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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 285-viii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
Wednesday 4 July 2007 PROFESSOR ALISON RICHARD and PROFESSOR GEORG WINCKLER PROFESSOR LAN XUE and MR TIM GORE Evidence heard in Public Questions 745 - 832
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 4 July 2007 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr Douglas Carswell Mr David Chaytor Mr Gordon Marsden Fiona Mactaggart Stephen Williams ________________ Memoranda submitted by Professor Alison Richard and Professor Georg Winckler
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Professor Alison Richard, Vice Chancellor, University of Cambridge, and Professor Georg Winckler, Rector of the University of Vienna and President of the European University Association, gave evidence. Q745 Chairman: Can I welcome Professor Alison Richard and Professor Georg Winckler to our proceedings and say that we are very grateful for them taking the time to come before the Committee. We can make Professor Richard if we had to; we cannot, Professor Winckler, make you, as you are not a British citizen, but, of course, we are always very pleased to see Professor Richard and I think she is quite happy to be here. I hope you are, Alison, anyway! Professor Richard: Indeed. Q746 Chairman: As I was saying outside, this is a very important inquiry for us. We have been to Australia, we have been to China, we have taken quite a lot of evidence on the sustainable university and the future of higher education in a global context, and so we seek to learn. I am going to ask Professor Richard and Professor Winckler to say a few words before the questions start. Professor Richard. Professor Richard: Thank you very much, Chairman. I was Provost of Yale University in the United States before returning to Cambridge as Vice Chancellor in 2003, and then, in 2004 2005, two university working groups viewed and made recommendations for Cambridge's international strategy, looking both at the experience of individual students and scholars but also at the university's institutional relationships internationally, and my brief remarks this morning are based on both those working groups' findings and also on my own experience. The starting point is that English is increasingly the language of not just business and science but also education. The US has the largest and strongest, though not without its own problems, university system in which English is the first language, and the UK's university system is much smaller but, in my estimation, punches far above its weight and outperforms every other nation except the US. For example, just six countries host two-thirds of students studying abroad. The UK ranks second only to the US in popularity. We are also the only country other than the US to have universities, Cambridge and Oxford, in the top ten in the world according to the Shanghai Jiao Tong World League Table - one must take league tables with a pinch of salt, I think, but there is some signal amidst the noise - but the competition is intensifying. I believe that our position globally is, as it were, ours to lose. What will it take to keep the UK system as a global centre of excellence, respected and admired around the world? I would like to make four points to answer that question: (1) we must stay focused on quality, not on volume; (2) we must price the education we offer competitively, particularly at the post graduate level where international competition for talent is intensifying; (3) at the national level policy-making must remain joined up and sensitive to the knock on effects for student recruitment of policy decisions in other areas. I would just like to say, I think it is pretty well joined up and quite sensitive at this point. We must hold on to that. (4) We must consolidate the UK's role as a major hub in the emerging global network of universities. It is emerging fast. I think we can do that through international partnerships and alliances and also, if I may say so, through better marketing. Why is all of this important? Speaking locally, parochially, for Cambridge it is absolutely a matter of keeping the university among the handful of universities recognised as the best in the world. For the nation, universities extend the UK's influence around the world, in addition to being a foreign currency earner, through the students we educate and through the impact of our research. Finally, I believe it is healthy, helpful and actually critical for there to be several centres of excellence in the world. The UK is one and it is of global importance, not just of national importance, that we remain one. Thank you. Q747 Chairman: Thank you, Professor Richard. Professor Winckler. Professor Winckler: Perhaps to introduce myself, I would like to indicate two experiences I have. The first one is I have been Rector of the University of Vienna since 1999, was chairing not only the Austrian Rectors Conference but also the reform process of the Austrian university system. There was a complete revamping in 2002, granting autonomy and also granting finance autonomies and other things, and what is also important perhaps to indicate is that the University of Vienna was the flagship university of the old Austrian/Hungarian empire, as you perhaps might remember, with quite many noble prices and so on, and there is the strategy to make the University of Vienna again the hub of central European various initiatives and I think we are successfully doing so. There is strong growth in the region, especially in Eastern Europe. Universities are reorganising, and I think you will see a change in the landscape in central Europe soon to come, and I think central Europe will then exploit not only (and I include) Germany, because this area has been somehow hit by national fragmentations and did not actually exploit the cultural diversity it has. So it is important to see that English is a very important language, but it is not the only language. We need to derive our strength also from cultural diversity. My second experience; I have been President of the European University Association since 2005, a little bit more than two years, and have been engaged now in various discussions about the modernisation agenda for universities. I was a member of the expert group which led to the document, in May 2006, of the modernisation agenda for universities, which came actually out of the Hampton Court follow-up of Tony Blair's very famous speech in October 2005, and I am also one of the participants in reshaping the European research area. I am also engaged in various university reform projects. I have participated now in the Finnish discussion. Finland will very likely change its university system soon in order to gain strength. So, there are a lot of things going on. Let me just say some words, which you can also see in the written document. The first point is actually when you come to look at universities you will see that the top universities are in the United States. I think only UK universities are able to compete globally. I think this has to be stressed. Yet, if you just count among the top 200, you will see that there are quite many European universities, as many as the US, so it is important to have a strategy for excellence in order to regain strength. The situation becomes more dramatic, if I may underline that, if you look, for example, to the ISI most highly cited researchers, or if you look to scopers or other rankings, according to the most highly cited researchers (and I may just give you the example of mathematics), of the 300 most highly cited mathematicians in the world, 200 are associated, affiliated, with US institutions, Europe has 19 in France (still very strong), 18 in the United Kingdom and only seven in Germany. So, you see that there has been a change and so what we really need is to have more people in the various fields at the top, but if you look at the very top stars, you will see that actually there are quite many Europeans in the top 20, so we have Nobel Prize winners. So, what is a very important strategy is to build critical mass around the very top researchers, and the ISI has the strategy with having the advanced researchers grant, for example. I cited mathematics because mathematics is not driven by costly infrastructure, so the financial burden is not of such importance, and I cite mathematics because it is not driven also by national languages, but this is. I do not want to talk about new entrants. It is very clear that India, Asia, and so on, will be new entrants - they invest highly. If you look at the research with GDP, China would already rank among the top 12 in Europe, so they are really investing a lot. India wants to increase the number of universities from 300 to 1,500 in 2050. Alison Richard has already talked about the US system. I think what is very clear to say is that neither the French system, with École Spéciale, Grand Écoles and the university system, nor the German one with the Humboldtian university type, and I would say to a certain extent even the British, could not meet the challenges of the twentieth century. It was the American hybrid system, having a traditional college education on the one hand and having on top of that a PhD education, which allowed the 200/300 research centres, intensive universities really to gather a lot of strength, and this combination proved to be very successful. It is also perhaps important to see that there is no planning at the federal level; there is a lot of planning at the state level. At the federal level you have mobility of staff and students supported by various schemes, you have also important federal institutions like the National Science Foundation, with a huge volume, now six billion US dollars a year, which will double in the next years to come, compared only to one billion Euros of the European Research Council, you have the National Institutes of Health with 28 billion US dollars, we have massive funding agencies and you have only a few general regulations. What you get in the United States, and this is very important, is not only a competition of universities but you get also a system competition amongst the states which makes the system very healthy. I do not want to talk about pressures to increase, about participation rates, lifelong learning and things like that which we have to do, we are doing badly. If you look into the modernisation report of the European Union you will see that actually this is one of the big challenges, how we can increase participation rates and lifelong learning. It is very important in this ageing society. There is globalisation with new forms of universities - I just indicated that - but let me just say, what we really need in Europe is modernisation of the university system, and I am putting all my efforts at the European level to make the universities move out of the shadows of national ministerial bureaucracies, become strong, that there is more funding for the universities so that we have to invest more and we have to invest better. That is perhaps enough from me. Q748 Chairman: That is an excellent start. As you both may have seen, the first part of the inquiry was looking at the Bologna Process and we wanted to have a look at Bologna in a hurry because the Bologna meeting was in London and we wanted to get it out before then. In the context of what you have both said, can I switch to Alison Richard and say, from what Professor Winckler has just said, do you see that necessity for Cambridge to work with other research rich universities across Europe? A lot of the evidence that we have had does concentrate on the United States, does concentrate the emerging economies of China and India and less, you said, about co-operation and communication and partnership of universities across Europe. What is your view on that, Professor Richard? Professor Richard: I think that Professor Winckler has spoken powerfully and eloquently to the transformations that are rapidly getting underway in Continental Europe. I think the fact of the matter is that it is widely recognised that, through a combination of state oversight, under funding, a different philosophy about access to university education, the greatness of the European universities has declined, and there is every indicator at the institution level that that has been the case. In Germany, in Austria, even in France now - President Sarkozy has been speaking out about this at the level of the EU, President Barosso also spoke out about this - I think we will see quite rapid change going forward. That in turn will drive greater co-operation and Cambridge academics will co-operate and collaborate where they see interesting scholars with whom to collaborate. We already have, for example, a shared Masters' programme in law with the University of Paris VI. We exchange students. They spend half of their legal training in Paris and half of it in Cambridge. I suspect that we will see more of that at the training level going forward, and the research collaboration, I think we will see much more of that as the EIT gets underway, if it does get underway, as national centres embedded in existing national universities, which I think is now the model, which is a much more promising model than the earlier notion of establishing MIT in Europe. I am pretty optimistic about what is going on in Europe. Q749 Chairman: What you are saying, in a sense, is it is the American model, partly the UK model, where there has been much more autonomy for institutions and the more successful model. We said in our Bologna Report that that was a worry we had. There was a history of centralisation or central government control of HE in many European countries. I think Professor Winckler said in the twentieth century the American model was successful. Is the American model still the proven model that we should be emulating? Professor Richard: The Spellings Report in 2006 flagged up some real concerns in the American model. I think one of the strengths of the American model is, indeed, its diversity, and it is interesting that, if you look at the top 50 universities in the Shanghai Jiao Tong League Table, 30 of them are in the US, 18 of them are state universities, 17 of them private universities, so all the strength is not in the private universities, there is great strength in the state system, and those budgets derive from the state, so it is possible to have substantial state investment but considerable autonomy. The US have been very successful in that regard, but as the state budgets come under increasing pressure, the great California system has been really squeezed by the squeezing of state budgets, and those universities are scrambling to diversify and strengthen their revenue systems. I think the most disturbing statistic coming out of the Spellings Report as far I am concerned is the steady decline in completion rates of degrees in the US. That is an indicator of something amiss, that students, for one reason or another - financial constraints or the sense of whether they are getting value out of the system - are dropping out. The UK, in contrast, has very healthy completion rates. I tend to view the US system still, as I said, as the finest system in the world, but it is not without problems. Professor Winckler: First of all, I would not underestimate the resilience of the American system, because one of the outcomes of the Spellings Commission and the discussion afterwards was that the United States are going to double the money for the National Science Foundation, and there is also a big discussion whether perhaps there has been too much concentration on molecular biology and medicine as an outcome of the concerns of an ageing society and whether the United States should move more into physics and material sciences and so on - so there have been very lively debates, and there will be a report coming out in 2008 - and the United States acts quickly on that, doubling the budgets, and so on, so this is the reason why I do not think that the American system will get into trouble. There is more resilience in the American system; there is also a lot of systems competition. One of the reasons why California now starts to spend more on its prestigious universities is because there is competition within the US with other systems. So, California wants to have the best university system and does not want to be outperformed by Wisconsin and Minnesota. Q750 Chairman: Is it just more money that we need? When we previously looked at this I remember Professor Richard Sykes put so much emphasis on a handful of universities, I can remember saying, "Do you mean a handful? Five?" He said, "Yes." Our report then said that we believed there should be a research rich university in every region of this country, and certainly I personally still believe we were right in that recommendation, but whichever view you take, in order to make UK and European universities more competitive in every sense, what is necessary? Is it more co-operation? Is it more money from government? Is it more money from the private sector? What is it? Professor Richard: We know that, relative to the US, there is a whole percentage point less of GDP invested in the university system in the UK. I believe there is still a funding shortfall, an investment shortfall. Where should that investment come from? Not all from government. It needs to come from the beneficiaries of the system. I believe that means society, for which one can say public sector investment. I think the private sector benefits and needs to invest more and those who individually benefit in one way or the other, I think it is reasonable that they too should contribute. So, a greater investment is part of it, but my observation also, and I think it speaks to something you were saying, Professor Winckler, is that perhaps because it is such a big country compared to the UK, the US is in the midst of this competition amongst universities, amongst states; there is, nonetheless, a much greater comfort with the idea of diversity within the university system, that different universities and different colleges are fulfilling different specific missions within the university system and they celebrate their strengths. What I see happening in the UK is you have an array of universities doing rather different things and many of them doing it very well; then you spin it through 90 degrees, you rank order everybody and then you are suddenly saying: Cambridge is up here and Anglia Ruskin, which is in the city of Cambridge, somehow ranks much lower than Cambridge. Well, actually, Anglia Ruskin does things that Cambridge University cannot do and does not do and vice versa, and we have got to get more comfortable with the idea of ourselves as an eco-system is the way I think of it. I think that is happening. I think that the development of more serious CMU, the Russell Group, The 94 Group. This is a reflection, not of a disintegration of the system, but actually a healthy recognition of the diverse roles we play within that system. The US is much better at that than the UK is, I believe. Q751 Chairman: We have got to have more investment in higher education. That is the truth, is it not? Professor Richard: Yes. Q752 Chairman: You have given us, may I say, Alison, the Dearing mantra, which I think most of us would agree with, but in real money, where should the money come from now? How urgent is this? How urgent is the necessity for Europe and the UK to invest substantially more? Professor Stephen Schwartz was in town this week and mentioned this new, is it, five billion dollar endowment that the Australians have put in, and another five billion is promised for next year, really as a resource for higher education research. What are the things we should be doing and how urgent is it? Professor Winckler: Let me come back to your first question. If you take the United States with about 200, 300 research intensive universities, the EU has about 1,000 universities granting PhDs and they have actually not sufficient money. To run a good research university nowadays, in order to exploit economies of scale and scope and so on, you need to have at least 1,000 good researchers and you need to have at least one billion Euros a year as an annual budget. How many European universities do it? There are quite many, but, as was indicated, perhaps in Europe it would be sufficient to have, I do not know, 300-500 research universities. If you compare that with the United States, this would be the equivalent figure, not 1,000. So, there should be diversification, but the important point is that that should be not ordered from above, from the top, that should be the outcome of an evolutionary process, and, in order to do that, what you really need in Europe is you need to give more money to institutions like, say, the ERC, to have an equivalent institution like the National Science Foundation, because that guarantees that the money will be spent on a competitive basis and will be spent in the right direction. This is what I wanted to say. Do not give the money just all of them, but try to organise something like an evolutionary process so these universities should come up. Professor Richard: For my part, I think that the UK actually manages its research investments very well in that respect, the Research Councils. There is a real hand-off and weak---. Cambridge competes, we compete for the research funding that we receive, we compete successfully, and there is a concentration of research investment in this country, but it is done through healthy competition, and sometimes we lose, and that is healthy too, because a world-class university cannot live in a kind of university desert. Cambridge's strength is, in part, a consequence of the strength of the entire system and we are constantly being challenged from across the system. Professor Winckler: Briefly, first of all, I would like to make a compliment for the British system because you have these competitive funding schemes with respect to research and in many other countries in Europe we are trying to emulate that. The second point is that I think we need to do it in a wider framework. I think the United Kingdom, if you look at the kind of scale and scope which you need to look for, we have to do it at the European level. This is the reason why I am very much advocating the European Research Council. Chairman: Thank you for those introductory answers. Stephen. Q753 Stephen Williams: Perhaps I could start with Professor Richard with some questions about the global competition that Britain is facing over the next decade but also the collaboration opportunities that there are out there as well. I guess the sheer demographics suggest that China and India are going to overtake certainly us and maybe the United States at some point in the next decade. Aside from volume terms though, when do you think they will overtake us in terms of quality? I hear what you say about rankings, but in terms of the research output from China and India, when do you think that is going to surpass Britain, Europe and the United States? Professor Richard: I have no crystal ball. The seriousness of the investment that is going on in both those countries to build those systems is incontrovertible. Professor Winckler: I just wanted to say, I think you do not have to look at that generally, you have to look at that in two various fields. There was a very good study and a research policy - this is a journal - at the beginning of 2006 in order to indicate how strong China has become in the field of nano-technologies and all nano-sciences, doubling in the world share from, I do not know, 10 % to 20 %, and Hong Kong University is included. So, what I would say is there are various fields in which Chinese universities will become very strong. Professor Richard: Yes, but I would say that those specificities do not make for a great university system that is educating citizens of the future, leaders of the future in a broadly educated way, which is a rather different question, which I think will take a little longer than developing specific fields. Q754 Stephen Williams: Are you effectively saying that Chinese and Indian universities have taken a more utilitarian approach to education; they are educating people with a view to economic advantage, whereas our system has other objectives? Professor Richard: I think, as far as I can see, we have got maybe a decade to consolidate and to position this system to retain its competitive edge, and I think a lot about how do you compete? Having come from 30 years in a very big country of such geo-political importance, how does this very small island keep its significance in the world? And I come back every time to saying, we have to operate at the very high end of quality, and the risk that I see to the UK system is that the under funding of our educational activities historically, less so in increased investment, but to the degree that it is under funded, the temptation will be to go for volume rather than go for quality. You bring in overseas students at premium fees. They are not necessarily the best students, because the best students will be going to institutions that will give them financial support, and then they do not get the experience that they had anticipated paying those premium fees and you suddenly get into a downward spiral. That is not happening, but that would be the worry if there is not sufficient investment. Q755 Stephen Williams: What do you think the UK's response should be to this challenge or opportunity, depending how you want to look at it? Is it in terms of thinking: "Can we consolidate? Can we compete?", or is the future in collaboration, just accepting that we are not going to be able to compete on equal terms in volume or finance so we had better just accept that and collaborate and build collaborative arrangements now? Professor Richard: My view is that it is both. As I look at it, certainly from the point of view of Cambridge, we are competing for talent, there is no question about it, we are competing globally, but smart competition is often co-operation: because actually academics will send their brightest graduating students to their colleagues at other universities, they will point them in that direction, so Cambridge's strategy is to build bilateral partnerships around the world with selected partners and also to participate in a small number of international alliances. We are part of LERU, which is a European based group, we are part of an international alliance of ten research universities around the world, and building those bridges allows both students, staff and ideas to flow more freely, and that is good for us, good for our partner institutions. Q756 Stephen Williams: Do you think the UK is doing enough of that? You speak about what Cambridge is doing, but do you think the rest of the UK higher education sector is following your example to the extent that we should? Professor Richard: Yes, indeed, I think that we are seeing this right the way across the board. There is a very interesting book that came out recently about what makes Silicon Valley hum, called The New Argonauts, and it talks not about brain drain or brain gain but brain circulation. It is a slightly weird concept, brain circulation, but it is pointing out that people now are increasingly flowing across national boundaries in the course of their lives and spending considerable periods of time in one place or another. The UK needs to be a great destination in that circulation of brains, and that is only partly about money; it is also about being a great place to live and work. We recruit from the United States to Cambridge and it is not because we can beat out other US universities in terms of salary, though we are doing better than we were, but people really like the environment, and we should not lose track of that. Q757 Stephen Williams: On that question of salary, we used to hear a lot about the brain drain, particularly in my own subject, history, to the United States. Do you think that is reversing? Do we offer attractive enough salaries to get the best brains in the world to Britain? Professor Richard: I do not keep score. If I did, at the senior level I think that for Cambridge we certainly come out quits, and possibly ahead. I worry more about the junior level and the movement of post-docs, particularly graduate students. We under fund graduate students. I think the UK has been slow coming to the recognition that there you are not just competing with other universities, you are competing with an increasingly interesting private sector. If you are a really bright 21-year old and you have just got your undergraduate degree, what might you do with your life? Going on and doing a PhD is not necessarily what you might do. In the US, if you go into a first rank US university now to do a PhD you get a letter of admission that says, "And we are giving you full tuition and a stipend of $20,000 a year for the next five years." We have got to load more funding into graduate student education in this country if we are to continue to attract the most outstanding students. Professor Winckler: I would like to add two points. The first point is the European University Association has been very hard working in reshaping PhD education in Europe. That is the reason why you find it now in the various Bologna ministerial declarations. The EUA has had workshops and we need (and this is the important point) institutional strategies on that, because in former times PhD education was too much left to various professors and the institutions did not really care. What we need is to care. It is the grant and stipend system which should be an institution policy. We should have quality management, quality assurance with respect to that; that should be an institutional strategy. We should try to get the right cohorts with so-called structured PhD education, and so on. The second point is, and this is one of the reasons why Continental Europe fell behind, we did not grant independence to early stage researchers. It is not only the question of the money they get, but it is the question of independence of research they have, and it is very important that we grant to the early stage researchers independence so that they can conduct their own studies. Q758 Chairman: Professor Winckler, they need independence, but they actually need some guarantee that there is a career. Professor Winckler: That is right. Q759 Chairman: I do not know about the rest of Europe, but in the UK too many of our young staff are on short-term contracts, they do not know how long they are going to be in that, and many of them are in their thirties before they get any assurance that they have got a career. That surely must put off some of the brightest who are coming into our universities from being retained? Professor Winckler: This will be part of the discussion we are going to have in October during the EU Presidency of Portugal. There will be a big meeting on the relaunching of the European research area, and one of the important points is to brighten the career perspectives of young researchers, because the important point is that they should not find their career perspective within their own institution, they should have a career perspective also to move to industry or to other institutions in order also to have this kind of brain circulation which we need. Q760 Stephen Williams: Just asking questions on the international student market, there are about four billion pounds worth of fee contributions to UK universities in terms of the spending power, even more to invisible exports effectively. Do you think the focus has been perhaps a bit wrong, seeing international students as cash cows for the higher education sector rather than the academic possibilities on offer both to those students and to our own home-grown students? Do you think the emphasis has been too much on the money and not the academic experience? Professor Richard: Let me make a general point in terms of the cash cow concept. By our estimation, at the undergraduate level the short fall between the revenues dedicated for undergraduate education and the actual cost of that education is actually not appreciably different for overseas students than for home-grown or EU students. Simply there is no case for suggesting that they are cash cows. Q761 Stephen Williams: Is that Cambridge's cost of teaching students or across the entire sector? Professor Richard: I just wanted to say that for the record. As far as Cambridge is concerned, we offer one of the finest educations in the world and it is an expensive education to offer and it involves loading in some aspect of cost of our collections - our libraries, our research infrastructure, our facilities and so forth, the capital investments. All of that gets loaded into that number. I do want to emphasise that there is no incentive for us to think of overseas students as a cash cow, but, as I said earlier, and I think it is a risk to our system. Insofar as the educational activities of universities are under funded, it will be tempting use the unregulated market of international students as a cash cow. Q762 Stephen Williams: I accept that for Cambridge it might be marginal, the contribution you might get from international students, but for some universities that is probably not the case. Do you think there is a danger that the UK grant might be damaged if overseas students feel they are not getting value for money, particularly when they can compare, once they do circulate and mix with their own students, that they are paying three thousand pounds and they may be paying fourteen thousand plus? Professor Richard: Yes. I think it is a problem. Q763 Stephen Williams: The final question, to finish off this section in terms of our own students. One of the experiences that we picked up in China, and we are coming on to that later, is that too few students from this country study abroad compared to the students who are coming from other countries to study here. Do you think we are doing enough to educate British students to be globally aware, to be aware of the opportunities in higher education that are available to them abroad? Professor Richard: I do not know whether you are thinking about undergraduate or postgraduates students, but at the undergraduate level, taking that first, first of all, I think you are right, there are not the same level of overseas junior year abroad. The US in particular places enormous emphasis on getting students out of the US and studying elsewhere, but that is in part because the US is so big, but if you look at the percentage of students in the UK who have spent time in Continental Europe, for example, for one reason or another, it is a train ride away and my observation is that the UK is more kind of unthinkingly international than the US is by a long shot. So, the US is having to be much more strategic about it and its educational objectives; I think we need to get a bit more strategic about it than we have. I do not think it is good enough to do it in an unthinking way, and it is one of the reasons to have these partnership programmes, so you can open up summer exchange programmes. We have the exchange programme with MIT, which is enormously successful and interesting, not just for the students but for the faculty who teach them. There is a whole pedagogical innovation activity that has been driven by Cambridge academics, finding qualities in the MIT students they do not see in their own students, and vice versa. So there can be great value in student exchange beyond simply to the students themselves. So, the short answer, yes, we should do more. At the graduate level, I think the real concern there for the US and for the UK is the 20, 25 year trend of declining involvement in PhD programmes that we have seen in both countries, such that in engineering programmes and economics it is very difficult to find a UK national in some of these programmes now. Does that matter? At some level one could say not much. I think, though, it does matter for two reasons. I do not think it is good for the UK not to be producing any of its own academics who are British academics, and also what does it say about the perception of universities and an academic career if none of our young people in the UK, or a very small number, are interested in dedicating their lives to research and education, research and teaching? Q764 Stephen Williams: Just to clarify what you were saying there, you are saying that there are not enough UK students studying at PhD level in this country. Professor Richard: I am saying it is a concern. How many is enough? I just say that for the last 25 years there has been a declining enrolment, and the reasons for that are complex. That trend is not unique to the UK; it is also the case in the US, and it is a source of worry there as well. Q765 Chairman: And the rest of Europe, Professor Winckler? Professor Winckler: This is just not true for the rest of Europe, because many students in Continental Europe use Erasmus programmes of various kinds in order to get the kind of global awareness you are talking about, and one of these reasons is, of course, in order to improve their skills in English. If you look, for example, to Continental Europe, Spanish students, Italian students and now, for example Polish or Czech students, are really using the opportunities to study abroad, not only in Europe, but also they like to go to Australia, they like to go to the United States, and so on. So I think that has increased in Continental Europe. Q766 Chairman: What about the question of European students staying on and becoming PhD students. Is there a declining number in Europe? Professor Winckler: No, PhD studies will be increasing too. We have to be a little bit careful when we look at the statistics, because we still have in Continental Europe a huge amount of what I would call old PhD studies where you can get your PhD quite easily without doing perhaps a lot of research; but there is the brain drain with respect to PhD to the United States, either PhD or post-doc, and this is one of our challenges and this is one of our reasons to revamp the university systems. Q767 Fiona Mactaggart: I just wanted to ask a question, Professor Richard, following on from what you said about the value of partnership, the importance of postgraduate students. When we were in China I met a British chemist who was working in a Chinese university who was jointly supervising PhD students with a French university, and the supervision was shared between the two universities. He was actually very enthusiastic about the kind of intellectual stimulation for him and for the students in that. He said it seems to be quite impossible to do that with British universities. I wondered if you knew of any examples of it and if you could tell the Committee why it is not possible for British universities to have this kind of exchange within a programme, sharing supervision of postgraduate students between universities. Is it cost? Professor Richard: It is not impossible and we do it. We have a joint postgraduate programme with NIH in Washington where students spend two years there, two years in Cambridge. We have just launched such a programme with the National University of Singapore. We also have a very innovative Masters level programme in Chinese studies immersed in particular academic areas - political science, economics and law - with Peking University, where students spend time at Cambridge, go out to Peking, come back to Cambridge. I think it is a very interesting model and it helps to establish all kinds of partnerships. The teachers get to work together. As I said, we have this joint Maîtrise with Paris, we have a joint law programme now with Harvard. It is happening more and more. I should just say, these things all take time and effort and staff commitment to make them work, and, as I look at Cambridge, we do not have the resources to put the infrastructure in to support some of these activities as well as one might, and you could pose the question, because you asked the question, how could government invest more? Should there be dedicated funding to support international partnership? Part of me says, yes, and part of me says we have too much ring-fenced funding already, and I am not a fan of ring-fenced funding, it is just endless jumping through hoops. If we could have a broader consensus about what was important and where we were trying to travel as a national system, then I think it is better to leave universities to make their own decisions about how to make the investments that they make. Q768 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask Professor Richard, what specifically do you think the United States is doing to rise to the challenge of growth in India and China that we could learn from? Professor Richard: It is a good question. Professor Winckler is absolutely right that there is no federal strategy in the US. It is very interesting. The Spellings Report is the first effort. One can say that you can go all the way back to Vannevar Bush's report, the classic report of 1946, that basically envisaged what the higher education system of the United States should be about and made a decision to make the country's major investment in R&D channelled through universities, graduate students to be a part of that effort, support for graduate students. Since 1946 there really has been silence, in some sense, on the federal front and I think there is now a growing concern that the system, while still second to none, has these problems. What can we learn? I think there are specific things that we can learn. We can learn that philanthropy is great, you can tap philanthropy, and we are trying to do that now. At Cambridge we are being very successful. If you do not ask, people do not give, but if you ask in a serious way and you make your case well, the English do not have a gene for meanness, is my observation, and we are getting a lot of enthusiasm and interest in the institution that goes far beyond simply philanthropy, and that is what is not well understood here. The relationship with your alumni community is a relationship with the best, brightest ambassadors you could have. They write about you, they talk about you, they connect you to the real world, they give you advice, they interact with the institution in all kinds of ways. We can learn that from the US system, and we need to. That is one really good thing to learn. The other, I believe, which I feel very committed to, is to think about undergraduate education. The forecast of undergraduate education and making it needs blind and needs based, and certainly for a university like Cambridge, as we strive to reach out to all sectors of societies from low-income families right the way across the spectrum, having such a policy in place is absolutely essential. So, in terms of federal policy, I see none right now. In terms of particular practices and aspects that have made that system strong, there I think there are interesting things to look at. Q769 Chairman: Professor Winckler, do you have a view on that? Professor Winckler: I would simply say, the typical reaction of the federal side, if they see a problem like that, is to double the budget of the National Science Foundation, but they do that quickly and with a certain effect. Q770 Mr Chaytor: So, you are both saying that the financing is the keys thing, either rapid investment in the National Science Foundation or the tapping of philanthropists and the establishment of endowments from alumni, but is there nothing structural about the system in the United States that has an advantage over ours and will enable them to continue to compete with China and India? Professor Richard: Part of the differences---. Again, it is going back to what you were saying. The system in the States has grown up out of history, so you have the private universities, you have a state system where they have to argue with the state legislator to get their budget, so it is not as if there are not constraints on the budget, but it is at the level of the state. Professor Winckler: Let me just complement that. Look at the State of California. They see that perhaps they might be losing, but then there is a proposal to invest more in the university system in California, so there is a reaction on the state level. At the federal level there is only just more funding. Professor Richard: Can I make one more point. I said earlier, much earlier, that one of the things I appreciate about the US system is this kind of celebration of the diversity of the system and the niche players within that system from a community college that is really proud of what it is doing in the same city as Berkeley and Stanford and so forth. By the same token, there is a diversity of financial underpinnings that support this system. So, the private universities are able to mobilise their own resources. The state universities still cap the cost of an undergraduate education in order to keep it affordable. The states make investments. The costs of some of those systems are not as high, because of what they are particularly doing. We do not see still here that kind of diversity. There is a kind of one-size-fits-all mindset to some degree here. Professor Winckler: If Stanford sees a problem it will mobilise its alumni and it will receive one billion dollars. Q771 Mr Chaytor: The fact that British universities have not until recently mobilised their alumni the same way, you say, is a weakness and this has to be a way forward? Professor Winckler: I do not know how it is in the United Kingdom. One of the problems in the European Union, the Continental European Union, is that they do not have any good well-working alumni organisations, and usually the alumni do not identify themselves with the universities because they basically say, "This is part of the state. I pay taxes, and that is sufficient." Professor Richard: I think that the good news in the UK is that that was very much the mindset, but the transition to a different way of viewing things is happening as we speak. It is happening at lightening speed, and I think that the new commitment for the Government to come up with matching funds to support philanthropy, however that plays out, these are all good things. I would like to see the tax laws further simplified and taken further in this country, because I think there is, in fact, huge goodwill and, of course, huge wealth in this country that could be tapped to the support of the higher education system. One of the strange things about the UK is that the philanthropy that there is is very differently directed - it is not directed at higher education in this country - quite strikingly differently, whereas in the US it is strongly directed at higher education as well as absolutely at a higher level. Professor Winckler: Allow for institutional autonomy so that you get a certain kind of identity, and then the alumni will like to come back. For example, I studied at Princeton University. I gave more money to Princeton University than to the University of Vienna because there is an identity created around the institutional autonomy of these institutions. Q772 Mr Chaytor: But in terms of the balance of funding between alumni undergraduates and postgraduates, the states and general taxation, how do you see that shifting? In terms of Cambridge specifically, for example, within the next ten years what do you think the balance will be in Cambridge's revenue income between funding from general taxation and private funding? Professor Richard: For Cambridge, our strategy is to try to diversify even as we strengthen our financial underpinnings. I think we can do it, I think it is essential for our financial strength, and that will be essential to support our academic endeavours. It would be my hope and my expectation---. Returning here to the UK, part of what brought me back was obviously a great university, but also a sense that things were really changing in this country and that there was a rapidly growing appreciation of the value of the university system. So I would anticipate and hope that, though every government has massive demands upon it from every corner, of course, that higher education would be viewed still as a major priority for this country's investments because the knowledge economy is something of a cliché but it is real for all that. Q773 Mr Chaytor: But as a guideline then, what should be the proportion of the revenue from the state for your university, or similar research in terms of universities in the next decade? Professor Richard: If you look at our budget right now, a third of our operating budget - this is in broad, straight terms - comes from Research Council funding. That is public money. It is peer reviewed, we compete for it, we do well at that. That is a third of the operating budget - Research Council money and the charities, the big charities. A third of our budget comes from a combination of fees, endowment income and other sorts of income and then a third of it comes from the QR block grant and our HEFCE teaching grant put together. I would like to see us grow these other sources of our fee income and our endowment income and, to some degree, our other sources of income to grow out of our dependence on government and to enable government to reallocate funding elsewhere, because the whole system needs it. Q774 Mr Chaytor: So after 2009, what do you think the typical undergraduate course fee at Cambridge will be? Professor Richard: I do not know. I think we have to wait--- Q775 Mr Chaytor: What would you like it to be? Professor Richard: I do not want to pre-judge the outcome of that question. I hope you know me. Q776 Mr Chaytor: The answer to your previous question is assuming there will be an increase in course fees from undergraduates as well as postgraduates. Professor Richard: One way or other, whether it comes from the students themselves and their families or whether it come from overseas, I do not know what the solution will be. I do not want to get there yet, because I actually subscribe very deeply to the stipulation in the 2004 Higher Education Bill that there should be a review of what has happened over the intervening five years with the introduction of £3,000 fees, because I have no question in my mind that from Cambridge's point of view, and this is a Cambridge view, for Cambridge to become, as it were, a finishing school for the children of the well to do, there would be two sets of victims there: those who were not coming to Cambridge because they felt they could not afford it, but Cambridge would also be a victim of that. It would be lesser place. You would lose the soul of the place if that happened, so we cannot allow that to happen. I do not believe it will, because we have a bursary system in place that should make it more easy for students from low-income households to come to Cambridge, but I think we have to wait until we get to 2009, see what the review is but we have to bear in mind that if we want to have an education of this quality it needs more support than it now has. Professor Winckler: Let me say, first, that per student Europe is lacking about 10,000 Euros; so actually universities need more. If you compare that with the United States, there is more public money with respect to GDP than in Europe. In the United States it is 1.2, 1.3 % of GDP, public money, in Europe it is only 1.0. If you then take on top of that the private contribution, then you come up in the United States to nearly three per cent per GDP, whereas in Europe there are actually only very few private monies, 0.2 or 0.3 % of GDP. So we really lack a lot of money. The question is how to close the gap. One point is tuition fees. This was the rate. I have been now part of discussions in Scandinavia whether to raise tuition fees; there is a debate in Sweden; there is a debate in Denmark. I have been participating in that debate in Poland and so on, and various issues come up. Let me just have three important lines of thought. The first one is you have to look at the tax system. To state it very bluntly, the flatter the taxes, the higher should be the tuition fees. So, if you have a tax system, for example, like in Denmark where you have very high marginal tax rates in the income taxation, so you have a very progressive scheme, then actually you should not allow for tuition fees because you would be likely to have some regressive effects within the system. So, the first thing is you should not look at that independent, after-tax system. The second point is you have to look at what kind of premium you earn on tertiary education in the labour market. One of the important points in the Spellings Commission is that they have the feeling that actually tuition fees have gone too far, too high, given the kind of premium you can earn in the labour market. Q777 Chairman: Where is this? In which country? Professor Winckler: In the United States, the Spellings Commission was. But take the case, for example, in Sweden. When you complete your tertiary education you can only raise your income marginally out of certain feelings of equity within the society, but then you should not charge tuition fees. So the question is what kind of premium we would have. If you take the study of The Economist "Brain Business" of September 2005, for example, in Britain actually you have a very high premium on tertiary education, and that could be perhaps a reason to introduce tuition fees. The third important point, and this is a lesson which needs to be learnt from the United States, is if you like to allow, for example, Cambridge to have higher tuition fees, then establish, let me say, a federal grant system on stipends and grants, otherwise you cannot do it. There are seven points. So do not look at that in an isolated way. Professor Richard: If you were asking about the lessons from the federal system, the one piece of federal intervention in the states has been the Pell Grants, but the Pell Grants have been under some attack budgetarily. Professor Winckler: I was alluding to that. Chairman: That is all very useful stuff. Gordon. Mr Marsden: Thank you, Chairman. I would like to probe a bit further, if I may, on this question of collaboration and brain circulation, which, incidentally, was a concept we came across in our visit to China. Chairman: We need more of it in Parliament. Mr Marsden: We need more of it in Parliament. Some people who have two brains, of course, find it difficult! Chairman: That has been circulating! Sorry, that was an in-joke. Q778 Mr Marsden: Professor Winckler, can I start with you and say that Professor Roderick Floud, who you I am sure know, said at The Guardian Higher Education Summit earlier this year that UK universities need to be collaborating with other major players in the European higher education area in order to be in the running for major research programmes and compete in big science. Is that something you would agree with? Professor Winckler: Let me first say that there are many programmes, be it they are framework programmes or other schemes where actually European universities, especially continental European universities collaborate closely. Sometimes, I must admit, there is too much collaboration in Europe and there should be more competition so what we need to find is the right balance between collaboration and competition, and that is one of the reasons why EUA, for example, has advocated that with respect to the grants given by the European Research Council collaboration is not a criterion to choose on. The important point is only quality. So what we would like to see is quality is the important point. But I agree with you that if I look at, let me say, collaboration among continental European universities this has become very intensive, yes. Q779 Mr Marsden: One of the reasons I ask that question - and it was something that we discussed when we had our inquiry on our Select committee on the Bologna Report - if you actually look at the track record in terms of producing results, in my judgment anyway, of certainly the European Union over the last ten to 20 years in science projects, technology projects it has not actually been that brilliant. We have had quite a heated debate here in Parliament as to the UK's position in support of the Galileo navigation system, which does not seem to be going very far, and there has been widespread criticism of the European space programme, and these are things which have been largely done on a collaborative basis, pushed by commissioners and the by EU Commission. Is this part of the problem, that it is too top-down? Professor Winckler: If you look at Bologna and Erasmus, for example the University is Vienna is collaborating - I cannot even say the number - 300 European universities, because we have various exchange programmes. The University of Vienna is one of the top ten or 20 universities with respect to the Bologna Process because we really engage in that because we see a big chance also in rebuilding Central Europe and so on by using Bologna. But the really top universities are Spanish universities; and now I think the Czech universities are catching up immensely. So here you will find networks of collaboration and I think the most important outcome is that we get students who have lived for at least one term in other country, speak another language, have a certain cultural diversity, are globally aware and things like that. We speak already in Europe of the Erasmus generation because that is changing the mindset. Q780 Mr Marsden: That I understand very well, Professor, although I have a couple of questions about Erasmus which I will ask you and Alison in a minute. Let me return to the central point I put to you. One of the problems has been, certainly in terms of the UK's perception, that European collaboration on some of these major projects at R&D and at university level has been clunky, has been top-down from the European Commission, and compared to the Americans and elsewhere has not really produced a great deal. Is that a fair assessment or not? Professor Winckler: Actually there has been a change already in the 1990s, that the Erasmus Programme, for example, should be backed by an institutional strategy. The University of Vienna is quite free in choosing its partner. Of course we get certain stipends and so on and we have to meet certain requirements, but I do not think that this is really top-down. Q781 Mr Marsden: Professor Richard, would you like to come in? Professor Richard: I would just like to pursue this point that you are making and also implying. There is barely a day of the week where there is not somebody knocking on my door wanting a partnership with Cambridge - there is a feeding frenzy going on in the world at the moment, gathering up brands, as it were. But actually universities do not collaborate - a university is an abstraction - it is the people who collaborate, and if the academics do not want to do it you end up with these paper collaborations, at worst with an enormous amount of money being invested. This is not to comment particularly on the European question, but I think it is a real issue. Certainly I cannot and do not commit Cambridge to collaborations because it is all about where the academic find paths of shared interest. Can you open up opportunities to facilitate those shared interests? Yes. Why would you, what is the interest in doing that? I think there are various interests in doing that. You are right to put the caution in about top-down. Q782 Mr Marsden: Through you, Chairman, can I ask both of you about the issue of brain circulation and particularly as regards British students and in the context of Europe because, Professor Winckler, you have just talked about Erasmus and you talked earlier about how it had been very beneficial in getting continental and European students to travel and to study elsewhere, but unfortunately the evidence is that it has not been very beneficial in terms of getting large numbers of British students to travel and to study elsewhere within continental Europe, and I wondered if you had any idea as to why that might be so? Professor Winckler: First of all, if I remember the statistics - and they were actually very good statistics because we just celebrated in May 20 years of Erasmus and then you see a huge volume of statistics - the United Kingdom in that respect is average or just a little bit above average; it is not, let me say, one of the countries where the students really are very mobile, but it is not also at the lower end. Q783 Mr Marsden: You think we should not be worried that there are not enough British students going to study in Europe? Professor Winckler: Let me put one point - and perhaps it is not the right place here, the British Parliament, to say that - that it is to a certain extent an advantage to speak English but it is also a disadvantage. For example, my mother tongue is German but I lived and worked for more than one year in France, because it is very clear when you come from these kinds of constituencies that you need to learn other languages. Q784 Mr Marsden: Professor Richard, can I take you up on that issue as well because you referred earlier, and I think the phrased you used was "unthinking" - and unthinking is perhaps the wrong word, but not a structured process of involvement by British students in continental Europe, but just something that happened. But is not one of the problems, partly, first of all the language issue to which Professor Winckler has alluded, but is it not perhaps two things. First of all, when British students go on a structured basis to continental universities they do not always want to go for a whole year and that we need more flexible programmes. Secondly, is there not also an issue in terms of credit transfer, that we do not have a fully fledged credit transfer system within the UK and we certainly have a highly problematic credit transfer system between the UK and other European universities? Professor Richard: Correct. Professor Winckler: Correct. Chairman: You agree with that? You have agreement there, Gordon! Q785 Mr Marsden: Can I finally ask both of you about Bologna and about the Bologna Process and particularly about the recent London Summit, because obviously Professor Winckler you have put a lot of emphasis on institutional autonomy and clearly the EUA is pushing that. This might be rather unfair but if one characterised the Bologna Process as a tension between a centralised approach, wittingly or unwittingly pursued by the European Commission and the desire for universities in Europe to have autonomy and to use the Bologna Process for that, who is winning under that? Professor Winckler: Let me say that in 1999 when the Bologna Process started and if you read the first communiqué actually the universities and students were not participating, and it was just saying that the universities are expected to take over what has been decided. So it started as a very centralised approach, I agree with you, but that has to be seen in the tradition, let me say, of the French, German and so on university system where everything came from above, from the top; so the French system is a very centralised system, so somehow this mindset was taking over. Since 1999 that has changed a lot. If you look, for example, how EUA has been active in the field of reshaping PhD education in Europe actually I have the feeling that now governments take over what institutions develop. So I have the feeling that we moving within the Bologna Process to a more decentralised system and I think it will become stronger and stronger because it is very important to implement Bologna within the institutions, and that of course makes the institutions stronger. Then, of course, we see that national systems are not very competitive any more and that is the reason why SOCRATES is now talking about the university reform a la carte, but that maybe is still to be seen. Q786 Mr Marsden: Professor Richard, very briefly, do you regard Bologna as a help or a hindrance in terms of your strategic objectives that you have stated today in terms of internationalising Cambridge and getting Cambridge students more internationalised? Professor Richard: As a matter principle I think how could one be opposed to that because it should make it easier to flow. If it gets implemented as a top-down imposition it will be a nightmare. The devil will be in the detail. Q787 Mr Marsden: Are we mastering the detail? Professor Richard: I was very pleased that you took on the Bologna Process because if we had had a concern it is that the UK Government in general, that the UK has not engaged sufficiently in ensuring that the Bologna Process had the flexibility to it and somehow recognised the need for the autonomy of institutions. I am actually cautiously more optimistic than I was a year or so ago when it started to look to me as if it was going to a very centralised top-down system, but it has moved a long way and to the better. Q788 Chairman: We had some very interesting reaction to the report on Bologna - most of it positive, although I believe I was attacked by a Dutch professor for something; but by and large we had a positive response. I feel embarrassed, Professor Richard and Professor Winckler, that this is the end of the session now because we could ask you a lot more questions and we have learnt a great deal. Is there anything that you feel you have not had the chance to say to the Committee this morning on this important topic? Professor Richard: Only about another three hours of conversation! Q789 Chairman: Maybe more succinct than that! Professor Richard: The important thing is it is so great that this country has a government with serious people sitting asking serious questions about this. That is the only thing I want to say; I think it is just terrific and very interesting. Q790 Chairman: The more compliments the better! Professor Richard: As you can see I very much like these discussions and I very much appreciate that politicians are interested in how the knowledge societies emerge and what kinds of implications that has for the universities. Let me just say, we need strong universities otherwise we will not meet the challenges of the future, and the universities need to be autonomous with institutional strategies. So as you have in the world of business where firms strive to development we need to have the universities which drive the development in the knowledge societies. Chairman: That is a very good note on which to finish. Thank you for visiting us, Professor Richard and Professor Winckler. Witnesses: Professor Lan Xue, Executive Associate Dean of School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University and Mr Tim Gore, Director of Education for the British Council, India, and head of the UK India Education and Research Initiative, gave evidence. Q791 Chairman: Professor Xue and Tim Gore, can I welcome you to this session of the Committee's session of the Committee's work on higher education, and to say, Professor Xue, that we have just come back from a visit to China, to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing and not only were we well received and visited a large number of universities but we were well received in the sense that we felt that there was no holding back of any information that we wanted and that we had some extremely valuable discussions with people at a senior level, both politically and administratively and in terms of all those universities and the university administrations. So I must compliment the people who cooperated in that visit. Tim Gore, of course your most relevant recent experience is India, so we are going to try in a short time to learn a little more about both China and India. I gave the last two witnesses the chance to say a short introduction about what they thought the main issues were. Professor Xue, would you like to start? Professor Xue: I would start by saying that first of all I really appreciate the opportunity to be invited to discuss the international aspect of higher education, in which we are all extremely interested. Today's evidence is based on my own experience in the US and in China, particularly in public policy and management. I went back to China to teach in Tsinghua University in 1996, after five years of teaching experience at George Washington University in the US. As part of my research I have studied the reform of China's higher education system and also the role of Chinese universities and China's innovation systems. Those are probably all my experiences in managing a public policy school in China, particularly the international collaborations with other universities. I think that given the previous discussions it is quite interesting, and I would start with a puzzle. By 2005 there were 94 universities in China which had won 64 joint educational programmes with overseas institutions. Guess which five countries or regions are on top? I was a bit surprised that the UK is not in this five, it is actually Australia, US and I think Chinese Hong Kong, Canada and France. Q792 Chairman: Yes, we picked that up when we visited. Professor Xue: Okay, so you picked that up. Q793 Chairman: Yes, but what we also picked up, Professor, was the fact that as we were in China ten million students had sat their university entrance exams in June. Professor Xue: That is right. Q794 Chairman: Only five million were going to get in but five million new undergraduates were going to start studying this coming September, which is a very large number. But then when we looked at the tiny percentage that 60,000 students coming to the UK represents at 0.25 % it puts it in perspective. Professor Xue: Yes, indeed. Q795 Chairman: In terms of the previous discussion we had with the two professors who were here earlier, did that picture of both competition and collaboration make sense to you? Did you feel comfortable about that analysis that was coming back from them in terms of how they view international competition and cooperation? Professor Xue: Certainly I do see the competition among higher education institutions in terms of attracting the best students, in terms of attracting the research for funding and so on, but personally I do not see that as a competition between countries. In a way I see universities of treasures of humankind, so I think the best universities in the UK, US, China or India, that is always the best part of the treasure that we can enjoy. So in that sense I think the growth of the higher education around the globe is the most healthy part of the human development. That is the first thing. The second thing, we can see that the competition among the universities really intensified in the last decade or so, particularly crossing borders in terms of attracting competition amongst universities for best students and so on. Clearly different countries have different modes of competition and of collaboration and the figures I cited seem to indicate that different institutions in different countries have picked up different ways of collaboration or competition. I think the UK's universities have been aiming at attracting students to come to the UK with less emphasis on developing collaborative programmes. Q796 Chairman: You think we should concentrate on the latter rather than the former? Professor Xue: I think there should be a balance. Q797 Chairman: A better balance? Professor Xue: I think there should be a balance between attracting students coming to the UK but also I think developing partnerships in joint programmes and so on. I was really surprised that the UK is not in the top five, given the language advantage and also given the great reputation of the UK universities. Q798 Chairman: Why do you think we are not in the top five? Professor Xue: I think maybe that is the choice of the UK universities; they have not been, I guess, as active in pursuing a partnership with the Chinese universities - at least that is what that data seems to be indicating. Also I think that maybe many of the collaborations in the UK and China are collaborations based on the old traditional channels of collaborations, but maybe there are many new channels, possibilities that the UK universities have not experimented with, but other countries have been able to. Q799 Chairman: I have been holding back Tim Gore. Tim, would you like to say a few words? Mr Gore: Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. My role in India as Director of Education within the British Council is really a representative of the UK higher education sector as well as the education sector in general, in India, and I do this through various partnerships and agreements with the sector. One of them is the Education UK Agreement that we have with the higher education sector, and we have 130 India partners, so 130 higher education institutions who have a very keen interest in working with India. My other role is as India Project Manager for the UK India Education and Research Initiative, which is quite a unique partnership of 13 funding organisations and both the UK Government and the Indian Government are involved. Also the private sector; we have four corporate champions - BP, Shell, GlaxoSmithKline and BA Systems, who support the initiative. So that is quite a unique initiative. India in many ways is a natural partner for the UK, and senior Indians say this very often, through the language and through a shared education system. However, our relationship has gone through various phases over the years. Clearly in post-independence we had a lingering role - many of the politicians in India had gone to Oxford or LSE and so on - and then we moved into a capacity development where we helped them create new institutions, such as IIT Delhi, but there was a sense of drift at that time and that moved into a more commercial relationship when we started recruiting students more vigorously, and it is only most recently that we have moved as a sector to a much more strategic relationship, looking at longer-term partnerships and multidimensional partnerships with India, and I think that is really important and we should build on that. Q800 Chairman: So how do you compare what Lan has just told us, in terms of where do you think is the preferred destination for Indian students who are going abroad to study? Mr Gore: Sorry, the question is? Q801 Chairman: He pointed out that in terms of the top five destinations he gave the UK was not one of those top five. That would not be the case in India, would it? Mr Gore: No, not at all. Professor Xue: Excuse me, let me correct myself; the kind of destination I am talking about is the joint programmes. In terms of destination the UK is not bad - I think it is more of the joint programmes between foreign institutions and Chinese institutions. There the UK is not in the top five, but in terms of destination of foreign studies I think the UK ranks probably either second or third. Q802 Chairman: I am glad I got that on the record; I misinterpreted that. Mr Gore: In both respects the UK is in the top five but it is a very competitive environment. In terms of student flows to the UK they have quintupled over the last eight or nine years from a position where we had about 4000 Indian students in the late 1990s, and we now have about 23,000 young Indians studying in the UK, which is a tremendous increase. The Australians and the Americans probably have more Indian students in their country at this time; the Australians have about 29,000, the Americans have about 79,000. But the annual flows are comparable; the Australians get about 15,000 students going over every year - they just stay longer; and the Americans get about 25,000 every year; whereas the UK is getting at the moment about 20,000. So the annual flows are comparable. What tends to happen is the vast majority of Indian students stay for one year in the UK and stay for either two or three years in the US and Australia. The motivations are slightly different in that immigration is a big incentive, or has been a big incentive in Australia and the US and much less so in the UK. In terms of partnership, a study done last year by the National University of Planning and Administration in Education put the US and the UK pretty much on a par in terms of educational partnerships, having about 60-odd partnerships each. The UK is actually probably in a slightly better position than the US and much better than any of the other competitor countries in terms of trans-national education, i.e. the projection of cross-border education for UK education, in that we have some of our programmes completely accredited by the All India Council for Technical Education, which no other country has achieved. Q803 Chairman: What is the quality control on all of this because, Professor, we found in China that people said what they wanted was a high quality partnership, a high quality relationship and they were very keen, and it was emphasised to us many times that they were very interested in strengthening and developing but the quality had to be there. Firstly, how do we make sure that those are high quality and how do we monitor that? How do you monitor it from the Chinese side? Professor Xue: From the Chinese side in terms of the joint programmes between Chinese institutions and UK institutions? Q804 Chairman: Yes. Professor Xue: In general I think the current partnerships are indeed very high quality ones, so I think that there is still great potential in developing those partnerships. I think there is a phenomenon that from both sides there are probably many requests in developing partnerships with the best universities, so in the best universities, the very top ones, it is a big crowded. But in both countries there is a very strong second tier or second best universities that they have not paid enough attention to, so I think there may be great potential for developing partnerships. In terms of the quality issue there is concern but again they are just starting to develop these. In the past I think the Chinese public has had a strong interest in sending their kids to undergraduate programmes in the UK, Australia and so on, but this relates to the problem that has been mentioned about the cash cow. But now because in some countries there are specific institutions developed just for the new market in Asia in some of these programmes, the quality control is not very well maintained and so there are cases of failed institutions because of the financial problems, the quality control and so on. That sent a very bad message back to China, which actually hurt the reputation of the whole country. There is also that message that has to be paid attention to. Q805 Fiona Mactaggart: I am very interested in what you say, Professor Xue, about the fact that Britain is not in the top five for research partnerships because if you look at where we ought to want to be, look at what China is doing at the moment, since 1999 investment in R&D has gone up by 20 % a year, it is very ambitious and it wants to be in the top five countries in the world for international citations and patents, then we ought to be in there. What is the barrier, why are we not in there? Professor Xue: I can only venture a guess. Again, we are talking about a specific mode of international collaborations. Here I am talking about the joint programmes. Those joint programmes can have joint degrees of all kinds. Indeed, the UK is not there but in terms of the students coming to the UK indeed UK is still on the top. So I think probably for the UK universities they are satisfied with the fact that a lot of students are coming to the UK but they are not necessarily interested in spending the effort to develop that partnership, and indeed that actually takes time. The other thing I think also it may be that in those partnerships, particularly with the US, many graduate students who went to the US and studied and then went back to China, like myself. So naturally we had that linkage with the US institutions, so it was natural to talk with your colleagues and then to start the partnership. For the UK I think maybe the kind of graduate students - again, this is my guess - that the UK does not have institutionalised support for graduate students to study here, so probably many of the students come to the UK for undergraduate studies or for maybe a one year Master Degree programme - I have a cousin who came here for one year and then went to the US. So in that sense that network is not strong enough to develop that partnership. It may be there is a need for some facilitation to help the institutions which have an interest in developing such partnerships and which may not be strong enough to provide incentives. Q806 Fiona Mactaggart: If we were to have more postgraduate student programmes here for Chinese students and actually put some energy into recruiting them, and maybe having a structure a bit like the Higher Education India Partnerships that we have heard about from Mr Gore, which was designed to structure some of those, do you think that would make a difference? Professor Xue: That could be. Again, if you look at the current existing joint programmes I mentioned, it is very diversified. One example is that in our Tsinghua University, in the business school, we have a joint programme with a German university. They have a student exchange so that some of the Chinese students would study two years in China and two years in Germany and vice versa, and when they graduate they get both degrees from both universities. So there are programmes like that. The Shanghai Jiao Tong University has a joint programme with the University of Michigan in mechanical engineering. Again, there was an exchange of student faculty also offering joint degrees and also developing joint research programmes. I can also cite that Stanford University now has a programme with Peking University. So there are various kinds of modes. I have to say that UK universities do have joint programmes, and one of the great examples is Nottingham University, which developed a partnership in Ningbo with a college --- Q807 Fiona Mactaggart: We went to visit. Professor Xue: That is a great example. But that particular collaboration is an hard example to follow. I have just seen a report on the collaboration and certainly financially both sides have invested quite a bit, which is not sustainable for other cases. Q808 Fiona Mactaggart: But surely the rewards are substantial for investment, particularly in terms of postgraduate studies if China is being this ambitious, that intellectually and arguably economically the rewards will be substantial for the UK; do you think so? Professor Xue: I think that would have to be defined by the particular institutions that are involved. First of all, I do not think the collaborations are what we have seen, the joint programmes between Australia, the US and other countries' institutions. I think maybe there is some support from the national government but mostly it is the interests of those institutions. So probably they see something that they ought to invest in in the future. Q809 Fiona Mactaggart: The other thing that interested me a lot in China is that we were all told that the kind of pedagogy being deployed in higher education in China is beginning to change from a rather formal textbook type to something closer to a UK investigative, collaborative, learning kind of approach. I was not sure that that is what I saw and I would like to ask you, Professor Xue, whether that was an ambition, a reality, a spin? Is pedagogy in China changing? Professor Xue: I think it is very hard to say that the pedagogy is changing in China. China now has close to 2000 universities and I would have to say that for the top universities the pedagogy has been changing for quite a long time, and I think many of the university professors, a very high percentage of them, are actually from overseas, who did graduate studies and then went back. So they naturally introduce what they learned from overseas and brought that back. So I would say that in those universities things have been changing very fast, but at the same time there are other universities that are less well equipped with the good faculties and they may steal from the old pedagogy. So it is very hard to generalise. But the one thing in China is that China has been changing very fast and many of the universities are in a constant mode of innovation and change, so they are willing to learn from other countries. So that is why you can see that in the openness to the outside collaboration and so on China is probably one of the foremost in developing countries. So that is the mentality, I think. Q810 Fiona Mactaggart: I was very struck by how much it had changed in the 25, 30 years since I was last there. What do you think the consequences of a more questioning, discursive kind of pedagogy is going to be on the whole of the education system and society in China? Do you think it is going to create other changes? Professor Xue: Certainly I think the higher education system is really producing the new generation of people who are known to be the leaders in every part of the society. So I think when they are trained to be more exploratory and investigative and they are more open minded that will produce positive change to their society; so I think that certainly will be positive. Fiona Mactaggart: I am glad you think it positive, so do I. Q811 Mr Marsden: Professor Xue, can we pursue this issue of quality and how you get quality assured. When we were in China and indeed in briefings we had previously we were told about the impact of the assessment of British courses, British institutions in China by our Quality Assurance Agency which had been carried out. We were also told that there are inevitable sensitivities within China about overseas quality assurance coming and looking at a range of institutions in China. So given that we share your desire to have quality assurance, both between a Chinese partner and any British partner, what is the best balance to be struck for having a structured framework for quality assurance of British HE involvement in China? Professor Xue: You mean for British programmes in China? Q812 Mr Marsden: Yes. Professor Xue: I think for British programmes in China first of all they are subject to the regulations about the joint programmes in China. I think the State Council has a regulation published in 2003 regarding the collaboration and joint programmes. First of all, it is those institutions engaged in those programmes that really have to evaluate the quality of their partners. So I think that is probably the most important one. Also I think there are government agencies that are monitoring and receiving feedback about joint programmes, and I think that is the second defence. But ultimately it will depend on the feedback of those students, whether they are receiving the quality education that they get. Q813 Mr Marsden: My colleague Fiona Mactaggart has been asking you your opinions on pedagogy. One of the things that was very interesting when we were in Beijing at the Ministry of Education - and indeed was said elsewhere - is that there is enormous emphasis on the potential to expand HE into Central and Western China as part of the economic development of those areas, and that long-established universities like your own University of Tsinghua were very important partners in that process. Is there anything specifically that UK universities, with their traditions of excellence in pedagogy and vocational education can do to assist that process? Professor Xue: I agree that there are great potentials in those areas. As I mentioned, there is great diversity in terms of the higher education institutions in China, and in general I think that the western universities are less equipped with different resources, but actually they are great institutions in those regions. Traditionally they have not had enough resources to engage in the kind of international collaborations that they really wanted to, and there I think could be great potential for the institutions to engage in. So I would say that there it would be best if there were some structured programmes that could be developed. Q814 Mr Marsden: So you would welcome a structured approach from perhaps a consortium of British universities who have strengths in that area to engage with China? Professor Xue: The other thing is that those universities also have their own strength areas, so I think it is those collaborations that will also produce benefits for the UK universities and that would sustain. So if it is purely on an aid basis I think those relationships will not sustain. The key is, how do you identify the strengths in those western universities and how do you match that with the UK universities? If we can engage in an effort to built that it would be tremendous. Q815 Mr Marsden: Could I ask you a final question about the experience of Chinese students coming to the UK, because obviously we are concerned to maintain excellence for that and there are issues, as you heard from the previous session, about are we getting the best students from China? But whatever quality students we are getting from China what can be said is that those Chinese students who are coming are either themselves paying a significant sum of money or, alternatively, they are receiving bursaries or scholarships, so it is obviously important that they get the best student experience. We have had a report which has been given to the British Council in the last few weeks by the Research Director at the Glasgow University Media Unit, Greg Philo, about the experience or about interviews with Chinese students in Britain, where they say that actually they feel a bit frustrated because they do not always feel that they get the best advice about coming here. He is actually suggesting that there should be a much more open basis, maybe a website, on which Chinese and, for that matter, other international students should be able to comment on their experiences. Do you think that is a way forward or not? Professor Xue: I think certainly that would be one way. Let me give you my impression from my own experience of having been in higher institutions in China for over ten years. I have many friends and colleagues who have studied in the UK and I think in general for those people who completed their doctorate degree in the UK they all had great a experience. They felt they had learnt a great deal and that they were extremely useful and they brought back their skills and were trying to use them in whatever professions they are in. So I think that impression is very strong. The second impression I have in terms of the students studying in the UK in the Master Degree programmes is the experiences vary. Some feel that after completing their Master Degree - and often it is relatively short - is that they are not learning the kinds of things that would be very practical for them - a bit too theoretical and so on. The third impression I get from the students who are applying to the UK universities, they sometimes felt there was not structured information about funding. I think many of the students applying for doctorate degree programmes very much like the US way that there is structured information about whether you are getting a scholarship, a fellowship or whatever, and so that is a package. But that is not well structured in the UK. So there is a structured differences between supporting graduates students between the UK and US systems, and that is the impression I get. Q816 Chairman: We have a new Prime Minister, you probably know, and new Prime Ministers like to make initiatives. Do you think that this is the time for a major initiative here with the relationship between the UK and China in terms of an ambitious programme of cooperation? Would you favour something that really raised the profile of, on an equal basis, a new injection of both energy of resources into partnership with Chinese institutions? Professor Xue: I think indeed this is a great time to engage in and really raise the profile in terms of collaboration in higher education with China. I think one thing that the new Prime Minister could do is to support students from the UK to China. In recent years the Chinese universities have begun to develop new international programmes where they are welcoming students from overseas. Using one example from our own school, we have just started a new programme, a masters in the national development, starting this September, and so we really welcome students from other countries to come, and the government is also providing some support, but it is very limited. So that is the first thing I would like to propose because I think we need a new generation of Needham, Needham who has been the greatest scholar in the history of Chinese science - that is from the UK and that is many years ago. We do not have that kind of scholar now and we need to produce those sorts of scholars. Chairman: That is very interesting. Can we switch now to India because we are neglecting you a bit, Tim, so we are going to redress that situation. Q817 Mr Chaytor: Tim, are the objectives of the UK-Indian Research Initiative on track? Mr Gore: Absolutely, yes. UKIERI established about 190 linkages last year, 2006/07, across the whole educational range. We met all the objectives that were set us by the joint partners. About 30 of those were research partnerships, seven collaborations of higher education teaching and 100 school links, so quite a lot of activity. In addition to that we have done a lot of work at the policy level which is very, very important in the relationship. Q818 Mr Chaytor: But you have certain objectives to achieve by 2010, like new collaborative research projects, and you are confident that the 2010 aims will be achieved as well? Mr Gore: Yes, we will achieve those. Q819 Mr Chaytor: What strikes me as interesting is the message we had from Professor Richard and Professor Winckler was that the way forward for universities to thrive was greater autonomy, increased funding; and in the United States, which arguably has the most successful system at the moment, there was no federal policy to direct the activities of the universities, but here, with this UK-Indian project, we have a very top-down approach with very specific performance indicators to achieve. So how do you reconcile that kind of almost command economy approach in terms of our relations with India with the lesson from the United States, that it is the autonomy of universities to do their own thing and to build their own partnerships? Mr Gore: That is a very good question. Of course, our system is a very bottom-up funding system, Research Councils and so on. The Indian system is not and to bridge the gap between that you need some sort of framework and I think one of the areas where we have possibly fallen down in the past is not recognising that sufficiently. In fact there is a market economy within this top-down approach and we run competitive bidding; and I think the evidence is that there is a tremendous amount of interest in research and collaborative partnerships. We took in about 400-plus higher education proposals and we only selected 10% of them, and that was on a competitive basis. So clearly there are two things: there is the top-down targets that we set and there is also a tremendous interest in that coming bottom-up from the UK and Indian sectors. Q820 Mr Chaytor: What is the role of private industry and business in the partnership? I understand that a number of different companies are now actively involved. How important are they to the overall success of the objectives? Mr Gore: I think they are crucial. I think it is very, very important that the initiative should be seen as wide ranging, not just a governmental initiative. We have both governments involved but we also have the discipline of having multinationals involved, big corporations. They of course bring tremendous expertise themselves in areas that the relationship is very important, for example energy security, climate security - these areas, BP, Shell, plus of course GSK in an area of research is very important for the Indo-UK relationships. Q821 Chairman: They are the big players though. We picked up in China, for example, a lot of enthusiasm for partnership on environmental projects because of the environmental challenges, and that again seemed natural. Is that not the case in India that we could get some of the smaller companies? That is a part of participation wherever we go. It is all right for the Shells and the BA Systems and so on, but what about the thousands of other companies that do not have that clout? Do you help them? Mr Gore: In terms of our partnerships we have to have a limited number of funding partners because otherwise the stakeholder objectives get too complex. However, there is a mechanism for involving smaller corporate entities and that is through the bidding mechanism. It gives an advantage to a bidder if they have a corporate sponsor because it indicates sustainability, market realism, and so on. So there are a lot of companies involved with the institutional collaborations. They are not partners to the initiatives but they are partners to projects within the initiatives. Q822 Mr Chaytor: How does what the UK is doing in India compare to what the United States is doing? Mr Gore: The United States is doing very well in India, but it is a very fragmented approach. The US do not have, as far as I can see, an overarching strategy for their approach to India. They bring in very, very high powered delegations and they come in and bring in presidents of universities and politicians and make a big impact and do a lot of things as a result of that. But it is fragmented and their whole marketing of US education does not have a single brand or any attempt to convey the diversity and variety of the American offering. So they are successful despite, I think, a coherent approach to partnership in the market. Q823 Mr Chaytor: What do you think is the general perception of the status of the UK university education amongst Indian parents, particularly that huge, growing Indian middle class who may be looking at sending their sons and daughters abroad for their education? Mr Gore: It has changed enormously over the years. It was that the UK was the country of choice because of historical ties and so on, but that declined considerably, and with the growth of the Diaspora in the US and the success of the Indians in Silicone Valley America really moved up and became, if you like, the trendy destination. A country of destination for overseas students is very much word of mouth more than anything else and the US really built that. However, since we launched the Prime Minister's initiative we have countered that quite successfully and built up the numbers considerably and also changed the opinion of what the UK is - it was seen perhaps a decade ago as rather dusty and uninteresting, but that has certainly change for a variety of reasons, partly because of the strong interest in Bollywood in the UK, and so that projects a more interesting perspective. But there are lots of things we have done to try and change perceptions. Q824 Mr Chaytor: Should British universities be anticipating or planning for an increase in the potential number of Indian students coming to the UK of the kind that we have seen in Chinese students over the last ten years? Mr Gore: We have seen a tremendous increase. As I said, the numbers have quintupled in the last eight years. Most universities have an internationalisation strategy now and what they want is a balance of students. The economic argument has declined slightly, the cash cow argument has declined because of the fees. Professor Richard made the point that there is not that much of a difference between what the UK will get from the direct fee from the student with the HEFKI top up to what an international student would pay. Q825 Chairman: All the evidence we have had, it says we do not want average students, we want the best. Mr Gore: Absolutely. Q826 Chairman: And we do not just want undergraduates we want postgraduates and people to stay on and do their PhDs - that was very clear from the earlier evidence. How do we move up in that direction? How do we attract the best students from China and India and how do we get them to stay and be post graduates and stay with us. How do we do that? Mr Gore: By partnerships, not with pure marketing; there has to be brand presence of the UK universities. I am very reassured that Professor Richard is coming for two weeks in the New year to really make sure that Cambridge has a presence there and a lot of universities are doing these same. They have to be recognised, they have to do things, they have to engage, they have to give talks, they have to engage in high level activities, and that will build the interest. At the PhD level - and I think Professor Xue also mentioned the unstructured nature of support for the top people coming to the UK - we do not do it well. Q827 Chairman: We do not only want the rich Chinese and Indians. I come from a generation when I was in the LSE where we had a lot of poor students from China and India and we celebrated that. Of course, we like to see bright young people from poorer backgrounds from our own constituencies, but we would also like mechanisms to attract bright people from less privileged backgrounds from China and India. Is that possible? Mr Gore: I think the US structure financing is better for top students. It is not that they necessarily provide for free scholarships for everybody, but they give them a promise of work in the university context or whatever, and that is all arranged before the student comes. We are much less structured about that. Professor Xue: In China in a similar way again the student would make a decision about where to go is the funding decision, particularly the top students. They often get many offers and if an offer has a very structured, stable funding separately they would choose those universities. Q828 Chairman: For a full package? Professor Xue: A full package in terms of the tuition and also the stipend. But also the Chinese Government just started a programme of supporting top Chinese graduate students coming out to universities in other countries to form a partnership with other universities and actually supporting their living expenses. So that is a structured programme that I think the UK universities can really take advantage of. This is a very large-scale programme and I think it is going to be quite a few years so there again I can see great potential. The other thing is the post-doc programmes. Again, in the US, particularly in some natural science areas they are very structured programmes that when people get their PhDs they will get into those post-doc programmes to study. Again, whether that can be structured in the UK so that when people finish their doctorate degrees they can continue studies for a period of time. Q829 Mr Chaytor: Which are the British universities that are most successful in establishing research partnerships and in recruiting undergraduates and postgraduates from India? Mr Gore: There is tremendous diversity of interest in India. On the one hand there are universities that have pure research partnerships and on the other hand there are a group of universities that have collaborative delivery programmes, so they design and deliver programmes strategically together, and there are those universities that have a mixed economy in the middle. To my mind the mixed economy works very well because they cross fertilise each other. Research, as Professor Richard pointed out, is in some ways an isolated experience of individuals within a university, and so sometimes a lot of research happens without relating to the strategic intent of the university as itself, whereas collaborative programmes are almost always strategic and becoming more so, and they can cross fertilise each other because the relationship depends on different parts of the institutions talking to each other, and then you get the flows of people moving backwards and forwards at different levels because there is that familiarity with the institutions. Q830 Mr Chaytor: Without asking for a league table could you mention one or two particularly interesting examples? Mr Gore: Taking different approaches, the University of Huddersfield has a recognised and accredited programme in hospitality management, which has a partner, which is the Institute of Hotel and Tourism in India and they are sponsored by the Tata Group of the Taj Hotels, which is an excellent set of hotels, and that is an excellent programme. There has been a lot of investment and it is accredited, it is a joint partnership and seen strategically by the partners as belonging to both countries, and I think that is a good approach. Chairman: You know that I am the Member of Parliament for Huddersfield! Stephen Williams: It ticks all the right boxes! Quit while you are ahead! Q831 Mr Chaytor: One final thing if we are coming to a conclusion. What interested me also was the relationship between universities in India and China and particularly the views of the respective governments in India and China about the future development of the HE sector because here we have two countries with enormously growing populations, enormously growing HE sectors. Is the view in India and in China that universities are good for the whole of humankind and should be shared and collaboration is the way forward, or is there a view that the universities in the two countries are absolutely key to India's and China's future economic growth and particularly the closing of this enormous gap in wealth and opportunity that has opened up in both of these countries in recent years? Professor Xue: First of all, I think the universities have always been considered as extremely important in China's economic growth, in training people and in providing research support and so on - that has always been the case. The additional elements in China's development in higher education is that first of all culturally I think the Chinese people have this drive for making sure their kids receive the best education. That is very, very strong in us - no matter where you go in China. That is why there is always that fierce competition in higher education, in getting into the best institution in the country. So that social need for university degrees, no matter whether it is for economic income or other reasons, they just want that university degree. I think that strong social demand is one of the underlying currents for the development of higher education. The other thing, after 1998, when China had this programme called the World Class University Programme, supporting the best universities, I think that element was also introduced not only just for the economic growth of China but also making some contribution in basic science which also should be part of the Chinese obligation as a strong country if China wants to develop internationally. Q832 Chairman: A brief word from you Tim; we are running out of time. Mr Gore: In such a vibrant as democracy you can imagine that both points of view are held and they are, and very aggressively. The government is a coalition government and there is a lot of interest in liberalisation of education but also concern that that will lead to elitism and work against education as a public good. Particularly relevant here there is a big concern in India that opening up to foreign influences could work towards elitism and commercialisation of education and that is something with which we work very closely with the government and with the stakeholders in India, to try and reassure them that we are not interested in a purely commercial relationship and that we can, also through widening participation programmes and so on, reach out and help India achieve both those goals. Chairman: Professor Xue and Tim Gore we have had an excellent rapport with you. Can I congratulate you, Professor, that when you made your first remarks you said that higher education is about solving the world's problems and I think we all realise that in this age of climate change and world poverty that it is scholars and researchers worldwide producing something for humankind that is absolutely essential. But there is competition within that and it is healthy competition. Can I thank you both for your evidence and hope that we have a continuing relationship with both of you. Thank you. |