Nobody said much about it before the election, but the new government inherits a ghastly financial problem with the higher education system. Rising costs, stagnant tuition fees, and a big drop in foreign student enrolments have left several universities tottering like ivory Jenga towers.
We probably have too many universities
This week we got an inkling of what education secretary Bridget Phillipson and higher education minister Jacqui Smith are thinking of doing about this mess. Not surprisingly, big money bail-outs are out (chancellor Rachel Reeves won’t allow them), as are increases in student fees (which backbenchers wouldn’t stand for). Instead, apart from telling the institutions in trouble to tighten their belts, the government seems rather short on solutions. One idea being mooted apparently envisages hinting that foreign students are more welcome than they were under the Tories, changing the rules to allow more courses to be given online, and leaning on some top institutions which are in less trouble to take over those on the brink. Unfortunately, none of these is likely to do much good.
Large-scale online teaching during covid quickly led to UK colleges being wryly dubbed the most expensive streaming services in the world. If institutions already in trouble try to repeat this without even the justificatory fig-leaf of a pandemic, not only will their teaching suffer badly, but their already dodgy reputation and marketability will dive further.
Any online shift would also sit rather ill with the government’s aim of attracting more foreign students to Britain. If such students are told that their already eye-watering foreign fees will now not even buy in-person teaching, who can blame them – or at least those who are any good – for looking elsewhere? It’s not as if there was a lack of competitors able to provide a good-quality English language education.
The idea of shotgun mergers between the prosperous and the troubled hardly bodes much better. It is not clear how well the management of a muscular research-led Russell Group institution would take to the incorporation of a division with large student numbers, much lower entry requirements and a preponderance of subjects like media or fashion studies. If that university was seriously loss-making, the betting is that funds would have to be diverted from the successful to the unsuccessful part of the business, something which is never a good sign.
There would be a distinct danger of inadvertently downgrading what was once a good university into a kind of second-rate academic British Leyland: too unwieldy to excel and, at the same time, too big to be allowed to fail.
The difficulty is this: the government dare not admit that Rishi Sunak was right when he said in May, one suspects with the quiet agreement of many Labour MPs, that we had too many graduates, and not enough apprentices or others with skills actually in demand. Yet if this assessment is correct – and it certainly seems so – the corollary is yet more uncomfortable: we probably also have too many universities.
In short, it would be no bad thing if some of the institutions at the bottom which cannot make ends meet were allowed to fold. By all means provide them with some short-term funding to allow existing students to finish their courses; but beyond that, Labour ministers must make it clear that after that the taps will be turned off, and they will be wound up unless they can find some other way of balancing the books.
This would undoubtedly raise howls of anguish, especially from those who cite the ever-increasing working-class desire for university study. But the arguments aren’t as strong as they look.
True, in a literal sense demand remains for places at all the 160-odd UK universities; even ex-polytechnics at the bottom of every academic league, with rock-bottom entry requirements, can end up over-subscribed. However, there must be doubt whether most of their students are fitted for, or even want, the kind of self-motivated study we associate with a college education.
We should also question whether the state should continue to subsidise those who go to university, not from any particular interest, but rather because they or their parents feel they must have a degree of some sort. Far better to spend the same money equipping them with more readily usable skills.
Vivienne Stern from Universities UK has pointed out that, in certain places, the local university is a sizeable employer whose demise would leave a big hole in the local economy. She’s right. However, there must be limits to preserving unprofitable and often second-rate institutions simply in order to palliate the employment figures and artificially support the local economy.
An innovative and far-sighted measure would be to accept a certain amount of creative destruction, even in higher education, and defund the institutions at the bottom. Unfortunately, that will not happen any time soon. However radical Labour might wish to be on matters like climate change, when it comes to higher education it is rather less confrontational. Labour, supported as it is by all too many university staff, is as much a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary as any retired brigadier. For the moment at least, we are therefore left with an administration that will neither finance its universities nor let them collapse, condemning them to getting ever shabbier, poorer and worse. Looking forward to Freshers’ Week, anyone?
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