A Bad Moon Rises Over UK Higher Education
Perhaps you’ve noticed that the timbre of news stories and opinion pieces about UK Universities has shifted in recent years. Perhaps you’re sensing a rising panic? As far back into the mists of the past as 2017, news coverage of UK higher education (hereafter HE) was suffused with a complacent self-satisfaction, broken only sporadically by the odd academic-at-the-coalface in the Guardian warning things were much more dire than they first appeared. The coalition government had removed all meaningful controls except one (the cap on tuition fees for domestic students) in a 40+ billion pound per annum sector which is quite obviously a public good and a core part of civil society and ought to be treated as such by the state. In 2017 the fee seemed ludicrously high (because it was), but worried parents and young people were reassured that, well, you’d never actually have to pay that all off. That is, unless you were in a successful career making double the national average wage. Readers, it’s worth recalling this is also the long decade of post-2008 crash 1% interest rates. It is then worth checking what the interest rate is, right now, on a domestic student loan in England.
So universities are cut loose, to go about their business, chase HE rankings and splash £5k a table on Times Higher Education award ceremonies for themselves (an indescribably cringe event); they build rowing lakes and STEM flagship buildings and start a campus in Qatar and to rake it in fleecing international students while serving a slowly growing population of domestic students. Corks are popping off everywhere in the campus boardrooms of the land. The good times were good, big tech was rolling into campuses armed with mediocre virtual platforms nobody quite had a use for but hey there’s a subscription model and, well, there was money to spare. People were gushing about ‘MOOCs’ the same way that one guy is now on about the revolutionary potential of ChatGPT and “AI”. Things were particularly grand if you were a member of a senior management team at a Russell Group University. Your salary rises would manage to beat average income growth in the City, of all places. You’d sit at dinner parties and calmly explain why you make double, sometimes triple, what the Prime Minister does. All that added value and wise management, you see.
As 5 years pass, quite predictably the gaps in the sector widen, Universities with existing reputational prestige learn to wield it more and more as a weapon in the war to attract students, and strains manifest in the steady drip-drip of ‘recalibrations’ involving the closure of programmes and in yearly academic redundancy rounds, almost always at regional universities. Those universities, and those stories, almost never make the national news. HEPI (the higher education policy institute, a think tank) wins its long crusade to eliminate any meaningful controls over student distribution and the ‘cap’ on student places comes off right around the same time the ‘Office For Students’ is inaugurated. The University of Manchester, where HEPI’s head sits on the board of governors, is delighted. About fifty other universities across England and Wales in particular? Not so much with the delight. How are both of those things going by the way?… How’s the Office for Students getting on? Not well? Huh, what a surprise.
So. Here we are. People “in the real world” have finally noticed that maybe all is not well in UK HE. Maybe the University of East Anglia literally falling over dropped the hint. And the op-eds appear. First of all, spoiler alert, universities are very much the real world, and to anyone who thinks otherwise I encourage you to come and make an attempt to do my job for a meaningful span. Second, it’s always Vice-Chancellors or That One Academic With Connections who are granted column inches to sound off about the state of play. There is the occasional vox pop in the Guardian around strike time (every year), but for the most part, that ironclad complacency that our “one shining and successful export, education” will endure, nay, thrive, as the world’s learners flock to these shores to pay for a top tier education from the finest academics in the — — — -
*Record scratch*
What’s that you say? It’s 2023 and the Tory government is, for reasons primarily to do with the political survival of the Tory government, cracking down on international students in a gratuitous and ham-handed fashion? Crisis meetings ensue in International Office boardrooms across the land. Management accountants present papers to SMTs around the realm, demonstrating in black (increasingly red) ink just how reliant the bottom line of The Business is on the middle-class citizens of the “Global South” mortgaging themselves to pay £43,000 up front for a one-year Masters Degree in Financial Maths. The Head of the Business school is up next, with grim reading about how they finally discovered that ‘franchising’ degrees in UK HE is completely unregulated and they might need to hastily rip the shiny logo stickers off that degree we’re backing in the Waterloo Bridge Business College of Businessing.
Outside of a handful of ivy-gilded halls, if you are lucky enough (?) to work as an academic in UK higher education on an open-ended contract, you have become quite emotionally familiar with the sense your job is under threat. This is doubly, triply, cripplingly true if you are a Humanities or Social Sciences academic, where odds are you’ve been adjacent to, or, just survived, a redundancy round in the past year or two. It is very likely you’ve been restructured in the past few years. Your department is gone and in its place is a School or a programme, and by and large the meaningful autonomy that allowed you to do your teaching and research well has been hoovered up by a team somewhere else, replaced in your working life by a seemingly endless series of inefficient bureaucratic checks and sign-offs and abstracted processes which quite simply do not work. You’re adrift and feel increasingly like a contractor, though you know your situation is still yonks better than the actual zero-hours contracted staff paid peanuts to run modules and mark students all across the sector. Every once in a while a glimmer of hope pierces the gloom, for instance you might get a proper grant: one of the few remaining pathways to meaningful autonomy in this ‘industry’. But even those have become scarcer and laden down with layers of bureaucracy.
It should be said at this point that pretty much everybody in HE means well. Yes, even the very highly paid senior leaders around the Decision-making tables. Folks know what the basic point of HE really is, and should remain, and there is broad and shared agreement on certain fundamental principles, and that shared sense of purpose does matter. UK HE is not under full-fledged assault by fascistic dangers like Christopher Rufo or the Florida legislature the way universities in the USA are right now. But, the edifice is crumbling, from deliberate neglect and poor decision-making and from malicious public policy, from the heavy sense that for-profit companies wait in the wings for the first major UK university to fall into administration, and from the slow sound of meaningful funding and support for the “core business”, you know, educating people, ebbing away.
What is to be done? Hope for a Labour government to ride to the rescue? Which appears to animate most of the op eds with which I began this sorry tale. For better or worse, there cannot be a market in higher education, not really. It was and is quite firmly a thing in the realm of public policy and public good. It’s not just finishing school for middle class kids and letters of recommendation on very nice letterheads to consulting firms like McKinsey. To find a vision of universities that suggests otherwise, that tells the story Tories seem to want to tell about our sector, you would need to travel back to before the second world war, and even then places like the London Mechanics Institute (Birkbeck University to you) existed specifically to widen the remit of higher education to the broader population of working people.
Don’t let it happen. Everyone loses if UK Higher Education travels as far down the current road as I think it might. Folks with a place to stand in the national UK media really do need to step up their coverage of HE and to think through the issues and implications, and yes, the finances. While I definitely do not agree that the current structural makeup of UK HE is fit for purpose, even I know that the cost to educate a student has risen, and that most of those costs are not pointless salaries to university employees: but rather the costs to service debts, pay rents, keep the lights on, keep subscriptions in the Library, and just generally run the whole massive thing called a university. UK citizens, understandably concerned with other matters right about now, need their awareness raised of just how bad it is out here in universities and just how much it matters to them in the long run. UK universities are still, somehow, genuinely in the business of knowledge-making, of pushing forward what we know and how we know it. There are virtually no other sectors of life where that work is done at scale, and the risks of it absorbed. Universities do that, and they teach this incredible range of disciplines and skills to anyone who comes through their doors. Watching a UK university go under, as the Tories clearly wish would happen, would be a public tragedy and an indictment of this sad little island in ways I’m not sure anyone yet fully appreciates. There’s a bad moon rising over UK HE, and I’m sat here like everyone else just hoping the sun eventually comes up.
