UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 285-vi
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
higher education
Monday 23 April 2007
PROFESSOR JOHN BRENNAN, PROFESSOR PHILLIP BROWN,
MR MARTIN DAVIDSON and PROFESSOR BERNADETTE ROBINSON
Evidence heard in Public Questions 573 - 678
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
1.
|
This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in
public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the
internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made
available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
|
2.
|
Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should
make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct
the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these
proceedings.
|
3.
|
Members who
receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to
witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
|
4.
|
Prospective
witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral
evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.
|
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Education and Skills Committee
on Monday 23 April 2007
Members present
Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr David Chaytor
Paul Holmes
Helen Jones
Fiona Mactaggart
Mr Gordon Marsden
Mr Andrew Pelling
Mr Rob Wilson
________________
Memoranda submitted by British Council and Professor John Brennan
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor John Brennan, Professor of Higher
Education Research, Centre for Higher Education Research and Information, The
Open University; Professor Phil Brown,
Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance; Martin Davidson, Director General,
British Council; and Professor
Bernadette Robinson, UNESCO Centre for Comparative Education Research,
University of Nottingham; gave evidence.
Q573 Chairman:
Can I welcome Professor John Brennan, Professor Phillip Brown, Mr Martin
Davidson and Professor Bernadette Robinson to our proceedings. It is always a great delight to have such a
talented group of witnesses. Sometimes
I have to pinch myself and say, what if we were paying the consultancy fee of
this lot for two hours, and then it makes more value, even more, the time we
have with you. Normally we give people
a chance to say something in their own defence before we get started, before we
sentence, but that is a humorous way of saying if you want to say a couple of
things, to get us started, you can, otherwise we will go straight into
questions?
Professor Brennan: I have jotted
down a couple of things, which I will mention, in terms of where I am coming
from, on this. One is essentially a
comment about globalisation, and perhaps one can argue that globalisation may
be more about becoming better aware of differences rather than about removing
those differences. In relation to that,
I should say that most of my own research focuses on UK higher education in a
European context and my comment there is that there are huge differences
between the UK HE system and its linkages to the labour market and its European
one; so I am not sure we are in a process of convergence.
Q574 Chairman:
Are we better linked, or are they?
Professor Brennan: We are linked
rather differently and I think I would summarise it, there has been a lot of
indicators, UK graduates appear to find less immediate relevance in the higher
education to their employment. The
second thing is a comment about international league tables. There has been some interesting work done in
Germany which looks at national rankings based on productivity per researcher,
as opposed to taking an institutional frame.
That is quite interesting because you get a rather different set of
league tables if you do it that way; in other words, the broad message from
that is that how many top universities a country has might not be, at the end
of the day, all that significant, that there is productivity of higher
education systems which are not necessarily dependent upon a hierarchical system
of individual universities. I thought
that was perhaps worth saying. Probably
just the other thing to say is that, whilst I recognise that the focus of this
afternoon is looking very much at internationalisation, it seems to me that for
all universities global, national, regional and local functions interpenetrate
each other, so I am not sure that internationalisation can be completely
separated from these other levels.
Q575 Chairman:
Thank you for that. Professor Brown?
Professor Brown: I am from the
University of Cardiff. I think one of
the things I would like to talk with you about is our understanding of
globalisation and the global economy.
For the last three years I have been interviewing corporate enterprises,
20 of them in detail, across seven countries.
We have had 180 interviews. We
have also spoken to senior advisers in China, India, Korea, Singapore, Germany
and the US, and on the basis of the evidence that we have collected and the
trends I think we have identified then I think I would like to challenge, for
example, the Leitch Review's actual title, that is Prosperity for all in the global economy; that assumes a win-win
scenario, that there are no losers, and there are losers. The sub-title is World Class Skills; that assumes that the key to this is skills and
also I would like to challenge that.
Q576 Chairman:
We will come back to that; that was very interesting, Professor Brown. Martin?
Mr Davidson: I am ready to
answer your questions, Sir, when you want me to.
Q577 Chairman:
You know that the Committee is going to China, and Beijing, and your team have
been very helpful in planning our visit and making it worthwhile. Professor Robinson?
Professor Robinson: Just to say
a word on my background, I am fairly ignorant about higher education in
Europe. I spend six or seven months of
each year in China, working mainly in the west but also in other universities,
so I do not come armed with a lot of facts and figures but maybe some
perspectives from in-country, in China, and maybe Pakistan and some other countries,
about the experience of higher education when students come here to participate
in it. I come from Nottingham
University, which has the largest number of Chinese students in the UK and
which also has over 90 research projects ongoing with China at present: a lot
of connections there with China for our university.
Q578 Chairman:
Can we start the questioning then. Is
it not a fact that if you are looking at the international higher education it
is not totally different from any other competitive marketplace product, is
it? Surely it is clear that we must
retain our high quality, keep our reputation for high quality, if we want to
attract students to come here to study, and to make sure that experience they
have while they are here, of one year, or three years, or longer, is of the
very highest quality. That will bring
people back, will it not? Is it not as
simple as that; or is it more complex?
Professor Brown: Obviously, you
need to have very high standards of educational quality within the UK to compete
internationally. The issue is, however,
what others are doing, instead of what we are doing, and are we all doing
exactly the same thing, in which case where is our competitive advantage. I think the second question would be do you
treat higher education simply as a commodity, how do you understand the idea of
the public good, should that be restricted to a region or to a nation, what
does that mean within an international context, where is the public good and
where is our understanding of higher education there, if we see this purely in
terms of yet somewhere else to trade internationally. I am not saying we should be doing that. I think we should and we have to think in those
terms, and the reason why we have to think in those terms is because everybody
else is. Whether we like it or not,
when you talk to those people, as you have, you know much better than I do that
they will give you the spin about, "Of course, we see this in 'public good'
terms," but underlying it is competition, a competition for places and students
and research and technologies and we have got to be part of that game. I think there is a broader agenda which we
also need to take into account here; if not, we narrow down far too much, I think.
Q579 Chairman:
Could it be bad for British higher education to go too far down this route
then; could we be undermining the quality of the product for our own students,
who are in the UK and in Europe, by filling too many places with foreign
students, for example?
Professor Brown: I think we could. It goes back to that issue, does it not, of
what is the public good, what is the purpose of higher education; is it there
primarily for people within the UK, or is it there also for international
students. The University of Oxford has
been talking about reducing the number of places for home students, needy
students, because of the problems of funding; so you have to link the funding
issues also alongside these broader questions about the overriding purpose of
higher education, I would suggest.
Q580 Chairman:
Martin: I am reverting to first names and hope that is alright?
Mr Davidson: I think it is very
important that we understand why international student flows take place, what
it is that students are looking for, and the research is very clear on
this. They are looking for, first of
all, the quality of the educational experience they are going to get, they are
looking for international comparability and usability of the qualifications
they obtain, they are looking for the quality of the experience that they get
and they are looking for the capacity to improve their work opportunities on
graduation. That set of things which
the international students are looking for is pretty well founded and clearly
students see themselves as operating in the international market, they will
move to whichever country, or set of institutions, is able to deliver that set
of goods for them. I think the other
issue which is worth asking at this stage is, given the sheer number of foreign
students in British higher education, at the undergraduate level, at the
postgraduate level, and indeed the number of foreign lecturers now working in
British higher education, is it actually reasonable for us still to regard this
as a domestic set of institutions which happen to attract a little bit of
overseas international involvement, which is financially beneficial but that is
about it? I would suggest that actually
the entire market has moved, in much the same way as, say, the bond market, or
the insurance market, for the UK is actually an international one; it brings
goods within the UK but essentially it is an international one. In some senses, British higher education has
moved into that same environment; actually now it is developing a whole set of
deliverables, whether they are in terms of course design or the student
experience, which are designed for an international market, which of course
includes the UK but is no longer limited purely to the UK.
Q581 Chairman:
Martin, if you were in the same profession as the group of people sitting opposite
you, you would start to get a bit worried if people in your constituency
thought that when their children came to apply to university they could not get
a place because "I'm sorry but UK universities have gone international and the
university is full of people not from Britain." That is different from other products, is it not?
Mr Davidson: That is assuming
that there is simply a limit on the number of places available.
Q582 Chairman:
Certainly there is a limit on the places in a lot of universities?
Mr Davidson: There is evidence
that the level of university student places does grow to meet the size of the
market. I think also it is assuming
that the international aspect of education provides no benefit to the British
student. Again there is good evidence
that the internationalisation of British higher education provides considerable
benefits to British students taking part in that education, whether it is
through a better understanding of international affairs, a better understanding
of other cultures, a better engagement with people from other parts of the
world, through to work opportunities and professional opportunities through
that wider set of engagements.
Q583 Chairman:
Martin, an awful lot of foreign students come here but not really enough UK
students go elsewhere, do they? All
this internationalism is fine in theory but we find that there is a poor uptake
of overseas places. Even in rather
welcoming places like the United States or the Scandinavian and Nordic
countries, where English is spoken and a lot of the teaching is in English,
still quite a low rate of UK students are taking advantage of the international
education experience?
Mr Davidson: I think it is
disappointing, the number of students, for example, who take part in the
mobility programmes; we know, for example, that the number of students under
the Erasmus scheme has reduced, year on year, rather than increased, there is
something like a two to one disparity between European students coming into
this country on those programmes and British students going overseas. There are a number of reasons for that, and
we have undertaken some research, and they are the obvious ones of language but
also they are questions about the transferability of credits, the acceptability
of credits earned overseas in their courses back here, as well as questions
about cost and utility, how useful do students see it who undertake those
programmes. I think also there is
evidence that there is a growth in the number of students going now to other
countries, most particularly the United States, Australia, Canada and other
English-speaking countries; part of that, of course, is language but part of it
also is the nature of the experience that they are undertaking. For many of them, rather than having
university experience, they are undertaking work experience or other forms of
international experience as part of that course. Traditionally, the number of students from the UK going into
other countries has exceeded other English-speaking countries, the United
States, Canada, Australia, as a proportion of the student population; the truth
is that probably those countries have caught up with us over the last three to
four years.
Q584 Chairman:
Caught up, in what sense?
Mr Davidson: The proportion of
students going overseas for study, and it remains an issue for us in this
country, I agree.
Q585 Chairman:
John Brennan, do students go because we have got first-class universities in
the UK and other universities, many in Europe, are not very good?
Professor Brennan: I think
probably there are different reasons for different patterns of mobility. Focusing just on Erasmus for a moment, I
have seen there have been done various evaluations of Erasmus programmes and I
think there is some suggestion that UK universities give less encouragement to
home students to go abroad than is the case in other European countries. Also there may be factors to do with the
brevity of the degree courses in the UK compared with their European
counterparts; there is just not a lot of time to fit things in. Whereas, if you have got first-degree
experience, which can go from anything, from four, five, six, seven years, then
there is more possibility of including a year abroad in that.
Q586 Chairman:
We thought steadily the whole Bologna process was bringing it all down to
standard, three-year degrees; it is not happening?
Professor Brennan: What I hear,
from within those European countries that I am spending my time visiting, which
is quite a few of them, is that, whilst the formal, two-stage structure is
being implemented, the view within universities and also employers was that
there was considerable doubt about the extent to which the first-stage
Bachelor's qualification will be an acceptable entry to the labour market. Those of us who can think back to Dip HE of
many years ago; in other words, the Bachelor's degree will be there but it will
be used as a staging-post on the way to the Master's degree, and that the
reality may change but it seems likely to be a very long time in changing.
Chairman: Thank you for those
first answers. Rob Wilson will lead us
on.
Q587 Mr Wilson:
If I could follow up on some of your questioning, Chairman, with just an
overall question on the international research market, very quickly; do you
detect that there is any brain drain within the British system of academics
abroad?
Professor Brown: I do not have
detailed knowledge of it but I would say, certainly in the social sciences, not
particularly. Just thinking of people
out there I would know of, who are regarded as leading figures, they have not
gone to the US. I think there is even
some discussion now in the US about talent leaving the US, but I think the
politics of the US also is an issue for people now and would you really want to
go and work for the US, because the US is the number one destination for
British academics. I do not think that
is the case and I think also we are beginning to recruit more from the US and
elsewhere, because we are struggling to recruit sufficient academics, so we are
having to look internationally now for various people, but I do not know the
detailed figure.
Mr Davidson: I think that there
is evidence of brain gain rather than brain drain. The number of foreign academics working in British institutions,
I do not think anybody has an exact figure but probably it is something like
15 per cent. I think that the
evidence, again which is anecdotal rather than carefully researched, is that a
number of British academics, if they go overseas, tend to go early and come
back, rather than being a permanent loss.
Mr Wilson: Brain gain, not brain
drain. I will have to write that
down. Can I turn to students, and how
healthy do you think the market is, the international fee-paying student coming
to the UK at the moment?
Q588 Chairman:
What about Bernadette; she has got a lot of experience in China and other
places?
Professor Robinson: I think the
market is healthy at the moment but I am not sure it is going to stay that
way. I think there are risky aspects to
it. I am thinking particularly of the
Master's level programme. The Master's
level in the UK has the competitive advantage that it is short, but
increasingly it is regarded with suspicion because the entry and exit levels
are perceived as lower than other countries; so now the first choice in China
for a Master's degree is not the UK generally but it is the US, because it is
seen to have more value in the marketplace.
I think part of this is to do with the length but part of it also is to
do with the mismatch of perceptions of students coming, especially from China;
they come and they expect to be taught, and that is not how Master's level
programmes operate in the UK. Somehow
the idea gets fixed that you can get a Master's degree in the UK, you have to
go to maybe only five classes a week, not understanding the intensive study for
the rest of the time that is needed. I
hear a lot of conversation about where to go for Master's degrees and the USA
now is the first choice for many of the Chinese colleagues I work with and for their
students.
Q589 Chairman:
They are not the sort of students we want, are they?
Professor Robinson: I think they
are the sort of students you want; they are intelligent, highly motivated.
Q590 Chairman:
Are they? Do they not want to be
force-fed tit-bits, forced down their throat?
Professor Robinson: No; they are
the ones who are the most able, the most ambitious, the most willing to work
their socks off.
Q591 Mr Wilson:
I was chatting to a vice chancellor the other day who said that the UK had
become quite an unfriendly country towards overseas students, in many
respects. Do any of you sympathise with
that view and what do you think is the basis of that view?
Professor Robinson: I think some
of it is to do with mismatch of cultural expectations and not enough attention
being paid to this when the students come here. I know many universities have officers who look after overseas
students' welfare, etc., but it is a complaint we hear from UK students as
well, that, our Master's programmes, or PhD programmes even, it is quite hard
to get hold of your tutor. Tutors are
very busy. The workload of academics is
just crazy and they do not have time and are pressured to do research and it is
very difficult to find time for students.
They are coming from cultures where it operates differently so their
expectations about access to tutors and their teachers at universities are
different, and so they feel very much adrift.
I think that is one reason why sometimes undergraduate students, from
Asian countries in particular, find it difficult to get comfortable and get established
on their degree programmes and do better on Master's programmes later on, when
they have matured a bit and got some experience of independent learning.
Q592 Mr Wilson:
Addressing this to Martin, do you think that whole episode of British foreign
policy, the Iraq war and all the things around that and the restrictions that
brought upon overseas students coming to some universities, from some parts of
the world, whether that has given a very unfriendly feel to Britain and British
universities?
Mr Davidson: I think there is
very good evidence, from a number of surveys that we and other organisations
have done, that individuals overseas, presumably you are referring particularly
to students from Islamic, Muslim countries, are able to distinguish between the
views and actions of the British Government and of the UK more generally. I do not think there is any question that
many aspects of our society remain extremely attractive; in particular, the
education. While I do not think there
is any question that a decision to study overseas and a decision to study in
which country is an emotional one and will be affected in part by an emotional
environment, I do not think there is strong evidence that particularly the
foreign policy has had a huge impact.
What has had more impact perhaps is the perception of safety. Certainly it is true that for a large number
of countries, most particularly China but also other countries, safety of the
student while overseas is of paramount concern. For example, the bombings in London last year will have had an
effect, but it will be, I would suggest, a rather marginal one. A much bigger issue of how friendly our
education is seen is actually things like the visa regime and the visa regime
has a very, very marked impact, and even if it is by reputation, rather than by
reality, an unfriendly visa regime, without question, does have an impact on
students' willingness to come here.
Q593 Mr Wilson:
Have we got an unfriendly visa regime?
Mr Davidson: The reputation was
poor about a year or 18 months ago and I think it has improved in a number of
ways. I think that the Home Office
setting up the Joint Visa Task Force, for example, has helped, it has given the
sector an opportunity to contribute to the discussions around it. I think things like the new international
graduate student scheme here, which provides opportunities for students to
study for a year after graduation, is going to be a very important aspect in
providing a rather friendlier environment for students coming here.
Q594 Mr Wilson:
Bernadette, you seemed to be agreeing more with the premise than the question
when I pitched it. Do you agree with
what Martin has just said?
Professor Robinson: Very
much. I think the visa issue has been
an important one for some students, who have chosen not to come for that
reason.
Q595 Mr Wilson:
Have we seen a fall-off in students from, say, Muslim countries that you have
noticed in the last couple of years?
Mr Davidson: I am not aware, off
the top of my head, of there having been a marked fall-off. There has been a drop in individual
countries, so China showed quite a large fall-off two years ago, but the
overall number of students has stayed roughly level over the period.
Q596 Mr Wilson:
The other point this vice chancellor made to me, when we were discussing this,
was that many institutions are becoming heavily reliant on the fee income from
overseas students; too much so, in many respects. Would anybody like to comment on that?
Professor Brennan: Just to
endorse that perception; we know of several universities which, even at the
undergraduate level, have got now something in the order of 40 per cent of
undergraduates from China, and that seems a very high proportion.
Q597 Chairman:
Where have they got that percentage?
Professor Brennan: Several
universities that I am aware of.
Q598 Chairman:
Right across the piece, not for any department; in the whole university
40 per cent are from China?
Professor Brennan: Yes.
Q599 Mr Wilson:
Does that shock you, that there are so many from one particular country?
Professor Brennan: Yes.
Q600 Chairman:
Can you think of any particular ones which come to mind which have that
percentage?
Professor Brennan: Two. One I think is the University of Luton and I
think the University of Glamorgan has got a high proportion, but it may not be
that amount.
Q601 Mr Wilson:
Do you have a feeling of what the level should be of overseas students at a
university; is there a right level and a wrong level?
Professor Brennan: I do not
think I would come up with a particular level, but I would come up with a view
that an international experience should involve interaction and integration
with home students, and where within universities there is almost kind of a
particular ghetto of certain courses, with students from another part of the
world, I wonder about the quality of that experience as an international
experience.
Mr Davidson: I would like to
pick up that point about the impact of a very large proportion of foreign
students on a particular course. I
think there is very strong evidence of dissatisfaction amongst students about
the educational experience they get if there is a predominance of foreign
students, particularly if it is a predominance of foreign students from a
particular country, most usually China, on that particular course. Certainly there are some courses in the UK
where upwards of 75 per cent of the students may well be from China, and I
think that does have an impact on the overall reputation of the institution
overseas.
Q602 Mr Wilson:
At the moment, I suppose overseas students are the goose laying the golden
egg. Do we have a realistic expectation
of that continuing, or do we think that might change over time?
Mr Davidson: The research that
we have undertaken - we undertook some research with IDP and with other
institutions two years ago - indicated that there would be a continuing growth
in international student mobility. The
issue for the UK is about our market share.
At the moment, we have about a 24 per cent market share of the
student flows. I do not think there is
any question that we would be able to maintain that so well; the overall number
may grow but the proportion coming to the UK, as opposed to other countries, is
likely to decrease. There has been a
very, very sharp increase in the flows to new countries, so countries like
Malaysia, Singapore, China all have student recruitment targets set by
governments. China has something like
110,000 foreign students studying there now, from a base of virtually nil two
or three years ago; so the competition for foreign student flows is very marked. I think the other big shift in the market,
which we see coming in, is a shift away from students travelling to other
countries purely for education and looking for a much more mixed education
environment, including some period of study in their own country, maybe
followed up by study overseas, or indeed wholly-owned study within their own
country but given through some mix of curriculum from a foreign university as
well as a home university. The whole
environment is becoming a much more complex one, though the overall scale, the
overall shift, of students around the world is set to increase.
Q603 Mr Wilson:
I have finished my questions but if we could have the figures for the Muslim
countries that would be very helpful?
Mr Davidson: Yes. I have figures with absolute numbers. I do not have figures for change over time,
but I can write to the Committee with this.
Mr Wilson: Thank you.
Q604 Mr Pelling:
Just to follow up on Rob Wilson's line of questioning, my understanding of how
we work competitively, as it were, against the US, in terms of the quality and
ease of visa applications, is probably about two years out of date. How are we standing vis-à-vis the US? My understanding is that the US recognised
that there were some very real problems, in terms of the visa process for
foreign students; could they be regarded now as being more customer-friendly
than we are?
Mr Davidson: I would say that,
yes, without doubt, the US has learned a very sharp lesson and is applying
itself very assiduously to increasing student numbers. Virtually all our major competitor countries
have put substantial sums of money into marketing themselves overseas and that
includes establishing advisory centres, establishing new scholarship schemes
and, most particularly, looking at their visa regimes in the US. While the US, like the UK, is seeing a drop
in its market share, it is putting substantial sums of money, about
US$400 million a year, into trying to rebuild that.
Professor Robinson: I think
Australia is seen as very visa-friendly to Asian students.
Q605 Chairman:
We went to Australia. It is no wonder
that they get students, they give permanent residence to people who take a
course there. It is mixed in with a
migration policy. Surely, that is not
part of international competition; it is a different agenda, is it not, with
the Australian Government? Bernadette,
you said it as though they are much better than us; come on, it is not the same
thing at all?
Professor Robinson: It may be a
different agenda for the Australian Government but it is the perception of the
students applying for the visa, and most of them that I know of come back.
Q606 Chairman:
I have to say that most developed countries would be perceived as very friendly
if they said "If you come in and study you can stay;" that is overfriendly, is
it not?
Professor Robinson: Yes, but I
do not think that is always the intention of the students who go.
Chairman: Fiona; you know about
this.
Q607 Fiona Mactaggart:
Bernadette, of the people in front of us, I think, it sounds to me, probably
you have spent more time speaking to students overseas. How important actually are the prospects of
migration and future work to students, in thinking about where they may study
overseas?
Professor Robinson: I think,
from the perspective of China, many of the students there, as well as getting
their qualification, want to get some work experience and many I know in the UK
have been here for a few years working but intend to go back to China at some
point. The work experience is a very
important part of their motivation in coming to the UK to do a qualification,
but also they have intentions about going back. For new graduates, I think the job market has changed in
China. Before, until quite recently, if
you had a foreign degree you were assured of a job straightaway when you
returned to China; that is no longer the case, partly because more graduates
are coming out of Chinese universities, with the expansion of higher education,
and the job market itself has changed.
Q608 Fiona Mactaggart:
John, your paper suggested that we have quite a short degree and then there is
more training in employment. Do you
think that connects with this point, and therefore the work after, that now we
have got a visa regime which allows students to stay and do related work a year
after; do you think that is significant in making the UK an interesting place
or an attractive place to study, because of the fact that we do not have so
much vocational training in our degree courses and various other places?
Professor Brennan: Again, in
terms of the European comparisons, I think that analysis makes a lot of sense
because the more general the academic programmes the more portable they
are. If I may, I would add the point to
this in terms of different stages of mobility, so whilst we were talking
earlier about UK students being less likely to study or work abroad on Erasmus
programmes we have been doing some recent research which does demonstrate that,
but when one looks at work and study abroad after the conclusion of the first
degree the UK figure is actually at the European average of 21 per cent,
which I think is quite high. In terms
of that working abroad being long stay, in other words, for a year or more, the
UK figure is actually higher than the European average. In terms of looking at student flows, I
think there is quite a lot of different levels in looking at it, and it is not
just during the course, it is after the course, there are issues of duration,
do you come back again or not come back again, and I think it makes analysis
quite complex, in that form.
Professor Brown: There is
another term which has been introduced now, which is brain circulation, which
is different from brain drain. The
brain drain notion was where you went from India and China into, for example,
the US or Britain and you stayed there, and so that talent was lost to India
and China. Especially with the Indian
experience, there is now this idea of brain circulation, that it is kind of
okay for people to go overseas to get their education because ultimately they are
going to go back and add value to their national economy; so I think probably
you will hear quite a lot about brain circulation, in terms of globalisation
debates. How realistic that is, of
course, is another question altogether, but what we do know is that more
people, for example, from India, are returning to India, and as the job market
improves in India and China, certainly certain parts of it, then you will get
movement back, but still many stay on, if they can, in Europe or in North
America because the jobs are better, the pay is better.
Q609 Fiona Mactaggart:
I am also interested in the different models of study. Bernadette, your institution has a campus in
China; and, Martin, in your evidence, the British Council predicted that by
2010 that might be a more common model than students coming here. I want to know what are the risks in terms
of that for the British higher education product; is it good, is it the quality
that we need? What are the guarantees
that those kinds of overseas satellites can be good enough; what are the risks,
in terms of them just being adopted as Chinese institutions or similar, and are
people good at doing this? Is this a
good model for the student?
Professor Robinson: I would like
to start a stage further back, if I may, in answering this. I think there are three main ways in which
the internationalisation of higher education can be turned into action, can be
operationalised. One is by recruiting
students to come to the UK, which is the very common one, which has been happening
now for some years. Another one is
through transnational courses of different kinds, distance education, different
combinations of distance education and in-country. Then there is this model of locating your institution or locating
your programmes in-country, with a special status, not just an offshore
operation, which has been used by the USA and Canada and various countries and
Australia. I think there are three
models, but in the UK I think we have had the dominance of this first model, of
students coming here always to do courses.
I think that in the future, over the next ten years, there has to be
exploration of different models, there has to be development of different
models to counteract the changes that are happening and also maybe different
flows and surges of numbers coming into recruitment in the UK and other
models. The University of Nottingham
has two campuses; it has one in Malaysia and one in China, the first foreign
university in China, the first Sino-foreign university, and I think the
motivations of those three different models are different. The idea of students coming here is to
generate income for universities. I
think the Nottingham Ningbo model is a 'not for profit' model but for different
reasons. I think the future of the
internationalisation of higher education, certainly with some countries, like
China and India, rests really on the development of relationships, that is the
thing which is going to sustain flows of students, which is going to generate
research interaction and develop relationships into new models which we have
not thought of yet. I do not think I
have answered your question, but that is the kind of context.
Chairman: It was a very
interesting answer anyway.
Q610 Fiona Mactaggart:
Were you going to say something about your prediction on numbers, Martin?
Mr Davidson: Just a couple of
things, quickly. I think that the model
of a transfer or creation of a home campus overseas is unlikely to be a major
form of transnational education in the future.
I think that the other models, of courses, shared courses, joint
curriculum development, are more likely, the nature of the transfer that we
have been talking about. All of these,
of course, lead to substantial issues around quality. I hasten to add, I have no comments whatsoever about the quality
of the Nottingham offering in China and Malaysia, but it is a very substantial
challenge to the reputation of British education to maintain quality through
offshore delivery, particularly at the individual course level rather than the
whole institution level. Maybe that is
a challenge which we have to face up to.
I would challenge a little bit Bernadette's assertion that the major
focus of inward flows of students is financial; of course finance is an
important aspect of it but actually it does have a number of other, very
substantial, additional benefits to British higher education. I think there is a third aspect of British
higher education's international agenda, which is about education reform and
development in other countries. It is
one of the aspects which are of really very considerable importance in our
work, British institutions' willingness to work with foreign institutions on
capacity-building, institutional development, as well as at a whole system
level of looking at higher education system development in emerging
countries. Student flows, creation of
courses overseas and engagement with the education system overseas are all
aspects of British higher education.
Professor Robinson: I was not
suggesting that money was the only motivation, but for some institutions I
think it is the primary motivation. Of
course, there are all these other reasons why we need to recruit students from
other countries, as Martin has said. I
think I am not advocating the model of Ningbo as the ideal; what I am saying is
that it is at one end of a continuum, and along that you have got all sorts of
possibilities for combinations, sharing, etc.
In the past we have had a lot of franchising but that raises whole
issues of quality assurance and quality standards. I think there is scope for exploration of new models but they
bring with them their own problems as well.
Q611 Fiona Mactaggart:
One of the things which strike me about the university experience is that
traditionally we have associated with universities academic freedom, freedom of
thought, a number of things which actually are not necessarily the norm in some
of the countries which are sending very large numbers of overseas
students. I am wondering whether, when
you create an institution like that, those issues become issues in those
institutions and whether you are exporting some values, or whether actually you
are failing to, I suppose is really the question I want to address. Are students getting the traditional
academic freedom, openness of debate, that we associate with British higher
education, or not, and if they are how?
Mr Davidson: Other than agreeing
absolutely that one of the huge benefits which flow from students coming to
this country is access to the entire value system which underpins higher
education, which I think then does go back to their countries of origin, as
well as the sets of relationships they create, unquestionably there is an issue
which I would suggest is part of the quality debate, whether or not those same
values are going to inform the experience that they get in a different system.
Q612 Fiona Mactaggart:
Bernadette, your institution does this kind of thing. I want to know whether you are confident that you are actually
delivering that and what the struggles are.
I cannot believe there have not been some struggles?
Professor Robinson: I am not
here speaking on behalf of my institution so I must be very careful not to do
that, but I can speak from my own experience of teaching in Chinese
universities and what staff and I can or cannot do in our teaching
sessions. Of course I can do most
things in my teaching sessions, because I am an ignorant foreigner who can make
all sorts of mistakes; but certainly there are sensitivities around some topics
that one has to be careful of and I think there is control. I think the practice of having a Party
observer in all teaching sessions is now gone, but nonetheless every university
has its Party committee and the deputies of educational institutions are Party
officials, so it is not entirely absent, and all students must do an ideology
course, so one is working within that cultural framework overseas.
Q613 Fiona Mactaggart:
What do we think that this does for the reputation of British higher education;
does anybody else want to comment on that?
Professor Brennan: I know, a few
years ago, a lot of foreign universities were setting up various kinds of shop
in South Africa, and British universities, I think, were to the fore there, and
of course they were having to satisfy the Quality Assurance Agency of the
quality of what they were doing out there, and a year or so on South Africa
created its own Higher Education Quality Committee which set about doing its
own appraisals of programmes. It started
with MBA programmes, and a high proportion of the UK provision effectively lost
its franchise. The point here, I think,
is that a good quality higher education experience in a UK context may not be
actually what is required in a very different culture and context, and there
may be certain elements which are in common and certain elements which
differ. I do not think they are the
major problems, I think the UK providers changed fairly rapidly to meet the
South African requirements, but I think the question of who should be the
ultimate arbiter of quality is quite an interesting one and clearly has
implications for the international standing of UK higher education.
Professor Brown: It depends on
the subject area, does it not; if it is engineering then it is not usually a
problem, if it is social sciences often it is a big problem. The first thing we do is get our students to
- we like using the term - critically assess, evaluate, and what does that mean
to a Chinese student; it was a big problem because they want the answer, the
correct answer, the one that the lecturer gives them. It is a real challenge to get them to say, "Well, it's okay but
there are no actual right and wrong answers here; just look at the evidence and
give an assessment of this." That is
pretty hard, and within a different cultural environment it is even more
difficult, it strikes me; so there are real problems. We could not teach half of our courses in social sciences in
Singapore, for instance, because we would be challenging the system and that
would not be acceptable; so I think there is a big issue about what it is you
are going to teach, where, and maintaining those standards. If we are just chasing money then we have
got a big problem, it strikes me.
Q614 Fiona Mactaggart:
Do we have any mechanisms which ensure that people do not go out, exporting
British sociology-based courses which say "This is the answer"?
Mr Davidson: Certainly there are
mechanisms in place which look at the quality of British offers overseas,
yes. I would be very surprised if those
systems would accept a course which said "This is the answer" rather than "This
is nature of the critical inquiry approach;" so, yes, there are systems in
place. As John said earlier, alluding
to the South Africa experience, those systems are pretty vigorous and on the
whole do match up when challenged by local systems.
Fiona Mactaggart: It sounds to
me, in terms of quality, when students are coming here, that we have a very
strong draw at the really high end of the market, also perhaps at the other end
of the market, and that there is an issue in the kind of middle-rank
universities about how well they are drawing in and bringing in overseas
students here. Is that an issue about
reputation, is that an issue about marketing, is that an issue about actually
how they welcome students in the institutions?
I am not talking about the countrywide level, I am talking of the
institutional level. Does anyone know?
Q615 Chairman:
It is a big problem for you, is it not?
If you were doing your job properly, which I am sure you are, you should
be telling universities which do not come up to scratch or are not competing
that your feedback from the big client countries is this and that way; or do
you not have that relationship?
Mr Davidson: Yes, we do have
that relationship, and the Education UK Partnership is very much based around
learning from each other. Marketing in
an international environment is a very complex business and I do not think
there is any question that a number of institutions, which have come late to
it, have found it quite a bumpy ride; whereas, obviously, there is a large
number of institutions which have been involved internationally for a very,
very long period of time. The issues
which are critical tend to be around overreliance on a single market,
overreliance on a particular level of education, and there are problems around,
for example, one-year Master's degrees, in that you have to renew that
constantly on an annual basis; the undergraduate market, you need to recruit
them only once every three years. The other
overreliance tends to be in a particular subject area; so an institution which
is overreliant on Master's degrees or short courses in a particular subject
area, in a particular country, is going to have a very high level of exposure. I think that there are issues about some
institutions which have allowed themselves to get into that particular
position. The sector as a whole, I
think, absolutely does see the dangers to reputation of any part of it being
seen to be too intent on simply recruiting students at any cost; so I think
that the peer pressure around quality and ensuring quality, both in the
recruitment process and the student experience, has grown very considerably
over the last few years.
Q616 Chairman:
Professor Brennan, I am getting a bit worried about some of your points because
you seem to have a rather low opinion of British universities; is not that
right? You thought we were overvaluing
ourselves and that really we were not much cop, compared with our competitors,
if we looked at the true stats: really is that what you thought?
Professor Brennan: No; no, not
at all.
Q617 Chairman:
It may be the truth. We like hearing
from the OU, because you have not got that kind of institutional, long-term
prejudice which sometimes we get from some institutions; so tell us how it is,
from your view?
Professor Brennan: I think, to
some extent, sometimes we assume that there is a particular Anglo-Saxon model
which could be applicable everywhere and others would follow. I think what I would say is that there are a
number of models; within the European context, higher education is relatively
short-cycle, comparatively.
Q618 Chairman:
Because it is output-based in that time?
Professor Brennan: Yes. I was going to say, that is not necessarily
a criticism, but what I think it does suggest is that there is perhaps a
somewhat different division of labour between higher education and employers,
in terms of the preparation of graduates for that, different relationships with
the labour market. I think there is
some evidence to suggest that other European countries are rather more
effective at managing the initial transition into work and graduates, in their
first jobs perhaps, feel anyway rather better prepared for them than graduates
within the UK.
Q619 Chairman:
With seven years to prepare yourself for work, you ought to be ready, I would
have thought?
Professor Brennan: Yes; a fair
point. Indeed, rather than looking at
duration within higher education, if one just took young people, I do not know,
at age 27, would there be very much difference. Equally, I think there is an argument that there may be
longer-term benefits from the UK approach, in terms of flexibility, in terms of
lifelong learning, and really a much more open labour market in terms of the
role that credentials play in moving people through them. I think the point perhaps I would want to
emphasise is to recognise that the UK system reflects one particular model;
there are other models around and I think we need to recognise and understand
that.
Q620 Mr Marsden:
Can we move on and talk about some of the issues around the international
market for research. You have said
already, I think, from the panel, that you do not think there is an issue in
terms of brain drain and brain circulation - I am waiting for brain substitution
- but is it the same thing when you are attracting academics, the same factors
when you attract academics that you get when you are attracting students:
quality, reputation, employment prospects?
Is there any change in the rankings when you are trying to attract
academics as opposed to when you are trying to attract students?
Professor Brown: I think the
same things apply. Academics are driven
by a number of things; one would be resources, will you get the resources you
need, will you get the time to do the research that you are doing, will you be
surrounded by people who are leading people in that field, these are things you
are driven by. I think that applies to
most academics, in most countries, to some extent; obviously, the salary makes
a difference, but if that were the case then more British academics would go to
the US, and they do not leave, so there are other considerations as well. There is absolutely no doubt about it that
the key thing, in terms of attracting high quality staff here, is the
reputation of the university, which I think is absolutely vital, and all the
universities in the UK, it seems to me, are doing the same thing now, they are
all looking at the Shanghai rankings, The
Times ranking, they are looking at how they are being put together, and
they are trying to work out how they can lift their profile. One of the problems with that, of course, is
if you lift your profile globally then what is the impact on the domestic,
national structure for the university and the competition, for example, within
the universities in the UK, in terms of access to resources? Do we say that we should try to target, say,
ten universities in the UK to be in the top 100, in terms of global rankings,
or do we say that we should give more resources to all the universities within
Britain to improve the student experience and the staff experience? For example, in my university, I get a lot
of time for research; in new universities there is far less time for research. It is not a level playing-field.
Q621 Mr Marsden:
Professor Robinson, in other circumstances and about other issues when the
Committee has looked at HE, it has become apparent that, in the UK set-up, in
terms of UK students, the issue of particular schools or particular
departments, rather than just the issue of the overall reputation of a
university, is becoming more and more important. If I can put it this way, with not just your Chinese hat on but
with your other experiences in other countries as well, is this something which
is happening overseas? If you are a
Chinese academic, do you think automatically "I really must go to Oxford or
Imperial," as opposed to "I'm going to Nottingham" or "I'm going to Liverpool,
because they're particularly good in my subject area"?
Professor Robinson: I think,
first of all, they would choose the top band of universities that they would
consider, and then, within that, they would look for the clusters of
excellence.
Q622 Mr Marsden:
There is still a banding approach?
Professor Robinson: There is
still a banding approach. In fact, in
China, I think the banding is more formalised than it is in the UK. There are, as it were, Government rankings
of universities, so they are expecting to find similar rankings when they come
here.
Q623 Mr Marsden:
There is a lot of discussion, and no doubt, when we go to China, we will probe
it a bit, in terms of how far the economic and intellectual classes in China
are able to develop their own ideas via the Internet. Is there the ability to have use of the Internet to pursue
alternative views of where they should go, as opposed to the state views?
Professor Robinson: I think
students have quite a free choice, in getting information about universities
and deciding where to go, and many of them are not coming on Government funding
any more.
Q624 Mr Marsden:
There is much more independent thought?
Professor Robinson: I think so.
Professor Brown: Of course, it
depends which universities they have heard of; probably they have heard of only
four or five universities in the UK so that immediately they are driven towards
those universities. I think it is the
issue of lifting the profile of some of the other universities in the UK which
is important, to give them more of a choice about where they might go; that is
an issue, I think.
Mr Davidson: From a different
country, India, where we run an Education Research Initiative, recently we made
30 awards on linking departments to departments. Certainly it is clear, just looking down the list of those, that
the Indian institutions have identified departments with which they are
interested in being linked, rather than universities.
Q625 Mr Marsden:
We will come on to ask a couple of things perhaps, Martin, in a moment, but I
wonder, Professor Brennan, if I could ask you, in terms of where the UK stands
over its global reputation for research quality, where you think we stand
today, compared with, say, ten years ago, and are there particular areas where
we are on the up, as opposed to on the down?
Professor Brennan: Honestly, I
do not think I have got any real evidence to provide a good view on that. Perhaps I would comment though, on the point
of internationalisation of research, on what I think is the growing volume of
research collaboration on international projects and multinational research
teams working together, that in many cases it is no longer a pattern of
academics choosing to up sticks and go to live on the other side of the world,
for many people now, your closest collaborators can be on a different
continent. I think there is a different
take perhaps on internationalisation.
Q626 Mr Marsden:
Can I come back to you, Martin Davidson.
Professor Brennan has raised the issue there of collaboration. We know, do we not, that scientific and
technical research is a major issue, in that respect; do you think that the
UK's generally good reputation for research in those areas has been affected,
in terms of overseas perception, by the threatened closure of science courses
at some universities, because clearly that has been something which has been in
the news and around?
Mr Davidson: There is no doubt
that anything which happens in British higher education gets reflected, to a
greater or lesser extent, in different countries. For example, in Singapore, normally you will find an article
about the closure of a department reflected almost the next day in headlines in
the New Straits Times. It does vary from country to country. I do not think that the individual actions
of universities' particular departments have a long-term impact. As I say, there is anecdotal evidence but
also some statistical evidence that when we are talking about research
collaboration the factors which are likely to have the greatest impact are the
reputation of the department internationally, the opportunity for individuals
within that department to have been cited in literature which a potential
research collaborator might have read, and the opportunity to meet at
international conferences. That tends
to drive the selection of individual departments. Certainly it is true, if you take international citations of
research as one element, that the level of citation from the UK research is as
high as, if not slightly higher than, it has been over a number of years, it
runs roughly around 30 per cent of the most highly cited, at the moment. I think that sort of evidence actually is of
more importance, in terms of decisions that departments make about where they
are going to create their research, than any particular headline or particular
institution.
Professor Brown: Just an aside
really; we were talking about closing departments of science. In relation to engineering, I was reminded
of an interview with a leading German multinational company, which said how
appalling was the state of science and engineering in Britain and the US and
how far we have to go to catch up with China and with Russia now. Certainly the view within some
multinationals is that we are already massively behind and show no evidence
that we are moving forward, and it was a bit of a shock to hear this person,
who had global responsibility for recruitment, talking about the state of
science.
Q627 Chairman:
Where did German and Russian universities come in the research rankings? I have always understood that Germany does
not have one university in the top-ranked universities?
Professor Brown: It depends
where you go. Within the top 100, I
think they are five; which, of course, is how they responded, because now they
are very worried about this, and before they had a level playing-field. They have said, "Look, all our universities
are good," so pretty much they were defending as being across the board. Now, they have introduced this I think it is
like an 'excellence' policy, and they try to identify, initially, five
universities and put more money into those particular institutions. Of course, the consequence of that will be
that internationally they will be seen to be the top German universities, that
German students now will want to get into those universities, more and more
resources will be fed into those universities, so what are the implications
then for the other German universities, which have not been selected within
that top five? That is how the impact
of global competition and thinking at that level then can have national
implications, which we need to think about.
Mr Davidson: On that, going back
to the point which you made much earlier, Phillip, Germany has roughly the same
level of international citation as the UK for its research, even though it does
not have a university in that top 20.
Russia, in contrast, has about one-third the number of international
citations.
Q628 Mr Marsden:
I might raise the issue of where the German citations come from, whether they
come from German universities or German academics at other universities; but we
will let that one pass, for the moment.
I want to move on, finally and relatively briefly, to the issue of
collaboration, which has been touched on already. The Committee has been given some facts and figures about the
UK-India Education and Research Initiative, which is talking about developing
50 new collaborative research projects, saying, at the moment, I think, 40 new
UK award programmes delivered collaboratively in India, 300 additional Indian
research students, postdoctoral researchers and staff will have worked in the
UK, and a target of 2,000 Indian research students completing research degrees
in the UK through collaborative delivery.
I would like Professor Robinson to comment on the specifics of that sort
of model for China, but I wonder if any of the rest of you has any views as to
how that particular model is shaping up, and how useful it is as a model
perhaps for partnership and collaboration with other countries?
Mr Davidson: As you know, the
British Council is managing this scheme on behalf of the partners. Inevitably, perhaps, I would see it as a
very successful model. We have already
established 30 research agreements, six major ones and about 24 minor
ones. I think perhaps more to the point
than the numbers is the impact which undoubtedly it has had, in terms of the
sense in India of the UK being interested in and committed to Indian research,
the idea that the UK collaboration is not simply one way - "Give us your
students; come and do your research here" - but that we are interested in the
development of research capacity and capability in India and recognise the
quality of the research which has been done there. I think that has made a significant shift, inevitably it is
uninflatable, in perception of the UK and the UK's interest in India. Again, anecdotally, we have been approached
by two other countries, most notably by Pakistan, to recreate similar schemes
for them.
Q629 Mr Marsden:
Professor Robinson, if we talk about India, and Pakistan perhaps to a slightly
lesser degree, we are dealing there with countries and cultures with which, for
good or ill, this country has had a very intimate relationship over a 200-year
period, where the academic structures, the educational structures, are much
closer to the UK's traditional structures than a country like China, for
example. Would a similar sort of
research partnership initiative work between the UK and China, and, perhaps the
trickier question, when you have a country like China, which historically has
not had a culture of open academic inquiry in the way that we have had, is that
an insuperable barrier to the construction of something similar to what the
British Council now are overseeing with India?
Professor Robinson: First of
all, I would like to say, China is not the only country which has not had an
open academic system. As I go to
Pakistan tomorrow, I am very aware of the constraints on my work there. I think the models are good and have got
potential in many contexts, so I see no reason why some version of these models
would not work in China. The difference
is the past historical relationship, I guess, with India and with Pakistan, and
that may play a role. China has got a
very strong Government policy to develop research. The Chinese Government is investing in research and so it is very
strongly policy-driven; so, again, that is a favourable environment. I guess, on the openness, it depends very
much on the subject areas you are talking about. We think, for many technology, science-oriented programmes, for
management, business practices, languages, though that is maybe not of so much
interest, for many areas of research I do not think there would be too many
problems, though, of course, like other countries, there is a big bureaucracy
to work through in getting some of these things implemented.
Mr Davidson: My own experience
of China would be that I think many of these schemes would work extremely well
there, and indeed in the past there have been schemes linking institutions
together, including for joint degrees as well as joint research. On the question of openness, one issue which
one always has to bear in mind is about the transfer of data, and certainly
there are problems with China, particularly in some of the social sciences
areas, about transfer of data, if you are going to be involved in joint
research. There are particular areas
where there are some complexities.
Chairman: We are going to move
on; but there is a bit of me that thinks we are not using your knowledge as
well as we could. You know our topic
for this; this is a major inquiry into higher education, a sustainable
university, and what I want us to get out of this next bit is much more a focus
which we started to get, some of you were getting towards it, because probably
we were asking you the wrong questions, how sustainable is it? Some of you were getting near it when you
were saying "But it's all about international competition; if the Germans are
putting all the money in five universities, what happens to the rest?" This is what we are after, what is the kind
of world we are living in, in higher education, now, and what is this
international market doing; is it for good or for ill or are there real
dangers, or should we be bouncing back and investing far more in whatever? Can we have that frame a bit more, from
colleagues and in terms of the answers: Paul?
Q630 Paul Holmes:
There always used to be a view that overseas students would study here, go back
to their country and be an ambassador for Britain, because they would rise up
the ranks of business and government and journalism and they would have fond
memories of having studied in the UK and that would benefit us. Was that ever true and is it true now?
Professor Brown: I can give you
an answer of sorts, on current research with these companies. Overseas experience is important, if you get
the linguistic experiences and the social and cultural experiences, because
that is what they are looking for in international companies. The problem is, if you stay at home, you
might even go to a League university but you do not have that range of
experience that they are looking for; that is why a lot of the élite in China
and India, and elsewhere, will still want to come to the US and to the UK. There is some evidence now, and this is one
of the things we need to think about also, that, of course, some of the Indian
companies and the Chinese companies are becoming multinationals in their own
right and they are looking to recruit, and, of course, because there are
linguistic and cultural differences between Europe and Asia, they are likely to
recruit from their own élite institutions.
We begin to see a slight change, where there are better job
opportunities now within India and China, and especially the élite institutions
in India, if you can get in one you will go in there. The Indian institutes of management and technology are the best
in the world, they are more difficult to get into than Harvard; so if you get a
chance to go you will go there and you might well end up then working for a
company which has become multinational, like Infosys, or something of that
nature. I think there are the
beginnings of change. Going back to the
general points, it seems to me that the pace of change was so rapid that our
knowledge at the moment, and all the assumptions with which we are operating,
about higher education, jobs and rewards, I think is fundamentally flawed. I think we need to go back and look at this
in much more detail and not assume simply that we understand what globalisation
is. The basic model we operate with is
this view that they are, if you like, 'head and body' nations, that the economy
develops in an evolutionary way, you go through industrial to post-industrial
development, it takes a very long time to develop good universities and to
expand those universities, and therefore it will take a long time for India and
China to catch up. We are the head
nations in the developed economies and most of the high-skill, high-wage work
will stay here, or in America, and our competitors, fundamentally, in what we
see as 'knowledge wars' are within Europe and North America or Japan. I think that is fundamentally flawed. I think that does not understand whatsoever
what is going on in places like China and India particularly. The pace of development is extraordinary;
when you think that now China has more people in higher education than the
US. China has 20 million students;
the US is a bit below that.
Q631 Chairman:
That is an accurate figure, is it?
Professor Brown: It is from one
of their senior persons.
Q632 Chairman:
From our briefing, the Chinese are building a university a week; that sounds
really strange to me?
Professor Brown: I think that is
an exaggeration. One concrete example I
can give you, and I do not know where you are going to in China but I suggest
you go to Guangzhou, which is Canton, and there you will find, I think it is
called, the University City; this is just on the outskirts of Guangzhou. There was nothing there in 2001. The regional authorities were concerned
about the state of higher education, they thought they needed rapidly to
increase their resources, primarily it was agricultural land, so they built ten
universities on this site; there was nothing there in 2001. In 2005 there were 80,000 students and that
will increase next year to 120,000 students.
I did not believe it, so I went there. You take the high-speed, underground tube, where the stations are
like Westminster, one of the few which is built like that, and it is 'state of
the art' buildings. They have done that
in five years. When you combine that
kind of knowledge, the largest training institute in the world, I think, is
Infosys, near Bangalore, which can train 15,000 people at any one time, when
you put this kind of information together with talking to the multinationals,
which are themselves, if you like, denationalising their training and their
skill formation, and previously they would go into a country, where it would be
the home base, and basically they worked with what they had got, they knew
there was a national system, but as they have become more globalised themselves,
of course, they are having to think more strategically about what they put,
where, and the greater flexibility they
have to combine knowledge bases in Britain and Asia and elsewhere means they
can do things differently. One of the
things they can do differently, of course, is that they can get innovation at a
much cheaper price. We are not
competing just on skills, we are competing on price, and we are competing on
price further and further up the skills and knowledge chain. It seems to me that what we need to be
studying is precisely what that process is, how extensive it is and what the
implications are then for British higher education and for our students and for
our competition strategy, because if we do not we are going to be finding
answers to the wrong questions.
Q633 Paul Holmes:
Phillip, effectively you are saying that the old view of overseas students
being the ambassadors for Britain is just totally out of date. Martin, the British Council have said:
"Higher education has the potential to make a major contribution to the
Government's international strategic priorities. It plays a very significant role in the UK's cultural and
diplomatic relationships with other countries." Which view is correct, the British Council's or Phillip's?
Mr Davidson: The British
Council's, of course. I do not think
there is any question whatsoever that in the past the opportunity for students
to study in the UK and return to their own countries has been a very
substantial and significant component of the long-term relationship which they
create, whether it is commercial or, if they move into other areas of work,
political or economic relationships with this country. You have merely to take China as a case in
point, where the relationships built within an academic environment are
relationships which last throughout a lifetime and are regarded as
relationships which can be drawn upon.
Clearly it would be foolish for us, as a nation, simply to regard that
as something which is going to continue, because the flows of students in the
past largely have been élite. The
environment we are moving into is where there is a mass flow of students, a
mass flow of knowledge, and we have to engage in that. As I said earlier on, I do not think any
longer we can see ourselves as a domestic higher education system, isolated
from the rest of the world. Like it or
not, we have become part of an international flow of students, and you have
only to look at some of the numbers, 74 per cent of research students in
finance are from overseas, 63 per cent in electronic engineering,
56 per cent in architectural building and planning. A large proportion of our research base is
populated by flows of foreign students, our own students are moving overseas as
well, while not perhaps at the undergraduate level, certainly at the
postgraduate, and at the post-experience level British academics are working
overseas. We are part of this global
movement now.
Q634 Chairman:
We may be part of the global movement but is it dangerous to our British higher
education, or is it just a question of taking on large numbers of foreign
students just to balance the books, not about the integrity or, something that
Phillip said earlier, the public good?
Is this the way to death and destruction or going to hell in a handcart,
just by following this market willy-nilly?
Mr Davidson: I would argue that
institutions have not simply followed the trend. It is part of the environment within which all advanced nations
and nations seeking to create advanced education systems for themselves are
going. Singapore, Malaysia, China,
India are all making substantial shifts of their education system into an
international environment. It increases
the competition for us. The number of
countries where actually you can now, in Europe, study in English, so that
those education systems can take part in this flow of students, is enormous;
France, Germany, all the Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands, all are
now offering degree courses in English, in order to attract foreign students
and to take part in this international flow.
To an extent, it is the environment where we are. I suppose one may regret it. I am not sure one should regret it, but
actually it is the environment in which we are working now.
Q635 Chairman:
We heard Phillip saying we should be concentrating and make all our
universities as good as possibly they can be, to train our own people to the
relevant levels to compete globally. Is
that what you were saying, Phillip?
Professor Brown: I think, more
and more, we have got to stop thinking that we are going to be the winners all
the time; basically, more of these research jobs now are going to go to
Asia. I think the thing that we have to
do, more than anything else, is develop the links, international links, with
other high-rated universities and research institutes so that we will get some
of this work. It is highly likely that
the leading corporations will not be putting all their eggs in one basket, they
will be spreading a lot of this work and development around and we have to get
a slice of that action. I think there
is no doubt about it, of course, we need to train up our students as well as we
possibly can; now they need to do that in an environment which is not
monocultural. The sooner we get away
from class, middle-class, boys and girls, from the South East and elsewhere,
the better. It seems to me, it is not
simply the question "Is this class full of Chinese students?" but "Is the class
full of white, middle-class, British students?" It seems to me, it is about the social mix, is it not? It is about how you get a mix of cultural
experience, and adult learners as well; how you combine them so you improve the
quality of the education for them to be able to have some kind of understanding
of the world beyond London, or Cardiff, or wherever it might be; that seems to
be absolutely crucial. If you have not
got that kind of cultural understanding then you are not going to get very far
in the way in which things seem to be going today.
Professor Brennan: To echo that
point, in terms of UK students, part of a high quality, higher education
experience needs to be an international experience, in some sense of that. That does not mean necessarily being mobile
or studying somewhere else, it is to do with what is going on in your own campus,
and international students are part of that, as is the staffing profile, as is
the overall activity of the university.
Just a model which interested me, which I would share with the
Committee, I had lunch, a few months ago, with a former vice chancellor of a
British university, who has now been hired as a consultant to the Technical
University of Kuala Lumpur. The
Technical University of Kuala Lumpur is opening campuses simultaneously in
London, New York, Beijing, and I think there is a fourth one as well as the
Kuala Lumpur home. What I found quite
interesting about this model was that a requirement of studying at this
multinational university is that you divide your time between two of the
campuses. To me, that is reflecting a
model of internationalism which I found quite interesting; and these were quite
substantial ambitions, they were talking about a campus for 4,000 or 5,000
students in the UK. Where those
students come from is another question; they may be competing for the home UK
market, which would be an interesting one.
Q636 Paul Holmes:
Bernadette, from your point of view, you work with a lot of overseas students
who come to Nottingham, you work inside Pakistan and China, are there two
different goals here, the mass volume of business and science students and the
more rarefied world of people who are going to go into government and
journalism, for example, where the old idea of the ambassadors comes from?
Professor Robinson: I think the
old idea of ambassadors is changing, and partly because now many people study
in more than one country, so you find, in China, they do not come just to the
UK, the same people go also to Malaysia or Korea or Japan even and they are
getting experience of more than one country, Australia as well is very popular. The idea that they go to just one country
and develop an allegiance to that country I do not think is true any longer,
but I think it is true that, having worked with students, lifelong contacts
develop with them and a relationship which you can use for other things as
well. I would like just to throw in a
couple of snippets; one is, nobody has mentioned the language issue and the
students who come to the UK and get a PhD are coming and getting it often in a
second language. They are then
competing sometimes with students from the UK for the same jobs. Our students have a declining language
competence and I think, unlike other governments, of course I should except the
recent initiatives in the UK, many other countries have been promoting second,
even third, language development. In
China you cannot get a degree unless you pass an English examination, at any
university, and we seem to be going in the other direction, recent initiatives
excepted, so that we are producing graduates who, when their CVs are put
together, will lose out because they are not as well qualified as some of their
foreign competitors in the international market. The other snippet I would like to throw in is about research. There is growing research capacity in Asia,
which I think will be very challenging for the UK. If we look at US research investment, for instance, in recent
years that has increased in China by 25 per cent a year; in Europe, US
research investment has increased by only eight per cent a year, so we have a
declining share of investment in research from the US, which would reflect our
perception of the research here. There
is growing capacity elsewhere.
Q637 Paul Holmes:
Is that eight per cent of a much larger starting-point, as opposed to
25 per cent of a small base?
Professor Robinson: I have not
got the figures. I can give you the
reference to the figures behind that. I
think what it is indicating is a judgment about where the future lies and it is
not in European research and American research, this is just China, there is
also investment in other Asian countries as well.
Q638 Paul Holmes:
Thinking of the concept that people talk about now, of a global citizen, if we
look back in 20 years' time will the UK have lost out on that, because, on the
one hand, the global citizens are this massive tide of expanding institutions
overseas and, on the other hand, we have got an increasingly insular and
non-linguistically able, like me, graduates in the UK?
Professor Robinson: It is an
interesting question. I think another
snippet is the EU's Innovation Scoreboard, where it compares EU, US and Japan
on 26 indicators, and the EU comes much lower than US or Japan. Ján Figel', the Commissioner for Education
and Training in the EU, estimated that it would take the EU 50 years to catch up
with US innovation, yet innovation is one of the things which will determine
the future of economies and education and the whole well-being of
countries. I think that is a very
interesting thing to look at, so looking not just at courses or programmes but
the whole position in relation to the education system that research is
producing by comparison with other countries I think is a big question which
needs more explanation.
Q639 Paul Holmes:
In a world of global citizens, in 20 years' time we are going to be the country
bumpkins, are we?
Professor Brown: Our greatest
strength is the English language; without that we would be in big trouble, I
think, but with it we have got a chance.
If you think about the Internet, and such things, and you talk to these
companies, and what have you, the language is absolutely crucial. The relationship between language and
culture, of course, is the interesting one.
I think probably we could get away with our poor language education, but
if we do not get those broader cultural experiences we really will be the
country bumpkin.
Q640 Mr Pelling:
Thank you very much, Chairman, for allowing me to be extemporary and off the
beaten track of the questions, and also to say my daughter is studying
currently at a university in Japan, so I think she is part of these flows of
people backwards and forwards. I was
very taken by the figure of the 72 per cent of foreign nationals you said
are doing finance research, positions, as it were, within our education. It is very concerning, I would say, that
when finance is such a big part of the UK economy these days such a small
percentage of UK students is taking up those places. Are they at some kind of disadvantage, in terms of taking up
those places; is there something that employers should be doing to encourage
more UK citizens to be pursuing the route to finance through taking up research
positions? Is it something currently
that is wrong with us that it is such a small percentage? It strikes me that if employers were to put
a very strong emphasis, as I suspect they do in the City, in terms of taking
people away who are very highly qualified, the City of London would become even
more international in its approach and the opportunities for UK students to
take advantage of that very strong, wealth-creating part of the economy will be
further lost?
Mr Davidson: One always has to
treat such statistics with a degree of care, because what we do not know is the
number of new courses which have been started because of the students wanting
to come here to study; in some sense, a very obvious place for people to come
and study finance is the UK. It may
well be actually that the capacity and opportunity for British students has
expanded because of the flow of foreign students into there. I do not know the answer to that. What is clear, it seems to me, is that the
opportunity for British students, by studying here, being given an
international experience simply because of the flow of students in and out is
very, very important. If they are not
going to go and study elsewhere then they have got to get that experience
somewhere if they are going to be competitive within the broader world. I agree absolutely with the issue around
language though. While, of course, it
is true that English language is a competitive advantage for British students,
being monolingual is a huge disadvantage and there is very sound research which
indicates the sheer disadvantage which students are suffering now from not
being able to speak more than one language.
That is equally true in finance.
Again, I do not have the numbers to hand, but you just have to look at
the numbers of foreign graduates now working within the City; what advantage
are they bringing, it is a broader international perspective, a broader
cultural perspective and a wider range of language as well as other competence
that they bring in, and our students have got to be able to match that.
Professor Brown: It is the
language and money which is the problem.
Basically what happens is, after you have done your degree for three
years, you have gone to a good university, you get snapped up by City firms
offering you large amounts of money, so why would you bother going on to do a
Master's degree or research in that field; you would not, so you go overseas to
recruit in. I think that is the primary
problem. If the City were not so
buoyant you would get more people going into the research area.
Q641 Mr Marsden:
Some of the things that we have just heard might render this question a little
bit narrow-minded or redundant, but we have had an enormous amount of
discussion, as witnesses will be aware, and this Committee has just done a
major inquiry into the whole issue of citizenship education and in that we
touched very briefly on citizenship education in universities. If we are talking about the ambassador role,
however changed it is, do British universities need to be looking more
specifically at how they communicate some of the values of British society in
their courses? I do not mean a sort of
"These are the top ten British values that you might all want to come and
imbibe during your three years in Britain."
I am talking about slightly broader issues, relating back to one of the
things that we talked about earlier, in terms of academic inquiry. Martin, I do not know whether you would like
to comment on that initially, and perhaps Bernadette, from your experience?
Mr Davidson: I suppose my
starting-point would be that values almost inevitably inform the nature of the
study, the nature of the course, the way in which you both create and then run
courses, so somehow distinguishing yourself as an institution from the values
which inform your society, which go into your make-up, seems to me to be
probably a false premise.
Q642 Mr Marsden:
It is a bit like passive smoking, when you are forced to imbibe it by the
nature of the forces there?
Mr Davidson: I think there is an
aspect which may be allowed.
Q643 Mr Marsden:
Perhaps that was not the right allusion, but you know what I mean?
Mr Davidson: Perhaps not the
right one. I guess the question which
worries me more is the extent to which the financial imperatives of bringing in
more and more students may drive institutions into poor practices, weaker
recruitment standards, weaker academic standards, and I think this is an issue
which a lot of institutions are very aware of, the need to maintain those
standards. In essence, in a globally
competitive market, it is about institutions hanging together, because if you
do not hang together you hang separately.
Q644 Mr Marsden:
Bernadette, is it Britishness, however nebulously defined, which has an
attraction for students who come here, or is it simply the hard nuts and bolts
of the way in which they get qualifications?
Professor Robinson: I think
utilitarian values rate very high in the decisions students make to come here;
they see it as a route to a good job, and I think that is the primary
value. However, I think when they are
here the areas where maybe some of the biggest changes take place, I would not
call those things directly British, but things like arguments which are based
on evidence, learning to use arguments which are based on evidence rather than
ideology, learning to examine a problem from different perspectives instead of
making assumptions about the nature of a problem, I think these are some of the
big changes that take place for students.
Q645 Mr Marsden:
Challenging academics? I was always
very struck when, in my previous incarnation, I used to deal with German
academics, German historians; whenever they stood up and delivered a paper you
had to wait for about four paragraphs of indebtedness to their professors over
the past 30 years before you got to the argument, whereas British academics
tend to tear apart their supervisor in the first paragraph. Is that an aspect of this as well?
Professor Robinson: Yes. I do not know if John remembers a famous
Open University course, which was produced, called 'That is Europe'. Each part of the course was written by a
team from a different European country, and the discourse conventions were so
different it was almost impossible to produce a coherent course, and the
preamble from some countries was so long there was no time left for actually
developing an argument. I think the
nature of discourse and argument is different and people can learn different
conventions and learn to understand the assumptions behind their own
conventions, in doing this. I think
this is one of the values of intercultural groups.
Q646 Chairman:
Why should it be, listening to some of the things that you, not just you,
Bernadette, but that some of you were saying, it seems always that we are hell
bent on a different kind of university ethos, it is all about being, okay,
better linguists, better competitors, adding more value, being able to earn
more money perhaps. I always tell the
story about walking across the hallowed turf of one of the most prestigious
Oxford Colleges and asking the Master whether any of his students actually went
into teaching, and he said, "No, no; they all go into the City." I did wonder why we were educating those
people to a high level just to go into the City. Is not there a kind of rat race you are describing that we should
be part of, is it not encouraged by university students coming from overseas? Bernadette says, "It's only about because
they want to get a better job and earn more money;" is not that actually
getting away from some of the values that we thought higher education was
about? Is it not about other
things? Should not there be something
in a university which says something like giving back to the society which
produced it, says something about going to be a town planner or a social
worker; not going to the City of London?
Is not that all disappearing because of this thing you seem to applaud,
Phillip?
Professor Brown: I certainly do
not applaud it and I know it is a huge problem for us, but what I am saying is
that we have to begin to understand the problem properly and I do not think we
have spent enough time understanding what the issues really are. This issue of people going to the City and
not using their knowledge, it is going back to the public good kind of
argument, is it not, about the university?
The thing is that the labour market has become so competitive that many
people seem to be in higher education primarily as acquisitors. Basically, they want a credential and they
want to get a credential that will give them as much value as possible within
that job market, and they will trade for whatever they can get. That is a reflection of our broader
culture. It is no good us just blaming
the universities for all of this, it reflects the society in which we
live. We are so driven by materialism
in this kind of sense that we have forgotten these broader kinds of values that
we have. The students themselves, I
think, have a problem, and it is this: how do you behave in an alternative way;
what are the alternatives? If there is
this positional competition then not to play it means you have no chance of
getting a decent career or a decent job, you could argue; maybe you still might
be able to get into teaching, or something.
I said it as a joke, of course.
There are many areas, when you are talking about the upper end, where
they believe there is competition and which they have to be part of. For example, with our own children, what
advice do you give them these days; what do you say, "Don't worry about that
kind of positional competition, about getting A-stars at A level, it doesn't
really matter, because what we want you to be is a really good human being and
we want you to contribute to society"?
That is a problem that we have got.
Chairman: There is a difference
between going into certain professions and with all the wonderful jobs in local
government, town planning, in the Arts Council, let alone the British Council,
all sorts of jobs that people do which add value and achieve wonderful things.
Q647 Mr Pelling:
Some people get a lot of money?
Professor Brown: These are very
important jobs and we should encourage more people to do them; but in terms of
describing my understanding of what I think is going on then I think there is a
broader problem.
Professor Brennan: May I give
some counter-data, to follow up, this is based on two large surveys of UK
graduates three or four years after they had been in higher education. This was a question they were asked about
what benefits they felt they had got from higher education. Round about 50 per cent of them thought
they had got a very good job, soon after higher education, from it, much lower than
the European average, 60-odd, 70 per cent felt that their long-term career
prospects had been enhanced, but nearly 90 per cent reckoned that they had
developed personally, as individuals, the personal development and change from
their higher education experience had been extremely high. That was perceived to be the biggest impact
and one that they valued most, and, in fact, one where actually the UK
graduates were reporting probably amongst the highest in these international
studies. I think that we do have to be
careful not necessarily to impute values to students, and whilst I think there
is quite a lot of research around which is saying that today's students are
very instrumental, I do not think necessarily that precludes attaching a lot of
importance to a lot of other values as well.
One of the things, while I am speaking, I might just mention, because it
is coming back to, I think, the Britishness and the citizenship, is the social
and cultural elements of the student experience and I think they and others
have mentioned the international nature of this. I would remark though that I think on some campuses the only
students who are around to have a social and cultural experience are the
international ones, because all the home students are busily working down at
the supermarket to pay their fees. I
think the extent to which the student experience is changing now is another
aspect we have to take account of.
Chairman: David, who has been
extremely patient, will take us on to our last section, on mobility.
Q648 Mr Chaytor:
Can I pursue this question of the apparently limited interest of UK students in
studying abroad and ask specifically what are Cardiff University and Nottingham
University doing about this? If we
assume it is a good thing that the HE experience is internationalised, is there
positive action from Cardiff and Nottingham?
Professor Brown: I think
Nottingham seems to be very good at it and I think we are really bad at
it. We do not have a lot of overseas
students. I think it is about ten,
12 per cent, and I am not sure we want to increase that.
Q649 Chairman:
You have a lot of English people?
Professor Brown: We have a lot
of English people in Cardiff, that is right, we do have, from the South East
particularly. I think there is a big
issue about how we address that international marketplace and I think now we
are trying to do this.
Q650 Mr Chaytor:
I am sorry, maybe we are talking at cross-purposes. I am looking at the question of British students studying abroad?
Professor Brown: I am sorry; it
is round the other way. It is part of
their experience. I cannot talk about
the University generally but I can talk about our School, which is that we are
desperately trying to go out there and sign agreements with other, and this is
quite important, of course, in terms of understanding this discussion, what we
would regard as leading universities elsewhere for the exchange of
students. We have the same problem as
everybody else, which is that students come to us from overseas but getting our
students to go overseas is a problem, and I think it goes back to John's point.
Q651 Mr Chaytor:
What is the problem for your students; what is the root cause of this?
Professor Brown: I think part of
the problem is the three-year degree, that it does not give them much time.
Q652 Mr Chaytor:
They have got three summer vacations to get off their backsides and go and
visit some interesting European places?
Professor Brown: You can do
that, but, of course, if you have got student fees to pay - - -
Q653 Mr Chaytor:
Which they do not have to now, because it is deferred?
Professor Brown: They have still
got to live, and I think they are in debt over time.
Q654 Mr Chaytor:
(- Inaudible -) to help them live?
Professor Brown: Most students
have big problems, which is why they are working during their university
studies to try to keep going during their three years. If you say, "Okay, we're going to extend it
to four years, because we think it's a really good idea for you to go off
somewhere else," I think it is a really good idea. I think virtually everybody should have overseas experience, or
at least some kind of sandwich element, with a degree, but actually
implementing that is extremely difficult, and there is the language issue, that
unless it is the US or Australia, or somewhere, they have not got the language
skills to be able to take up the opportunity.
Q655 Mr Chaytor:
The language problem is historic and that is not going to be changed overnight
until the changes in the primary curriculum filter through in ten years or
more. On the other issue, the financial
issue, is there a stream of funding within Cardiff University which is set
aside to support students going abroad?
Professor Brown: No, we have not
got the resources to do that; maybe we could give them £50, or something. It is not going to help; it is a really big
problem, I think.
Q656 Chairman:
Why is not the British Council helping?
Mr Davidson: The Erasmus scheme,
of course, we do administer now, and the Erasmus scheme does provide
assistance.
Q657 Mr Chaytor:
How many students a year go abroad with Erasmus?
Mr Davidson: Seven thousand; that
was in 2005, I think, which is the latest figure.
Q658 Mr Chaytor:
Do you have any figures, Martin, of the total number of UK students going
abroad as part of their course, or would anybody have those figures?
Mr Davidson: I am not aware of
any; whatever it is is anecdotal. What
we are seeing is a decline. We have got
figures on declining numbers of students taking up Erasmus places, so it has
dropped from 12,000 to 7,000 in two, three years.
Q659 Mr Chaytor:
Is that a reduction in the overall programme?
Mr Davidson: No, that is a
reduction in British student take-up.
Q660 Mr Chaytor:
So there are vacancies on the Erasmus programme?
Mr Davidson: There are vacancies
available and money not spent on it. On
taking over the programme, we have taken on a commitment to increase it to
43,000 students by 2012, which does not fill me with enthusiasm, I have to say;
but the barriers are real. We did some
research in 2003 with HEFCE and the barriers were language, finance and credit
transfer. Language we have mentioned
already, the finance has been mentioned and the other issue is the
universities' preparedness to accept credit transfer from experience elsewhere,
and, to date, the universities have shown themselves remarkably reluctant to
accept credit transfer.
Q661 Chairman:
Was not Burgess involved? On the one
hand, we have had credit transfer with Burgess looking at it, is not there a
Burgess report, domestically, in the UK universities? On the other hand, we have got the Bologna Process; has not that
helped at all, that this may be a lesson?
You have got rid of some of the Chevening scholarships, have you not;
they have declined in number?
Mr Davidson: I am sorry, but
Chevening is inward rather than outward.
Q662 Chairman:
There is only one way?
Mr Davidson: Yes. On Erasmus; this is about average flow. They are two-way but each nation has an
Erasmus agent who manages the flow out from their country into other
countries. The flow into the UK, on
Erasmus, is about double the outward flow, but that is administered by the
national agencies.
Q663 Mr Chaytor:
Can I ask Bernadette about Nottingham.
Does the existence of your campus in China have any advantage for home
students in Nottingham?
Professor Robinson: It does,
but, as I said, I am not here to speak on behalf of Nottingham, but I can get
that information and send it, about the mobility of students. I think Nottingham is fairly active; how
successful it is I would not be able to say, in terms of numbers.
Q664 Mr Chaytor:
Could I ask again, the growth of the decision by some European universities to
offer degree programmes taught in English presumably is directed at Asian
students to divert them from the UK, but is this likely to have an advantage
for UK students, in encouraging them to study in Europe, or is that just not an
issue at all? Is it in any way going to
be attractive for UK students to, say, take a degree in English in The
Netherlands or Germany as against here?
Professor Brennan: My perception
is that this is something which is happening predominantly at the postgraduate
level and the take-up at postgraduate level of UK students is still relatively
low compared with the European norm. If
we did see a movement and a growth at the taught Master's level, in other
words, Stage 2 Bologna, that could be, arguably, the point at which this
sort of mobility could start taking off, in the sense that the provision is
certainly growing, as you say, in quite a lot of European countries, although
again there is still this, I think, central problem which has already been
referred to: is the Master's stage a one-year or a two-year programme?
Q665 Mr Chaytor:
Does this have any impact; the question of the need to internationalise the
undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, does it have any impact on the
one-year Master's problem, because if there is a concern that the one-year UK
Master's is under threat because of the Bologna Process, would not building
onto that some international component deal with this problem of credits and
transfer? Has anyone examined that?
Professor Brennan: I do not
know. My view is that there are
question-marks about the sustainability of one-year Master's courses in the
long run, and that would be quite an interesting way of extending it.
Q666 Mr Chaytor:
Could I pursue with Martin the question of credit transfer, the transferability
of the credits. Do you think that the
way to improve the situation is largely through bilateral arrangements between
individual universities, or do you think it can only be improved with top-down
initiatives from Government?
Mr Davidson: I think that the
scale of the problem is such that probably it needs a multifaceted approach
across the board. Certainly it is the
case that individual universities, I think, need to do more to encourage
student flows. The whole of the
recruitment process when students actually go into university, the opportunity
needs to be part of their consideration.
I think that we need to begin to build in school, at sixth-form level, a
further exploration of opportunities through mobility. I think also it does require a greater
top-down approach, which clearly indicates the advantage which this sort of
mobility programme can deliver. I think
it is quite important to recognise that the existing students, those 7,000
under Erasmus, which are the ones that we have data for, are almost exclusively
from pre-1992 universities, in other words, the old research universities, and
they are very, very predominantly from a small ethnic section, in other words,
white, middle-class students, who are taking it up. There is virtually no ethnic minority take-up of the opportunity,
there is very limited take-up from the new universities, and all that, I think,
does indicate some potentially quite important social issues about the mobility
of British students as well.
Q667 Mr Chaytor:
Erasmus provides financial support to students who go abroad?
Mr Davidson: It does, yes.
Q668 Mr Chaytor:
The blockage here may be to do with language but it is not necessarily to do
with financial support; but is it not an issue for the British Council in terms
of marketing of the Erasmus programme if the take-up is confined largely to
pre-1992 universities?
Mr Davidson: It is. I would say, in defence of my institution,
we took over the marketing only in January so we have got a bit of a way to go
yet; but, yes, there is an issue about marketing. There is also a slight tendency to blame the students for not
wanting to go overseas. I think we have
to start from the point that students make pretty coherent decisions about
where their future best lies, and if it is not to have an overseas experience
at the undergraduate level then I think we ought to be asking the question why
it is not of value to them.
Q669 Chairman:
Where is the leadership in the sector?
Where would you expect the leadership to come from in the sector?
Mr Davidson: I think the
leadership is going to have to come from two areas. Clearly, there is a responsibility on my own organisation; if we
believe in international mobility, which we do, then we have got to start doing
much more to publicise it. I think the
institutions themselves have got to start seeing value in that and that means
accepting the value of the overseas experience. Whether or not it is a university experience or some other
experience, work attachment, for example, a number of universities are
beginning to look at that as an opportunity as well, which might take up the
issue about being able to do something during long summer vacations, etc. Also I think there is an issue for
Government, at the centre, also to start demonstrating the value which is
attached to this sort of experience for students.
Q670 Mr Chaytor:
Is Erasmus the only programme that would provide financial support for students
to study abroad as part of an undergraduate degree?
Mr Davidson: As far as I am
aware, it is the only coherent programme.
Individual institutions may have their individual programmes. There are other European mobility programmes
at different levels but not at the undergraduate level.
Q671 Mr Chaytor:
Erasmus is for an academic year only?
Mr Davidson: It is for a variety
of different periods; they are small periods of time.
Q672 Chairman:
You can go for a month or a term?
Mr Davidson: Yes. You can go for a year, if it is appropriate,
yes.
Q673 Chairman:
John, why has not the Open University rallied the troops on this and said "This
is all disgraceful; the carbon footprint of all this international travel for
study is awful"? Could not a lot of
this be done by distance learning?
Research, I think we were getting there, but having a relative who is an
academic, a young academic, describing how in a short time, ten years, the
nature of the research has been transformed by the accessibility, you do not
have to go to the wonderful institutions with great libraries any longer, you
can actually sit at your PC and get the original documentation on your PC, so
is not collaboration worldwide, in terms of research, so much more
possible? That is the future, is it
not; is it, Phil, is it, John?
Professor Brennan: As with other
colleagues, I could not speak particularly for my University. Essentially, I think I would agree with the
proposition that the possibilities of international contacts, exchanges, via
the Internet, without leaving home, are huge, including the Open University is
doing a lot, it has a huge number of international students and, of course,
there are all sorts of potential mixed-mode experiences. We are talking about a time or a year
abroad; if you can link a period abroad with some kind of e-learning experience
which is internationalised, simply being abroad for a week actually might do
it. I think that technology gives us a
lot of new models.
Chairman: Someone going back to
brush up their rather poor French and seeing the quality of the technology you
can have to help you learn, on your own, I am just amazed how the world has
changed. Should we not have a new
University of Sangatte, not very far away, intensively teaching language to
English students who have not learned any languages yet?
Mr Pelling: Some people might
think that Sangatte is too close.
Q674 Chairman:
The world has changed. What is the
British Council doing to lobby, to turn this around, and say, "We could
actually do something about the proficiency in languages in this country"? I go to your places in foreign countries and
it is wonderful, you have got micro universities there, teaching people to
learn English. You have all those
techniques, why do you not turn them round, on this country; you are not
allowed to?
Mr Davidson: Probably one or two
people would object a little bit if we did.
I think that what we are doing really is looking at how we can use IT
techniques, virtual learning techniques, to widen the opportunity for students,
both in this country and in others, principally, I have to say, at the school
level rather than at university; but the sheer number of school links and other
links which are now taking place, across multiple countries, is enormous and
something which I think we should continue to grow.
Q675 Chairman:
The OU was restricted on foreign language teaching, was it not, at one stage?
Professor Brennan: I am not
sure; we do it now, certainly.
Q676 Chairman:
Do you? I thought, in the beginning,
you were frightened that you would be seen as unfair competition with the
private sector: no?
Professor Brennan: I am sorry, I
am not aware of that.
Q677 Chairman:
We have come to the end of our session.
Is there anything you have not been asked or would like to say before we
close this session: what have we missed?
Professor Brown: There is just
one thing, and thank you for giving the opportunity to broaden out the range of
things that we have discussed, it has been very helpful, for me anyway, at
least I have been able to say what I wanted to say, which is good. There is one additional comment I would like
to make. We have not talked at all
about differences in the graduate experience within the UK. One of the things which struck us very much
from our research is the ways in which these leading companies, you would think
that their big issue would be the wealth of talent, so if you look at the
massive expansion of higher education around the world, that is their big
concern, what are they going to do with all this talent, yet do they talk about
that; no, they talk about the 'war for talent'. In other words, what they talk about is "how we recruit the right
people for our organisations." Very
often we are talking then about the top universities, no longer just in the UK
but globally. They are internationally
benchmarking universities now, and so, for example, if you are an international
company it is likely that the UK would have probably only about four or five
universities it would regard as world-class for its purposes. If you are in one of those universities then
your chances of doing pretty well are pretty good; so for the top ten or 15 per
cent of graduates in the UK I think their prospects are okay. What worries me a great deal is the rest;
because the more people you put into higher education, whether you like it or
not, going into higher education comes with a set of expectations. If you like, it is a psychological contract
between the university and the Government, because the Government has pushed
this very much; but learning is learning, you go to university and you will
improve your prospects. What I think is
that for large numbers of graduates it is not going to improve their prospects
very much, and so I think looking at the differentiation in the graduate
experience is very important.
Professor Brennan: I think there
is a lot of evidence to suggest that actually it is the prospects of students
who go to many new universities that are almost transformed by going to higher
education, because if you do not look at the input factors you can
misunderstand the output factors. Some
of our élite universities are very good at selecting an élite and that élite
then is rewarded in the labour market; but, essentially, they were élite when
they started and they are going to be the élite when they finish. The movement is actually taking place
elsewhere in the sector and it may not be as spectacular, and of course they
are not going to get as good jobs as being a member of the élite, but if you
ask the question "How has your life been changed by going to university?" I am
not sure that you will get the best stories from the élite institutions.
Professor Robinson: Just two
points. One is, I think we need to look
more at the equation of cost, quality and value for money in relation to
international students, both coming to the UK and on UK courses. The second point I would want to make is
that I think there needs to be more exploration of different models of
delivering courses for international students, using new technology, using
different combinations of in-country, out of country, whatever. I think getting away from the idea, which
many universities have, that there is only one kind of recruitment and that is
bringing students here. I think the
future lies with exploring the diversity of models and using them, not having
just a single model, with a single audience, which may vanish, for some
institutions, in the short term.
Q678 Chairman:
Thank you very much for that. I did
think, Phillip, as you were expanding on that last theory of yours, that if you
were up in Huddersfield University, in terms of getting people jobs and adding
value to their careers, that is just Huddersfield, of course, but, like a lot
of the new universities, we produce a lot of entrepreneurs. If you are blocked, if you have got the
talent and you are blocked from getting into the élite professions, it may be
that you want to do something a lot more useful than getting into the City.
Professor Brown: I hope you are
right.
Chairman: It has been a very
good session; can I thank you. Could
you see this as a kind of 'hello'? I
thought we started to get under the skin of the argument somewhere, as the
process is kind of a development one, but now you know who we are and we know
who you are can we remain in conversation and communication. As you are going home, wherever it is, if
there are things you think you should have said to the Committee, please get in
touch; we are here to discuss these issues, this is a very important inquiry
for us and we want to get it right.
Thank you.