Students must broaden their horizons - and soon

The current recession, and the threat of its global spread, sets a major challenge for the UK economy and for higher education. There is a real danger of self-delusion that we can "take the pain for two or three years, and then get back to normal". That is unlikely.

The onset of the recession holds up a giant mirror to the UK. The reflection says: "This is your economy now. Will it sustain you in 2010 or 2011?" I think the answer is "not without some major changes". Some of those changes must relate to graduate-level skills.

For the foreseeable future, our graduates will be hitting a very difficult labour market. Universities are going to have to address employability with renewed vigour. One aspect of the employability agenda is internationalisation.

There is a danger that the current economic downturn will further strengthen the shift in economies and financial power away from North America and western Europe towards the Middle East, Asia and Russia. What does this mean for our graduates?

Major companies can recruit from anywhere in the world and pick the very best graduates with the most relevant and developed skills sets.

For many UK graduates, this will not be a problem because they will be working for organisations that are UK-centric or which have restrictions that protect UK employment. However, especially in the private sector, many will need to compete internationally.

At present, most UK students leave school lacking foreign language skills. The government is going in the right direction by bringing back international languages in primary schools, but it will take years before we will see the effect of this in higher education. In the meantime, we simply can't ignore the lack of foreign language skills among our students and graduates. Universities must take the lead to address the issue.

Although English is, happily for us, the language of business and IT, an over-reliance on one language is short-sighted, culturally elitist, insensitive and will damage our ability to work internationally. There are other major international languages - including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Urdu and Spanish. As universities, we should offer all students the opportunity to study at least one of these.

This does not mean that all of our graduates need to have high-level language skills, but they should all have a basic competence in at least one other, and they should be much more aware of and experienced in other cultures.

Our students also need to be encouraged to study and work abroad in order to get a better understanding of the global environment in which we operate. It certainly doesn't help to forge positive relationships with other cultures if British people continue to make little or no effort to learn foreign languages and demonstrate little understanding of different cultures. Students really should broaden their horizons to compete with international students who commonly live, study and work abroad and who often speak two languages or more.

The challenge for universities is to innovate and to offer curricula and opportunities that will help our graduates to develop a more international outlook. Universities must help to facilitate work placements and study abroad. Ideally within the medium term, the majority of full-time undergraduates should spend significant time studying or working abroad.

Clearly this is too huge a task for individual universities alone. But it is an issue that must be addressed.

I often meet students at my university who have come from outside the UK. Many of them are from China. The average Chinese student in the UK will have at least three languages: Mandarin, their local dialect and English. They are studying at undergraduate and postgraduate level in English. They are living in the UK in a very different cultural and physical environment to their home and most of them are very successful. How many UK students are studying in China, at final-year or postgraduate level, working entirely in Mandarin? How many are doing so in Europe?

Malcolm McVicar is vice-chancellor of the University of Central Lancashire