Labelling Learning

FRANCES CAIRNCROSS asks whether Oxford should compete with American universities' brand awareness, and whether it can afford not to

"Harvard is a brand. I'm very happy to have that brand now I'm back here. It opens many more doors than Oxford does."

The speaker was a former Rhodes Scholar, an Indian with a flourishing legal practice in his home country, who had studied law at Oxford and then gone on to do a law degree at Harvard. He immensely admired Oxford and the education he had received there.

"US universities treat you as a consumer of education, not as someone who would want to interact. Oxford is about building you as a person, not as a career," he reflected. "In Oxford, the innocence of learning for learning's sake still exists. You can't reproduce views - the expectation is that you produce work of publishable quality in the exams."

The conversation, in a café in bustling Bangalore, brought home vividly the perils and prizes of regarding a university as a "brand". Use the word in Oxford, and people understandably shudder. This is not just instinctive squeamishness about anything to do with money or markets. Nor is it just a form of arrogance: everyone has heard of Oxford University, so why do anything that smacks of marketing? More profoundly, the queasiness reflects concern about losing that most treasured academic quality: "the innocence of learning for learning's sake". Oxford, unlike many rival American universities, can attract and retain distinguished academics partly because it has retained that innocence.

Heather Bell, the university's new director of international strategy, is optimistic about the weight that the name still carries. "I'm struck by the strength of the Oxford brand overseas," she says. "It has prestige and cachet, especially in Commonwealth countries." She sees Oxford University Press as a powerful part of the brand: many people first encounter the name of Oxford when learning English through one of OUP's many language-learning products, including the electronic ones.

The trouble is, as the Bangalore conversation also revealed, a "brand" is not simply - or even primarily - the way a university wants to present itself. Oxford has a "brand" without doing much to create it. For in some senses, the words "brand" and "reputation" imply the same thing. My young lawyer friend had acquired a particular view of Oxford. But what mattered more to him was the view of potential clients, many of whom had probably never been to an overseas university - and there, he found the Oxford connection less valuable than that of Harvard. My other visits to India bear out what he told me: Oxford's reputation in India often fails to encourage the brightest students to apply here, instead of to the United States.

Should that worry us? Well yes, it should. India is the world's largest English-speaking country, with strong historic links with Britain and a rapidly growing middle class, hungry for an international education. I do not know whether Chinese students see Oxford in the same light, but we should at least be asking that question: China has, or will soon have, the largest number of university students on the planet and even the tiny minority that wants to study abroad represents the world's largest cohort of students studying overseas.

But can we change our "brand" without changing the fundamental nature of what we do? That is a more difficult question. Other universities jump through all sorts of hoops to woo students. One recent commentator argued that "Placing the name of the city first, as in Southampton University, emphasises the relationship with the host city; placing the word university first, as in University of Southampton emphasises the academic aspects of the university." His point was that, if your university is in a depressing sort of city, it might be best to put the location last. Stick to "the University of Basra" - students will prefer it to "Basra University".

American universities, even very successful ones, also worry constantly about their brand. A few years ago a health maintenance organisation called Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, or HPHC, got into difficulties. The university took it to court, to try to wrest its name away. The Massachusetts attorney general argued that giving up the Harvard name would cause HPHC to lose investors, status and important name recognition.

Such legal control would be hard for Oxford to attempt, given that the university and the city share a name. But American universities protect their brands in less litigious ways too. Williams College, a liberal-arts school in Massachusetts, studiously monitors its "head-to-head" in admissions statistics: what are the chances that a student offered places at both Williams and another university will accept Williams? (The answer, for all but a handful of big research universities, is that the overwhelming majority plump for Williams.) It also knows whether students are happy with their experience at Williams, compared with the happiness ratings of students elsewhere (the answer is that Williams comes tops) and how happiness varies by a student's ethnic group (on the whole, everywhere, white students are happiest).

Oxford colleges rarely pay that sort of attention to their students' experience. Why not? Well, as long as tuition fees for Home and EU undergraduates are set far below the cost of teaching, and at the same level as universities of much lower quality, Oxford is bound to have many more applications than it can take. It's a buyer's market. And as for overseas undergraduates, most of the higher fees that they pay go to the university rather than to individual colleges, so there is no financial incentive to worry much about whether they like what they get when they arrive in Oxford.

All this may now start to change. Top American universities such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale - and yes, Williams College - are offering needs-blind admissions to foreign students with family incomes that put them firmly in the middle classes, and not just those from poor homes. It may now be cheaper for a bright British student to go to university in Cambridge, Massachusetts than Oxford, UK. Once that point sinks in, and Oxford finds that it is having to work harder to attract the cleverest British undergraduates, then the concept of "brand" and the need to promote it may acquire a new relevance. But it would be sad if that concept were merely about sporting facilities, famous alumni and mediaeval buildings, and did not also celebrate the innocence of learning for learning's sake.

Frances Cairncross is rector of Exeter College.