News - Midlands
The Rise of Sterling
As chairman of the Russell Group, Birmingham University vice-chancellor Michael Sterling is one of the most powerful figures in education. Also an outstanding engineer, he revealed his views on the future of industry to jim pendrill
Back in the 1950s it must have been quite an adventure for the young Michael John Howard Sterling when his parents put him on the train to Birmingham during the holidays to see his grandfather.
Not only could he escape the hustle of London and enjoy some green rolling fields, but the young Sterling could also savour the mechanical beauty of the train itself.
Already obsessed with anything related to engineering, he probably spent much of the journey working out the precise mechanics of how he was moving forward. "I was always frustrated that I couldn't learn enough at school, especially about how things worked," he tells me as we pore over the menu at Birmingham's Pasta Di Piazza off St Paul's Square on a crisp winter's day. "If I saw any machine, I always thought to myself 'someone must know how that was built, I want to find out how they did it.'"
No surprise then that it wasn't long before Sterling himself was building things. Frustrated by the confines of schooling he couldn't wait to embark on a career on the factory floor, even if it meant going against family tradition and being the first eldest son in countless Sterling generations to eschew a career in banking. "With a name like Sterling what else could the family do," he quips.
The factory floor for Sterling would be in East London's Woolwich at AEI, destined to become part of the ever growing GEC empire and a factory which at the time was making telephone exchanges. As a student apprentice Sterling got to see every corner of the business and the experience would stay with him for life.
However, somewhat inevitably, by his mid-20s the call of learning returned as Sterling sought to answer more of those mechanical questions which his brain kept asking. Little could he have imagined that he would never return to the factory floor.
Instead Sterling spent the next 20 years looking for engineering solutions for the utilities sector within the confines of academia. A professor of engineering at Durham University by the age of just 33, he was one of the brightest sparks of his generation.
Then in 1990 he stepped upstairs so to speak, first becoming the youngest vice-chancellor of his day at Brunel University where he oversaw massive expansion, and then moving to the plum job in charge of Birmingham in 2001. "Simply too prestigious a job to turn down," he recalls.
But why never a return to industry? Half an hour into our lunch the menus haven't moved from the table beside us, but we are so deep in conversation that we are happy to let our stomachs wait while Sterling continues filling in the gaps in his CV.
"I did have several lucrative offers to go back into industry," he reveals, only to add with a mischievous grin, "but I always fancied running a university too".
Such a snapshot into Sterling's background is important given his powerful role today. It means he really can speak with authority when he talks of how to solve the pressures facing UK industry, and more specifically at what education needs to be doing to ease the situation
"Look at it from the broad perspective. What is the mission of the UK? We don't have large amounts of natural resources, nor as much manufacturing as we used to. Our future is as a global leader in the knowledge economy. And to deliver that we have to have top quality people which means top quality graduates. Second rate graduates will not do."
In Sterling's view, unless we do something quickly to raise the game in higher education we are not going to retain our competitive edge. Although comfortable that UK research remains second to none, Sterling is petrified that we are not investing enough in undergraduates and that we are fast heading towards a second-rate university system because we cannot afford it.
"Unless we tackle this now, in 10 years time the UK will find itself a second rate country. Make no bones about it, we are playing for big stakes."
By "this" Sterling is of course referring to the funding of UK higher education, on which he is at the heart of the current national debate. As chairman since last summer of the Russell Group, the affiliation of 19 top red-brick universities in the UK to which Birmingham itself belongs, Sterling has been a vociferous campaigner in support of tuition fee rises and has shot to national prominence as he lobbies all and sundry to push the merits of a rise.
The day we meet is exactly a month after the knife-edge vote which saw the government push the Higher Education Bill through by just five votes. Yet although the subject has now all but disappeared from the public and media gaze, Sterling insists that the bill could even now be derailed.
"Whether the bill goes through the rest of Parliament is still in the lap of the gods. It's not over yet by any means and if it fails it will be a disaster for higher education."
However, even if the bill goes through in its present shape, allowing universities to increase annual fees from £31,100 to £33,000 by 2006, the lobbying still goes on.
Sterling claims that the bill means that universities will only effectively gain the equivalent of £31,700 per student on top of government funding of £35,500. Instead, he says that students need to be funded to the tune of an extra £35,500 each to be on a par with the funding levels they receive in the US, the funding model which he believes the UK has to follow. In other words, we are still £33,800 short per student.
As things stand the £33,000 figure has also been locked in until 2010, following pressure to water down the bill, so the numbers still don't stack up for Sterling.
"We will continue to fight for this gap to be bridged and it now looks like only the government, and that means the taxpayer, will bridge it. That is acceptable because I have never argued that students should have to bear the whole cost, only part of it."
That said, Sterling says that because graduates earn significantly more than non-graduates it is only right they bear some of the cost. He also believes the debt issue is overplayed. "It is often the fear of debt rather than the actual level of debt itself that is the problem."
However, Sterling adds that if the shortfall in funding is not addressed fully then the sheer numbers of students piling into the higher education system must be questioned. "If we cannot afford to do it then in my view it is not worth cutting the quality to get the numbers up."
This is a clear swipe at the government's much-lambasted target of putting 50 per cent of all children through the university system, a target which like so many of New Labour's has been played down of late. "It is interesting how the government has now changed the wording to 50 per cent 'experiencing' higher education," he adds.
Sterling oversaw a huge expansion in student numbers at Brunel. "I accept that with hindsight we should have said to the government no more students unless you pay, but at the time we were sucked into this system of increasing numbers at a pace that couldn't be kept up with financially. We were storing up massive problems."
It's not just students who are suffering from a creaking system. The Association of University Teachers recently voted for industrial action. Sterling fully accepts that lecturers are underpaid. "Their salaries have not kept pace as they should have done, there is no argument about that."
Sterling calls for more flexibility in the teaching pay structure. "To take one example, engineers can command higher salaries outside university than, say, historians. We have to be aware of that."
For Sterling it all boils down to an immense frustration with the wider system. "At the end of the day our business model is hopeless. We cannot change prices or change the number of students. What then doesn't help is that we are also over-regulated and over-audited too."
So for Sterling the lobbying continues on several fronts. Between them the 19 Russell members account for three-quarters of all research funding in the UK. Given the government's commitment to ensuring British industry steps up the all-important value chain, what goes on at those 19 universities is immensely significant for the UK's long-term economic health.
"The Russell Group is all about research-led and research-intensive universities," explains Sterling. Birmingham is a case in point. Two-thirds of its £3300m turnover comes from commercial income of which a sizeable chunk is made up of research contracts both nationally and internationally. A fifth of the university's 27,000 population are overseas students who, as Sterling revealingly adds, also "pay the proper rate".
Birmingham could yet get even bigger. Sterling has expressed strong interest in forming a single "super" university across the city, although the prospects of Birmingham, Aston and UCE getting into bed with one another still seems unlikely.
Plans for a merger between UCE and Aston fell through at Christmas with Aston citing "significant differences between the missions and strategies" of the two. A merger between Aston and Birmingham was scuppered shortly before Sterling came to the Midlands.
But he hasn't entirely given up. "We are open to suggestions about mergers. We are not saying we are a Russell Group university and we do not want to talk to anyone else, and we are interested in three-way discussions in the city. Although UCE do not seem to want to follow that route now, we have left the door open to Aston."
Sterling concedes that mergers are difficult. "Each party has got to see the benefits. The only way for mergers to succeed are if both governing bodies agree to it, and that is inherently difficult." However, he admits that he has kept a close eye on the recent merger of Manchester and UMIST, which not only proves that mergers can work, but which also poses direct competitive challenges to the West Midlands.
And Sterling knows about those challenges to the region. On the board of regional development agency Advantage West Midlands, Sterling is at the heart of the region's economic regeneration, or "oiling the wheels in the right places" as he puts it. "There is a good balance of people on the board and a determination to drive the region, although we accept we have quite a way to go."
The key is transforming the skills base. "We have a tremendous skills base, but what we have failed to do is move it in a direction which is of long-term benefit to us."
He cites the example of the North East which successfully re-engineered itself into an IT economy. "The Midlands should have got more of that growing IT economy than it did. We now need to move very quickly, we effectively need to take a punt on the next big thing." Sterling cites the food industry as one such potential growth area, an area in which AWM is investing heavily.
And if Birmingham University can help create that vision then all the better. "The university was founded in order to help Birmingham companies achieve their goals and ambitions. We must never forget that."
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Back in the 1950s it must have been quite an adventure for the young Michael John Howard Sterling when his parents put him on the train to Birmingham during the holidays to see his grandfather.
Not only could he escape the hustle of London and enjoy some green rolling fields, but the young Sterling could also savour the mechanical beauty of the train itself.
Already obsessed with anything related to engineering, he probably spent much of the journey working out the precise mechanics of how he was moving forward. "I was always frustrated that I couldn't learn enough at school, especially about how things worked," he tells me as we pore over the menu at Birmingham's Pasta Di Piazza off St Paul's Square on a crisp winter's day. "If I saw any machine, I always thought to myself 'someone must know how that was built, I want to find out how they did it.'"
No surprise then that it wasn't long before Sterling himself was building things. Frustrated by the confines of schooling he couldn't wait to embark on a career on the factory floor, even if it meant going against family tradition and being the first eldest son in countless Sterling generations to eschew a career in banking. "With a name like Sterling what else could the family do," he quips.
The factory floor for Sterling would be in East London's Woolwich at AEI, destined to become part of the ever growing GEC empire and a factory which at the time was making telephone exchanges. As a student apprentice Sterling got to see every corner of the business and the experience would stay with him for life.
However, somewhat inevitably, by his mid-20s the call of learning returned as Sterling sought to answer more of those mechanical questions which his brain kept asking. Little could he have imagined that he would never return to the factory floor.
Instead Sterling spent the next 20 years looking for engineering solutions for the utilities sector within the confines of academia. A professor of engineering at Durham University by the age of just 33, he was one of the brightest sparks of his generation.
Then in 1990 he stepped upstairs so to speak, first becoming the youngest vice-chancellor of his day at Brunel University where he oversaw massive expansion, and then moving to the plum job in charge of Birmingham in 2001. "Simply too prestigious a job to turn down," he recalls.
But why never a return to industry? Half an hour into our lunch the menus haven't moved from the table beside us, but we are so deep in conversation that we are happy to let our stomachs wait while Sterling continues filling in the gaps in his CV.
"I did have several lucrative offers to go back into industry," he reveals, only to add with a mischievous grin, "but I always fancied running a university too".
Such a snapshot into Sterling's background is important given his powerful role today. It means he really can speak with authority when he talks of how to solve the pressures facing UK industry, and more specifically at what education needs to be doing to ease the situation
"Look at it from the broad perspective. What is the mission of the UK? We don't have large amounts of natural resources, nor as much manufacturing as we used to. Our future is as a global leader in the knowledge economy. And to deliver that we have to have top quality people which means top quality graduates. Second rate graduates will not do."
In Sterling's view, unless we do something quickly to raise the game in higher education we are not going to retain our competitive edge. Although comfortable that UK research remains second to none, Sterling is petrified that we are not investing enough in undergraduates and that we are fast heading towards a second-rate university system because we cannot afford it.
"Unless we tackle this now, in 10 years time the UK will find itself a second rate country. Make no bones about it, we are playing for big stakes."
By "this" Sterling is of course referring to the funding of UK higher education, on which he is at the heart of the current national debate. As chairman since last summer of the Russell Group, the affiliation of 19 top red-brick universities in the UK to which Birmingham itself belongs, Sterling has been a vociferous campaigner in support of tuition fee rises and has shot to national prominence as he lobbies all and sundry to push the merits of a rise.
The day we meet is exactly a month after the knife-edge vote which saw the government push the Higher Education Bill through by just five votes. Yet although the subject has now all but disappeared from the public and media gaze, Sterling insists that the bill could even now be derailed.
"Whether the bill goes through the rest of Parliament is still in the lap of the gods. It's not over yet by any means and if it fails it will be a disaster for higher education."
However, even if the bill goes through in its present shape, allowing universities to increase annual fees from £31,100 to £33,000 by 2006, the lobbying still goes on.
Sterling claims that the bill means that universities will only effectively gain the equivalent of £31,700 per student on top of government funding of £35,500. Instead, he says that students need to be funded to the tune of an extra £35,500 each to be on a par with the funding levels they receive in the US, the funding model which he believes the UK has to follow. In other words, we are still £33,800 short per student.
As things stand the £33,000 figure has also been locked in until 2010, following pressure to water down the bill, so the numbers still don't stack up for Sterling.
"We will continue to fight for this gap to be bridged and it now looks like only the government, and that means the taxpayer, will bridge it. That is acceptable because I have never argued that students should have to bear the whole cost, only part of it."
That said, Sterling says that because graduates earn significantly more than non-graduates it is only right they bear some of the cost. He also believes the debt issue is overplayed. "It is often the fear of debt rather than the actual level of debt itself that is the problem."
However, Sterling adds that if the shortfall in funding is not addressed fully then the sheer numbers of students piling into the higher education system must be questioned. "If we cannot afford to do it then in my view it is not worth cutting the quality to get the numbers up."
This is a clear swipe at the government's much-lambasted target of putting 50 per cent of all children through the university system, a target which like so many of New Labour's has been played down of late. "It is interesting how the government has now changed the wording to 50 per cent 'experiencing' higher education," he adds.
Sterling oversaw a huge expansion in student numbers at Brunel. "I accept that with hindsight we should have said to the government no more students unless you pay, but at the time we were sucked into this system of increasing numbers at a pace that couldn't be kept up with financially. We were storing up massive problems."
It's not just students who are suffering from a creaking system. The Association of University Teachers recently voted for industrial action. Sterling fully accepts that lecturers are underpaid. "Their salaries have not kept pace as they should have done, there is no argument about that."
Sterling calls for more flexibility in the teaching pay structure. "To take one example, engineers can command higher salaries outside university than, say, historians. We have to be aware of that."
For Sterling it all boils down to an immense frustration with the wider system. "At the end of the day our business model is hopeless. We cannot change prices or change the number of students. What then doesn't help is that we are also over-regulated and over-audited too."
So for Sterling the lobbying continues on several fronts. Between them the 19 Russell members account for three-quarters of all research funding in the UK. Given the government's commitment to ensuring British industry steps up the all-important value chain, what goes on at those 19 universities is immensely significant for the UK's long-term economic health.
"The Russell Group is all about research-led and research-intensive universities," explains Sterling. Birmingham is a case in point. Two-thirds of its £3300m turnover comes from commercial income of which a sizeable chunk is made up of research contracts both nationally and internationally. A fifth of the university's 27,000 population are overseas students who, as Sterling revealingly adds, also "pay the proper rate".
Birmingham could yet get even bigger. Sterling has expressed strong interest in forming a single "super" university across the city, although the prospects of Birmingham, Aston and UCE getting into bed with one another still seems unlikely.
Plans for a merger between UCE and Aston fell through at Christmas with Aston citing "significant differences between the missions and strategies" of the two. A merger between Aston and Birmingham was scuppered shortly before Sterling came to the Midlands.
But he hasn't entirely given up. "We are open to suggestions about mergers. We are not saying we are a Russell Group university and we do not want to talk to anyone else, and we are interested in three-way discussions in the city. Although UCE do not seem to want to follow that route now, we have left the door open to Aston."
Sterling concedes that mergers are difficult. "Each party has got to see the benefits. The only way for mergers to succeed are if both governing bodies agree to it, and that is inherently difficult." However, he admits that he has kept a close eye on the recent merger of Manchester and UMIST, which not only proves that mergers can work, but which also poses direct competitive challenges to the West Midlands.
And Sterling knows about those challenges to the region. On the board of regional development agency Advantage West Midlands, Sterling is at the heart of the region's economic regeneration, or "oiling the wheels in the right places" as he puts it. "There is a good balance of people on the board and a determination to drive the region, although we accept we have quite a way to go."
The key is transforming the skills base. "We have a tremendous skills base, but what we have failed to do is move it in a direction which is of long-term benefit to us."
He cites the example of the North East which successfully re-engineered itself into an IT economy. "The Midlands should have got more of that growing IT economy than it did. We now need to move very quickly, we effectively need to take a punt on the next big thing." Sterling cites the food industry as one such potential growth area, an area in which AWM is investing heavily.
And if Birmingham University can help create that vision then all the better. "The university was founded in order to help Birmingham companies achieve their goals and ambitions. We must never forget that."
For the fuller picture,
subscribe to Insider
every month.