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Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Scheme

I declare an interest as a professor at Cambridge, a university proud and privileged to have hosted generations of outstanding students from the Commonwealth. It was certainly disconcerting to learn in March that the FCO was culling its fellowship and scholarship scheme. In the summer, HEFCE announced that the ORS award scheme was being phased out—a real loss of opportunity for all outstanding students from outside the EU. We all welcomed the palliative action of the recent DIUS scheme, but there are surely concerns about the zigzag, unco-ordinated policies and the signal sent by a department that is still called the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Academically, the UK is in a position of strength and opportunity. No other country apart from the United States has so many universities high in the global league tables, but we are losing ground by not exploiting our competitive advantage. Back in the 1960s, advanced study at a British university was a prime ambition for most Commonwealth students, but now it is to the United States that the very best students generally aspire, whether they are from Australia or India. Obviously, given the scale and quality of American higher education, this is unsurprising, but we should surely ensure that we do not slip below number two. We attract large numbers of students from the Commonwealth, as we do from the rest of the world. Most of them pay high fees to come here—higher, of course, than EU students. But our focus in this debate is on a small but crucial fraction of the students, the really top students for whom universities are competing and whom United States universities are enticing with generous grants. Those very best graduate students are academic assets. There is an international market for them. They are offered generous packages by leading private universities in the United States. None of our UK universities has endowments to match Harvard, Stanford and the like; in consequence, privately funded full-cost studentships fall far short of the number that the UK needs to compete. That is why prestigious publicly funded scholarships are so important; they are an investment in our universities and a down-payment that gains us influence in the long term. That is surely why we should build on the Commonwealth scholarships. We send all too few signals that we value the Commonwealth, but here is one that it is very much in our interests to stabilise and strengthen.