UK needs to raise its game to compete

By Martin Rees. How can UK universities become more globally competitive? At the graduate level, one way would be to follow the US, where a minority of universities have strong graduate schools.
Even though many British universities may offer masters courses in specific subjects, I believe the UK should concentrate graduate education at the PhD level and encourage alliances and clustering in specialised areas. Many academics bridle at this suggestion, so, in making it, it is important to emphasise that concentration of graduate education need not, especially in the humanities, entail an equivalent concentration of research – that is a distinction that is often conflated.
Many who teach in the best American liberal arts colleges are productive researchers and scholars, but if they have graduate students, these are based in another university.
* Lord Martin Rees is astronomer royal and emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. This is an extract from the pamphlet University Diversity: Freedom, excellence and funding for a global future published by the Politeia think-tank. He will be debating with Universities and Science Minister David Willetts on 12 December on whether British universities can keep ahead in a global future in connection with the recent launch of the Council for the Defence of British Universities, of which he is a member. Read more...