Tony Blair visit to Brunel University: walkabout / speech

Tony Blair visit to Brunel University: walkabout / speech; - Come back to this question of resources and governance / Increased funding brings with it, of course, the requirement for accountability, we are conscious however that this ought to be as minimally bureaucratic as possible / We have already cut the regulatory requirements and if you want us to do more, we will lend a sympathetic ear - On resources, we currently provide around 10 billion pounds a year for higher education, tuition fees will provide an extra 1.3 billion pounds a year from 2010, you are competing with better- funded competitors abroad, not least in the United States - That is the reason for today's announcement on endowments / Private fundraising - from alumni and business - is a major source of income in the United States, the UK does not spend much less public money on higher education than the US, but private giving there is much greater / The average US university has an endowment fourteen times that of a comparable UK university / 207 universities in the USA currently have endowments worth 100m pounds or more, there are only 7 in the UK - Why is this? Partly it's about cultural attitudes, but partly it's also about capacity, in the last twenty years, there has been a rapid growth in private endowments in US public universities, often as a result of matched funding from the state, and in Ontario, Canada, a match-funding scheme has greatly increased private giving in the province's 29 universities and colleges - We have listened to the evidence collected by Prof Eric Thomas and by the Sutton Trust, and I believe the time is right to have an endowment policy here / Endowments fit very well with a sector that has increased autonomy, greater specialisation and a strong pursuit of excellence, already, working with Universities UK, we have provided some resources to help build fundraising capacity, now we want to go further and introduce a major national fundraising initiative - Our sch...