Universities and students alone cannot bring the skills and sustained economic development to local areas says Laura Williams from the Work Foundation as she explains how communities should approach attracting new universities in the area.
The UK Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) recently announced a new ‘university challenge’: cities are to be offered the opportunity to bid to be the homes of new university campuses. This expansion of higher - and further -education into communities and economies where the existing workforce has low qualification levels (and where the future workforce are less likely to participate in higher and further education) is to be broadly welcomed. Cities successful in their bids will have a new ‘tool’ in their economic development kit.
What appears to be missing from this latest initiative is clarity about how places and universities interact. Which local problem will a university help address - worklessness, low skills, a lack of entrepreneurial activity, a perceived brand deficit – and how? Politicians across Europe speak of what John Denham, the UK Government minister in charge of universities calls the ‘power of higher education’. But in the absence of detail about how universities can transform struggling places, this can sound rather mysterious. The question is whether this latest approach will go further in creating more successful universities and more successful cities – in addition, of course, to helping the UK Government reach the 50 per cent target of young people going into higher education.
Education and skills have always been high on the political agenda. The Lisbon Strategy, signed in 2000 by the heads of all the European states, set Europe the goal of becoming ‘the most dynamic and competitive knowledge based economy in the world’, and has been a catalyst for investment in human capital and knowledge transfer. In the UK, the higher and further education sectors have expanded impressively, both in the numbers of institutions and the volume and students. And with this expansion comes a widening of the role of universities and colleges and a changing relationship between education institutions and the cities in which they are located.
Cities and universities suffer from similar pressures to ‘compete’ with each other and, as many of their slogans tell us, to be the best in the world. But in any league table, there will only ever be a small number of universities or cities at the top of the table and thus there are many mid-ranking universities and mid-ranking cities. The success and characteristics of the city are sometimes linked to those of the university. Some cities are lucky enough to be the homes of two universities, or more, but the wider benefits of the universities are not always felt at the local level. The mere presence of a university is no panacea for economic and social success.
Stoke-on-Trent in the West Midlands is an example here – two universities are based in and around the city, yet the city has a challenging set of socioeconomic indicators. Demand for high skills in an economy like Stoke is relatively low. It follows that those who acquire higher level skills are likely to leave the area or may end up working in a job that does not utilise their skills. And this in turn has an impact on the productivity of the local economy and on the attractiveness of Stoke as somewhere to invest and grow - human capital is a key factor for knowledge based firms making location decisions.
More universities and more students in universities will not therefore automatically lead to more or sustained economic growth in cities. Without active partnerships between universities and local authorities that aim to realise mutual benefits, then the wider economic development impact of universities in cities will not be felt. The good news is that many cities have realised this, and some excellent work is currently underway in different cities, involving different institutions. Indeed, work is underway on a university quarter in Stoke on Trent.
At The Work Foundation we’ve been investigating the ways in which universities and colleges can best engage with the communities and economies of the cities in which they are based. Our report, Higher and further education in knowledge cities, will be published in April. Drawing on case studies of Birmingham, Brighton, Leeds and Norwich, we show that there are many effective projects taking place in each city that help to address some of the socioeconomic challenges faced. The focus of these projects include increasing local participation in higher education, strengthening the capacity for innovation of local businesses, improving the attractiveness of the city to new investors, collaborating on city centre developments, running community based initiatives, and, investing in the cultural life of the city, amongst others.
Universities and colleges can helpfully be described as ‘anchor institutions’ in cities. That is, organisations with a relatively stable presence in cities as employers, educators, knowledge hubs, development partners and in civic life. The knowledge economy makes their role even more important. As the competition for where to drop these new ‘anchors’ in England opens up, the question for the new institutions and for the cities themselves will be how to embed them in the local community and economy. There are also wider questions to address about social mobility, the reinforcement of a tiered higher education system, and, perhaps most crucially, the culture of some businesses that do not value or invest in the skills of their workforce. Going forward, there needs to be greater clarity about how the new ‘university challenge’ will tackle these ongoing tensions and problems in economic development and education policy.
The Work Foundation will soon publish a report about the changing role of higher and further education in cities in the knowledge economy as part of its programmes of research on the Knowledge Economy and Ideopolis.
