Leaving aside what you might think of vouchers, let's look at what improvements the proposed scheme offers students. Under current arrangements, students can transfer to another institution with their APA after just six months. I think the onus is on Government to demonstrate how this proposal will really improve conditions for postgraduate research, and they have not done so yet. In studying the debates about New Knowledge, New Opportunities, I've noted on one level, an honest desire to constructively engage these proposals, and to embrace the rhetoric of innovation and change. On another level, many participants experience a fundamental struggle to reconcile this rhetoric with a framework which effectively caps existing resources for institutions and reduces their discretionary expenditure while promising to spread the jam even more thinly.
Universities have their own place in the innovation framework.
It is not the same place as is occupied by industry. Universities are a place for risky research with potentially huge prizes, for independent inquiry a collaboration across the full range of disciplines. There are ideas in this paper which can help us to improve their contribution to this framework, and we should explore them vigorously. However, if we neglect the real economic and social benefits that come from a properly funded higher education sector which is essentially focused on the public good, then the value of this contribution may be lost.