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Sir Malcolm Grant offers practical guidance for government and university leaders navigating the complex realities of expanding and sustaining high-quality higher education systems. In this clip, he outlines the long-term investments required to build effective institutions—from developing a strong faculty pipeline to aligning research and teaching efforts that attract and retain academic talent. He addresses the growing challenge of declining public funding for universities and explores alternative revenue sources such as philanthropy, alumni engagement, and international student enrollment. Drawing from international experience, Grant advocates for balanced, strategic leadership that can adapt to fiscal constraints while maintaining a focus on long-term institutional value and student opportunity.
There's an obvious sense in which teaching and research are closely interrelated. Historically, we would say, well, you would get very good teaching if you've got very high-quality researchers. And although I'm skeptical about that as a proposition, there is an interdependence between the two.
You want to be able to attract high-quality faculty. And the thing that often attracts high-quality faculty is their opportunity to do research, as well as to do the teaching.
So if I were talking to political leadership in countries such as this, I think my starting point would be, well, what's your objective? Is the objective to spread higher education across the nation, knowing that if you start from a weak starting point, you'll have a weak performance? Is the objective to raise the credibility of this nation's higher education in global terms? In which case, what are the markers that you would be looking to use? And where are the faculty? Have you got the faculty? Have they been educated already in this country, or have your top faculty moved abroad? Are you able to bring them back? Of course, which is something that China has done very effectively as it's developed, this higher education system.
Or are you on a long burn of training up faculty who will be the PhDs of the future, who will be the assistant and associate, and full professors of the future? There's no fast route to this. The other model, however long cited, is, well, can this country enhance its higher educational performance by drawing online from what's been established elsewhere around the world? And you can't just crudely draw online. You need to have local support and local instruction. But professors can be hugely underpinned and assisted by facilities that are not available across the world. I would say it's a slow burn, and if you don't get it right, you are condemning your nation to poorer standards of living as the rest of the world develops higher education and develops AI, and creates new types of employment.
So it is absolutely essential to understand that this requires investment. Not just investment now, but a commitment to investment over time. I've worked in some countries where the inability to confirm investment for more than a year at a time makes it completely impossible to recruit faculty. Nobody wants to go to a job that may end in a year when they can go to other jobs that may last forever.
Of course, in many of the nations that we're talking about, where higher education is starved of resources, there are some extraordinary wealthy people, and we need to just figure out how we can do what America's done so well, which is to establish a link between great wealth and philanthropy. That means that the names of these great people are remembered forever in the institutions that they founded and created and nurtured. Of course, many, many of the people who are extremely wealthy never went to university at all. So there's a need to establish that relationship. So philanthropy, I think, is one route. Another route is through alumni, giving back. And that's a more modest form of philanthropy when you have a less successful number of students going through. What other countries have done is to set up a way in which international students can be attracted, because international students are not then normally subject to the price cap of domestic students, and that certainly has underpinned higher education, actually increasingly across Europe, but certainly in the U.K. and the U.S.
Beyond that, you just have to press for political support, and political support because it can in two ways. How much is the nation willing to invest? How much is it willing to encourage students to contribute to the cost of their own education and lift the price cap, whilst at the same time ensuring that students who are capable of benefiting can still come in if they can't otherwise afford to do so.
So it's pretty much a mix of what can we do on campus?What can we do online? How can we bring down costs? How can we make efficiency savings across the university? But, this is what leadership's about.