Government needs to ensure changes to funding are fair and help tackle skills shortages
TIGA broadly welcomes Lord Browne’s proposals in the ‘Independent Review of Higher Education Funding & Student Finance’ that reported today but calls for the Government to look further at tackling skills shortages.
Richard Wilson, CEO of TIGA, said:
“Lord Browne has reported a series of proposals that can help to tackle the funding problems for Higher Education Institutions. TIGA broadly welcomes the proposals to increase tuition fees as a solution to the comparative under investment in the UK Higher Education system. As the recently published OECD’s ‘Education at a Glance 2010’ report showed, the UK only invested 1.3% of Gross Domestic Product in higher education in 2007. This is significantly lower than our competitor countries such as the US (3.1%), Canada (2.6%), Australia (1.5%), and Japan (1.5%).
“It is essential that enough safeguards are put in place to ensure students from all backgrounds can take advantage of our Higher Education institutions and young people from poorer backgrounds are not deterred.
“The Government also needs to consider addressing the skills shortage by competitively pricing tuition fees for mathematics and computer science courses to incentivise students to study these disciplines. These changes, as well as maintaining investment in our universities, are essential to allow us to compete in the global knowledge economy.””
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