The presentation entitled ‘Employers’ perspectives on the value of Postgraduate Education’ included key findings such as the high demand and strong satisfaction with higher degrees and concerns about the increasing plethora and variable quality of postgraduate qualifications.

The research identified five different types of employers based on how and why they recruit postgraduates. These include:

• Trawlers
• Spearfishers
• Anglers
• Harvesters
• Baitless

More information about the conference can be found here and a link to the presentation is here

You can also download the full Talent Fishing report here.

In a letter to the Telegraph senior executives from companies including CIHE members Shell and Centrica, have said the Government “must ensure it supports innovation” and that the university sector, which generates £59 billion annually, “can spur the economy on further”.

The letter went on to say:

“Businesses look to the UK’s excellent universities for graduate talent, research and innovation. Business helps fund higher education, which in turn makes the UK a good place to invest.

“We need a credible plan for restoring fiscal balance but urge the government to be cautious over those elements of public spending that are vital to the future growth and prosperity of our economy – science, innovation and knowledge.”

Referring to the protection attached to spending on these subjects in America and other global competitors, they added: “We cannot afford to be left behind in international league tables.”

More information can be read in the Telegraph article ‘Protect universities, urge business chiefs’.

“[It’s] Universities Week – help support great institutions of which we can be so proud”.

A recognised supporter of the campaign he has said:

“I cannot believe that anything I am now or do now or have now could have existed were it not for my three years at university. University education is a most marvellous profound and life-changing experience. It is a glory we do not always prize highly enough and it cannot be taken for granted. It is not about elitism but nor is only about training for the job markets. It is about enriching the cultural, economic and social life of our country in an inexpressibly important way.”

Earlier in the week, Professor Brian Cox presenter of BBC science programmes and recent OBE also showed support by tweeting “superb letter today from business leaders in The Times”.

A number of CIHE members support the campaign having written to the Times earlier in the week. CIHE member Genevieve Berger, Chief Research & Development Officer, Unilever plc has said:

“Unilever is a company committed to making the lives of consumers everywhere a little better every day with products and services to meet their musts, needs and wants. This demands a continuous stream of innovations based on new technology and strong R&D. In pursuit of this mission our academic partners in the UK universities play a crucial role in engaging us with leading edge research to create new scientific possibilities and supporting our company with the supply of new talent not just as industrial R&D experts but as potential business leaders of the future.”More on Universities Week can be found here.

As part of Universities Week CIHE supported a breakfast roundtable hosted by the 1994 Group of Universities on 15th June 2010 to discuss how universities can engage more effectively with business and have greater economic impact. Attended by business executives, universities and senior policy makers, the discussions addressed a number of ‘how to’ issues, including:

• How can the research base at universities add value to business?
• How can universities work with businesses to achieve greater strategic scale in university-business collaboration?
• How can the government support university-business partnerships?
• How can university enterprise activities support business growth?

As one of the panel members, CIHE Chief Executive, Dr David Docherty, highlighted the important role universities have in creating the ‘knowledge workers’ of the future. This would require universities to collaborate with business across a broader range of activities – beyond research, skills development and work placements. To make our graduates more employable would require a doubling of efforts on the Early Professional Development of students. To this end both universities and businesses should focus on making this part of the student experience more systematic, more scaleable, selleable, and more satisfying for students.

Miles Templeman, the Director General at the Institute of Directors, noted the importance of universities making themselves “open for business” to both local and international companies. Universities could best support businesses by helping them achieve a competitive edge.

Other speakers included Professor Trevor McMillan, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Lancaster University and Alice Frost, Head of Business and Community at HEFCE.

Key issues for further consideration from the meeting included:

• ensuring that the incentives and rewards for universities encouraged collaboration with businesses;
• government policy focused on ways of lowering the hurdles and barriers that prevent the first experience that businesses have with universities;
• doing more to celebrate and publicise the success of university-business collaboration – already the latest research shows that about £3 billion worth of services are provided by the higher education sector to business, government and charities;
• making universities more responsive to business drivers for competitive advantage and aspirations for growth;
• encouraging a broad and diverse range of interactions between businesses and universities.

The latest CIHE report titled “Absorbing Research: the role of universities in business and market innovation” was also presented at the meeting, and can be downloaded here.

David Docherty, Chief Executive of CIHE has written for the Guardian saying that pragmatism is key if David Willetts is to find answers to the fees debate that has haunted higher education for decades.

In the article David says:

“Three things became clear to me from reading Willetts’s speech and talking to [John ] Hayes. First, it’s a lucky stroke of coalition fate that two seasoned shadow ministers got the jobs. Second, both are genuinely passionate about social advancement. And third, ideas are back in fashion – but only if they have pragmatic value. Francis Maude at the same conference essentially said, whatever works, works.”

Referencing the newly announced employability statements to be in place by the end of August, David went on to say:

“The problem is that employability is a baggy and undefined term and perhaps the new politics needs new concepts. In the spirit of pragmatism, we need to promote early professional development (EPD), using “professional” to mean games design as much as medicine. This would be similar to continuous professional development programmes, which are accredited jointly with business, embedded within the degree course from year one, and are part of business and public sector engagement schemes. These can either be taught by universities or outsourced to specialists.”

The full article can be found on the Guardian website.

John Hayes, Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, stated that “further and higher education are public services, quite as essential in their own way to maintaining our way of life as the NHS or the police force”. He went on to say:

“Like other parts of the public sector, the previous government borrowed and spent billions on post-compulsory education. But much of this was wasted. Spending has risen far quicker than performance. And all too often, extra money has been spent not on improving the quality of teaching and learning, but on driving the system from the centre.”

As part of the panel, David probed John about the relevance of the Leitch report to the new coalition government. John said that “Leitch was useful and is useful – it elevated skills up the agenda and made a case as to why skills matter”.

Picking up on a point raised previously by Pat Bacon, David then asked about sectoral focus with John replying that they need to enforce a sector approach and that we “need to ensure that the employer voice is channelled through a conduit that what we teach and test is relevant to current economic needs”.

Following John’s speech David remarked that he had been both ‘intrigued and heartened by John Hayes and Francis Maude’ who had spoken earlier in the day.

David went on to state that ‘there is a massive demand for HE and that it is unmet’ and asked the open question of whether ‘the government will meet this for the science and skills base’.

David pointed out that people that have been through university are known to have more social capacity and linked this back to the Conservatives Big Society approach. David also stated that ‘we need more experts across the board’ and that ‘businesses want more experts’.

John Hayes full speech can be found on the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills website here and you can watch the event again here.

CIHE were also tweeting throughout the event – if you are not already following us please do so here.

This co-location has enabled the BBC and the University to work up a partnership agreement and I look forward to the fruits of their co-operation when the relationship beds down. Great example of university-business relationship building. http://www.salford.ac.uk/news/details/742

David states that the review rightly points out that the higher-degree market is big business: £1.5bn in fees, 36% growth in students over the past 12 years, and the UK government and devolved administrations spend £850m supporting it. And it’s a functioning market: universities set their own fees and students decide whether to pay them.

In the article, David says:

“We don’t need to soul-search about postgraduate education, but we do need everyone involved to be smart about future challenges.”

Full article: Postgrad sector needs to be smart.

Press Release:
Rewarding research connected to impact and global challenges

More CIHE press releases can be found in the Media section of our Knowledge Bank.

The real sadness about the report’s initial reception is that it is a bold statement of intent by the CBI. The taskforce is calling for a major commitment by businesses to work with universities in every part of their life. Click here to read on…