Peter Lampl: Forget costly UK universities. Go to America

Sir Peter Lampl writes on the bursaries available at leading US universities in The Times.

he Government will today try to reassure us that social mobility will not be the victim of its market reforms in higher education. It will announce targets for attracting poorer students and the expansion of the Office for Fair Access as one of a series of measures unveiled in its Higher Education White Paper.

Make no mistake, the higher education landscape has been shaped by the bombshell of a trebling in university fees voted through by Parliament last November. Much against the Government’s predictions, the vast majority of universities have responded by charging the maximum level of £9,000 a year from 2012. These are the Government’s attempts to deal with the fallout.

Its decision to expand the tiny Office for Fair Access is long overdue, as the body is vital for keeping up the pressure on university admissions processes. The promise of a new careers advice service is also to be wholeheartedly welcomed as too many comprehensive students make poor subject and university choices. But there is a big question mark over whether this service can be made to work.

The White Paper only reluctantly raises the possibility of post-qualification applications whereby prospective students apply for degrees with their actual rather than predicted A-level grades. This half-hearted commitment is bizarre given that the central mantra of the Government’s strategy is to create an army of well-informed student customers. What could be more empowering, particularly to low and middle-income students, than applying with the confidence of exam grades safely achieved? Such a system would also increase the confidence of admissions tutors, who currently have to base offers on predicted grades, more than half of which are wrong, and who are naturally more wary about predictions made by schools that they don’t know.

The White Paper gives similarly guarded support for the use of “contextual” information to gauge the academic potential as well as attainment of bright children from poorer homes who have made the grade against all the odds. It beggars belief that we demand the same A-level grades from a pupil at an inner-city comprehensive as from a pupil at a top state or private school.

This list of proposals and possibilities hardly fills one with confidence, given the dramatic backdrop of the decimation of university teaching budgets in England and the creation of the highest average tuition fees in the Western world. As Aaron Porter, the outgoing president of the National Union of Students, has said, it’s the price rather than educational standards that has trebled. (The White Paper actually confirms the introduction of a real interest rate for student loans, where none now exists, which effectively means even higher fees.) We are only just starting to understand the ripple effects of this change on the livelihoods of future generations of students. The implications will surely not be lost on one of the architects of the strategy, the Minister of State for Universities, David Willetts, whose book, The Pinch, charted how one generation’s decisions damaged the prospects of the next. It seems we are still at it.

To give one example, research by the Sutton Trust suggests that graduate debts of more than £40,000 — from fees and living costs — will delay the age at which future graduates will be able to buy their first home. The average age for first-time buyers without family support will move from 38 to nearer 43.

This is just one of the unforeseen legacies of higher fees. Another concerns the uptake of postgraduate degrees, increasingly the gateway to the country’s elite professions. It is glaringly obvious that postgraduate study will become increasingly unattractive to graduates from low or middle-income backgrounds, already loaded up with debt. On this and other important issues, the Government’s White Paper is silent.

Another missed opportunity is the creation of a credits system, so that students who drop out of degree courses can return to university later, but with credits acknowledging their previous study.

In fact, there is nothing in the White Paper that changes my conviction that the damage to social mobility has already been done. Amid all the changes to higher education, one thing is clear: all future graduates will face a lifetime of high graduate debt.

One of the unspoken problems for the Government’s brave new world is the paucity of degree courses currently on offer in the UK that provide a genuinely useful preparation for life beyond university. Our pupils and students leave schools and universities after an incredibly narrow diet of education compared with their international counterparts.

After a lifetime working in various countries in consulting, private equity and the corporate world, I believe the uncomfortable reality is that many overseas graduates outshine our home-grown talent. They are more broadly knowledgeable, more numerate and generally more employable. Other advanced countries study a wide range of subjects to 18 and continue to study broadly at university before specialising. In arguably the most crucial subject of all, maths, less than 10 per cent of British students study beyond GCSE — inadequate for employment in many areas such as consulting and finance — in contrast with other advanced countries where maths is compulsory up to the age of 18.

With the trebling of fees in England, degree courses abroad have suddenly become a much more tempting proposition — particularly those in the United States. The average level of debt after a four-year bachelor degree programme in the U S is $23,000, or £15,000, compared with a projected debt level of more than £40,000 for a three-year course over here.

It is one of the reasons why the Sutton Trust is developing with the Fulbright Commission a university summer school in the US that will run next year. It will give 100 bright non-privileged teenagers over here a taste of university life over there. We predict that the majority will go on to study at a top US university.

I believe that this will become a significant trend. I certainly would have no qualms about recommending it to my own children as their best option.

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