News & Views item - August 2007

 

 

The Soon to be Disbanded UK House of Commons Education and Skills Committee* Reports on "The Future Sustainability of the Higher Education Sector: International Aspects". (August 6, 2007)

    The House of Commons Education and Skills Committee on August 5 published its report on "The future sustainability of the higher education sector: international aspects".

 

It opens with: "The increased internationalisation of higher education potentially brings great benefits, both economic and otherwise, for the UK and its universities. In order to ensure that the UK continues to experience those benefits, there are a number of issues that need to be kept in mind."

 

With regard to overseas students attending British tertiary institutions institutions the committee quotes impressive figures:

The benefit, in purely financial terms, of being the choice of place of study for 100,000 EU student and over 200,000 non-EU students is enormous. The Higher Education Policy Institute has recently calculated that the net direct cash benefit from fee income and living expenditure of EU students is at least £800 million (A$1.9 billion)) per year; for non-EU students the figure is £3.3 (A$7.9) billion. EU and non-EU students who go on to work in the UK after graduating are calculated to increase GDP by £2 (A$4.8) billion per year. These are huge sums of money for universities and for the wider economy, and so at least maintaining, and preferably increasing, the numbers of students is a vital task.

However, the committee then goes on to warn:

The [higher education] sector needs, however, to guard against the risk that the recruitment of international students will be seen as driven by short term gains in fee income by ensuring that the teaching and research offered are of high quality. Building genuine partnerships and engaging in thoughtful collaborations will lead to more sustainable relationships with institutions and students from other countries.

 

The provision of high quality post-graduate education is essential to enable the HE sector to thrive. If the UK higher education sector is to succeed in attracting the most highly qualified students to study here at post-graduate level, it needs to work with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills to provide more systematic support.

The committee also recommended that more should be done to support part time students: "as a matter of urgency the current arrangements for fee support payable to institutions for part time students and the availability of support for part time students themselves [should be reviewed]. For the future, we believe that students should be seen as one group with a variety of needs for support rather than being arbitrarily divided into categories of part time and full time."

 

And returning to matters international it also recommended that more should be done to encourage British students to increase their foreign study: "To maximise the benefits of international education, student flows need to be two way. We examined ways of encouraging larger numbers of students from the UK to undertake part of their studies in another country. One is for the HE sector to be more strategic, to decide as a matter of policy that more students should spend time in another country and aim to facilitate that."

 

Finally, The Guardian reports: "The committee, which had been investigating the future of higher education generally over the next decade, is disbanding because of the recent departmental changes in government. But it wanted its successor, the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, to continue the work of scrutinising."

 

Much of what is in the report is pertinent to the relationship between Australia's universities with their overseas students as well as the federal and state governments roles. There is an element of short-sightedness that needs to be overcome before an implosion occurs.

 


*Membership at time Report agreed

Mr Barry Sheerman MP (Labour, Huddersfield) (Chairman)
Mr Douglas Carswell MP (Conservative, Harwich)
Mr David Chaytor MP (Labour, Bury North)
Jeff Ennis MP (Labour, Barnsley East & Mexborough)
Paul Holmes MP (Liberal Democrat, Chesterfield)
Helen Jones MP (Labour, Warrington North)
Fiona Mactaggart MP (Labour, Slough)
Mr Gordon Marsden MP (Labour, Blackpool South)
Mr Andrew Pelling MP (Conservative, Croydon Central)
Stephen Williams MP (Liberal Democrat, Bristol West)
Mr Rob Wilson MP (Conservative, Reading East)