Higher Education

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Luce, on initiating such an important debate on a vital topic for the future of the country. I start by declaring an interest as the principal of Jesus College, Oxford. In my brief contribution, I shall touch on two points that have already been discussed by others: the diversity of the higher education sector and access. We have already heard that the ideal of a university as a temple dedicated to the life of the mind is nowadays supplemented by the more utilitarian view that universities are also engines of future prosperity and useful knowledge to improve our lives, for instance through curing diseases or preserving the planet. However—this is my first key point—universities should not all strive to do the same thing. A small number should aim to be world-class research and educational institutions, while many others should aim to support their local economy, for instance by training people in technical skills. As we have heard, as a result of the system of incentives and esteem in this country, too many of our higher education institutions strive to climb up the same ladder: to be excellent in both education and research. Let me illustrate this with a striking fact. Of the 168 higher education institutions in this country, 147—nearly 90 per cent—award doctoral degrees or claim to be research institutions. Let us contrast this with the United States, where less than 6 per cent of universities award doctoral degrees, with the other 94 per cent pursuing other valid and important purposes. Translated into UK terms, this would equate to a dozen or so research universities. Why does it matter? The answer is simple. Scarce resources are spread thinly across the whole sector rather than being concentrated in a small number of elite institutions and, importantly, training in technical skills tends to be left out as the universities that should be doing this aim to ape the elite. Rather than blurring the distinctions among universities, we should respect and celebrate diversity, as the noble Lord, Lord Rix, said. At the same time, we should distinguish between education on the one hand and training and skills on the other. These are not the same thing. If my daughters came home from school and told me that they had been to sex education classes, I would be comfortable; if they said they had been to sex training and skills classes, I would not. My second point is about access. My own university, Oxford, has been set a target to increase its intake of students from state schools to 73 per cent. It has been criticised by Ministers for not achieving this. Currently, just over half Oxford’s intake is from the maintained sector. It rightly strives hard to attract students from less well-off backgrounds and from state schools and it provides, as we have heard, extremely generous bursaries to support them if they get into university. We want to attract the best students from all backgrounds; there is no gain to us in not doing so. A naive view would be that, while 7 per cent of children are educated in the private sector, around half the students entering the top universities such as Oxford are from the private sector, so there must be discrimination. This is plain wrong. The entry requirement for Oxford and many other top universities is three As at A-level. Just about half the pupils in this country who reach this level are from private schools. In other words, this matches our intake. There is no evidence of discrimination. This proportion of three As at A-level from private schools would be higher if you counted only the A-levels that were shown by the Durham study to be hard and that count for Oxford entrance. The real question for the Government is why the maintained system, which educates 93 per cent of children, produces only half those who are suitably qualified for entry into elite universities. By pointing their guns at the universities, the Government are heading towards the wrong target.