Give us a pubs tsar – but spare us Tim Martin

More than a third of UK universities are in financial doo-doo: staff cuts, cancelled courses, slashed research budgets and possible bankruptcy beckon. Behind this is the fact that domestic students paying £9,250 in fees (way behind inflation since that figure was last raised in 2017) cost £11,750 to teach, representing a collective annual £5 billion loss hitherto made up by international students paying £20,000 each. But the last government’s ban on foreign students bringing dependants with them has provoked dramatic falls in non-EU recruitment: bizarrely, the straw that’s breaking some universities’ backs is a 49 per cent decline in Nigerian students applying for one-year Master’s courses.

‘Anything short of an emergency rescue package for the sector will be insufficient to stave off catastrophe,’ trumpets the University and College Union – whose pay demands have deepened deficits and whose strikes have done huge damage to the student experience. I’d say the sector’s business model needs a radical redesign, in which courses that offer no job prospects should be scrapped but research that contributes to growth prospects (and the good of humanity) should be sacrosanct; in which bloated bureaucracies and cushy tenures should be fiercely reviewed and legitimate foreign students offered serious courses rather than milked for cash. Far more likely, I fear, is that Labour ministers will heed the union, kick the can down the road with a partial bailout – and blame it all on the Tories.