No Nobels

It is difficult conclusively to prove the no­tion that Britain's top universities are fall­ing behind their international counter­parts, such as Harvard and Yale. There is, after all, no internationally agreed defini­tion of what a university is supposed to do. "Fitness for the world" - what J.H. New­man, the great 19th-century advocate of a liberal education, saw as its ultimate aim - is tricky to measure. Teaching is obvi­ously part of any definition; but it is diffi­cult to compare the modular education of­fered in top American colleges with Britain's single-subject approach.

The creation of wealth, directly as well as indirectly, is increasingly regarded as part of a university's role; and in terms of the efficiency with which they spin off companies and pull in outside investment, British universities seem to be doing rather well. They still attract more than their fair share of foreign students.

But there are some indications that Brit­ain's share of top-level research is dimin­ishing. Britain won 11 Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine in 1960s, 13 in the 1970s, four in the 1980s and two in the 1990s. Of the past five British scientific Nobel prize-winners, none worked at a British university (they were at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and government research labora­tories). According to Andrew Oswald of Warwick University, only 80 of the world's 1,200 most-cited scientists are working in Britain, compared with 700 in America, whose lead is growing.

Leaders of the top universities - such as Sir Derek Roberts, provost of University College London (UCL) - are convinced that a crisis is impending. By British standards, UCL has a vast research budget; but it is running a deficit and has lost academic staff to America, though Sir Derek is more worried about the exodus of PhD and post-doctoral students to more remunera­tive countries. Because of the continual erosion of funding and salaries, he says, prestige institutions such as his are now "living on borrowed time". To help secure its pre-eminence, UCL is considering a merger, combining with Imperial College, another premier London institution, to create a university with far greater clout than either Oxford or Cambridge.

Across the Thames in unfashionable El­ephant and Castle, though a long way architecturally and academically from the academics at work around UCL's neo-clas­sical quad, is South Bank University (for­merly South Bank polytechnic). Deian Hopkin, its vice-chancellor, is a passionate advocate of higher education for all. He is, he says, much more worried about stan­dards at the end of a student's course than at the beginning of it. South Bank has an agency to help students find part-time work. It also runs schemes in which em­ployers try to persuade local pupils of the benefits of going to university. But because of a high drop-out rate, and its failure to meet student recruitment targets, South Bank has been obliged to cut academic jobs, and give back some of its grant to the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the primary government funding agency for universities. The problem, says Mr Hopkin, is that institutions such as his have been forced to compete for students and money with old universities that have vastly superior resources.

The government sees the problem but not the solution. It tinkered with funding arrangements in 1998, when it introduced small student fees to cover part of the cost of tuition, and supplement the much larger state subsidy. At the same time, the maintenance grants that students had pre­viously enjoyed were replaced by loans.

One of the stated aims of these changes was to improve access to university for less-well-off teenagers. But the wide gap between the proportions of students who come from the top social classes and the bottom ones hasn't shrunk. Partly because of that, and partly because students and their parents don't like stumping up the cash, the government has come under pressure to scrap the fees (£1,100 for this ac­ademic year). In fact, only about 39% of students pay the full (if piddling) amount; 42% of them pay nothing at all. But replac­ing grants with loans too mean to cover liv­ing expenses seems to have frightened off some students. The government is likely to bring back grants under some new name.

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