University Challenged

The cost of higher education off-island can prove prohibitive for potential students in Jersey and Guernsey. But could a Channel Islands university offer a solution? Christian Doherty investigates.

Ever since Tony Blair adopted it as his mantra, education has enjoyed a place firmly at the top of the political agenda. This position has been further cemented in the last 12 months with the continuing controversy over university funding and the thorny problem of tuition fees.

At its heart, the debate has centred on how higher education in the UK should be funded: are we still prepared to pay for young people to spend three or four years at university, or are we living in an age where students must shoulder the majority of the burden, and where institutions are able to sell their services to the highest bidder? This issue is further complicated for the Channel Islands by their particular relationship to the UK. “In Jersey, we can’t access the UK student loan system,” explains Andy Gibbs of Careers Jersey. “That means that those from Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are classified as island students, which means they’re not international students or UK students. While that may change in 2012, as it stands the islands negotiate a fee with UK universities for different bands of subjects.”

This ‘island fee’ reflects the fact that the UK university doesn’t receive any funds for a Channel Island student, resulting in a higher price. Currently a UK student would pay just under £3,300 for the lowest band course. For an island student, that jumps to £6,500. For the 600-odd Channel Island students that leave school at 18 looking to go on to higher education, the costs are significant – whoever shoulders the burden.

The States make a contribution to the fees of lower-earners in Jersey, while Guernsey operates a similar system. But for average earners the contribution is reduced, meaning the personal cost can be substantial.

According to the figures, the cost to a Guernsey family with average earnings – say a combined gross income of £75,610 – to send a student to a UK university is around £11,495. For Jersey, the figure is even higher at £13,694. With Universities free to charge up to £9,000 a year in tuition from 2012, these figures could rise significantly.

Weighing up the options

One way to avoid this expense is to look beyond the UK to Europe. Some European universities are offering a growing number of international qualifications, with many taught in English. For instance, the prestigious University of Maastricht currently offers degrees for EU students for just £1,500 per year, a fraction of the cost in the UK. Not surprisingly, that route is growing popular.

“There is definitely a strong trend of students looking further afield to study,” says Gibbs. “We fund 12 in Australia, 12 in New Zealand, seven in the Czech Republic as well as students in Denmark, France, Germany and elsewhere. The educational opportunities are more global, and we’ve extended our funding to incorporate that in the same way as we do in the UK.”

For those wishing to study at home, taking the cheaper option of staying on-island has its drawbacks, notably in the level of choice. Currently, Highlands College in Jersey offers a small number of foundation degrees in finance-related subjects, as well as courses including childhood studies and construction management. Many of these courses are offered in partnership with UK universities, notably Plymouth and Portsmouth. The construction management course, for instance, was the result of a tie-up with London’s South Bank University.

Focusing on developing partnerships with UK universities is a well established and deliberate strategy. “When we started a few years ago, we based it on research to see what demand would be, and we also looked at what other small jurisdictions were doing”, says Professor Ed Sallis, Principal of Highlands College. “For smaller places that have close connections with somewhere bigger – the Caribbean, for instance, or Jersey – institutions in these places often look to partner with larger institutions.

“For a long time we’ve had a link with Plymouth, so we’ve taken a pragmatic view: what can we do with a reasonably small demand? There are restrictions on staffing to take in to account, so by working closely with local employers we’ve come up with a plan: to create a separate University Centre within Highlands College.”

Staying at home

The University Centre is clearly successful – Sallis reports it is now the single most popular HE option for young people in Jersey, having superseded Plymouth University. And as well as Highlands there is the Jersey International Business School (JIBS), though its focus falls mainly on the provision of post-graduate qualifications.

Meanwhile, over in Guernsey, the situation is slightly different. It has its GTA University Centre, which mainly offers post-graduate qualifications centred around business and finance. Its foundation degrees are still limited, though growing, and it has partnered with UK universities – notably Southampton and Bournemouth – to deliver its programmes. It’s also working with Highlands to deliver an MBA.

Fiona Naftel, Managing Director at GTA, says that while the organisation is increasing the breadth and scope of its offered courses in order to cater to on-island demand – new additions to courses on offer include Islamic finance and corporate governance – it isn’t designed as a substitute for a UK university education.

“What we’re not trying to do is say: ‘you must stay on-island’. I’ve got three daughters myself, and I’d encourage them to do whatever they wanted. However, we are trying to provide an alternative to those who’ve chosen not to go. We’re trying to give them a choice should they want to stay.”

Ed Sallis at Highlands College echoes that, and is firm in his belief that trying to replicate what is on offer in the UK is neither sustainable nor preferable. “We’ve tried to build programmes that are different from the UK – there’s more emphasis on work-based learning, and on degrees that match employers’ need. The whole curriculum has been based on work with local employers.”

Some disciplines are clearly not cost effective to provide on-island. Science, engineering and medicine all require large-scale capital investment, making them all but impossible to offer to students off the mainland. Instead, both Jersey and Guernsey have turned to the local business community in order to devise programmes that will turn out skilled graduates for the benefit of the local economy. For instance, the Guernsey College of Further Education generally has 300 to 440 students on HE-equivalent courses across a range of subjects.

But both Sallis and Naftel agree that a mixture of provision – a growing number of foundation degrees; specialist qualifications tailored to the legal and financial services industries; as well as critical areas, such as nursing and health studies – offer the best way forward for those wanting to study at home, leaving the majority of students who want more choice in their degree to study in the UK.

For those looking to stay in the island and work within the professional services field, the landscape is more welcoming, as Stephen Platt, Director of the JIBS, explains. “We have increased the breadth of our offering to include BSc degrees, as well as around 35 different professional qualifications that we deliver for a range of bodies, such as IoD, STEP and the IC A,” he says. “Then we have certificated awareness programmes, short courses on a range of technical subjects and a large in-company training programme.”

And JIBS isn’t the only organisation providing on-the-job training. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) recently linked up with education provider BPP to offer its ACA qualification to students in the Channel Islands, and there are currently around 50 students each on Jersey and Guernsey studying for the ACA.

“A few years ago we managed to start up the provision of tuition in the Channel Islands. This is hugely valuable given the costs of sending students to the UK, which was prohibitive for a lot of smaller organisations,” says David Garrigan, Senior Business Development Manager at the ICAEW. “Having this tuition delivered in Jersey and Guernsey [through BPP] has made a significant difference to our availability for potential students.”

Beating the brain drain

Despite the increasing breadth of courses on offer across the islands, there are perennial fears that both Jersey and Guernsey are in danger of losing their best and brightest because of the limited choice. The silver lining, however, comes from the rates of return, as Andy Gibb points out.

“We try to keep a record of how many people come back to the islands, and we think that over a 10-year period we’ll end up with about two-thirds of our graduates coming back, with many bringing with them a graduate partner, having married in the UK.”

However, despite the growing diversity of the education on offer both in the Channel Islands and the mainland, there remains one unresolved problem: whether a Channel Island university would be viable. And while it may have fallen down the educational agenda, in 2004 the States of Jersey came close to giving the proposal a green light.

The university proposal was presented by Malcolm Johnson, Professor of Gerontology at Bath University, whose expertise centres on the stresses created by an ageing population, something Jersey, in common with most developed countries, must grapple with in the future. As part of his work with the States, in 2004 he was asked to conduct a study into whether a Channel Islands university would be viable, and if so, what it might look like.

“The questions I asked were: why would you have a university in Jersey, and indeed why would you not?” he says. “So I asked around about why there wasn’t a university already. And in the main people thought Jersey was too small, it would cost a lot of money and so on. So then I went about trying to map the costs and benefits for the island.”

In Ed Sallis’s view, however, the key objection was simple: numbers. “The difficulty is that we have 450 18-year-olds leaving the island, and even when you add those from Guernsey, it’s still not much,” he says. “You can’t produce a huge range of degree programmes for that number.”

The long-term view

The context for Johnson’s research was the contention that over the last 50 years Jersey has lost its key economic drivers: agriculture and tourism. “And what it now has is the financial services industry, which is productive in terms of revenue, but everyone knows that it could just disappear one day – there’s been talk of it going off to Dubai, for instance.”

Johnson’s report ultimately recommended that a fully fledged university in Jersey would deliver both economic and cultural benefits. “If you set up a university – unlike a business, where the average lifespan might be short, even for a big business – it can go on bringing an economic benefit for decades – even centuries,” he says. “So if you want a reliable core activity, the university is a good idea.

“Secondly, it would bring in cultural capital and introduce a category of individuals that are not represented on the islands: academics, intellectuals, writers, artists, teachers and so on. So that would stimulate the cultural economy, and would also bring a constant and changing population of visitors who came and left, which for Jersey is really important. A new university wouldn’t involve a new tide of immigration, but a wave of people coming for three or four years, and on the whole they would then go away.”

Johnson also examined whether Jersey’s population simply isn’t big enough to sustain a university, and concluded that it was no real barrier. “It’s true that Jersey isn’t very big,” he admits. “But look at where the universities that have been created in the last 20 years are: lots of them are in places that are a similar size or smaller. Look at Worcester, Winchester, Bolton, and Luton: these are moderate-sized towns sustaining considerable universities. I have a professorship at Bath, with a population of 80,000 and a worldranking university, so the size of population is no deterrent whatsoever.”

The study even identified a site, the old St Saviour’s Hospital, and pinpointed potential sponsors. “If you were building a whole new university, you’ve got some very highnet- worth people happy to put their names on buildings, research departments, chairs and so on,” Johnson says.

His proposals envisaged a business and liberal arts university with social sciences, arts, drama and health studies offered, and a business school attached. To him, the arguments were compelling. “There are lots of newer universities in that style in the UK. The models exist, and it would have been perfectly viable. The benefits for locals would also be there, making it cheaper for island dwellers to study at home – a trend that’s increasing in the UK.”

But the proposals, despite garnering significant support, were ultimately rejected, and the International Business School got the go-ahead along with further support for Highlands College to bolster its offering.

So was this an opportunity missed?
“It did require long-term thinking, and the people who have founded universities tend to have a long-term perspective,” says Johnson. “It’s true that financial services could go, and therefore you’d think that an idea like the university – which is not high risk, where you can buy in high-quality talent in the form of academics and managers – would be a good idea. Surely if they can get decent people to go to Luton, then how easy a sell is Jersey?”.

Christian Doherty is a freelance business journalist.

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