Over the past few years, higher education in this country has been the butt of negative attacks by politicians and by those who should know better. During a debate in March in the House of Lords I made the rather simple observation that if there was anything amiss, we should fix it.
The sector is in crisis. Arguments about “Mickey Mouse courses” pale into insignificance alongside financial cuts, with at least two or perhaps three dozen universities on the edge of insolvency. The value of the £9,250 annual student fee has dropped by more than a fifth since 2017. Income from overseas students is decreasing, not least from the European Union, whose cohort is now counted as “foreign students”.
In the aftermath of Suella Braverman’s disastrous period as home secretary, the government has asked the Migration Advisory Committee to do a quick review of overseas graduate entry. The terms of reference for this review were clear. They want to discourage overseas undergraduates, even though education ministers have acknowledged more than once that there is no displacement and home students are not “squeezed out”. The Home Office wins, the economy and our education institutions lose.
This report will be published in the coming weeks. In the words of the committee themselves, all they’ve been able to do is to talk to focus groups rather than doing proper, professional and therefore verifiable research. This is just one more nail in the coffin of one of our best and most respected assets.
Every time these claims are made international students take note. That is why in France and Germany, English-speaking courses are being laid on to recruit students who think they are no longer welcome in the United Kingdom.
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Even our most prestigious universities have been badly affected by recent pronouncements. Recruitment from the countries from which we draw the largest intake is down as much as two thirds in many Russell Group institutions for the next academic year.
The reality is this: the university sector in the United Kingdom is worth about £116 billion a year to the economy. Overseas students, after taking account of costs arising from accommodation and the like, provide a net gain of more than £37 billion a year.
While London and the southeast benefit disproportionately, the presence of universities and colleges provide gains across the country. Not only do they draw in talented students, lecturers and researchers, but they have a key role in knowledge transfer — what is known as “impact”. Last year there were 4,500 start-ups supported by higher education.
In the jargon they are often called “anchor institutions”, which signals that their presence is beneficial at a local level. Students who take the view that they don’t want to move to London or the southeast to work for mega-institutions — financial, accountancy or legal, for example — help to regenerate and develop local economies instead.
They are discounted, however, by the absurd longitudinal studies that judge the success of higher education by how much graduates earn in their early working life. A more ridiculous measure could not have been invented.
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It applauds those institutions which encourage their graduate students to work in the City, taking potential wealth creation and concentrating it where growth and productivity is already highest. It discounts part-time earnings, the self-employed and those who take maternity leave.
If I have a criticism of the university sector in the UK, it is that it doesn’t encourage entrepreneurship enough. I believe there should be a module in every course which would be about how the student might contribute to employment and innovation rather than taking a job that already exists.
The government has already taken measures to tighten the intake of international postgraduate students and their accompanying dependants. Attacks have already severely damaged the sector. If you tell people often enough that what you are offering is second-rate, they start to believe you.
The world looks with envy at Britain’s Nobel prizewinners and the world-beating research into areas that are crucial to our lives, from vaccines and neuroscience to the technologies that make net zero possible.
It is our universities that are at the forefront of keeping our economy competitive. Cross-subsidisation from the fees paid by overseas students has sustained our research capacity, cutting-edge innovation and creative economy for years. Why would we want to strangle this vital resource?
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So where there’s a genuine problem, let’s tackle it head-on. How about taking full-time students out of the migration statistics? Above all, let’s celebrate what we excel at, build on it, restore our reputation and stop putting negative attack politics before the country.
Lord Blunkett was education secretary from 1997 to 2001 and home secretary from 2001 to 2004
