With seismic changes planned for school exams and undergraduate fee increases still fresh, the government might have hoped to keep postgraduate issues tucked safely away in a study. But it would do so at the UK's peril, suggests a report to be published next week.
In it, the Higher Education Commission, a cross-party group of MPs and representatives from business and academia, paints a dire picture of the country's economic future and global position unless postgraduate education is "brought in from the cold" and treated as part of a holistic vision for education.
It describes postgraduates as "the new frontier of widening participation", arguing that while postgraduate qualifications are increasingly becoming the norm for many professions and careers, higher undergraduate fees and banks' unwillingness to offer loans make this level of study less and less accessible for poorer or debt-averse students.
"If we don't pay attention … this area of education will be closed to some people because of cost and accessibility," says Graham Spittle, chair of the commission. "We will probably not be able to grow the indigenous talent we need to staff our universities, which, if you like, are the factories that groom the next generation. We are probably hindering ourselves from getting the strong technical leaders and entrepreneurs that society is going to need – that we're all going to need – in the future."
The commission, he says, found clear evidence that students did not want to increase their level of debt by going on to postgraduate study and some had already decided against it for that reason.
Referring to postgraduate education as a "social-mobility timebomb", the report echoes Alan Milburn, former Labour minister, now government adviser, who called last week for universities to make more efforts to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Milburn used the same phrase in an interview with the Higher Education Careers Services Unit's magazine earlier this year, adding: "Everyone agrees that nobody should be barred from undergraduate education because they can't afford fees, and yet we completely accept this barrier when it comes to postgraduate education. The fact is, postgraduate education is not a luxury for the individual, it is a necessity for our economy and wider society." His fear was that the problem required money and there was not much of that around.
The commission's report says to avoid spending on postgraduates would be a false economy, warning that "education and skills is one of the key fronts on which the battle to maintain competitiveness will be fought", with India, China and South Korea proving an increasing threat.
Spittle says: "Some of this will cost money, but the opportunity cost is unbelievable given that we want to become a skills-based economy. I think we have no choice but to pay attention to this area. It doesn't all have to be funded out of the public purse, but we need to strategically make choices as a country about what we are doing here and not just let market forces take their effect."
The report agrees with Milburn's proposals last week that some kind of postgraduate loan scheme is needed, and goes further, calling for a taskforce to be set up immediately to look into how it might work, reporting by December next year with a view to having something in place by September 2015, when the first undergraduates to pay £9,000 tuition fees will be graduating. This should please students, who have been looking for clear recognition that financial help for postgraduates is urgently needed.
There are even suggestions of different loan schemes that could be considered, including one drafted by Tim Leunig, now an adviser to the education secretary, Michael Gove, which could help propel the idea through parliament.
In the long term, the report suggests, undergraduate and postgraduate funding should be integrated. It also proposes that future postgraduate applications should be processed, like those of undergraduates, through the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. This would make it easier to monitor admissions data, including information about the socio-economic backgrounds of students.
This idea of a more seamless sector is perhaps not surprising from a commission specifically set up to take a broad, strategic view. This is its first report and it will decide at a meeting this week what to tackle next.
Postgraduates were chosen as the first area to look at because they were seen as a neglected part of the sector, in spite of a review carried out just over two years ago by Adrian Smith, now vice-chancellor of the University of London. This identified a need for more information about postgraduates and called for Lord Browne to consider how they should be funded in his report on student finance, then in the pipeline.
In the event, Lord Browne's report hardly touched on this part of the sector, and the Smith review was largely overtaken by a change of government and the impact of higher undergraduate fees, although there has been much more emphasis since on postgraduate data collection.
Spittle says that nothing in the commission's report contradicts Smith's review but "the world is a very different place". "We refer to a perfect storm facing students today. And that is something that is new and was not around three years ago."
What has also changed is the government's stance on immigration, with tougher visa regulations making it harder for postgraduates to stay on after they finish their studies and the government's pledge to reduce immigration to "tens of thousands a year".
The commission warns that the higher education sector would be "significantly damaged, particularly at postgraduate level," were this pledge realised, with many courses in strategically important disciplines relying on international students to remain viable. It predicts course and even departmental closures and long-term damage to British research capacity and competitiveness, and calls for students to be removed from the immigration cap completely.
Recent proposals by the universities minister, David Willetts, to produce disaggregated immigration figures for students are not enough, it says, warning of a "climate of uncertainty for prospective and current international students which does not inspire confidence for those considering investing in a British university education", not helped by 14 changes to student immigration regulations since 2009. It is also concerned that making it harder for postgraduates to stay on after their degrees means the UK is in effect training its competitors, becoming "the education outsourcing capital of the world".
The commission has strong words for the government but there remain question marks over whether it will have any teeth. Spittle says he has spoken to Willetts about the report and, while he is non-committal about the minister's reaction, says he is "optimistic" that it will lead to action because of the broad spread of opinion it reflects – from politicians on all sides of both Houses of Parliament, students, universities and business – and the degree of consensus reached.
He also believes the time is right. "I think we have to look at the whole system end to end, starting with young children, all the way through their schooling, through university, to right at the high end of that process," he says.
As chief technology officer of IBM and a former chair of the Technology Strategy Board, with an MA in geography from Edinburgh University, Spittle says systems thinking shows that actions taken early on in a cycle have a significant impact down the line. "I don't think this is a minority game," he says. "I think this is a very important part of the UK economy. I think it's also a very important part of social mobility."
Source: 22nd October 2012, The Guardian by Harriet Swain
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/oct/22/postgraduate-study-social-mobility-loans
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