Deborah Prentice: preparing for the jobs of the future

Chris - When you went to university, and certainly when I went to university, it was still the case that we could probably look forward to counting on one hand the number of jobs or roles or careers that we're probably going to have. And I went to an event at a university in Australia a few years ago, and one of the researchers there stood up and she said, 'the reality is that your average student at university now, the job they're going to spend most of their life doing doesn't even exist yet.' And her second point was that you will need many hands to count how many jobs people will probably do. We're moving to a portfolio career type thing. What must universities like Cambridge do to be sufficiently agile so that we are training people with that in mind?

Deborah - I think we have to train people to in fact be flexible and agile themselves. And honestly, I think whatever course a student reads, whatever they study at Cambridge, that matters, I think, much less than learning some basic skills to analyse, to read, being numerate, right? Having some basic quantitative and general analytic skills, and then having the confidence and the curiosity and the openness to try new things and to go into new fields. I think we're looking at a situation in which lifelong learning is going to need to be a reality for many people. So learning to learn, learning to love learning, and establishing a really strong foundation and an expectation that in fact you are going to change and that change is good and you're going to learn throughout your life and ensuring that people have the personal and social skills and qualities that they need in order to succeed in that kind of a world.

Chris - The other change that's been very dramatic in the last about 30 years is that we went from about 5% of the population going to university to 45 to 50% of the population going to university. And now we are perhaps reversing that trend and people are saying, 'I'm accruing big debts. It's very expensive. It's hard to get services. So perhaps maybe I'll actually go into an apprenticeship or something.' So this whole kind of trend towards higher education is shifting. How are you going to react to that?

Deborah - It's a very interesting trend. There's a similar trend in the United States as well. College attendance is dropping in terms of percentage. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I know the aspiration was 50% of people should attend university. I don't know if that's somewhat arbitrary. I'm not sure if that's the right number. I'm not sure there is a right number. I think apprenticeships can be absolutely the right path for many students and for many, many different careers. So I'm not concerned necessarily about the students deciding that university isn't for them. I think the most important thing to us at Cambridge is to make sure that anybody who wants to come, anybody who wants to do this work and who in fact has achieved training and skills that they need in order to achieve, I think they should be able to come, regardless of their means, regardless of their background. So we focus very much on ensuring that our bursary scheme and other forms of support are adequate so that any student with the talent to succeed at Cambridge can make it to Cambridge.

Chris - What about people coming internationally? Because funding has always been tricky for higher education, but it's got more and more tricky as time has gone on and universities across the board have been forced to source their funding streams from students coming internationally and paying three times as much as a home student or more would to do those same courses. Is there a risk that they are taking up places that home students could have and therefore we are depriving British students of an education at Cambridge because we're educating the rest of the world? Or is that not the case?

Deborah - Our percentage of home students at the undergraduate level has remained fairly constant over time. I mean, it's 80% or 85%, I can't remember, so I shouldn't say a number. But the vast majority of our undergraduates are in fact home students. We do take in some international students, certainly, because they're extraordinarily talented, and we always take the most talented students in our applicant pools. More of our postgraduate students are international. That's always been true. And again, we're thrilled to have them. They bring talent and then they go back and our impact on the world is all the greater because we've got these incredible students who then go fan out into the rest of the world. So I'm delighted to have the international students. We don't have strict numbers driven by a budget model of the number of international students we need to get in. And so we're in fact still choosing the best from among our existing pools. We just tend to have more international students in our postgraduate pools compared to in our undergraduate pool.

Chris - Talking of internationals, you've made some points in the past about perhaps evaluating and reevaluating our relationship with China. Can you elaborate on that?

Deborah - China is a huge source of talent. Their higher education system is growing by leaps and bounds. And they're such an enormous system and such a large part of the science establishment, for example, that we still do work with China and will continue to do so. Of course, we have to be concerned about our security and the security of our intellectual property and other potential threats that can come from those kinds of collaborations. And so we have robust processes for vetting our engagements with China, with Chinese scholars and Chinese institutions to ensure that, in fact, intellectual property and just the humans involved are operating under secure circumstances. But China, it's a fifth of the population. If we're going to solve climate change, if we're going to tackle the world's most difficult problems, we're going to need the smarts, the knowledge, the help of our Chinese colleagues. And we'll welcome that.