THE Scottish Government has established a task force to consider the future of Scotland's universities.
The task force is working against a background of constrained resources for higher education and resurfacing arguments about the policy of expanding participation.
There has also been an increased focus on whether the considerable public investmen
t in higher education is appropriately targeted to build capacity, release potential and give the public the best possible return in terms of economic prosperity and quality of life.
Writing in The Scotsman recently, my fellow principal at Queen Margaret University raised the issue of funding for Scotland's six newer universities. Most of these were established in the early 1990s as an important part of the drive to expand participation in higher education. But these universities were not new creations. They were already a firmly established and distinctive part of Scotland's higher education landscape and had been delivering high-quality degree-level programmes and undertaking valuable research for many years. The award of university title was, therefore, a recognition of the contribution these institutions were already making.
The creation of such modern universities can be seen as simply the latest phase in the development of higher education. Each phase has been a response to changing demand for knowledge and skills in the economy and society. The expansion throughout the 1990s and the development of the distinctive purpose of the new universities was a response to increased demand for skills in an economy which could no longer compete with other parts of the world on price and had to compete on value. It was a response to demand for skills in new and rapidly expanding disciplines such as the creative industries. It was a response to the increased demand for lifelong learning as people increasingly need to update their knowledge and skills throughout their lives. And it was a response to the social injustice, and economic foolishness, of effectively excluding large swathes of talented people from higher education.
The new universities have grown and matured. We now collectively teach more than 68,000 students – of all ages and backgrounds. We are leaders in making university education accessible to all by making our programmes flexible and working with further education to help individuals progress from college to university. We have first-rate applied research programmes and an excellent reputation for transferring that knowledge to business. Our graduates can look forward to good employment prospects and we are known for our responsiveness to employers. We make a big contribution to the export of Scottish higher education and to the development of Scotland's relationships overseas.
It is the case, however, that new universities have not been supported by a proportionate growth in the share of public funds they receive, even as the issue of historically low Scottish economic growth rates and issues of social exclusion have gained greater prominence.
There is an argument that the expansion of participation in higher education was wrong in the first place. The principal reason offered is that employers do not need more graduates but do need more skills. There is an implication that skills are more effectively or efficiently imparted by something less expensive and less rarefied than universities.
Such a position ignores the reality that the same employers do, and will increasingly, require higher level skills if they are to continue to compete effectively against the rapidly developing economies of China, India and elsewhere. This point was underlined by recent newspaper headlines that voiced alarm at the decline in Scottish domiciled students undertaking postgraduate courses at our universities.
Swallowing the arguments against increased participation in undergraduate higher education will not help boost the numbers of postgraduates and will not help the economy. New universities are well placed to make a greater contribution to Scottish economic growth. We have the experience of delivering courses and research programmes that are close to markets, that are strongly informed by employers and that produce confident, creative graduates and ideas for use directly in our businesses and public services. We do it efficiently by targeting our resources and by collaborating with other organisations to pool resources, generating a high impact relative to the amount of public funding we receive.
My own university can point to a project called 2KT, a collaboration with Queen Margaret University, that identifies, applies and exploits intellectual property to develop new products and provide solutions to business problems. We can point to innovative courses such as our new suite of postgraduate health programmes which are a direct response to employers' demand for key skills. We can point to innovative support for the development of generic skills such as our Confident Futures initiative – supported by both public and philanthropic funding – which is designed to strengthen employability skills, boost self-confidence and encourage personal and professional development in our students.
The new universities deliver high-quality, highly relevant teaching and research very efficiently but remain constrained by the historical distribution of public funding. The initiatives I have mentioned are just a few of many examples where targeted small-scale investment has released potential to increase the impact we can make.
What is needed now, and the task force provides this opportunity, is recognition of what the new universities contribute; parity of esteem for our distinctive purpose; and targeted investment in long neglected capacity building to release untapped potential on a much larger scale.
• Professor Joan K Stringer is the principal and vice-chancellor of Napier University.
The full article contains 917 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
