Higher Education

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Luce and congratulate him on initiating the debate. I declare my interest as vice-chancellor of Cambridge University from 1996 to 2003. Our universities have performed well over the past few years. The quality of their science and engineering research is second only to the United States and it is now more fully funded thanks to the increase in the science budget. Problems remain, however, in transferring technology to the mainstream of our industrial base. Entrepreneurship has flourished in universities and there has been a healthy growth in the number of start-up companies spun out from the universities. But there is a need to develop mechanisms and incentives that will encourage investors, including our large companies, to become involved on a larger scale. We need to grow some of those small companies into companies that employ thousands, rather than tens, of people, so that they will have an impact at the national level. The quality of teaching in our universities has similarly remained at a high level, but the financial support, as has been said, for teaching, unlike that for research, is far from adequate. Professor Alison Richard, the present vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, tells me that while funding varies considerably from subject to subject, on average, the university has to find from its own resources £5,000 to £6,000 a year per student to subsidise undergraduate teaching. The top-up fee has helped, but the financial gap remains large and is unsustainable in the long run. The funding of teaching remains unfinished business. I will conclude with a point that I have made before but which needs to be made again. It relates to the lack of breadth in the subjects required to gain entrance to our universities, especially our leading research universities. At present, many students are, in effect, forced to choose between the arts and sciences at the age of 15. To my knowledge, we are the only country in the world that does this, and a lot of young people do not want it and are frustrated when they find their options blocked at university. The problem is exacerbated by our four-year science and engineering masters courses. I declare that while I was head of the Cambridge University engineering department, we introduced such a course in 1994. To bring students to an internationally competitive masters level in four years, they need to start at a level that requires specialisation at school. Even then, the course is too short for any but the brightest students. It works satisfactorily at our very top universities, but for the majority of those who want to become professionals in their disciplines, the combination of a three-year baccalaureate followed by a two-year masters is better, which is why it is used in most other countries and has been adopted in the Bologna agreement. In the USA, a four-plus-two year course structure is common, but this would clearly be too expensive for us. The popular and profitable one-year masters courses could continue, but probably not for those who are going on to be professionals in science and engineering. There are efforts to broaden the scope of teaching in the final two years of schooling, such as the new diplomas and the new Cambridge Pre-U Diploma, about all of which I am enthusiastic. But we should have a long-term goal to require students to include English and mathematics in their final years of schooling and, preferably, a language.