David Willetts: 'Students should be given better information about degree courses before they apply'

David Willetts is looking unusually pink, well-scrubbed and excited – and for good reason. He has cycled into work and had a quick shower. And he has just learnt that Gordon Brown made a big boo-boo when he increased student grants last year. The government simply hadn't done its sums properly and is having now to cut grants to balance the books.

That is the kind of mistake that boosts the morale of Conservative spokesmen and keeps them going during the dark days of opposition, though there is nothing particularly dark about the shadow minister for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Willetts, 52, is bright and friendly, dubbed Two Brains for his policy-wonk approach to life and for the books he writes on Conservative philosophy.

Despite having been effectively demoted from the shadow Education secretary to the shadow universities job for a controversial speech he gave on grammar schools, he is handling the universities brief with gusto, thinking big ideas and making speeches about what the Conservatives would do if they got into power.

Higher education seems to suit him, not least because he clearly enjoys thinking the politically unthinkable for a Tory (viz. his heretical ideas on how academic selection entrenches advantage rather than spreading it). He is a visiting professor at the Cass Business School and a fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and his most important big idea is that university applicants need more and better information about courses.

In particular, he believes they need to know the employment rates and the salaries that graduates earn, say, two years after graduating from individual courses at specific institutions. "I am thinking that if, for example, I want to do IT at Derby, which has a great reputation for training people in skills for writing computer games, I can see that 90 per cent of people are in employment after two years and their average salary is £27,000. I can compare that with IT at University X where 70 per cent are in employment and they are earning £17,000 a year."

At present, this kind of data is available to researchers but they are not able to name institutions. It is being collected and it's a great pity that it is not all in the public arena, says Willetts. "I am assembling a team to look at this because I am very keen to see prospective students able to access much more precisely information about individual courses and individual universities."

Not only is such information useful for students it will also put pressure on the universities to show what they're doing to improve the prospects of their students, he believes.

How will potential students get hold of such information? Willetts goes coy. He has talked to UCAS, he says. Some researchers are working on it at the University of Wisconsin. But the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills is dragging its feet, he says, because it would reveal that some courses at some universities are not doing very well.

Willetts believes passionately that universities need to take teaching more seriously than they do at present. As the father of a daughter studying English and art history at York University, he clearly has anecdotal evidence. But he does not divulge it. What he does say is that the size of seminars and who teaches them (PhD students or experienced academics?) is an issue for many parents. "If the universities were to expect any government to raise the cap on fees, they would have to persuade students and their parents that this money would go into an improved student experience," he says.

"This would mean that the library would be better stocked, the labs would have more modern equipment, the seminars would be less crowded and the teaching more intensive. The universities took that for granted with the previous increase in fees, but they could not do so again."

This kind of talk worries vice- chancellors who believe that Willetts does not understand the importance of research, partly because he doesn't talk about it but also because he emphasises teaching at the expense of research.

At the same time, the shadow Universities secretary seduces higher education bosses with talk about how he wants to give universities more autonomy. You have to give universities space, he thinks. "These are big, grown-up institutions. Most universities I visit now have got budgets of £100m-200m, and some of them are internationally regarded. They are not the playthings of ministers to treat like a soldier being got out of the toy box."

One of the things that universities most suffer from now, he says, is attempts at micro-management from the centre. "As an example of that I think of a conversation I had with the secretary to the governing body at Cambridge University who said he was phoned every week by a Treasury official asking when Cambridge was going to change its governing structure so as to match Gordon Brown's views about governance for the 21st century."

The Treasury should have been keeping its eye on the banks rather than Cambridge, says Willetts. "Universities need to change but it's not the job of a finance ministry to get into that sort of thing."

Otherwise his views are virtually indistinguishable from those of Labour ministers. He is a liberal, cerebral kind of Tory, who believes in widening participation. In fact he is just the kind of minister that David Cameron needs to persuade the world that the Tories have changed and moved to the centre ground. He has no plans to alter Labour's targets on widening participation. He is keen on vocational degrees, including such subjects as media studies and equine event management (what Conservatives used to call "Mickey Mouse degrees"), and he agrees with the emphasis on universities engaging with employers.

Crucially, he does not sound very enthusiastic about the hot potato of lifting the cap on top-up fees. This is because it will cost the Treasury money in increased loans to have universities demanding higher fees, never mind the little matter of its political unpopularity.

Instead, he says, he would like to see more people having the chance to go to university. That means encouraging part-timers and mature students – and having more imaginative distance learning. All of which should please the new universities, which take the lion's share of part-timers.

In case you hadn't noticed, Willetts is trying to steal Labour's clothes and present the Conservatives as the party of innovation, compassion and brains. The general election is still a way off but if he keeps cycling hard in this direction he could just succeed.