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Sir Malcolm Grant reflects on the distinct challenges shaping higher education across Europe. He examines how historical separation between teaching and research, limited faculty engagement, and high student attrition have constrained institutional progress in many countries. Grant also addresses the lack of philanthropic support for universities and the growing trend of students seeking education abroad. While highlighting political and economic uncertainty across the continent, he points to promising reforms — such as France’s integration of research and teaching — as signs of progress.
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 talking to political leadership in in countries such as this, I think my starting point will 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 and global terms, in which case what are the markers that you would be looking to 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 as higher education systems. 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 alongside it, is how well can this country enhance its higher educational performance by drawing online from what's been established elsewhere around the world. I mean you can't just crudely draw online and you need to have local support and local instruction but professors can be hugely underpinned and assisted by facilities that are now available across the world. So, I would say it's 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, 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've founded and created and nurtured. Of course, 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 of domestic students, and that certainly has underpinned higher education actually increasingly across Europe, but certainly in the UK and the US. Beyond that, you just have to press for political support. And political support because it can go 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 a 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? Bu this is what leadership's about.