Anna Fazackerley’s article (‘You just can’t go on losing students each year – something has to happen’, 7 February) brought into sharp focus the intense competition facing universities. This has been brought about by removal of the student numbers cap on universities, allowing for expansion, and a demographic change resulting in fewer 18- to 23-year-olds in the country. A further contributory factor has been an inexplicable tendency of politicians and press to exhort young people (and old) not to go to university.
This is all the more bizarre when all the hard evidence indicates that for both the state and the individual, a university education offers positive outcomes. Graduates have greater lifetime earnings, they pay more taxes, and, furthermore, they are essential. Doctors, nurses, engineers, chemists, economists and historians, among all the other graduates, are the glue that holds society and civilisation together, and we need more of them, not fewer. The numbers of jobs requiring graduate qualifications still outstrip the number of graduates we can produce – and with technological progress will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Fazackerley’s article suggests that if a university were in danger of bankruptcy, a solution would be to allow private investors to take over the profitable parts of the institution. However, the profitable parts are likely to be departments such as law or business, while other disciplines of strategic importance to the national economy, such as science or engineering, fall by the wayside. We should be completely clear, if public universities were allowed to cherrypick the profitable parts they would not be in danger of bankruptcy.
Professor Quintin McKellar
Vice-chancellor, University of Hertfordshire
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