Higher Education

My Lords, I am not quite a jobbing academic, but I am the third academic to speak in this debate—in which there have been far too many chiefs and not enough Indians, if I may say so. Give or take a few days, this is the 17th anniversary of my maiden speech in this House, in a debate on the future of manufacturing. I pointed out then that there was no future in manufacturing in the old-fashioned manner, antagonising Members on my own Front Bench right from the beginning. I said that we would have to move on to R&D-intensive, high value added industry, and for that the country had to have much more education than was being provided at the time. I am glad that we have proceeded in that direction, but I am still not quite satisfied. One of the major problems in British society is that we mistake uniformity for equality. We impose uniformity on a system that for all sorts of reasons should actually have multiple rankings. Because we have uniformity, we waste resources on people who should not be getting them. I do not mind saying that because I come from the London School of Economics. We are a low-endowment university and we live by our wits. I very much welcome the revolution of income-contingent fees for higher education, which we pioneered at the LSE. Unfortunately, not enough has been done in that respect. There is a lot of misinformation about student debt, because people do not realise that the full debt on an income-contingent loan does not have to be repaid, only a proportion of salary above a certain minimum. So there is no mortgage fear in this respect. It is a strange country where people worry more about getting mortgages for houses at non-inflated prices while resisting borrowing for education, an asset which earns much more income than would any house. I would like to see the full fee charged. However, different universities should be allowed to charge different fees because their costs are different. There should be no government subsidy for teaching. The Government should deal with all such resources through bursaries. No university should get any subsidy for teaching; they should meet teaching costs out of their own revenues. This would encourage much more concentration on where the comparative advantage lies. As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said: why should we have so many universities giving PhDs? Why do we pretend that PhDs from different universities are of the same quality? I have been a teacher long enough to know that that must be a fallacy. The California system, to which many noble Lords have referred, is a great example of how you can achieve diversity and equity while charging fees but not imposing uniformity. It is because we impose uniformity that we have the problem of, for example, access. How many people are going to Oxbridge? Who cares? What matters is that people get higher education, whether at Oxbridge, Manchester, Warwick or wherever. Many people should not go to Oxbridge; perhaps it is not suitable for them. We should concentrate on a variety of junior colleges with one-year, two-year or three-year degrees. That will spread higher education and let people have higher education at the pace that suits them. We should not insist on completion. Let people drop out and come back. Let us have a credit transfer system so that universities do not capture students and treat them like slaves until they get a degree. The attitude seems to be that they are not allowed to go away and, if they do, the little education that they have had will be of no value. I have probably spoken quite enough. I would like all teaching subsidy to be abolished and all research money to be allocated solely by the RAE.