Tag: education

Hard lessons about soft power

On holiday recently in George Town, on the Malaysian island of Penang, I visited the Khoo Kongsi “clan temple”, a semi-fortified compound that testifies to the difficult history but also the success of Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese population. One room there is lined with brass plaques commemorating the successes of local children at universities – in Singapore, in Australia, at Oxford and Cambridge and in London. Soft power, written on a temple wall.

Debates about tightening the graduate visa, which allows its holders to work in the UK for two years after graduation, tend to focus on the consequences of reducing international student numbers for university finances and the UK economy. Falling foreign student numbers would be deeply damaging for both. London and its universities would be particularly hard hit. There were more than 200,000 foreign students in London in 2022/23, nearly 30 per cent of all those in the UK. University College London and King’s College London alone had 44,000 foreign students between them.

Losing even a small proportion of these, whose fees help bridge the funding gap for domestic students, would deal a further blow to balance sheets that are already buckling, following eight years of frozen tuition fees. There would be a direct hit for the economy too: research has estimated that foreign students in London are worth £10 billion to the UK.

But in the long term, the damage could go deeper. The UK is probably the world’s leading exporter of higher education, relative to the size of its economy. We export around £28 billion of education services, the vast majority of which are at university level. The sector makes up just under 10 per cent of service exports. The United States of America, our main competitor, exports around $50 billion (£37.5 billion), despite having an economy almost ten times larger than the UK’s. Higher education is one export sector in which the UK is genuinely world-beating, and London is the nation’s shopfront and brand leader.

It wasn’t always like this. The capital didn’t even have its own university until 1825. But agitation for more modern and accessible education – “the people would learn and must be taught”, as one pioneer proclaimed – led to the establishment of University College London, King’s and the University of London in short succession. These radical new institutions triggered a period of rapid growth in higher education at home and abroad. By the end of the 19th Century, examinations for “external” University of London degrees were being taken in centres across the world, from Mauritius to Malta.

As Britain decolonised after World War II, newly-independent states established their own universities (some with support from University of London). Demand for external study was expected to fall: University of London closed its external programme in the late seventies. But appetite for London degrees persisted. Today, 150,000 “transnational” students are studying in their home nations for London university courses, with around 40,000 of them on University of London programmes.

The reputation that drives demand for London degrees attaches to London itself, as well as to specific courses and institutions. That’s why so many UK and international universities have established a presence in the capital. And, despite its unaffordability, London is repeatedly identified as the best student city in the world.

While some people who come to the capital to study may settle here, most return home. But soft power persists: if students had a good experience here (or studying remotely for London courses) this will further bolster the city’s and the country’s reputation and influence. Today’s students are tomorrow’s decision-takers, on international trade and investment and in politics. In today’s world of shaky alliances, the 58 world leaders who studied at UK universities are a diplomatic asset, each one a potential ally in tackling global challenges such as climate change and security.

Panicked debates about immigration obscure the huge benefits – financial, cultural and diplomatic – that foreign students bring, and risk creating a “hostile atmosphere” that could drive them away. There are abuses in the system, and universities and regulators should address these. But responding to specific frauds by imposing blanket constraints on a UK success story seems perverse.

This is a moment when many international students will feel nervous about studying in the US, given reports of deportations and increasingly aggressive policing of immigration, and many US students, too, seem to be looking to the UK. This is the time for extending a welcome and building on our strengths, not erecting barriers that could be as self-defeating as Trumpian tariffs.

First published by OnLondon.

Movin’ on up

London’s universities are big players in the capital’s economy as well as a visible presence on its streets. They account for 85,000 jobs – more than in the advertising, and architecture and engineering sectors, and almost as many as in accountancy and law – and their economic impact has been valued at £27 billion every year.

Our leading universities are truly global institutions: University College London (UCL) and Imperial regularly feature in global “top ten” rankings, and foreign students make up a large proportion of London’s student population – a success in terms of exports and soft power.

But London’s universities also have a good story to tell about their local impact, and in particular their offer to students from less advantaged backgrounds. Two recent exercises, which I reviewed for University of London, have sought to evaluate how the UK’s universities compare in terms of supporting social mobility by attracting and boosting the careers of students from poorer families or places.

Two years ago, the Sutton Trust and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) analysed how well universities did in attracting students who had been on free school meals at age 16 and how many of these were in high-earning jobs at age 30. The ten highest-performing universities by these measures were all in London, with Queen Mary University of London, University of Westminster and City University of London taking the top three slots.

A slightly different approach was taken by Professor David Phoenix from London South Bank University. His English Social Mobility Index, which has now been published for three consecutive years, looks at how well students from deprived places perform in terms of access to courses, continuation and completion rates, and then earnings and “graduate employment” one year after graduation.

The 2023 index shows Bradford and Aston universities in the top spots but five of the top ten are London institutions: City, King’s College London, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Queen Mary and UCL.

Neither approach is perfect. No, graduate earnings are not the only measure of the value of higher education. Yes, London is at an advantage because graduates who stay in the city will earn higher salaries (even if most of those evaporate in rent and travel costs). And, yes, focusing on the deprivation of places rather than people does not reflect the differing geographies of poverty inside and outside London.

However, the indices do seem to show London universities – both established institutions with global brands and newer former polytechnics – doing relatively well. This is partly because Londoners from poorer backgrounds are more likely to go to university: 44 per cent of London pupils on free school meals go on to university compared to 27 per cent across England, and eight per cent go to more demanding “high tariff” institutions, compared to four per cent across England.

This is partly a tribute to the performance of London schools, which have shifted from being the worst performing in the country to the best over the past 20 years, particularly for pupils from poorer backgrounds.

The reasons for this have been intensively debated, with some analysis pointing to the investment and focus that came with the London Challenge, and others arguing that it is the ethnic make-up of London’s young population that is driving success – put bluntly, white British pupils drag down the results in other parts of the country.

Some of London’s most successful universities certainly have an intake that reflects the high levels of aspiration in many minority communities: Queen Mary, City, LSE, Imperial and Westminster all have disproportionately large intakes of students from UK Asian backgrounds, though fewer universities (East London, West London, London Met and Middlesex) do so well in recruiting UK Black students. These broad categories also gloss over any differences within different groups, for example between Indian and Bangladeshi, and Black Caribbean and Black African students.

But London’s universities also do well in offering courses that attract students from poorer backgrounds, particularly those looking for a stable and well-remunerated career. Pharmacology, computing, law, economics and business offer the strongest social mobility dividend, according to the IFS/Sutton Trust research.

Nineteen of the 20 top courses in these subjects are in London, with Queen Mary and City universities in the vanguard. And universities work to tailor their courses to student circumstances: in interviews for University of London, teaching staff at Queen Mary emphasised the flexible approach they took to timings and teaching approaches to support students with caring responsibilities, of whom they have a relatively high number.

High participation rates in London show how far university attendance has been normalised here for young people from all backgrounds (in contrast to apprenticeships, where the capital has the lowest take-up of any English region). This may partly result from the widespread presence and visibility of universities, but is also driven by the demands of London’s job market: in 2016, 53 per cent of jobs in London were held by someone with a degree, compared to 30 per cent in the rest of the UK; for senior managerial jobs, the proportions are 64 per cent in London and 38 per cent elsewhere.

But it’s not just the managers. People working in administrative or elementary manufacturing roles are also more highly qualified in the capital. These graduates working in such “non-graduate” jobs may account for London having the lowest proportion of graduates saying that their work was meaningful, fitted with their plans and used the skills they developed in university. Scores were particularly low for those graduates who had lived in London before going to university.

So, London universities play an important part in London’s success as a “social mobility hotspot”, showing how access to higher education can be widened for all classes. There may be opportunities to widen the hotspot: universities from across the UK have opened outposts in London; perhaps London universities could work with local partners to open satellites elsewhere. However, low job satisfaction levels for London graduates also suggests that more needs to be done outside universities, to make work fulfilling for all and to help young Londoners to access a diverse range of post-18 education and training.

Originally publcished by OnLondon