Degrees of separation

As our universities reach out around the world, Polly Curtis and Roger East weigh up the benefits.

You can’t help but hear them - the American accents, the Chinese dialects and the multitude of European tongues chattering between library and lecture hall. Last year 325,000 international students - undergraduate and postgraduate - came here in search of an internationally recognised and respected British education.

Visit Malaysia, China or Dubai, and you’ll see more telltale signs - the British university logos in the newspapers, advertising the degrees they offer there via partner institutions, or on their own local campuses. Our higher education system has gone global. What could be more appropriate, in this era of globalisation - or more attractive for the students themselves, rubbing shoulders and making friends across cultures from all around the world?

Manchester University’s president Alan Gilbert sees it as something they’re entitled to expect. “It’s incumbent on universities to give their students learning environments which are genuinely international,” he says, “because that’s the world they are entering.” At Manchester, Gilbert is leading the drive to break into an elite group as one of the world’s top 25 research universities. He has a target of 15,000 overseas students by 2015, three times the current number.

Luton University, less lofty in its aspirations, is likewise increasing its overseas student intake - and vice-chancellor Les Ebdon is just as insistent that the international mix is an attraction in itself. “All students benefit from the diversity of our population,” he says, “not only while they are here but also after they graduate. They create contacts and networks worldwide.

We know the planet is shrinking; our students are going to be working in a global village. If we give them a foretaste, that can only help.” Put like that, it sounds like a splendid investment in social capital. In truth, however, it’s not always all it’s cracked up to be.

Dominic Scott is chief executive of Ukcosa, which represents international students in the UK, and he’d like to see our universities make better provision for the students they are so actively recruiting - especially those with husbands, wives and families. “They aren’t all 18 and single,” he says. Some find the pubs ‘n’ booze lifestyle prevalent among British students hard to stomach.

According to Ukcosa/British Council research last year, overseas students did generally say they got a good deal - but, shockingly, almost two-thirds said they had few or no British friends. One even spoke of “a Berlin wall of prejudices from UK students - something that everybody knows about but no one dares talk about because it is sort of a taboo”.

And something else sharply distinguishes the international students from their UK or EU counterparts. They pay up to 10 times more for their tuition. Kat Fletcher, president of the National Union of Students, fears the implications, in these chronically cash-strapped times. “Universities should not see international students simply as pound signs that will solve their funding shortfall,” she says. “Market forces in higher education will force them to perceive their students as customers - and favour the highest paying ones during the admissions procedure.”

That was the charge levelled at Oxford University, when it announced plans to raise its proportion of international students from 8% to 15% within a decade - and to cut home student numbers to make room for them. Vice-chancellor John Hood insists that the motive is to improve the cultural and academic life of the university, but sceptics point instead to the university’s admission that, financially, it’s in a black hole. For Manchester too, as Gilbert admits, the financial motive to take more international students is “very strong”.

Both Hood and Gilbert are vocal, however, about the need for top universities to recruit the most able students - irrespective of their ability to pay. That’s the rational behind a new crop of bursary schemes designed to attract UK talent - and Manchester’s ‘equity and merit’ bursaries will also be offered to students from deprived backgrounds in developing countries. The plan is to have 750 of them a year by 2015. At least 5% of the university’s international intake would then be financial beneficiaries - and no one’s ‘cash cows’.

There’s no denying that higher education has become a highly competitive business at the global level. And nowhere is this more evident than in the move to set up physical outposts abroad. Nottingham University was a pioneer on this front, with a campus in Malaysia, and has gone on to set up a second, larger one in Ningbo in China. Charles Clarke, when he was education secretary, hailed this as an example for other universities to follow, and already there are more than 200,000 students taking qualifications from UK universities without actually leaving their home countries.

Bold and expansive it may be, but is it sustainable? In terms of environmental impact, it might at least start to curb the upswing in carbon dioxide emissions caused by all those students winging their way around the globe. But campus design and management criteria also affect the CO2 equation, and radical low-carbon solutions surely lie more with communications technology and distance learning.

The viability of the economics, meanwhile, assumes an uninterrupted upswing in demand for UK degrees. With India turning out 1.5 million graduates a year, the majority of them English-speaking, and China developing its own university system so fast that it’s already producing twice that number, it’s a debatable assumption to say the least - even without the ambitions of the likes of Malaysia to become a regional education provider on a substantial scale. Globalisation cuts both ways, as bitter experience in a succession of other industries has already shown.

As Gilbert sees it, “Britain is precariously placed. Prices are high, as is the value of sterling. Our reputation is good - for now - but I don’t think we can be complacent about students coming in their abundance forever. More universities have lost money than made money and if you want to stop costs rising you could be compromising quality.”

Manchester, which does run some postgraduate and MBA programmes in Singapore, has decided not to expand any further in Asia. Gilbert’s reasons for this go beyond the issue of business risk. “I believe it’s very important for students to be mobile, to study in a country that’s not their own.

I feel less easy about the value of foreign universities going and offering their degrees in other countries. What are they saying about the universities in that country?” And there’s the rub. He may be highly motivated to make Manchester a leading global brand, but Gilbert also insists that universities accept their obligations as international organisations. “Universities are at the forefront of globalisation.

The biggest bottleneck in that process is skills. It’s going to be critically important that Britain and other countries help provide those skills.” And equally crucial that the strongest players in the education market of today - which means above all the USA and the UK - don’t simply asset-strip weaker economies, in the words of Sara Parkin, programme director at Forum for the Future.

Investing in human capital through education, as she puts it, creates economic and social as well as individual benefit. Instead of the kind of ‘brain drain’ that former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohammed recently railed against, demanding that his country should be reimbursed by those who took away its graduates, Parkin emphasises the need to contribute to building in-country capacity - and she points to Forum’s own International Masters Programme [see blue panel further down] as a small step towards doing precisely that.

Andy Johnston, head of Forum’s Education and Learning Programme, agrees that UK universities can’t view their overseas operations solely as economic vehicles: they have a wider responsibility. He wants to see them integrate themselves within their host country and make sure it’s getting something from the deal. “The Department for Education and Skills should be linking up its agenda with the Department for International Development (DfID),” he says.

In parts of Africa, for example, local universities have had their teaching staff devastated by the AIDS pandemic. “To what extent do the plans of British universities include building capacity with local populations? If they go into competition with local institutions, is that fair considering the resources?”

Neil Kemp, director of marketing at Education UK, the British Council-run initiative to promote British education abroad, says that British universities working with partner institutions can contribute invaluable experience to the development of new university or postgraduate sectors. However, he readily acknowledges that there’s a limit to how much they can put development issues first - and it’s a simple financial one. The programme of collaborative links is very small, with DfID investment in it amounting to just £3 million a year. “The goodwill in the UK is immense, but the modern university is run as a business.”

Kemp, to his credit, is not shy of spelling out the questions this formula leaves unanswered. “If you’ve got a system which is purely market-led, how do you make sure quality is maintained? And what about equity of access - should this kind of education be available to only those who can pay?”

Pay mastersOverseas students contribute £10.4 billion a year to the UK economy.

Their fees make up 7% of the income of our higher education institutions.
The Westminster model?At Westminster University, international students represent a quarter of the intake - and receive most of the £1.2 million that’s available in the way of bursaries. Colin Matheson recognises that these bursaries, which “started as philanthropy”, are now an effective marketing tool to attract quality students. Westminster’s criteria for awarding them focus on social and global justice - they’re based on a combination of need, academic excellence, and confidence that students will return to their own country afterwards to use their skills there.

Meaningful MasteryLast year 90,000 people took intensive - and hugely expensive - Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degrees in the United States, the traditional home of this prestigious qualification, which is seen as a leg-up into the higher echelons of corporate management. Spotting a market, UK institutions have also moved in on MBAs; 12,000 people took them here last year, as did 8,000 elsewhere in Europe.

They’re the very archetype of the global degree, with a student profile to match: students of 73 nationalities graduated this year from Insead (a ‘top 50’ business school based jointly in France and Singapore), and no single country accounted for more than 12% of the year group. “The broad range of national, cultural and professional backgrounds means there are a lot of different experiences and points of view in our class discussions,” said Alex Dabbous, a UK student there.

The benefits for participants are evident enough. The rise and rise of the MBA, however, has signally failed to teach us the dangers of cultural arrogance. If we have dug ourselves into a hole, thanks to our flawed model of (unsustainable) development, then we don’t need more of the same - it’s time to overhaul the educational system and learn to stop digging. Putting globalised education on a sustainable footing requires some fundamental appraisal of what skills and attitudes we need.

One big step in the right direction would be to build in a requirement for ‘sustainability literacy’ [ ‘Like learning to read...’, GF53] as part of all higher education courses. We could then be sure that students were gaining the kind of knowledge and habits, relevant to their individual disciplines, to predispose them to act in favour of sustainable development.

Sara Parkin also suggests that it’s high time to recognise that “we’ve got more to learn than to teach” from traditional societies in Africa, where there is simply no separation of the environmental and social dimensions from the economic. By contrast, only a handful of Masters’ degrees in this country make any real effort at joined-up approaches to sustainability.

Forum for the Future runs two of them. Students taking its UK Masters Programme in Leadership for Sustainable Development, which has just celebrated its 100th graduate [ ‘100 bright young things’, GF54] , gain an up-to-date knowledge of sustainability solutions and the capacity to develop as the type of leader who can envision, and then help deliver, a better future. This year also saw the first pilot of Forum’s new International Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development, delivered in conjunction with LEAD International.

Masters Programme in Leadership for Sustainable Development,
Forum for the Future, 020 7324 3674
Polly Curtis is a reporter for Education Guardian. Roger East is managing editor of Green Futures.

20 September 2005

Polly Curtis and Roger East