Although the government’s higher education policy remains a work in progress, there’s one area which stands out for the lack of vision attached to it; that of postgraduate education. It takes only two paragraphs of the white paper for BIS to state that the challenge universities face is ‘putting the undergraduate experience at the heart of the system’ and policy towards postgraduates doesn’t improve from there.
The funding system for graduate students in the UK bears little resemblance to that for undergraduates; uncapped up-front fees mean that students have to rack up debt to do a Masters qualification. In spite of this research from Universities UK shows that the number of students on taught masters programs in the UK rose by 77 per cent over the 11 years to 2009 with nearly 25 per cent of university students in the UK now doing a postgraduate degree.
A combination of three factors now threatens the expansion of postgraduate study in the UK, and with it the development of highly skilled graduate students. The first of these is the trebling of the undergraduate fee cap for UK and EU students that may well deter continued progression to postgraduate study. The white paper acknowledges this and says only that ‘we will revisit the issue of postgraduate funding as the new system beds in’.
The second is the government’s visa reforms. With over 130,000 students from outside the EU doing postgraduate qualifications in the UK, non-EU students perform crucial research, enrich the culture of higher education and – incidentally – bring in huge amounts of revenue to universities. Even the watered-down visa changes that are to be implemented have sent out the message to international students that they’re better off going elsewhere to a higher education system that will welcome them. This isn’t even acknowledged in the white paper.
The final, most dangerous, change that threatens postgraduates is increases in course fees. The white paper doesn’t make this explicit, instead noting that support for postgraduate teaching will continue and ‘will reduce from 2012-13 onwards, in line with our reforms for funding for undergraduate teaching’. The difference, of course, being that none of the loans, debt write-offs and financial support available at undergraduate level exist for graduate students. Removing 80 per cent of the teaching grant to universities has caused chaos at undergraduate level. Graduates will see a straight up-front fee hike to fill in the funding gap.
Absolutely none of these issues are meaningfully addressed in the white paper. Alan Milburn’s report on Fair Access to the Professions in 2009 found that postgraduate degrees have ‘increasingly become an important route into many professional careers – in the law, creative industries, the civil service, management professions and others.’ In spite of this the government has shown little interest either in broadening access to graduate study or identifying the importance of preserving it. The only concrete proposals the white paper makes about postgraduates involve developing an annual survey of postgraduate satisfaction and monitoring the composition of the postgraduate student body. Describing these plans as ‘papering over the cracks’ would be too generous.
If Britain’s postgraduate degrees are to be protected and improved, a root-and-branch review of how they’re financed and supported needs to be urgently undertaken. The risks of a stratification of the undergraduate university system are real under the new funding regime. But they’re nothing compared to what’s about to happen to access to postgraduate programs under the coalition’s proposals.