Oxford woos students from India

Lord Chris Patten, Chancellor of Oxford University, will visit India next month as part of a drive to attract brightest students from the country to help university compete with the better-funded US Ivy League colleges.

"Globalisation doesn't end at the Thames Valley," the former European commissioner and governor of Hong Kong told the Financial Times in an interview published on Monday.

"I hope it will be the first of several visits to India and China over the next few years," he said. "I don't think a serious university can do without a properly thought-through strategy for China and India."

Lord Patten will visit Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi and meet Oxford alumni, speak at a Business School seminar and discuss ways of raising more money for bursaries for Indian students. He said there were about 17,000 Indian students in Britain, compared with nearly 80,000 in the US.

He said, "We have to fight very hard to keep our position in the world league table to stay up there with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT."

Oxford had twice as many Chinese as Indian students, he said. "One of the problems in India is that we have a rather conservative, stuffy image.  People don't realise the flexibility and modernity of our courses."

Cambridge University said that it too was committed to attracting the best international students, although its focus has recently been more on China than India.

Lord Patten, who will also co-chair his first annual meeting of the UK-India Round Table in Goa, spoke of a crisis in higher education and research in Europe.

"We're falling further and further behind the United States," he said.

The US spent twice as much as Europe on its universities and on research and development, he said.

"Ten years ago, 50 per cent of European students who went to America to do PhDs came back.  Last year the figure was 25 per cent.  None of us should want to be part of creating an ignorance-based economy."

His comments come against the background of reforms at Oxford, proposed by John Hood, the vice-chancellor, to meet government demands for better governance and make it more attractive to potential donors.

Some of the proposals, such as performance appraisals of academic staff, have met strong resistance.

The post of chancellor is currently a figurehead. Under the proposed reforms still being debated, Lord Patten would gain greater powers, becoming chairman of a new board of trustees.

He defended a planned reduction in undergraduates as necessary to safeguard its teaching quality. Lord Patten denied the motive was the extra money that postgraduates brought to the university.