter what the specifics of the degree are, certainly not as much as it did in the old days. Mr Gilleard: In the bad old days in that sense one would make assumptions about what a graduate was. I find it incredibly difficult. I work in this market day in day out. It is difficult to define what a university graduate or degree is, as both evidence sessions today have shown. We are not talking any more about homogeneous groups. I like the first part of what you said; I could not disagree with "signal for potential". I thought you were saying something very positive, but you went on to talk about the status of a degree. I believe that it is too expensive for recruiting employers to fall for the line "I have an all-graduate workforce". It means a great deal. Most of the employers I work with do a great deal of assessment of the value added that graduates bring to their organisations. Although I did not submit this in the papers for this session, we undertook some work with Dr Anthony Hesketh at the University of Lancaster into the value added of a degree. He came up with a measurement. He did that work by talking to employers. I believe that employers with a long tradition of recruiting graduates do it only because they recognise that those graduates bring added value, in particular the value of speed: they are very quick to pick up the skills and take senior positions within their organisations. I do not think that the status bit applies any more. Q197 Jeff Ennis: I do not know whether any of the other witnesses have an alternative view. Mr Mayhew: I take your question to be almost a student exam question for third year labour economics which is: does a university education of itself increase somebody's productivity and capability, or does it just signal to potential employers that they always are better, as it were? It is a question which labour economists empirically have found very hard to resolve. It is an important question and my guess is that it is a bit of both. Whether the proportions are changing over time is an even more interesting question that we have not resolved. Ms Vignoles: You are right that to distinguish between the signalling effect and productivity effect of a degree is an incredibly hard thing to do, and it has not been satisfactorily done by labour economists. But there is new international evidence that graduates are measurably more productive and the value they add to firms is in excess of the gain to their wages; in other words, the contribution to firm productivity exceeds the benefit as measured by their own increase in wages, which is indicative of genuine productivity. Q198 Chairman: We have been waiting for you to talk about productivity. Here we are committed to this vast expansion in higher education, but there is worrying evidence that in spite of a big increase UK productivity still languishes. Why is it not cause and effect? Why do we not see more graduates creating more productivity? We have a pretty healthy economy, but the measure of productivity is worrying, is it not? Ms Vignoles: The latest estimate of the OECD is that an additional year of education increases growth by three to six percentage points. As a labour economist I have suggested it is quite hard to prove causality and we will not resolve our low productivity problems simply with a skills agenda. There are other issues, particularly capital investment, that need to be considered alongside any skills initiatives. Mr Hillage: I endorse that. If one wants to put a number on it, it is probable that skills and education account for 20 or 25 per cent of the problem. There are other bigger things that affect our productivity which I had understood had been quite good over the past few years compared with previously. I do not believe that it is too bad a record. Q199 Stephen Williams: Are you saying that the return to an employer who employs a graduate is greater than the return to the graduate himself or herself? Ms Vignoles: We have found that is the case in both training and productivity. Q200 Jeff Ennis: I turn to the so-called graduate premium. I believe that the UUK report estimates that the premium is an additional £160,000 over the lifetime of the particular graduate's working life. Is that an accurate reflection? To what extent can we hang our coats on that particular hook? Mr Elias: I think the reason the Department for Education and Skills funded the 1999 survey of graduates which we conducted in 2003 and 2004 was to try to answer this question. We could not answer it directly because we were asked to conduct a survey only of graduates, not those who had not gone through higher education. That is part of the problem. The other part of the question is the issue of selection. We were, however, able to compare the earnings of graduates some three to four years after graduation from our earlier survey with those in the 2003 and 2004 survey. We found evidence that the earnings of these graduates was not keeping pace with the growth of average earnings over the period, which implied that on average the graduate earnings premium was falling. We were asked, therefore, to put a figure on it that the Minister could stand behind. We refused to do that simply because we had insufficient information. That remains the position. We know that the graduate's earning premium is on average falling. I stress, however, that the graduate's earning premium is not just a fixed amount or a magic figure that means an increase in earnings when an individual graduates. It is a wide distribution. There are those who earn less as a graduate than they would have earned if they had not gone to university; and there are those who earn significantly more than the 15 to 20 per cent that is often bandied around. In terms of international comparisons, I note that as we have expanded our higher education system probably the graduate's earning premium is on average coming down to something more in line with that in other countries. It is also still there and we must not lose sight of that. We must recognise that many employers are, therefore, paying significantly more for a graduate three to four years after graduation; in other words, they know something about that graduate and are willing to pay. My bet is that it is due to the productivity of the graduate. Q201 Jeff Ennis: Is that premium likely to fall as we try to recruit or train more graduates? Mr Elias: As the output of graduates continues to increase, yes, it will continue to fall. I for one who look at it simply from an international perspective do not believe that it will fall so dramatically that we should start to worry about what graduates are being paid. It is still the case that graduates will command on average a higher salary than non-graduates. Ms Vignoles: Perhaps by way of clarification, if one measures the average return to a degree across an entire working age population it does not appear to have fallen, but Mr Elias is talking about the very early careers of a specific group of graduates which is a warning sign of what is to come. It is a small fall for the most recent cohorts. I did some digging around to try to clarify the Universities UK estimate. Basically, they come out with a premium of 25 per cent per annum for a degree over A levels. That is broadly consistent with our best estimates derived from somewhat different methodologies, but the return is higher for women. For men we are talking of 18 to 21 per cent; for women it is 25 to 27 per cent. That is the premium for a degree over A levels or level 3 qualifications or equivalent. Therefore, it is in line. Q202 Chairman: It is not all doom and gloom, is it, if the graduate premium is stabilising a bit or even coming down. Presumably, if we do believe in other streams of education, like further education and vocational education, we should be quite happy if people are in good and gainful employment as non-graduate productive workers. Should we not be quite happy if there are highly paid electricians, plumbers, builders, plasterers and others who do useful jobs? Mr Gilleard: Except when you have to pay the bill! I have to say that as someone who has just moved house. One of the thoughts that I have had throughout this discussion is that it is not just about graduates. Many of the employers I represent employ a lot of graduates in non-graduate jobs and a lot of non-graduates in non-graduate jobs. One would hope there is sufficient flexibility and adaptability in those organisations for individuals to find their level. There are some very famous examples in this country of people who have been incredibly successful in their careers in every respect who did not go to university, and good luck to them. The more people there are like that the better. Q203 Chairman: We often get into that question and there is reference to people like Richard Branson. It is a very good, valid argument, but this Committee has been looking at the sustainable school and the transformation or nature of education through building schools for the future. It is not just the physical structure but the way they can transform communities. What we have got into in a bigger way than I expected at the beginning of the inquiry is the transformational nature of teaching and learning experiences in schools. How far do you think we are up to date in what we do with young people and older people in the higher education sector? Some research shows that if someone is standing in front of a class of 25 to 30 people 20 per cent of the knowledge is retained, but if there is team working and kids are given the ability to manage their own learning in the right environment they can retain 70 per cent. Is there a sense that perhaps what we are doing in a university in the way we teach and expect students to learn is a bit old fashioned and perhaps it is the last bastion of conservatism? Is there something wrong with what we are doing? Should we not look at that? Mr Mayhew: I come from a university which is at the forefront of experiments in new forms of delivery. Q204 Chairman: And, I note, democracy! Mr Mayhew: My impression is that universities are experimenting a lot with different modes of teaching. There is an organisation called the Institute for Advanced University Learning which works quite hard on this. Whether they are doing enough or how responsive the average academic is to them I do not know, but they seem to have quite a big influence in the areas of higher education of which I am aware. Q205 Chairman: Therefore, the way you teach your students is radically different from the way you learnt? Mr Mayhew: I was going on to say that I think it depends on what one is trying to deliver to one's students. This comes back to the increasing heterogeneity of the products that universities will be offering. Is it the traditional product of teaching them general academic skills through a particular subject? At the other extreme, is it a particular vocational course where they have to learn competencies? I do not know whether or not they are going too slowly, but my impression is that universities have woken up to it. I cite the IAUL as one example of how they are trying to cope with this. Q206 Chairman: But you have switched from an academic model to a vocational one, whereas I would put to Mr Gilleard that when someone has that "wow" factor at interview he or she has the ability to lead and build a team and organise. It comprises a range of competencies that are part-academic. You know when you have them. Is our education system, especially higher education, delivering those sorts of people? Mr Gilleard: I think that it is beginning to do so. I do not spend enough time in universities to observe what is going on, but I did spend a day at the University of Warwick which has developed learning clubs. If you go into a learning club you can be in any modern business. You have groups of students working together, so there is team building. Someone will take the lead. They will be working on a project together, so there is another skill: project management. Q207 Chairman: What discipline? Mr Gilleard: This was across disciplines. There was a real sense of industry which one does not always associate with students and university campuses. I go back to the out-of-the-blue phone conversation that I had with the university that intended to build a new business studies block. I believe that more and more universities recognise that there are different ways in which they can teach students that might be more appropriate to the 21st century and help those individual students better when they make the transformation to workers. Q208 Mr Marsden: We have heterogeneity in terms of universities and their output, but do we not also have heterogeneity in terms of skills gaps in different parts of the country? That is one of the matters referred to by Leitch certainly in his interim report. When we say we need more graduates in this, that and the other to what extent are we focusing on the London and South East issue and to what extent are the problems in terms of getting a supply of graduates to fill the sorts of jobs that you are talking about very different in other parts of the country? Mr Mayhew: If you have not already had it brought to your attention, I cite a piece by two researchers called Hepworth and Spencer which came out about four or five years ago. It made precisely that point about the geography of skills mismatch and demands. It is not just London and the South East; there are other pockets of high demand, but there are large areas of the country where that is not true. What one draws from that depends very much on one's views about the mobility of labour to work in the high-tech and high-skill hubs, whether or not that is a good or bad thing. I believe that the regional distribution is quite concerning. Mr Hillage: There are a number of tiers in the graduate labour market. The national graduate labour market gravitates around London and the South East, and people in the high-level universities or whatever will tend to move to those areas where they can attract a higher salary and so forth. In the regions the supply and demand vary enormously. Most of the people who go to the new universities stay in those localities, and certainly if one thinks of widening participation older people will tend to be less likely to be mobile. That is another factor to take into account. Q209 Mr Marsden: But is that necessarily a bad thing? Potentially, it means that damaging heterogeneity is likely to become less. Mr Hillage: It does not necessarily mean that it is a bad thing, but from an employer's perspective it depends on where the person is located. That is why it is important to build up a relationship with supply and have a good relationship with potential universities or other sources, if that is where one wants to get one's supply. Q210 Mr Marsden: Is there more that we should be doing centrally, or that universities in terms of clusters should be doing perhaps across regions, to address the skills imbalances that we are talking about? Mr Elias: I believe that some universities are now acting in clusters to identify their local graduate labour markets and see how they can engage with those markets and bring their graduate careers services together and start to act en bloc. Everything has changed so much. For example, in Manchester we now have one super-university which is dominant in the whole of the North West. I believe that it behoves Liverpool and other universities to join in and link with that to find out how to share their resources. In other parts of the country there are clusters. There are clusters in the West Midlands and East Midlands and in the South West. Q211 Chairman: There is quite a cluster on the M62 in Yorkshire. Mr Elias: I am sure there is, but I am not aware of it. Q212 Chairman: Are you not aware of Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield and York? Mr Elias: Yes. Q213 Chairman: It is zooming past your own institution in terms of ratings, is it not? Mr Elias: Yes, that is right. To reflect on the preceding remark about migration, it is the case that in Scotland, Northern Ireland and to some extent in Wales in many instances graduates have left their home universities and taken jobs in London and the South East. One can argue that there is nothing wrong with that; that is where the demand is and they have moved to satisfy that demand and the labour market is working. From the perspective of the Scottish and Northern Ireland university system one gets a very different picture. Here they are producing graduates who then leave and do not benefit the local economy. That is quite an important issue and one that the devolved administrations may want to look at more closely. Chairman: As all of us who are regional Members of Parliament know, universities are part of the answer to this. If we did not have a university cluster in our region and sub-region we would be extremely worried. When Sir Richard Sykes came here and said that he wanted only five or a handful of research-rich universities if carried through it would have rather telling consequences for anyone outside London and the South East. Q214 Fiona Mactaggart: I should like to follow up Mr Elias's disappointment that the penetration of university education had not gone further into communities that did not have a tradition of university education: working-class people and other socially excluded groups. Tying that to the premium, I was interested to hear that it was higher for women than for men. Is there any evidence about the graduate premium being different for students who have not had an experience of higher education in their families? Ms Vignoles: There is evidence from Ray Reardon of the Institute for Fiscal Studies to suggest that the premium for males from working-class backgrounds is higher than for males from other socio-economic backgrounds, quite crudely defined. There is no evidence of that for women, and that is a fairly old cohort. It is not exactly compelling, but it hints at it. Q215 Fiona Mactaggart: That may be another piece of evidence that by not expanding participation among working-class young men in university we are wasting talent that could increase our productivity substantially. Is there any other evidence of which you are aware that also highlights that? Mr Elias: There is no recent evidence of rates of return by social class. The evidence to which Ms Vignoles referred concerned a cohort born in 1958. Ms Vignoles: That is correct. There is some evidence on wider benefits that differ by socio-economic background. One has in mind health and other potential outcomes. One can say that there is a loss of productivity and non-economic wellbeing, if one defines it as such, but it is pretty weak. If one is looking for an economic justification to expand it to lower socio-economic groups it would not be because they would get a higher return but simply that they would get the same return as everyone else. Q216 Fiona Mactaggart: I believe that social justice is enough justification, but I am also interested in other ones. Mr Mayhew: Commonsense must suggest that there is massive waste of talent there. The striking statistic that as of early in this decade the percentage of university students from the three lowest socio-economic groups is not much different from what it had been in the mid-1960s, which is quite scary. It suggests that there must be a lot of naturally capable and able working-class kids who are still not getting to university. It is a waste of talent. They would benefit from it, but a lot depends on whether employers will harness it, to go back to the earlier discussion. Ms Vignoles: If we go back to the effects of the expansion, in the late 1980s and early 1990s that benefited largely less able students from higher socio-economic groups, so the doors were open but the people who came in were not those from the lower socio-economic groups most able to take advantage of the intellectual environment. Q217 Fiona Mactaggart: Is there something that you would do differently which would significantly increase participation of students from working-class backgrounds? Mr Elias: I would re-examine the whole issue of fees. A lot more could be done in schools to encourage and engender the view that higher education was the norm. Part of this is a peer association problem in the sense of, "We are not going to go to university; we are not good enough, so we will do something else." Schools, careers advisers within schools and parents have a role to play. It is a very difficult issue but it is one that must be challenged much earlier in the whole decision-making process through which young people end up in higher education. That may start even at primary school. Q218 Jeff Ennis: Do you not think that it is also a community-wide issue? Mr Elias: It probably is. Q219 Jeff Ennis: It is not just engaging parents but local communities in raising the profile. Mr Elias: I have no evidence of it but you could well be right. Mr Hillage: To pick up the point about fees which was referred to earlier, we were involved with the National Centre for Social Research. The student income and expenditure survey indicates that people from lower socio-economic groups are more concerned than other groups about the potential debt. Q220 Chairman: Evidence already given to this inquiry is that students are much more worried about their present income than future debt. That comes out very clearly from the evidence. There is a low level of worry about future debt; there is more worry about the income to get them through university. Mr Hillage: I take the point. Those from the lower socio-economic groups are more concerned about financing their student experience. Q221 Chairman: To meet Mr Elias's point, the Government has brought back grants and universities have created bursaries. Mr Hillage: We will have to wait and see whether that has an effect or not. Q222 Chairman: We had evidence this week that England is doing far better than Scotland and Wales. Mr Hillage: I understand that the evidence relates to applicants. Q223 Chairman: I am putting the facts that have been given to the Committee in its briefing. Come back to us on it because this is what has been presented to us. Mr Hillage: You have to wait until the applicants turn into people who turn up and survive three or four years of a university education - remember, this is just one group - and see whether they manage to finance their education successfully and their fears are not realised. Prior to the changes that have taken place the people who were most worried about financing their time at university were those who ended up with the greatest difficulties. They had a higher level of debt or expenditure at the end of it. Q224 Chairman: But it is of interest to us sitting here, because one or two years ago when we conducted an inquiry into this people of your quality told us it would be the end of the civilised world as we knew it because variable fees would mean that working-class kids would not be going to university. Mr Hillage: I am all in favour of variable fees and I do not have a worry about it. Q225 Chairman: I am just trying to tease out from Mr Elias and others what their view is. Mr Hillage: My view is that it is too soon to say. Ms Vignoles: I disagree that fees would be an issue. The evidence suggests that most pupils regardless of socio-economic background who are adequately qualified to go to university on the conventional measures do so. From the research that we have done, it seems that the problem is in the schools with lack of achievement and perhaps aspiration; it is not to do with whether or not fees are charged. We had 20 or 30 years of no fees and a massive expansion. The relative position of socio-economic groups did not radically change, so that would appear to prove the point. Q226 Paul Holmes: I think the Chairman has just illustrated that the piece of research he likes shows one thing and research that others like shows the opposite, and that is what my question is about. About half an hour ago Mr Gilleard said that in terms of student experience the aspect that he would most like to change is the advice given to students before they go to university, because one third of graduates say that they do not believe they have undertaken the right course. But earlier this afternoon we heard that according to the national student survey 80 to 90 per cent of third-year students were very happy with what they were doing. How can one survey say that 80 to 90 per cent are very happy but you say that 33 per cent believe they have done the wrong thing? Mr Gilleard: One could still be reasonably happy with the experience having studied the wrong degree. The CIPD survey went on to say that what they would have changed would be the introduction of business studies. Because they are graduates maybe this is a survey when they are trying to market the degrees they have rather than reflecting on their experience at university. I did not say I thought that was the number one thing to change. I had a shopping list of several items, but I do feel with a passion that when an employer has a graduate trainee for, on average, three to four years he will spend an enormous amount of time, money and expertise in selecting the right candidate, but when it comes to going to university there are many students who get onto courses without any contact with the institution. It makes me wonder why we do not have a higher drop-out rate. Incidentally, I am not altogether against drop-out rates as long as it does not mean the end of the road and people come back. I think that is part of the answer to changing access for people from disadvantaged groups who traditionally have not gone to university. What is wrong with them going to work first and being encouraged by their employers to go to university, which was exactly what happened to me? Together with the graduates to employment unit at the University of Liverpool we produced a publication called If Only I'd Known. My main contribution to that publication was the title. When I went into graduate recruitment in 1989 I thought I had the easiest job going. These were intelligent, well-educated and mature individuals. They would know what they wanted to do. The number of graduates I saw face to face who said, "If only I'd known that I would have done something about it", ran into hundreds. It is not so much that they have not been told; it has not registered because they do not see the relevance of it. When one is 16 or 17 and one is told by someone like me, "It's time you started to think what you might be doing at 21 or 22", one cannot visualise it at all. The system - the school and then university - has to encourage them and take them down that route. I believe that potentially there is a growing problem here. I started to do some work to understand generation y, that is, the next generation of young people going through higher education and into the labour market. I believe that employers will have a really big job to match the aspirations of those young people to the careers and prospects they can offer them. I believe that the same issue is beginning to arise in universities. The most negative thing I will say today is that we have placed a lot of emphasis on the experience at university and developing the employability of individuals. I think that we have persuaded the institutions that that is important; employers have always felt that it is important, but I am not sure that we have convinced students of its importance. Q227 Mr Chaytor: I return to the question of skills and productivity. If 25 per cent of the productivity differential between the UK and France, Germany and the United States is explained by skills what proportion of it can be attributed to the deficit in graduate level skills and what proportion to the deficit in intermediate level skills? Mr Mayhew: The way that the econometrics is done in the particular study to which you refer would not allow you to distinguish between the different levels. One should also say that not everybody necessarily believes that the 25 per cent is God-given and can necessarily be trusted. Q228 Mr Chaytor: Does anybody believe the figure for the productivity gap? Mr Mayhew: I think people believe that figure, but there is an issue about what any incremental change to any bit of the educational system will do to close that gap. As to where there is most agreement, successive governments have pulled a lot of levers and there has been some improvement in productivity performance, but there is still a gap. I suspect that most of the profession would argue that now the gap is probably due to capital investment and infrastructure investment. Ms Vignoles: I believe that Leith's emphasis on benchmarking partly reflected the attempt to put together the international comparisons of skills with information on productivity gaps, because logically if we just looked at our international standing at various skill levels we would say that to a large extent the problem was at the intermediate rather than graduate level. But lots of countries in the OECD have much more rapid rates of growth in HE participation than we have. A number of countries have overtaken us. We have lost the lead position that we had in 2000, so if we stopped expansion now we might then say that graduate skills would explain part of that differential. Mr Mayhew: But what the league tables also remind us of is that different countries produce level 3 and level 4 skills in different bits of their own national systems, and that becomes very relevant for Britain where I suspect we shall be producing more level 3 skills in our higher education sector than historically. There is then the issue, in my view, as to whether that is the efficient place to produce them unless we change the nature of some higher education institutions. Mr Elias: I think this takes us back to a point I made right at the beginning. We must not lose sight of our higher education sector as an exporter of higher education. That is very important. My university has the highest proportion of students from mainland China of any UK university. On the whole, nearly all of these students are going back to their homes following their education and contributing significantly to economic growth in their country. But it is more than just economic growth: they contribute to the spread of knowledge about English culture, society and so on. We must not focus too much on the whole issue of productivity. It is a complex issue and let us not lose sight of the international trends that are taking place. Q229 Chairman: Nobody has really talked about the different markets for graduate skills. Are small and medium-size companies as employers better at using graduates than the bigger ones? Is there any research on it? There must be more graduates going into small and medium-size companies than there were. Are they better used there? Do they add to greater productivity? Mr Hillage: Small and medium-size enterprises cover such a wide field. The word of the afternoon is "heterogeneity", but this is an enormously wide group. One has professional and medium-size high-tech companies which will use graduates better or as well as any large company. But a large number of graduates end up in small and medium-size enterprises and the employers do not know they are graduates, at least to start with. Mr Elias: There are many graduates in small and medium-size companies which are part of much larger organisations, and that is the way the situation has changed. That itself is very important. We have looked specifically at graduates who have said they entered self-employment at some stage in the three or four years following graduation. These numbers are small despite all the efforts of universities to try to stimulate entrepreneurial skills in particular, but it seems that essentially they fall into two groups: those who are moving into professionalised areas where self-employment is the norm, which may be in medical services - dentistry or whatever - and those who choose self-employment because it either fits in with what they want or it is an alternative to being unemployed. Often those are craft and low-paid jobs. We see a big split between those who are on very high salaries working in finance, software provision, medical services and so on and those who work more in subjects associated with the arts and humanities which are very low paid. When one looks at those two groups and asks about their job satisfaction one finds very little difference between them in terms of job satisfaction. Q230 Chairman: Do any of the witnesses want a last word before we wrap up this session? Mr Mayhew: I make one plea and echo something said earlier. If we hit a 50 per cent participation rate and graduates go into a range of jobs which historically they would not have gone into - there is an issue about how well they are utilised and whether they do the job any better as a result of being graduates - the really important question is: what happens to the 50 per cent who do not go into higher education, particularly if this class bias remains? Chairman: Keep in touch with us. It will take some time to collect all the evidence, and we want to make this a good inquiry. I can tell you that none of the Chairman's prejudices will dominate it. Thank you. |