Sunday thoughts: University world rankings, tuition fees, and education politics during the election
This week, the QS World University rankings – along with the Times Higher Education rankings, one of the two “gold standard” league tables – put Imperial College London 2nd in the world. Much chatter was about how it had overtaken Oxbridge, but Oxford itself is third, and Cambridge is fifth, so it’s hardly evidence of a slide. In total, the UK has four in the top 10 (UCL comes 9th), 6 in the top 50, and 15 in the top 100.
These stats are relatively well known – you often hear politicians talking about the UK having a lot of top ranked universities. Yet it is worth pausing to reflect on just quite how remarkable that is. The USA also only has 4 of the top 10, including MIT at No1 (though the USA then dominates the rest of the Top 100), with Switzerland and Singapore having one entry each. France only has 4 in the whole top 100, Germany has 5.
Can you imagine the discourse in the UK if year on year, our closest and some of our strongest international economic competitors were smashing the international university league tables? There would be existential doubt from the Right – why is it that British students are so lazy, why is it that we can’t maximise talent? From the Left, there would be concerns that a marketized system fundamentally can’t succeed in an internationally collaborative scholarly environment. We would gnash our teeth when talented students and staff went abroad to do PhDs and frontier research. We would wail when leading start-ups came out of those institutions. We would complain when talented twenty and thirty somethings moved to Paris, or Berlin, to work at the innovative companies around these universities.
And yet we have all of that. And it gets nodded to by politicians. But otherwise…..pretty much ignored? Baffling.
“That is a really unpalatable choice, I do not want to do that” said Bridget Phillipson during Question Time on 23 May, when she was asked if she would raise tuition fees.
On 27 May, Keir Starmer gave a speech titled “country first, party second” in which, as Gaby Hinsliff and others noted, he conspicuously also did not rule out raising tuition fees.
At the time, I tweeted that “I suspect they may have a half plan for ‘put them up to £9,750’ which buys a couple of yrs to see things shake out”
If they didn’t want to do that, then they could have said, for example, “this is just not going to happen, not in a million years”, to take a random remark from *checks notes* the previous Universities Minister, Rob Halfon.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve grown even firmer in my conviction - not that this is the central plan, but that it is being deliberately left open as an option. I’ve raised some eyebrows at some sector events when I said it (but I also raised some eyebrows during the MAC Review when I said I didn’t think the government would change the Graduate Route because the final report wouldn’t give them the case they needed and there’d be a political split, so I can occasionally make calls that I think are right even if eyebrow raising).
Others have also made the case – not least Mark Leach in Wonkhe this week just gone.
The argument for doing so is relatively self-explanatory – discussions about university financial sustainability have moved from conversations among university finance directors, to sector wide events, to mainstream media, and it’s on the Sue Gray “shit list”. A one off fee increase by no means solves the underlying issue, but a 5.4% increase in fee income (in cash terms) – when combined with the tweaks to graduate repayments that Labour are clearly planning on doing so a nurse doesn’t pay more than a banker – seems palatable to me, and allows for a couple of years to consider a wider solution, while keeping fees under the psychological £10,000 a year line. And as Mark said, if they do it early in their term, and with a large majority, they can ride out any unpopularity.
As I say, I still don’t think it’s the central scenario – but it’s very possible.
Public First are working with our friends at the University of Warwick, who are kindly supporting us in doing some wider work around the issue of university sustainability, and in particular looking at the regulatory and policy environment if a case of what is called “disorderly market exit” does happen. That will hopefully be out shortly after the election, and provide a case for some of the wider changes that need to take place alongside potentially some shorter term funding changes, and a longer term question of financial sustainability.
As Schools Week plaintively titled their leader on Friday, “Say something, anything, about education?”
And as I sat through the 7 way debate on Friday night, amid being distracted by Daisy Cooper’s incredibly bright pink suit and quite how tall the Plaid Cymru representative was, I was also struck that there wasn’t a single question on education.
There may well be political reasons for that – it isn’t polling anywhere near the top of issues that voters consider important at the moment – but it is nevertheless a sector that spends close to £100bn a year, educates millions of children, and employs millions of adults in the broader children and young people’s workforce.
So we at Public First have designed a poll with the most detailed set of opinion work that we believe will be done this campaign by any organisation on education issues. We’re really excited by this – we’ve asked for a ranked preference on both of the two main parties’ existing commitments on education to see which are the most popular; we’ve asked for voter priorities for any additional education investment; and we’ve ranked education alongside other public policy issues as priorities for voters. Because even if there’s no discussion about the topic, Labour whoever wins is going to have a series of challenges to address and a series of commitments to try and implement.
This will be out on Wednesday this week, dodging nimbly in between all the manifestos being released by all 3 main parties. Look out for it!