Ever since the Browne Review was published in the autumn of 2010 there has been silence from the government on postgraduate education.  Browne was supposed to say something about it - it was in the brief - but nothing came other than a statement that the benfits of postgraduate taught programmes accrue more to the individuals that have taken them than to wider society.  I have tried to refute that suggestion in graduation speeches to postgraduate social scientists over the last two years - the idea that society does not benefit from having trained postgraduate social workers, town planners, teachers and economists is, to me, preposterous.

HEFCE has received no steer on postgraduate education, and as a result funding is already being progressively withdrawn.  The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has received no vision from the coalition government. 

But with the introduction of the new undergraduate fee regime in the autumn of 2012 the issue of who will take postgraduate professional training programmes from 2015 onwards will start to loom large.  Will students who graduate then be willing to take on an extra debt burden, particularly sicne there will be no maintenance support for them (as well as no fee support)?  My colleague Mary Stuart, Vice-Chancellor of Lincoln University, has pointed out at a HEFCE committee we both sit on that there is a danger that by the late years of this decade postgraduate taught programmes will be populated entirely by overseas students.  Where, then, will come the graduate entrants into key professions where a Masters degree or postgraduate diploma or certificate is essential?  Will we only see the wealthiest able to afford such training?  What of all the widening participation students we are supposed to be encouraging into our undergraduate programmes - will they be able to go on to take the courses that convert their undergraduate studies into a profession (such as the Legal Practice Course without which the Law graduate cannot get into practice as a solicitor)?  Assuming that research councils might still be funding postgraduate research places, where will the supply of students who have done the preliminary research training masters come from?

All these questions are on my mind because tomorrow I will take the train to London to attend a meeting that, at last, BIS has called to discuss the future of postgraduate education.  The attendees are a promising cross-section of major stakeholders in this area (plus me!) - the Chief Executive of HEFCE, the Presidents of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the British Academy, the head of the Council for Industry in Higher Education, the chief executives of each of the university mission groups, and so on.  But I don't hold out great hopes.  Clearly the coalition will not countenance any increased Treasury charge for supporting a different aspect of higher education.  That will mean that any support for postgraduate education would come at the expense of a reduction of support elsewhere - for instance a reduction in undergraduate students in order to reduce the student loan book.  It may be an interesting meeting in terms of the dynamics between different participants, but I will have to keep an open mind as to whether anything that chanegs the policy landscape comes out of it.