The rise in tuition fees is expected to cause a decrease in university applications this year, but HR experts at universities across the UK also predict a ‘jobs boom’ in academic employment.

An increase in recruitment for university staff seems counterintuitive after recent figures showing an 11.9 per cent drop in student applications compared to this time last year.

However, it may be too early to determine the how drastic the decline will be. Applications with an earlier deadline – those for Oxbridge, Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Science were all submitted before 14th October – showed only a 0.8 per cent decrease.

Universities are instead turning their attention to the impact of higher fees upon student expectations.

They anticipate that a student paying fees of £9,000 a year will demand a higher quality of education compared to a student paying £3,375, and many hope to achieve this by increasing staff numbers.

Matthew Knight, chairman of Universities HR and the University of Leeds HR director, said: “Within the context of £9,000 fees, many universities have a strategic drive to improve the quality of the student experience.

“Therefore, many are taking the opportunity to improve student staff ratios regardless of the numbers of applicants. So there’s a lot of recruitment going on at some universities, although there’s no specific pattern to this.”

As the QS World University Rankings use student-faculty ratios as the only globally comparable indicator to determine their tables, an increase in employment can be used to promote a university’s image and attract students.

Peter Brook, director of HR at the University of Portsmouth, stressed that university employers would not be panicking about the reported fall in student numbers, but would be more sensitive to the pressures of competition with other universities.

He said: “Our view is that the quality of the student experience is what will differentiate us from other universities, so we want the best possible staffing levels and the best calibre of staff available.”

This has included, at the start of this academic year, the recruitment of more learning support tutors to support students in the development of more generic and employability skills.

Since the announcement of the hike in tuition fees, the average number of contact hours in Britain has fallen from 15.6 to 14.7 hours per week, but the pressures of increasing competition suggests this will not last for long.

As more and more universities adopt a recruitment drive as a way to set them apart from their competitors, employment in higher education could flourish.