In many ways, UK higher education has been a great success over the past two decades. But our public debate remains trapped in a sterile tussle about whether more university students is a good or bad idea. We need to move on and ask more fundamental questions about the deeper function, effectiveness and purpose of much of UK HE.
More students than ever before are going to university and our top universities enjoy high global rankings. Little wonder, perhaps, that Tony Blair, who as prime minister initiated a huge expansion with his call, in 1999, for 50 per cent of young people to go to university, last week proposed a 70 per cent target by 2040.
Equally inevitably, this has been met with severe criticism from those concerned about the impact of student fees, student debt, the declining graduate premium on income.
Future earnings are by no means the full measure of a university education. But they are relevant, and astonishing Institute for Fiscal Studies research shows that nearly a fifth of UK graduates earn less than if they had not gone into HE at all.
Instead of numbers, we need to look more closely at the courses we could offer. The recent Augar Review, with its emphasis on skills, made a very useful contribution. Now we need to build on it.
The point is not that there are “too many students” or “too few jobs”. It is that too much UK higher education still reflects ideas about abstract thinking, elite education, vocation, class and wealth that originate in the 12th century, with its focus on classical definitions of learning, the trivium and quadrivium, and the works of Aristotle.
That tradition has great merits. But it is just one. Now we need to look more closely at the best international models, from Olin College outside Boston, making engineering more inclusive, to Tilburg university in the Netherlands and the “Learning Factories” in continental Europe, which emphasise problem solving.
Closer to home, the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE) in Hereford, draws on all these exemplars. The institute, which opened last September, offers an accelerated three-year Masters in Integrated Engineering, validated by the Open University. Students perform hands-on work, “learning-by-doing” in small teams on intensive three-week modules. A constant flow of real-world challenges is set by real employers. The result is that they learn both academic content and professional practice from the start.
The overwhelming body of UK universities use academic entry requirements to prime high academic standards at graduation. They then select or recruit students who clear that bar in terms of public exams. Ministers have proposed going further, limiting access to student loans to those who can hit the right grades at GCSE or A-level.
NMITE works the other way round. Of course, students must show they have the ability to pass the very demanding masters course. But instead of grades, the institute focuses on five personal qualities: grit, curiosity, passion, creativity and collaboration.
The goal is to recruit highly motivated team players who can deal with adversity, who learn and think independently, who can work imaginatively through problems and have deep interests.
It is already striking how this approach leads to much greater inclusiveness and massive cognitive, socio-economic and geographic diversity. Sixty per cent of our students do not have a maths A-level; a quarter do not have A-levels at all. Yet the dropout rate so far has been 3 per cent, half the sector average.
There is a vast pool of talent inaccessible to UK higher education. This approach is one new way to release it. It underlines the case for different types of courses and qualifications, and entry requirements. We need new models to deploy across in the UK if we want higher education to continue its positive economic and social effect.
Published in the Financial Times (£)