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I welcome all members to this meeting of the Enterprise and Culture Committee and remind everyone to turn off their mobile phones.
Thank you for inviting me to give evidence on this bed-of-nails issue. In one capacity or another, I have been engaged for the past 20 years or so in the debate on how best to finance higher and further education in Britain and in Scotland. The present arrangements are a bit expensive, they are unfair and they continue to cause aggravation to both students and staff. Last Sunday, 30,000 students marched in London to protest against the possibility of paying fees. A couple of years ago, 100,000 students marched the streets of Paris, picked up the pavements and threw them at the police. I am saying what you presumably know better than I do, which is that this is an intensely political matter.
Thank you for your presentation. I do not think that we would accuse you of being anything other than a radical thinker on this issue. I know that in the past you have written extensively on this topic.
Let us suppose that a student wants to go to one of the more expensive Oxbridge colleges. It is a great privilege to go there and people are entitled to want to do so, but it is a frill that no other system could possibly afford. I think that those who want to go there should pay the extra to go there and reap the benefits. If they are not in a position to afford it, that is a problem for that university college, which must make certain that enough students of that kind come into its community by giving them extra scholarships. There is nothing to be gained by hiding from ourselves the fact that the cost of that student may be £20,000 a year. I am not in the business of suggesting that such places should not exist—although something in me is offended by the difference—as that is how the country has grown up. I do not regard that as a two-tier system; it is a one-tier system in as much as everybody gets a chance, but if someone wants to pay for frills, they should be entitled to do so. We should not engineer the system to make it easy to forget that there are frills. I do not know whether that is an answer to your question.
It is not really. My question was why would all universities not decide to charge additional fees.
All universities would like to do that, but at this stage not all can make the same case as Imperial College London or the University of Edinburgh can. Those universities know very well that, whatever they do, students will still come to them, but that might not be true for places such as the University of Abertay Dundee or the University of Huddersfield, which are still making their way in the world. A level playing field must somehow be created. There is not a level playing field now. This is the best way that I know to do it. Perhaps I have still not answered your question.
No, I think that I understand.
I wanted to make the same point about your interesting paper as that on which Murdo Fraser quizzed you. Perhaps I am missing something. Your suggestion has considerable merit, is interesting and is worth examining in greater depth. I do not remember the 1960s—I studied in the 1970s when that change had just taken place. At that time, subsistence grants were the big issue. I do not know about the proposal. The end of your submission says:
The proposals are similar, but the term "top-up" suggests that the system will change across the board. I say simply that every citizen should have one entitlement in their lifetime to entry to a university of their choice that will take them for a basic course. If all courses are open to that, we are in trouble, because that is expensive. If some universities wish to offer extra facilities—whether that means halls or other residences—we should not prevent them from doing that. You may want to call that a system of top-up fees, but I do not see it that way. That simply shows the cost to the system of what that university has on offer.
There may be a terminological difference. I accept that what you propose would be called not top-up fees, but just fees. Students would not otherwise be charged fees; they would be given money to cover their own fees, but universities that thought that they had greater status would immediately charge fees and I am sure that the universities that you mentioned would be the first to do so.
I will try again to answer your question, which is penetrating and difficult to answer. The top-up fee confronts a student who was paying nothing and is now required to pay £3,000 because somebody in another place has said that they must pay an extra fee. If a student automatically received a scholarship that was worth, say, £6,000, that would be his entitlement. The next question is which university he wants to go to. If he decides to go to the most expensive university in Britain, do we want to disguise the fact that it is more expensive? We must not. Universities will not be financed sensibly while most of the costs and most of the income are fudged away. The system would not be looked on as involving top-up fees because top-up fees mean topping up from zero to something. Instead, the system would reflect a university's actual economic cost.
Surely the difference between your proposal and top-up fees is that the Government guarantees to pay top-up fees immediately and will collect them from a student after graduation only if the graduate's income reaches a particular level. Do you propose that the student would have to find anything over the basic cost at the time of going to university?
I am assuming that most universities, including Imperial College London and the like, will be prepared to offer a first degree of the kind that made Scotland famous. The old Scottish MA was not an intensely specialised degree. It was not an expensive degree to give; there were no laboratories and students were not involved in clinical work of any kind. It was an affordable first degree. Surprise, surprise, it is the same kind of first degree that is given in the United States. It is a better degree because it is more general and it does not specialise too early.
However, if we go down the ordinary degree route, that is a different argument and I would like to come back to that.
I assume that your proposals would extend outside Scotland and that you see them operating on a UK-wide basis.
No. I am a bottom-up man. With respect, this is an area where the Government has least to offer. I am sorry; I know that you are members of the Government, but microengineering on that level does not work. I suggest that the Government leave it to universities and colleges to decide how best they can use their talents.
But the follow-on from that is that such colleges might be tempted to pocket the money and give remarkably few scholarship places. Would that not disadvantage some of the brightest and best from the poorest backgrounds?
It is in the colleges' interests not to be seen as ivy league colleges because in Britain there is no wish to see such a differentiation. I therefore believe that such colleges will not take advantage of the system just to fill their coffers but will pay more attention to being seen as a good university across the spectrum. Again, I am not sure that I have answered your question.
It is a fair point. The Eton and Oxford path was still being followed in society until very recently and I see that as dangerous. With luck, that time is behind us, but the trend could grow again.
I apologise for not being in the meeting for the beginning of your presentation, but I read your submission. On the issue of growing excellence and quality and the ability of institutions to invest in excellence and quality, have you considered what effect your proposals would have on those institutions that are not currently of the 5* or 6* rating but would wish to be so? Would your proposals make it less or more difficult for those institutions to improve?
The white paper and all the thinking behind it anchor many people into the second rate for ever. That is not in the spirit of the country. Therefore, we have to find a way to level the playing field and the only way I know how to do that is to give everyone an entitlement or right to apply for scholarships or bursaries that would enable them to attend any university of their choice on the same terms as all other universities. That is the way it used to be done.
It could be argued that, in order to improve institutions that are not in the ivy league—to use your terminology for the purposes of illustration—such institutions should be entitled to a greater level of investment. Even under the proposals that we are discussing, it would be likely that institutions that could get away with charging significant sums could increase their income and therefore buy in quality that would not otherwise be available. Do you agree that a danger in your proposals might be the perpetuation of mediocrity?
Forgive me, but I do not see things in that way. The best possible way in which to improve the prosperity of British universities is to make the student a customer. If a student becomes a discerning customer, his or her desires will push up standards everywhere. Nobody wants to go to a dud place—everybody wants to go to the best place. A person might not get into one of the best places, but you can be sure that some universities that you have in mind will strive to become as good as all the other universities and nothing should stand in their way. We should bear in mind how we normally buy motor cars and houses. I am not a free-market man, but up to a point, the market is a valuable way in which to solve such problems. There are not the same problems that you have described in supermarkets, for example, where customer choice has a way of defining what is desirable and excellent and how something can be obtained. The current top-down arrangements threaten to anchor the system in a frozen state.
I suspect that you are proposing almost a voucher system whereby the value of the voucher would be equivalent to the cost of three years' education at a basic university. Do you envisage that every university would have to offer a number of places at that voucher price?
It would be in their interests to do so. However, we should not oblige anybody to do anything in this life. People at universities are clever and will always wriggle out of whatever one tries to make them do. It is best not to think the worst of them but to believe that they know well how to handle their own affairs. If universities are given the opportunity, they will prosper. The only thing that stops them prospering is the current legislation and ministers telling them what to do rather than letting them use their own initiative.
I want to follow up on the education voucher approach. I commend you, as you are one of the few people who have written to the committee with a proposal. You have offered a solution. That is not to say that we agree with that solution, but at least you have had the courtesy to address the fundamental problem and give us a potential solution. You went back to the idea of the ordinary MA that the ancient Scottish universities used to offer 40 years ago. What value would that foundation degree have and would it have the same value whether a student went to the University of Abertay Dundee or Balliol College?
The simple answer is yes. I will go back a step. When I first came to Scotland, I was given a book to read called "The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century". Somebody said to me, "Read that book and you will understand why Scottish education was famous throughout the world." I read it several times.
Why is it advantageous for somebody to add extra years on to their education to get the professional qualifications in the areas that you mention? What advantage is that to the individual or to society in general? Surely you are saying to us that it would take six or seven years for someone to undergo the basic university training to become a lawyer, as opposed to the current three or four. You would add even more to the medical training, unless part of the foundation degree would count towards an overall professional qualification in medicine. I thought that we were trying to increase the number of doctors and people who can develop specialist skills. Surely a consequence of your proposal to have professional qualifications after foundation or ordinary degrees would be to add to the time and cost. Where would the benefit be?
I was not suggesting that we simply add the present five-year medical training to whatever comes before. I imagine that that training would change to address the fact that many students would be well educated in a more general sense. That would be taken into account when training them to be doctors.
Are you suggesting that it would be possible to do a foundation degree of three years and then qualify as a doctor by doing only a further two years?
No. You must understand why medicine in the United States is of higher quality than medicine in this country. You must know why engineering in Germany is better than engineering in Britain. I am sorry to say such things, but you must understand where the time goes. People are amazed that someone could leave university and enter professional life at age 20, which is possible in Britain. That is not a matter for congratulation. It is simply short-changing the person concerned.
You have suggested that, in essence, we should have a free market in education—that is my interpretation. How would we deal with the cap on the numbers in each university that there is because the Government has some kind of say in education? Do you suggest that the caps should be removed as well so that universities should be free to grow or contract according to how they satisfy their customers?
I tried to say earlier that the world does not really want a free market: it wants a regulated market of a different kind. If we allow free choice to run through the system as far as possible, we are likely to get a better result than if we try to predict it from above.
Would the regulation that you envisage include capping student numbers?
No. We could do with twice as many doctors as we have. We have half the number of doctors that we need simply because the system sought, on no good basis, to cap the numbers. We must learn to trust people.
If we do not regulate through capping, how should we regulate?
I know of no way in which to regulate the number of engineers, doctors or lawyers, except by allowing people to discover what they can best do to earn a good living and to serve their country well. That is not so much about a free market as about providing as much choice as possible.
I sympathise with some of what you say. We talk about the decline of the Scottish ordinary degree, which has happened since I was at university in the 1960s, but it is interesting that the Crichton campus of the University of Glasgow in Dumfries has introduced a three-year general arts degree.
Yes, it has.
It strikes me that the reason why people are increasingly moving to honours degrees, especially in arts faculties, has nothing to do with money, but has to do with the perception, which is perhaps wrong, that an ordinary degree is somehow second class. The thinking is that one must get an honours degree, albeit in a subject that one will certainly not use in one's profession, if at all. How do we change that idea? Are you suggesting that the fact that only the first three years will be funded will concentrate people's minds powerfully?
No. What you said earlier is absolutely correct. If I may reveal my whole intentions, I believe that, apart from the fee issue, the best possible outcome would be the restoration of the Scottish education system. That system has much merit: it is economical and represents the best use of students' time. Why has the system changed and why did we go the other way? I lived through the time when universities expanded as a result of the Robbins report. However, the report expanded the Oxbridge and—forgive me for saying so—the Edinburgh system, which involves early specialisation.
I want to push you on a small point. I am probably the only person in the room who has an old-fashioned ordinary degree. You mentioned doctors in America and talked about students here graduating at the age of 20. I presume that your point is that students in America do more years of study, which is why they are better doctors.
They do.
In my experience of American graduates, which includes graduates from the ivy league, they are not as broadly educated as you hint. They do not have the width of education provided by an ordinary degree. With all due respect to Princeton University, Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, my perception is that specialisation starts early on at such universities. Do you stand by your remarks on that?
The system is varied and you are quite right that it takes all kinds of colours. People major and minor and some people insist on majoring early on. However, there is a great culture in that country of a lot of people doing a lot of things while they can. People take their last chance to study music, theatre, drama, physiology or whatever while they are finding out who they are and what they want to be. I cannot believe that it is in the interests of students in this country to decide that when they are 17 or 18 years of age, when they do not know, and have no means of knowing, what they will be good at. That is self-defeating. I cannot prove that to you, but that view comes from long experience of seeing failed students and successful students and from seeing what goes on in other countries.
I have twins in their first year at Scottish universities and they are both doing three subjects. They have specified an honours subject, but they could well end up doing another of those three subjects, or a first-year subject taken at second year could develop into an honours subject—I have seen that happen before. Do you not think that the way in which people such as my children currently do an honours degree—which is the end point—is a sufficiently broad-based approach?
I do not think that this country is in a position to be able to afford to offer the honours-degree programme in mass higher education. That is a mistake. It was a grave error of judgment when the system was expanded in that way. Not everybody is capable of going to that level. Most people do not want to go to that level, but they feel obliged to enter university on those terms, because that is the only way in which they can get in.
While whistling Puccini, I would hope that my doctor would give me the right tablets. Expertise is necessary. One could argue that the failure of this country—I am playing devil's advocate—was due to the fact that people were broadly educated so that they could run the empire. We did not put our money where our mouth was in terms of developing skills, which is why Germany in the early part of the 20th century still had a lead on us and why we lost our place to America and everyone else. Do you agree that the lack of specialised training is our problem?
It is difficult to answer your question. I see no special merit in early specialisation. It does not produce better engineers. Of course one will find the occasional person who is brilliant under all conditions and who wants to specialise regardless but, taking things in the round, I do not think that that system produces the best doctors and engineers—it simply produces them in a hurry. If we short-change them in time, we will short-change them in quality.
I echo Brian Adam's earlier comments. I genuinely appreciate hearing some out-of-the-box, blue-sky thinking in this inquiry, because we have not heard enough of it. You have said many things that have got us all thinking. Having said that, I will come back to earth with a bump and ask some obvious questions that people might put. You said that the system worked well in the 1960s—about 30 or 40 years ago—and that it can work well today. Equally, you identified how much the system has changed since then, not least in terms of expansion. We must now have five times the number of students and two or three times the number of institutions. Therefore, you would be putting a system that worked in that 1960s pre-expansion context into a 21st century post-expansion context. Surely that must have more practical implications than you have identified.
I can tell you only that a substantial number of people have been working on these ideas for a long time. They have been through all the financial arguments and all the other arguments that they know. They would be prepared to have a go at convincing you that there are no difficulties other than the fact that the system has worked in another way for the past 30 years.
Thank you for commenting on that. I want to stick with the issue of the size of the system, although I am the first to acknowledge that quality issues are every bit as important as, if not more important than, that. Nevertheless, there is considerable interest and concern about participation rates in higher education. I refer to the model that you have described. If you were to make the quantum leap 10 years ahead with the system that you have proposed, what might the landscape look like? What levels of participation might there be and what spread of higher-education institutions might we expect?
We are aiming for the highest possible performance, which is what we get from graduate schools. The great strength of the United States is not in its undergraduate education but in its graduate schools. They are specialist places where only the best will do. Perhaps 10 per cent of the student population at most—perhaps only 5 per cent—will aim to be doctors, lawyers, scientists or engineers at that level. Experience in other countries shows that the remaining 80 or 90 per cent will be content to be educated citizens ready to do other things—or to become doctors or lawyers if they want to. Most of them will go back into the workplace, doing many jobs in their lifetime with all the skills required. I fear that I have not answered your question again.
I just wanted to pin you down on numbers, particularly participation rates, which is a preoccupation.
Let us not put a ceiling on numbers. If we want to get 60 or 70 per cent of people—
With respect, I am not asking you to be prescriptive; I am asking you to gaze into the crystal ball and give me a picture of what levels of participation we might expect in the new order if we go in that direction.
We must remember that we have underestimated participation rates every time. People are now complaining that 50 per cent is too much, but that has arrived. In Japan, the rate is about 70 or 80 per cent. An educated population must feel that it wants to be educated. Let them come, but they will be more easily satisfied economically and feel that there is something for them if we do not make the first degree so demanding.
You said a moment ago that a group of people had been developing these ideas. Will you say more about what input there has been in the discussion of the ideas and what level of support you think the proposals might attract, particularly among others in higher education?
That is a difficult question. I believe that about a third of the vice-chancellors would declare themselves in favour of the proposals. I think that another third would sit on the fence for ever and another third would feel that too much effort was involved and that the proposals were not worth it. It is the usual story. However, they know, as you do, that the present arrangement is not working. They are not given the investment to do all the things that they want to do and they no longer have the freedom or the inclination to take risks.
You have suggested more than once that we should revert to the Scottish MA ordinary degree. I presume that you mean not only the MA, but the BSc and so on.
Yes.
You have also suggested that 5 or 10 per cent of graduates may go on to graduate school. Already, 50 per cent of the population are going to university. If 10 per cent of graduates go on to graduate school, that would mean that 5 per cent of the population would be going to graduate school. That is just about the percentage that went to university in the halcyon days to which you refer. All that we would be doing would be creating a new elite degree class without making a significant difference to individuals or to society as a whole. Do you agree? Would we be differentiating between institutions that can offer postgraduate education and the rest that would not cut it?
Forgive me if I misled you on the numbers. I was saying that 10 per cent of the intake would find its way to the higher levels of further degrees and so forth.
But that is the number of people who made it to university in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the introduction of maintenance grants or of fees being paid by the state other than through the bursary system. Would the effect of what you suggest not simply be to allow the middle classes—as you describe them—the chance to distinguish themselves yet again from the plebs by being the ones who could afford to go on and get a postgraduate degree?
I would hope not. I have called the present system grossly unfair to the working class in this country. The system is skewed towards people who do not mind not paying for something that is very valuable to them. Would you repeat the second part of your question, please?
Sorry—
Forgive me, I should have remembered it.
You go ahead.
Let me just talk about what I think you wanted me to talk about. Let us be optimistic about people. I do not believe that there is a limit. Most people can go a long way if given the chance. The reason why they do not go far is because a lid is dropped on them at some stage in their life, making them stop. We should be optimistic about humankind. What I have said is about opening doors for everyone.
But surely the effect of what the Government proposes, and of what you propose, will be that differentiation and choice will be on the basis of whether people can afford it or are sufficiently outgoing to take the risk that there will be a benefit at the end.
That is such an important point that I want to answer it as clearly as I can. Imagine that most students, or all students, will take that first degree—the so-called Bologna or foundation degree. All people, regardless of their income—and remember that they have all been supported to that point—can go to graduate school. Where do they get the money from? It is very simple. They earn money at that stage by becoming a graduate apprentice, an intern at medical school or a worker in legal chambers. They gain a lot from the professional element of training at a time when they are ready to be a professional and want to be a professional. It is up to the professions to support them, and they will, because those graduates are very good value for money. I do not see any of the discrimination that you suggest. The proposal would be an open way for any child, regardless of where they started from.
So you are saying that, in essence, postgraduate education will be paid for primarily by industry—
Absolutely. It is such a privileged thing to do.
It will be paid for primarily by industry.
Not primarily by industry, but by the professions or the students themselves, if postgraduate study is what they want to do.
The reason why we are having this inquiry is that there is a suggestion of a new system south of the border. We are looking at the potential knock-on effect on Scotland. More money sloshing about the system down south might lead to our best research people being attracted down south. There is also the possibility that students could be displaced up north because our system would appear to be relatively cheaper. I am not clear how your solution would impact on that situation. Would those two problems still exist?
That is a difficult question. The global society has opened all doors to all countries. The question that was asked at the Royal Society of Edinburgh last night was "Shall we all end up in the United States?"—it was asked because the US takes all the Nobel prizes. I do not think that that will happen—cultural factors will keep us here. I also do not think that all the students will flow down to England. On the other hand, if all the students flow up to Scotland, that would be a good idea.
As there are no further questions, I thank you for your evidence, which was interesting and stimulating. We are grateful to you.
Thank you for asking me. I am sorry that I have spoken so much.
Not at all.