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Higher Education

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. American universities, and especially ivy league universities, have greater resources. When one meets a president from somewhere such as Stanford, he will have 50 MBAs standing behind him. That does not happen with most vice-chancellors in most universities in Britain. But let us get the balance right. I am not condemning universities in this country; I am saying that they could do far more in terms of going down their supply chain and looking at where their talent comes from and, if there is a deficiency, doing something positive about it. I have been rather disappointed in some of our institutions. I am a governor of the London School of Economics and I tell our director that we do not do enough. We have summer schools, as do many universities. But, without the impetus of the Sutton Trust and Sir Peter Lampl, many universities would not even have gone that far. The hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) and I have visited summer schools in Cambridge. The criterion for someone to go on one of those Cambridge summer schools, which are supported by companies such as Goldman Sachs and organisations such as the Sutton Trust, is that neither parent has been to university. Perhaps it is dreadful that that criterion is used, if the hon. Member for Henley is to be listened to, but the fact is that a high percentage of the young people invited to those summer schools get into Cambridge. So, there is much that can be done. Universities in this country, including the London School of Economics, should go further. I am disappointed that more universities have not gone into partnership with academies, or created academies. They could go down their supply chain and choose to be based in communities where they could make a difference and participate in the process long before children choose their subjects. That is the level of partnership that I would like to see our universities indulging in. There is also the new ability to form trusts, which are in some senses less onerous. I would like to see more imagination from our higher education institutions in reaching down the supply chain, identifying the problem and doing something about it. Let me make a comparison. The thing that, more than anything else, has stimulated universities in the United Kingdom to move faster towards the American tradition is fundraising. Universities throughout the country now carry out fundraising much more successfully than before, usually because they are copying American techniques. Indeed, many universities are hiring Americans to raise money for their institutions. If more attention were paid to the situation in America—the Americans have a similar culture to ours, and a comparison with continental Europe is much more difficult—we could learn American techniques reasonably quickly. There is much to learn from the United States. Of course, American universities have more resources, but there are now more resources in this country than there have been for a long time because the fundraising of some of our premier institutions has been very successful.