NEWSWEEK: Are British universities struggling to attract the best and the brightest as competition from universities across the world gets more intense? Sir Tim Lankester: The competition is hotting up, but for the absolute best universities like Oxford and Cambridge, we still stand tall. We can’t be complacent, however. British kids are applying for universities in America who a few years ago would not have considered going across the Atlantic. But kids today are eager to get over there.
Are you worried about the growing competition from up and coming universities in countries such as Australia, China and India? If I worked for a middle-ranking British university, I would say: “Definitely, yes.” Asian universities are quite competitive in terms of quality. But, again, without wanting to sound complacent, I think we at Oxford offer the best. I would be surprised if, for example, Australian universities could compete with us for quality.
America’s best universities have huge endowments compared to British universities. Does this relative lack of resources make Britain less capable of attracting the best students from around the world? We haven’t got the same money, but I believe we offer an amazing undergraduate education. I’m not going to discuss which is better or worse, because the curricula are different, but the closer attention that Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates get, compared to the great American universities, is in particular outstanding. [In our system], students have weekly [private] sessions with their tutors [professors]. You don’t get that as an undergraduate even at Harvard, Yale or Princeton. In terms of resources, we’re not as rich, but our resources are still quite amazing. Our library systems are, some would say, better than anything in North America. Our labs are as capable. We’re not able to pay our personnel the sort of salary that they pay over in America, which causes some problems, but we are still able to recruit.
Year after year, the same handful of universities gain top billing in international rankings of the best universities—what do you think makes them so untouchable? I don’t think any of them are untouchable. But the top three or four of British Universities are very hard to beat in [emerging university countries like] Asia or Australia. I think our competition—meaning the top four: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE—is only North America.
But 10 years down the line, do you think Asian universities could reach the top spots? They could. Singapore is interesting. They’re pouring huge resources into their universities. Their learning facilities and classroom technologies are phenomenal. Furthermore, they’re offering American salaries to their professors. I would say, in some subjects, Singapore is coming up very fast. And they will soon be attracting Chinese students the same way that British universities are now. Chinese universities are coming up fast as well. I’ve got some students at Oxford who are going to China’s Tsing Hua to do their masters degrees in international relations. Something like that would have been unheard of 10 years ago. India has a few extremely good specialized institutions for technology, which certainly could become strong competition for computer science courses in Britain. But India is very poorly resourced and so I doubt it will become a real competition. Their classrooms are too big and their library resources are poor.
What is the buzz topic amongst educators at the moment? In Britain, the issue is domestic. We need to make university education accessible to a much wider part of the population. At Oxford, our class sizes are growing, but higher education is still very much the domain of the upper-middle class. And the huge efforts, over the last few years, to try to bring in kids from working class families have been unsuccessful.
What about globally? Globally, the issue for educators is the need to look East—not just for competition, but to understand what is happening in places like the Middle East, and to incorporate that understanding into our curriculum in politics, economics, anthropology and language skills.
