Partnership is the way forward

Dear Ron... Our two final open letters to the Dearing committee of inquiry into higher education urge it to conisder the student point of view. Jamie Darwen chair of the National Postgraduate Committee, reminds the committee that postgraduate education and research are an integral part of the system.

You will, of course, be aware that postgraduate education has just been through its own process of review; Martin Harris and his committee have recently published their report. This makes many recommendations on quality and standards in postgraduate education, which have been broadly welcomed, and on funding, some of which have been more controversial.

This does not mean that your job has already been done. Far from it. Postgraduate education will need to remain an integral part of your deliberations, just as it is an integral part of higher education as a whole. The Harris report was written from a particular viewpoint, driven by the need of the English funding council to consider its own role in shaping provision of postgraduate education. You will need to consider the responses to the Harris report, and also other aspects which it does not cover. The report does attempt to put postgraduate education in a wider context, in terms of purposes for the individual student and of public needs for highly qualified people. However, it does not do so in a practical sense, by considering how individuals might progress through different stages of their education and, in particular, how they might fund these different stages.

On funding, the report attempts to find the most effective way of distributing a limited pot of cash. For taught postgraduate provision, public funds to institutions should be capped; any further expansion will have to be funded from private sources (employers or students themselves) or through efficiency savings. This means fees will rise, as institutions have to recoup full costs, and students will be expected to contribute more.

The report explicitly does not consider student maintenance, and barely touches on likely sources of private funds - in fact it suggests this will be a critical area of your own review, so as to ensure healthy growth of postgraduate education. It is not practical to suggest all postgraduate study should be free at the point of entry (as is often proposed for undergraduates), as over half of postgraduates are funded privately even now. I wonder, though, how much scope there is for an increase in private contributions.

Currently there is little to help those who have to fund themselves; student loans are not available to most postgraduates, and career development loans are available only for a limited range of vocational courses. Few postgraduate courses can guarantee an immediate financial reward in future employment, and there is evidence that many postgraduates will never recoup the earnings lost during their time of study. Employers have stated that they are only likely to invest in courses which fulfil their specific needs.

There has been much public debate about how undergraduates should be funded, and several models have been proposed. However, none of these has considered how uptake into postgraduate study might be affected. A large debt accrued as an undergraduate will provide further discouragement from continuing into postgraduate study. Any funding system should encompass all of further and higher education. For postgraduates, it should ensure that full-cost grants and scholarships (from research councils, institutions and others) are maintained and that support is available for those who cannot get such grants, for example through bursaries or loans.

Part-time study is likely to become predominant on taught postgraduate courses, to fit patterns of lifelong learning. Already over half of taught postgraduates are part-time. Support for part-time students must be brought into mainstream funding arrangements.

For postgraduate research, the Harris report advocates selective funding. It wishes to limit funding to departments which have a pervasive research culture, and uses a grade 3 rating in the research assessment exercise as a yardstick (although with some safety nets). This proposal has, not unexpectedly, divided the higher education community. From the perspective of the research student, a selective approach must be right. It should ensure that most postgraduates get to study in a high-quality research environment.

Postgraduates, on the whole, are clearly not studying for future financial reward. Their motives are more often to do with personal development and a specific interest in their subject. This means that quality becomes crucial; there is little point in making the financial and personal sacrifices that many do for a poor-quality experience. The Harris report quite rightly states that "the most important factor determining future demand may be the quality of postgraduate education". Postgraduate education, whether taught or by research, cannot be done on the cheap. Postgraduate work is, by its nature, at the cutting edge and must involve a high standard of teaching and facilities to be worth anything.

Finally, postgraduate education is not the end. For many postgraduates, drawing near to completion of their PhDs, comes the frightening prospect of "postdocs". Aspiring researchers have to struggle through a rat race of repeated short-term contracts, in an attempt to build a portfolio of publications as quickly as possible, before they have any chance of long-term security. Most postdocs receive little support from their institutions and little career advice. I urge you strongly to consider the plight of postdocs and encourage some sort of career structure for academics, so that our brightest young minds can consider their futures with far less dread.

Jamie Darwen is chair of the National Postgraduate Committee and is a PhD student in the department of genetics, University of Nottingham.