Writing
Jo spent 13 years at the Financial Times in a variety of roles, including Associate Editor, Head of the Lex Column and South Asia Bureau Chief. He writes regularly for the FT and other publications.
Western universities need to brace for a geopolitical shock that could dislocate global research networks and dramatically narrow the range of potential collaborative partners, argues a new report led by former universities minister Jo Johnson. Read More
9 December, 2021: Report for King’s College London
Forge comprehensive knowledge partnership with
India to reduce dependencies on China, report urges.
15 August 2021: ORF Foreign Policy Survey 2021
August 2, 2021 OpEd in Times Higher: For lifelong learning, England’s ELQ rule must be scrapped
Any savings on the student loan book will be dwarfed by the costs of making retraining harder, says Jo Johnson. Read More
9 March 2021: Report for King’s College London and Harvard Kennedy School
China's influence on UK research has grown ten-fold in past 20 years
Government must go further on adult skills training
Jo Johnson
Friday October 02 2020,
OpEd for The Times
If you blinked on Wednesday, you could be forgiven for missing the government’s long-awaited response to the 2019 Augar review of post-18 education and training. The proposed measures aim to transform the education and skills system, prepare workers for the post-Covid world and ensure that there are enough people with the right skills for the UK economy to thrive.
Importantly, the government announced the creation of a four-year lifelong learning allowance, which students can use to fund studies on different courses, at different institutions, at any time during their adult life.
People will be able to space out studies across their lifetime, take more vocational courses, in both further education colleges and universities, and be supported when they retrain. Also finance will be provided for shorter-term studies, so that students do not have to study in blocks of one, three or four years. And the announcement included a much-needed £1.5 billion investment in the FE estate.
Opportunities for education throughout people’s lives, and not just immediately after leaving school, are of undeniable importance. The pandemic has sent a shock wave through our economy, leaving millions either unemployed or underemployed, on lower pay or working fewer hours than six months ago. Many will want or need to reskill.
The skills gap is widening because of the need to reduce reliance on immigration from continental Europe while artificial intelligence and the fourth industrial revolution reshape traditional roles.
Both the further and higher education landscapes may be dramatically reshaped by these measures, but it is critical that the detail, which has yet to be revealed, does not narrow students’ freedom of choice. Rules governing eligibility for the new learning allowance funding must not be designed to prevent people from choosing what to study or where.
Nor should the skills gaps be closed in some sectors of the economy, while others are neglected. It is clear that those studying science, technology, engineering and maths (the Stem subjects) are vital to the economy, and there is evidence that they will earn more during their careers than those studying the arts. But can it really be argued that Stem skills are the only ones the nation ought to value and support?
Britain’s world-leading arts and creative industries have been decimated by the pandemic. It would not be right for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to promise to reinvigorate them, while the Department for Education fails to support people to train to work in them. From the learner’s perspective, it is important that the measures support people to study on short courses and allow them to transfer credits across courses, institutions and sectors, building skill sets and qualifications, one module at a time, should they wish to do so.
Some higher education institutions, such as Birkbeck, University of London, have long advocated and supported flexible approaches to learning by building relationships with local colleges to support the transition from FE to HE, and by promoting short certificated courses alongside full degrees. But most HE institutions have not. Perhaps this is because of barriers to studying on short courses or transitioning from college to university.
The introduction of loans to cover fees for short courses, not just entire qualifications, is a welcome and overdue step. However, to be truly transformational, these must be combined with the wholesale dismantling of the ELQ rule. Introduced by Labour in 2008, this prevents someone from securing a loan to cover course fees if the qualification is at an equivalent level to, or lower than, their existing qualifications, unless it is for a Stem course.
While the measures have much promise, it is critical to individuals’ job satisfaction and the future success of the nation that they are backed up with policy change that truly allows people to study subjects that motivate them and to gain credits for doing so that are recognised by employers and transferable across the post-18 sector.
Jo Johnson, former universities minister, is president’s professorial fellow at King’s College, London.
It’s time to end Tory uniphobia: Conservatives should overcome their misgivings about higher education
From THE SPECTATOR magazine issue: 22 August 2020
Before the exams meltdown, universities were losing both friends and influence on the Tory benches. They were deemed to be on the ‘wrong’ side of the referendum and then enemy combatants in a low-level culture war. The ministerial message to young people was shifting from the sensible ‘you don’t have to do a degree’ to the openly discouraging ‘too many go to university’. The high watermark of uni-phobia perhaps came last month when cabinet ministers denounced Tony Blair’s target of 50 per cent of children going to university and warned that any institution finding itself in financial difficulties would be ‘restructured’. To say our universities feel unloved by this government is an understatement.
But the furore over the botched exam results has shown that most people are still very keen on universities. MPs have been besieged by thousands of families worried about their children’s future and enraged by grade downgrades and missed university offers. Are ministers really going to respond by telling kids (other people’s obviously) to take short vocational courses instead? Does any MP seriously relish the failure of a university in his patch? I doubt it.
To say universities feel unloved by this government is an understatement
Perhaps the best policy of the coalition era was the abolition of student number controls. Dismantling this ‘cap on aspiration’ was a flagship Cameroonian policy that modernisers rightly predicted would enable tens of thousands more young people from under-represented groups to access higher education. Today, students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more than 50 per cent more likely to attend the most selective institutions than a decade ago. This is what happens when there are more places: universities can enrol bright kids from Sunderland without turning away lavishly educated ones in Surrey.
There has been plenty of focus on the fees universities charge. But this has allowed them to expand — which means more opportunity for everyone. It has been a different story in Scotland: free tuition and the need for tight controls on the number of taxpayer-funded places available for Scottish students have limited progress on widening access.
The return of Soviet Gosplan-style student quotas this year — ostensibly to stabilise recruitment in a volatile year — was a downpayment to those in parliament eager to restrict the expansion of universities in general. But that backfired in this week’s meltdown, constraining universities’ flexibility. Thankfully, it has now been removed. But for how long? Weaker institutions struggling to fill places as selective universities hoover up students will lobby for the return of quotas, but that would be a serious mistake. Artificially constraining supply at sought-after providers and corralling students into universities further down the pecking order is certainly not in the student interest. It would be far better to give financial support to weaker universities to prevent their failure than to restrict the important role that student choice plays in determining the size and shape of the sector.
Parents aren’t convinced by the alternatives to university. A survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute found that 97 per cent of mothers want their kids to go to uni. You can see why. In a knowledge economy, jobs are overwhelmingly created in sectors disproportionately employing graduates. Even Conservative associations want them: more of this cohort of Tory MPs went to university than of any before it: 83 per cent, up from 68 per cent in 1979.
The last few days and weeks have shown us just how much a place at university is valued by young people and their families. Tony Blair’s problem is that he was not ambitious enough with his 50 per cent target. High innovation economies — including the likes of South Korea, Japan and Canada — provide higher education to nearer two thirds of their populations. Our ambition, surely, should be to join them.
WRITTEN BY Jo Johnson
Jo Johnson is a former universities minister, chairman of Tes Global and president’s professorial fellow at King’s College London
OPED IN THE Evening STandard: Don’t betray the next generation of creatives
Tuesday 14 July 2020
Creative industries in London and across the country should celebrate Monday’s Home Office announcement of the new Graduate Route visa. The timing could hardly be better. These are crucial days in the university admissions cycle: anxious international students holding offers at London's engines of creativity - whether coding at Imperial, fashion textiles at UAL or graphic design at the RCA - are making final decisions on whether to come this academic year.
The confirmation of a massive boost to our post-study work offer should encourage many waverers to enrol this September.International students completing a degree here from summer 2021 onwards will be able to stay on for two years (three years for PhDs) and work at any skill level. They will also be eligible to switch into work routes and stay on longer if they find a suitable job. And there will be no limit on the number of international students who can come to the UK each year.
The impact this will have in countries like India, where the duration of post-study work is a critical factor, could be sensational. It will help defend the UK’s competitive position, which has suffered gravely from Theresa May’s abolition of the post-study work visa in 2012 (following the mistaken inclusion of students in the now abandoned 100,000 net migration target).
The UK’s market share has fallen from 12% in 2012 to below 8 per cent, with countries such as Canada gaining at our expense.Coming days after Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden announced a £1.6bn rescue package for Britain’s arts and heritage sectors, this is encouraging evidence of joined-up policy in support of the creative industries. And rightly so.Up until the Coronavirus struck, they were growing at five times the rate of the economy and generating around 15 per cent of national gross value-added. Enabling historic palaces, museums, galleries, live music and independent cinema to access emergency grants and loans while their doors are closed is a no-brainer.
For policy to be fully joined up, however, the Department for Education must take care over how it operates recently re-imposed domestic student number controls. This risks turning into a crude process to allocate places - and therefore funding - on the basis of flawed measures of graduate earnings. This would unfairly penalise creative arts courses already in the cross-hairs of higher education sceptics in Parliament fired up by Gavin Williamson’s denunciation of the Blair-era target for 50 per cent of young people to go to university. If we have learnt anything lately, it is to value socially useful but lower-earning professions.
It would be incoherent to open the door to international talent to work across our economy, while restricting opportunities for domestic students to prepare themselves for careers in the arts. An economic nonsense too: the creative industries were generating £13 million for the economy every hour before Covid-19 – enough to repay the subsidy to arts courses in the student loan book many times over.Our creative industries will only recover if we supply them with the skills and talent vital for their success.
Jo Johnson, former Universities Minister, is Chairman of Tes Global
OPED IN THE TIMES: Universities must do more to attract foreign students
Jo Johnson
15 June 2020
If it is serious about Global Britain, the government should double down on international students. Post Covid-19, competition for overseas talent will be more intense than ever, with increased reluctance to travel and a smaller pool of students with the means to do so.
Over the past decade, however, conflicting policy goals — boosting exports and soft power while trying to meet a 100,000 net immigration target that mistakenly included international students — have caused Britain to lose ground in the market for international education.
It is time to iron out these contradictions. At zero cost and for huge benefit to the taxpayer, to domestic students and to towns across the country, the government needs to take a number of steps to help universities drive our recovery.
We should, first, double the duration of our post-study work visa. While the announcement of the graduate immigration route last year was welcome, our competitors have not stood still. A four-year post-study work visa would help restore our competitive position vis-à-vis the US, Canada and Australia.
It would give the sector the tools to mount a marketing push, with the aim of doubling numbers from India (balancing China, which accounts for 40 per cent of visa approvals) and increasing access from key countries such as Malaysia and Nigeria.
Surveys have reported low awareness of the benefits of studying in Britain, which shows the need for an overhaul of the British Council. Now that all its public funding comes from the aid budget, which can only be spent in developing countries, it is leaving key markets under-served. The government should enable the British Council to fund itself in part through universities, with a modest levy on international fee income that amounted to almost £8 billion last year.
A reformed British Council should establish a genuinely global student mobility scheme that includes not only EU institutions but the best worldwide; create an alumni network that could be the envy of other university systems; and negotiate reciprocal agreements with governments which do not recognise UK degrees, especially those with significant elements of online learning.
Jo Johnson is chairman of Tes Global and former universities minister
15 June 2020 - Universities Open to the World. Report for Harvard Kennedy School and King’s College London
Will the Covid crisis turn into a university crisis?
28 May 2020
A big question hangs over British universities. With open days cancelled, visa offices and language testing centres closed, incomes dented and long-haul travel unreliable, just how many international students will enrol this September and what will vice-chancellors do to survive without them?
As students from the global south scramble home, governments in English-speaking countries, which dominate the global education industry, are waking up to the existential threat their absence poses to universities young and old.The UK’s ability to bounce back will be gravely impaired if international students are no longer around to underpin the foundations of institutions central to our performance as a knowledge economy.
A drop in international student numbers of potentially 50 to 75 per cent will threaten the vitality of dozens of mid-sized British university towns from Chichester to Newcastle and send into reverse one of the great boom businesses of the globalised economy.
There are few sectors of the world economy in which the UK is globally competitive.International education has been one of them, despite years of inept policy from a Home Office desperate to manage down numbers because of the foolish inclusion of students in the (now thankfully abandoned) 100,000 net migration target.Britain is second only to the US in its share of some five million overseas students, although it risks being overtaken by Australia, Canada and China itself, now a major destination for outward-bound learners as well as the biggest source of them.
In the absence of other government funding, sustaining excellence in a system that currently boasts three universities in the world’s top ten and no fewer than 31 in the world’s top 200 would simply be impossible without them.The £7 billion they bring in fees provides an annual cross-subsidy that compensates for losses incurred in research and the teaching of high-cost subjects. These include not just laboratory-based sciences but also courses vital for our creative industries.That’s why international students account for six out of ten learners at Imperial College, which consistently features in the global top ten, and 56 per cent at University of the Arts London, number two in the world for art and design in the QS World University Rankings.
To say the sector feels unloved is an understatement
Across the sector, this loss of revenues will force governments to choose between costly bailouts, forced mergers and disorderly failures that push tens of thousands of students onto the streets and into a labour market already in turmoil.So far, a plea from lobbyists Universities UK for a sector-specific bailout package has gone largely unanswered.Barring a £100 million dollop of research funding and the bringing forward of £2.6 billion of tuition fee payments, universities have been told to manage their financial risks with the same grant, loan and furlough schemes available to others.
To say the sector feels unloved is an understatement.It is a victim of its own relentless growth, itself a function of the poor quality of the alternatives, a demand-led higher education funding model and, above all, the changing occupational structure of the workforce.Jobs pre the current Covid-19 crisis were overwhelmingly being created in the sectors that disproportionately employ graduates, which is why the sector is expanding in all high innovation knowledge economies, from Israel to South Korea.But the message to the sector from government is clear: any university approaching the Treasury for special treatment can expect to emerge in a very different shape following a rigorous debt workout.Forced mergers and the closure of programmes deemed to be offering low quality or poor value for money will be the order of the day, even if measuring this objectively will prove to be immensely challenging.
The tough love approach reflects disillusion with the continued expansion of higher education, amid evidence of dubious marketing techniques, rampant grade inflation and rising numbers in non-graduate roles five years after their finals.Even though the idea that shrinking the proportion of young people with higher levels of education is the route to greater productivity has no evidence supporting it, gone too are the days when governments set ambitious targets for university expansion.When the Blairite 50 per cent milestone was reached last year, it was greeted with hostility by the growing number in Westminster who want to prune universities in the belief this will prompt more school-leavers to undertake technical and vocational training.
Indeed, unlike every other sector of the economy stricken by Covid-19, the business of charging domestic students £9,250 per annum in taxpayer-underwritten fees for three-year bachelor degrees is one the government would happily see shrink.The return of domestic student number controls, ostensibly on a temporary basis to prevent an unseemly scramble to backfill places left empty by international students this September, will in time turn into a tool to dial back the expansion of the sector. It will make international students more keenly sought after than ever.Those institutions that have the financial reserves to ride out the storm this coming academic year will find that pessimism about the medium-term future for international education is overblown.
Students and scholars leaving their homes in search of education and knowledge is hardly a new phenomenon. It will resume.The push factors behind international education remain strong. In key developing countries, the mismatch between qualified students and available places at prestigious institutions will remain acute for the foreseeable future.Driven by growth of the middle classes in Asian and African developing countries, the demand for higher education is set to increase from 160 million students in 2015 to over 414 million by 2030, according to UNESCO.To meet that surge, the world would have to build four universities that serve 80,000 students every week, every year – and that’s not going to happen.
The two largest nations in the world, China and India, which account for a quarter of overseas students, cannot accommodate student demand for higher education within their borders. They are far from unique.UK universities cannot expect plums to fall in their laps. The disruption from coronavirus could accelerate a new and very different phase of growth for international education. Traditionally, it has been a privilege reserved for those who either have money or the know-how to secure financial aid. In future, its benefits will be likely to reach a much wider pool of talent.
In future, students will head in different directions. The flow of talent is today still surprisingly one-way: clever young people from the developing world take their skills and talents to richer countries in the global north.As developing countries seek to improve their own league table performance and welcome overseas students themselves, international education will cease to be considered in terms of a mainly Western and English-speaking archetype.
The crisis will accelerate take-up of online, distance-learning and blended courses that combine digital teaching and classroom interaction with traditional place-based learning. These will be of interest to mid-income families unconvinced by the return on investment from traditional multi-year overseas programmes.
Notwithstanding heroic efforts by universities to move to a virtual teaching environment, the crisis has exposed the extent to which UK universities have been lagging the best around the world in preparing for the new digital opportunities.The most far-sighted institutions are already in a position to turn this crisis into an opportunity. Others are clearly scrambling to provide anything resembling a coherent online offering. They will pay a steep price in student satisfaction.
Demand for the traditional multi-year programmes of overseas study will return in time for the groups who’ve always accessed it. Online teaching will not replace face-to-face education in the long-term for those students wanting kudos and status benefits from real-life academic study. UK universities can’t count on the good times coming back overnight. There are many steps for government to take to ensure we come out of the blocks faster than our competitors. But an international education market that is more accessible, less elitist and less carbon-intensive will be at least one good thing to come out of the corona crunch.
Jo JohnsonJo Johnson is a former universities minister, chairman of Tes Global and president’s professorial fellow at King’s College LondonComments
14 April 2020
King’s College, London, Policy Institute
What will higher education look like after coronavirus?
Online learning and intra-regional study will receive a boost
Few institutions have the longevity and deep roots of universities.
Yet even those that have been around long enough to survive plagues, fires and revolutions are finding that the coronavirus is stretching their resilience and endurance to the limit.
As international students scramble home to continue classes online, governments in the English-speaking countries dominant in the global education industry are waking up to the existential threat their disappearance poses to universities young and old.
Over the last decade, the number of international students worldwide has more than doubled to 5 million. Before the coronavirus struck, this trend was set to continue unabated, with some expecting over 8 million overseas students by 2025.
No one today has visibility or confidence in predictions over that sort of timeframe.
What is certain, however, is that they are unlikely to return to physical campuses in North America, the UK and Australia in anything like the same numbers for the start of the new academic year this September.
Governments and university leaders are sensibly preparing for a drop in international students of potentially 50-75 per cent – or worse – that represents a significant reversal for one of the great boom businesses of the globalised economy.
This will be a lesson for politicians who have persistently failed to speak up for international students when they’ve found themselves tangled up in wider debates about immigration.
They are now waking up to the critical role overseas students have quietly been playing in underpinning the financial foundations of institutions central to the performance of all knowledge economies.
The loss of revenues will force governments to choose between costly bailouts and disorderly failures that push tens of thousands of students out of classrooms, onto the streets, and into a labour market already in turmoil.
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In the UK, where some 460,000 international students represent 20 per cent of library ticket-holders, massively cross-subsidise research in Russell Group institutions and contribute £20 billion to the country’s annual services exports, these challenges are particularly acute.
The reputational consequences for any country whose institutions mishandle their student populations in this time of crisis will be long-lasting.
The Office for Students will need to design and put in place a multi-billion pound stabilisation fund to prevent the collapse of scores of vulnerable English universities.
Access to this fund should be subject to strict non-negotiable conditions, including the phased closure of poor-quality and low-value courses under teach-out arrangements to ensure that students can complete their studies.
If there is a scramble this September to backfill empty places from a shrinking pool of domestic 18-year-olds, as seems likely, there will inevitably be winners and losers.
If groups of financially robust institutions are minded to show self-restraint and want to agree voluntarily to limit their recruitment of domestic student numbers to their 2019 levels plus, say, 5 to 10 per cent, that should be their decision.
The OfS should, however, firmly resist lobbying from weaker institutions for the reintroduction of government-mandated sector-wide student number controls.
It is not clear that any move to reimpose institution-by-institution student number controls for this purpose would work in practice, make much difference to the financial crisis or be consistent with the market regulator’s statutory duties to promote value for money.
What is clear, though, is that a return to centralised command-and-control would create perverse incentives, limiting the ability of successful institutions to expand at a reasonable rate at the expense of those offering poorer quality and outcomes.
Artificially constraining supply at excellent providers and corralling students into universities further down the reputational, quality and outcomes pecking order – to which they haven’t applied and don’t want to go – hardly seems sensible.
It is certainly not in the student interest.
Critically, it would also be a fundamental setback to a powerful driver of social mobility. For, once imposed, number controls would stay for good, satisfying the desire of HE-sceptics to clamp down on the expansion of the sector.
The removal of the “cap on aspiration”, announced in 2013 and implemented over the following three years, was a flagship Conservative education policy that modernisers rightly predicted would enable more people from disadvantaged backgrounds to access a university education.
Young people from such backgrounds are more than 50 per cent more likely today to attend the most selective institutions than they were a decade ago.
If sector-wide government-mandated student number controls return, one of the lasting casualties of the coronavirus will be the role higher education plays in levelling up opportunity across the UK.
That would be an entirely self-inflicted injury.
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For all the legitimate and justified anxieties over the coming academic year, pessimism about the medium-term future for international education is overblown.
Students and scholars leaving their homes in search of education and knowledge is hardly a new phenomenon. It will resume.
A QS survey of 11,000 prospective international students found that 85 per cent were still open to applying – although a significant proportion of these intended to defer entry for a year.
The push factors behind international education remain strong. In key developing countries, a shortage of places at prestigious domestic institutions that match social aspirations and academic needs will remain acute for the foreseeable future.
Driven by growth in middle classes in developing countries in Asia and Africa, the demand for higher education is set to increase from 160 million students in 2015 to over 414 million by 2030, according to UNESCO. To meet that surge, the world would have to build four universities that serve 80,000 students every week, every year.
The two largest nations in the world, China and India, which account for a quarter of overseas students, cannot accommodate student demand for higher education within their borders. They are far from unique.
In Bangladesh, a country with a young population of 170 million, and Sri Lanka, there are an estimated five students competing for every available university place, according to the British Council.
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In the longer term, the disruption from the coronavirus could accelerate a new phase of growth for international education.
Traditionally, it has been a privilege reserved for those who either have money, or the know-how to secure financial aid. In future, its benefits will be likely to reach much wider pool of talent.
This will come about through an acceleration of two trends.
First, future flows of students will be more multi-directional. The flow of talent is today still surprisingly one-way: clever young people from the developing world take their skills and talents to richer countries in the developed world.
Disruption to travel and incomes from the corona crisis will boost the relative appeal of opportunities for intra-regional study. Many Asian students interested in overseas study are increasingly contemplating safe and more affordable study options closer to home, in countries such as Malaysia.
As developing countries increasingly seek to welcome growing numbers of overseas students themselves and improve their own league table performance, international education will cease to be considered in terms of a mainly western and English-speaking archetype.
Second, the crisis will accelerate take-up of online, distance-learning and blended courses (combining online educational materials and classroom interaction with traditional place-based teaching methods). These will be of interest to a broad swathe of mid-income families unable to afford (or unconvinced by the return on investment from) traditional multi-year programmes of overseas study.
Notwithstanding heroic efforts by universities to move to a virtual teaching environment, the crisis has exposed the extent to which UK universities have been lagging the best around the world in preparing themselves for the new growth opportunities in online, distance-learning and blended courses.
The most far-sighted institutions are already in a position to turn this crisis into an opportunity. Others are clearly scrambling to provide anything resembling a coherent online offering. They will pay a steep price in student satisfaction.
Demand for the traditional multi-year programmes of overseas study will return in time for the groups who’ve always accessed it. Online provision will not replace face-to-face education in the long term for students wanting the academic kudos and status benefits from full-on immersive experiences in other countries.
But the most exciting growth in international education will come from institutions using technology to scale up access for talented students from poor and middle-income backgrounds for whom it has previously been out of reach.
An international education market that is more accessible, less elitist and less carbon-intensive will be at least one good thing to come out of the corona crunch.
Jo Johnson is Chairman of Tes Global and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also President’s Professorial Fellow at King’s College London.
Financial Times
12 April 2020
Competition for overseas students is going to be fierce
Universities have a chance to lure a new group of middle-income families.
You don’t know what you got until it’s gone. With international students bundled back home to continue classes online, the English-speaking countries hitherto dominant in global higher education are realising what they risk losing.
Politicians have persistently failed to speak up for international students during wider debates about immigration. They are now waking up to the critical role overseas students play in underpinning institutions central to the performance of all knowledge economies.
In the decade before coronavirus struck, the number of international students worldwide had more than doubled to 5m with that number expected to rise to more than 8m by 2025.
Now, doubts are growing over how many overseas students will enrol on traditional face-to-face courses this September. Governments and universities in North America, the UK and Australia say they are preparing for a drop in international students of potentially 50 per cent to 75 per cent.
This major reversal for one of the great boom businesses of the globalised economy will have calamitous consequences for university finances. It will force governments to choose between costly bailouts and disorderly failures that could throw tens of thousands of students on to the streets and into jobs markets already in turmoil.
The challenge is acute in the UK, where 460,000 international students represent 20 per cent of library ticket-holders, massively cross-subsidise research in Russell Group institutions and contribute £20bn to service exports. Regulators will need to design a stabilisation fund to prevent the disorderly collapse of scores of vulnerable English universities. Access to it should be subject to strict conditions, including the closure of poor-quality courses.
Yet for all the anxiety over the coming year, pessimism about the future for international education is overblown — even if it may no longer hew to the current westernised, Anglo-Saxon and mainly English-speaking paradigm.
The push factors remain strong. In key developing countries, such as China and India which account for a quarter of overseas students, the shortage of places at prestigious domestic institutions that match social aspirations and academic needs is acute. In Bangladesh, with its largely young population of 170m, and Sri Lanka, there are an estimated five students competing for every available university place.
Driven by growth in middle classes in Asia and Africa, the demand for higher education is set to increase from 160m students in 2015 to more than 414m by 2030, according to Unesco. To meet that, the world would have to build four universities, each serving 80,000 students, every week, every year.
Only last month, a QS survey of 11,000 prospective international students found 85 per cent still open to applying — although a significant proportion intended to defer for a year. In fact, the disruption from coronavirus could accelerate a new phase of growth. Traditionally, an international education has been a privilege for those who have the money, or know how to obtain financial aid. In future, it will probably reach a wider pool of talent, through two accelerating trends.
First, the disruption to travel and incomes from the pandemic will boost the relative appeal of opportunities for intraregional study. Many Asian students increasingly contemplate safer and more affordable options closer to home, in countries such as Malaysia. Developing countries will increasingly seek overseas students themselves, with the global north losing market share to the global south.
Second, the crisis will accelerate online, distance-learning and blended courses that combine online educational materials and classroom interaction. These will interest middle-income families unconvinced by the return on investment from traditional multiyear programmes of overseas study.
The best institutions will turn the crisis into an opportunity. In time, demand for traditional programmes of overseas study will return for the elites who’ve always accessed it. The academic kudos and status benefits of full-on immersive experiences in other countries will continue to draw many students.
But the most exciting growth in international education will come from institutions that use technology to increase access for talented students from income groups for whom it has previously been out of reach. An international education market that is more accessible, less elitist and less carbon-intensive may be one good thing to come out of the corona crunch.
The Times OPED ARTICLE
10 February 2020
It’s time to level up routes into teaching
Jo Johnson and Jim Knight
Will we really feel the benefits of a rising schools budget if we don’t have enough teachers? The government has missed its teacher recruitment targets for each of the past seven years. By 2025 there will be 15 per cent more pupils in secondary schools than in 2018, at the same time as numbers leaving the profession early are rising. By 2026, we could face a shortfall of up to 33,000 secondary teachers.
In some regions, such as the north and the Midlands, the workforce is already shrinking. This means increasing workloads because of larger classes and fewer specialist teachers available for schools to offer subjects like physics that are crucial to our post-Brexit future.
The government is alive to the problem. Last year it published a range of proposals, but the scale of the challenge means we must go further. The solution as we see it is more about flexibility than funding. Here are three steps to consider.
First, we need to open up the apprentice levy. Only 46 people have completed the present teaching apprenticeship since its creation in 2017. Teaching needs to remain a graduate-level profession, but it shouldn’t stop us having a full degree apprenticeship that allows graduate status and qualified teacher status (QTS) in one programme. Opening up apprenticeship levy funding would enable passionate classroom assistants to realise their vocation. We’d plug the shortage if only 15 per cent of assistants took up this route.
Second, we must give established teachers more options to switch between school phases and subjects. The bulge of pupils progressing into the secondary system is creating a surplus of primary teachers. With more flexible funding for subject knowledge enhancement, we can make it easier for a primary teacher to move into secondary teaching. Equally, it would allow redeployment of teachers into shortage subjects.
Financial Times
27 January 2020
Modi’s culture war storms india’s universities
OpED Article
The country’s hopes of transforming itself into a knowledge economy are under threat
On the barricaded highway around New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university, the epicentre of protests against Narendra Modi’s shift towards majoritarian rule, the quality of the posters speaks volumes. While a few have just scribbled “Muck Fodi” on pieces of paper, others have produced well-designed artwork with pithy messages of defiance directed at the prime minister and his Bharatiya Janata party.
If the BJP were still presiding over growth rates to rival China’s — as it was until its disastrous demonetisation move of 2016 — it might have been harder to bring students to the streets. But with unemployment at a 45-year high and graduate jobs scarce, the opportunity cost of disrupting the diploma mills of the world’s soon-to-be-largest higher education system has fallen.
The protests, involving universities across the country, are about far more than dim prospects for young people. They represent a backlash against a run of anti-Muslim policies, culminating in a crackdown in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and a law that excludes Muslims from a fast-track path to citizenship for persecuted religious minorities. Their intensity shows a commitment to democratic values among people of all faiths who are fearful for the idea of India as a multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religious state.
India’s liberal universities are battlefields in this culture war. To the BJP, they are hotbeds of resistance to its Hindu nationalist agenda — teeming with entitled, virtue-signalling leftists, out of touch with the real India. After home affairs minister Amit Shah said they should be “taught a lesson and punished”, Delhi police allowed a mob with iron bars to beat up students at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Mr Modi has pledged to propel Indian universities to the top of global league tables even as he seeks to stamp out dissent within them. These objectives will be hard to reconcile: a toxic combination of state-sponsored attacks on students and faculty, thin research funding, dismal growth and eye-watering pollution could instead drive a new brain drain. India could not count a single university in the Times Higher Education’s ranking of the global top 300 in 2020, for the first time since 2012.
Much will hinge on Mr Modi’s plans to give greater autonomy and funding to a few opaquely selected “institutions of eminence”. Mirroring China’s creation of the C9 league of research-intensive universities, two of which now rank in the global top 30, the plan could provide a quick fix for national prestige. But it will do little for the vast majority of India’s 800 universities and 40,000 colleges if it ends up an empty exercise in marketing, or gaming metrics, that diverts attention from wider reform.
Political interference in Indian academia is hardly new. Every government has been able to parachute in the occasional pet vice-chancellor, but convention limited meddling to state-level institutions. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) wrote the playbook in the 1980s and 1990s, turning Calcutta university into a party fiefdom. Centrally funded national institutions were largely out of bounds.
If there is a difference today, it is in the scale of the interference. Education is a fixation for the BJP and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Nationwide, this government is rewriting textbooks and fixing appointments, even at the elite, centrally funded institutions. At Delhi university, for example, 4,500 vacant positions represent a golden patronage opportunity, as well as a chance to capture for a generation one of the jewels of India’s education system.
There is pressure on private universities, too, to stifle critics. Ramachandra Guha, a biographer of Mahatma Gandhi, found himself unable to take up a position at Ahmedabad University in Gujarat, home city of both the freedom fighter and Mr Modi. Others have stepped down from prominent roles. Academics returning to India with an easily withdrawn “Overseas Citizen of India” status feel vulnerable. Some self-censor.
For many in a country whose first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, so venerated the “scientific temper” that he enshrined its promotion as a civic duty in the constitution, the sense that academic freedom is dying has been traumatic. Last month, Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel Prize-winner, pointedly recalled how research in Germany and the Soviet Union had been set back decades by nationalism, pseudoscientific racial theories and suppression of ideologically suspect research.
Delhi’s state elections next month will signal whether Mr Modi will continue transforming India into a majoritarian state. If the BJP concludes that marginalising Muslims and waging a culture war against liberal elites is a winning strategy, there is more at stake than India’s universities. The country’s hopes of transforming itself into a knowledge economy and its distinctiveness as a democracy in an authoritarian neighbourhood are also under threat. This is nothing less than a battle for India’s soul and against the closing of its mind.
The writer, a former UK universities minister, is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Times
22 november 2019
David cameron’s for the record
OpED Article
With the Conservatives due to unveil their programme tomorrow, Jo Johnson warns of the pitfalls to avoid
I wish I could say for certain that the 2015 general election manifesto helped to win the first Conservative majority in almost a quarter of a century. All I know for sure is that it didn’t make a Conservative majority impossible, as the 2017 edition did so spectacularly for Theresa May.
With that caveat, and with the Tory manifesto due to be launched on Sunday, here are six dos and don’ts of manifesto production.
First, give it plenty of time. A snap election is no excuse for a half-baked effort: like Nick Timothy two years ago, Munira Mirza, Boris Johnson’s policy chief, has been up against the clock as she moulds the thoughts of the prime minister and his advisers into a coherent platform.
Reporting to Cameron, Osborne and Lynton Crosby, the policy unit I led spent more than a year working on the 2015 document, a gestation period longer than it ended up being used as a programme for government, thanks to Cameron’s resignation. But that’s another story.
In meetings with Lynton, he made clear that my job was mainly to do no harm. He would have preferred not to have had a manifesto at all, especially one “stuffed full of [expletive] policies”, but he saw that they were a necessary evil.This meant taking time to test ideas with experts, get them costed by the Treasury, undertake focus groups, and generally ensure they were not, à la social care, going to blow up the campaign.
Second, make sure to mix light and shade. Lynton’s priority, like that of his protégé Isaac Levido today, was famously to “scrape the barnacles off the boat”, so that by the time the campaign entered its crucial phase we had a well-honed message that would deliver the Tory vote.
There is a tension here: a “lighthouse” manifesto that rehashes campaign slogans is low-risk but it won’t give you a mandate. To bind MPs into the government’s programme it needs a bit of “shop-window” and intellectual crackle too.
Nor will recitation of standard Tory lines on welfare, immigration and law and order help the leadership to pursue the party’s stop-start modernisation effort, for which a mix of counterintuitive, liberal and outward-looking policies are required.
Third, resist pledge inflation. Every manifesto commitment carries risk: it strengthens the mandate and satisfies a vocal lobby but it is also the equivalent of putting on a straitjacket.
The very first manifesto, Peel’s Tamworth declaration of 1834, was simply a general declaration of Conservative principles without a single policy commitment. Since then, manifestos have become tedious encyclopaedia, reflecting pressure from single-issue campaigners to say something about everything.
Whereas Thatcher’s 1979 manifesto made 124 specific policy commitments, by 2010 the Conservative programme, with 648 pledges, had lost the battle with lobby groups. No party wants to be hung out to dry on social media for “not caring” about an issue important to potentially millions of voters. But failing to deliver on commitments is even worse.
We reversed pledge inflation a little in 2015 — our offer contained 16 per cent fewer commitments. And the 2017 manifesto was also deflationary, a trend Boris’s manifesto must continue.
Fourth, keep your MPs happy. They are buying a pig in a poke, as manifestos are invariably published long after the deadline for nomination papers has passed. In other words, candidates are committed to standing on the manifesto you are producing long before they know what’s in it.
The only way around this is to give MPs a proper opportunity to submit ideas for consideration. Backbench working groups, attended by cabinet ministers, help to secure buy-in from the party.
Fifth, don’t be afraid of running a tight ship. You are running the most centralised of all the main parties’ manifesto processes. While everyone and his aunt must be consulted, the flow of information must be one way only. The Conservative leader has the last word on what’s included.
Never let anyone else hold the pen. Not even for a minute. Leaks kill manifestos, so never send anyone anything by email. Ever. Print only numbered copies of papers and take them away from meetings at the end.
Finally, remember that the manifesto is a process rather than an event: most policies will have been announced before its formal launch. Make the most of the material you have because the strategic value of the manifesto, once it’s been published, expires within 48 hours.
By the time it comes out, its contents should be largely familiar, like a greatest hits album. The days leading up to the launch should be like the culmination of a tantric firework display, with a few showstopper policies generating appreciative oohs and aahs at the end.
That’s the aim, anyway. And remember, if a manifesto is going to unravel it will do so fast. You’ll know about it on the bus on the way home from the launch event in some northern or Midlands marginal. If anyone is talking about it more than 48 hours after it’s been released, you’re in serious trouble.
Jo Johnson was director of the No 10 policy unit from 2013 to 2015. He served as a government minister under David Cameron, Theresa May and his brother Boris Johnson before resigning in September. He is standing down as MP for Orpington.
