Growing numbers of part-time students will force universities and colleges to offer more diverse and flexible ways to study.

Speaking to senior academics at a conference to debate the future of higher education, skills minister John Denham (pictured) warned yesterday that the sector must adapt to survive in the long term.

As well as developing more flexible, credit-based degrees and allowing students to study at more than one institution to complete a degree, higher education would have to significantly improve routes in for people who had undertaken vocational courses and effectively address fair access.

It is a year since Denham launched a national debate on the state of higher education, aiming to develop a framework to ensure the sector maintains its world class status. In a wide ranging speech to yesterday’s London conference, he addressed issues surrounding postgraduate research and study, research excellence and the need for better partnerships between institutions.

He also argued that institutions would have to make the case much more strongly for increased funding, from both the private and public sectors, if they were to receive more money.

Denham warned that changing demographics meant there were fewer 18-year-olds entering higher education. The rise in older, part-time student meant that more flexible, credit-based degrees had to be developed.

He said: “The future higher education system will need to ensure greater diversity of methods of study, as well as of qualifications. Long-term trends suggest that part-time study will continue to rise, and it’s difficult to see how we can increase the supply of graduates as we must without an increase in part-time study.

“But we will surely need to move decisively away from the assumption that a part-time degree is a full-time degree done in bits. I don’t have any doubt that the degree with remain the core outcome but the trend to more flexible ways of learning will bring irresistible pressure for the development of credits which carry value in their own right, for the acceptance of credits by other institutions and for the ability to complete a degree through study at more than one institution.”

Achieving 50 per cent participation by young people would, when the current demographic boom reverses in the quite-near future, become necessary to stop universities shrinking and to meet the demand for graduate skills.

“Once we have higher levels of participation, it will be as hard to reduce them as it would be to cut our current levels today,” he said.

“And, in terms of who goes to university, while the arithmetical majority of widening participation may take place in the more recent universities – as it has to date – the more research-intensive universities must address fair access effectively, or their student populations will remain skewed.

“Failing to attract the best talent from all parts of our society is bad for those institutions and bad for the students who miss out on studying there.”

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