Britain’s elite universities will be unable to retain their world-class reputation and recruit the best academic brains from around the world unless funding is substantially increased, a leading academic says today.

In a speech in Cambridge, Alison Richard, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, says that higher education in the UK is hopelessly underfunded and that the Government should not use the excuse of the economic downturn to keep a lid on funding.

She also says that UK universities spend less per student than their main competitors — the US, Australia, Germany and most Nordic countries — and this could hamper their efforts to compete for the best postgraduates.

Professor Richard’s plea on funding is accompanied by a robust criticism of government pressure on elite universities to do more to recruit pupils from state schools and deprived backgrounds. While increased social mobility is a desirable outcome of the work that Cambridge does with students from all backgrounds, it is not the university’s core mission, she says.

On funding, she told The Times yesterday that she feared waking up one day to find she did not have sufficient numbers of outstanding postgraduates at the university to enable it to compete on the global academic stage.

“Not every postgraduate you recruit is a genius,” she said. “Some, though, are absolutely extraordinary. My concern is that one day you realise that you just haven’t recruited sufficient extraordinary people to keep you on the frontier of research and teaching excellence.

“There is no cliff edge. It is just an imperceptible slip in the overall quality of the people you recruit so you don’t see it coming.” Professor Richard, an anthropologist who returned to England in 2003 after 30 years at Yale, said that Cambridge and Oxford had only a fraction of the money available to their biggest US rivals. She pointed out that the US invested 2.9 per cent of its gross domestic product on higher education, compared with the 1.1 per cent spent by the UK. Even China spends more at 1.3 per cent.

In her speech to the annual conference of the UUK, representing vice-chancellors, she says: “We are competing. . . with US universities offering full tuition fellowships and annual stipends of $22,000 (£12,500) up front for five years. We must be able to respond in kind. Yet there is a prevailing view in the UK that students, all students, are a source of income, not an investment in the future.”

The divide

— 59 per cent of Cambridge students are from state schools, up from 41 per cent in 1986, but down on the 69 per cent in 1980

— Last year 53.7 per cent of Oxford students were from state schools

— More than 4 in 10 Oxbridge students are from independent schools

Sources: Times archive; Cambridge University

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