Evie:
It is hard to not hear the bells tolling for Higher Education (HE) in the UK. Almost every statistic presents the same grim reality. The Office for Students (OFS) warns that 40% of universities will run budget deficits this year. The Financial Times reports a £5.3 billion deficit in university research activities. Research by the UCU highlights that 74 universities are slashing costs through redundancies and hiring freezes. A Guardian report exposes the ‘wiping out’ of black scholarship due to cuts. As of last month, international student visa issuance had dropped by 17%. To top it all off, England’s degrees are the most expensive in the world.
Against this bleak backdrop, Universities UK (UUK), the trade group for higher education providers, has published its “opportunity, growth and partnership” report. It acknowledges that HE has reached an “inflection point” and calls for a new relationship between universities and the government to secure economic growth and future-proof British HE’s ‘soft power’. The five “big shifts” proposed – expanding opportunities, improving collaboration, generating local growth, securing research, and establishing a global strategy – aim to do this.
The report is timely, ambitious, and scarily optimistic about how fast these ‘big shifts’ can be implemented. Yet, as I see it, the crisis engulfing HE is not solely economic; it is existential. Instead of ‘big shifts’ to serve age-old growth-oriented ends, the funding crisis should be seized as an “inflection point” for rethinking who higher education serves and what it should accomplish.
The report focuses on funding challenges. Fair enough. The last time universities in England broke even was 2015-16. The £9,250 tuition fee instated in 2010 has lost over a third of its value due to inflation. On this, UUK calls for a ‘hybrid’ solution – index-linking tuition fees to inflation, reversing the decline in international students, and making the whole ‘business’ more efficient.
“The crisis engulfing HE is not solely economic; it is existential”
Yet UUK’s reforms won’t go far enough or fast enough, and the cracks are already showing. Index-linking has been scrapped in favour of a one-off fee raise to £10,500. Meanwhile, Lord Mandelson, a UUK commissioner and former minister, has called for academics to cut research and increase the teacher-student ratio. Such austerity still won’t fix the crisis, and responsibility will likely fall on the private sector to fund degrees.
UUK haven’t quite plucked up the courage to admit this economic reality. Yet doing so is essential to reckon with the more glaring issue: higher education isn’t working. In this regard, the crisis is not dissimilar to the current furore over the NHS, prisons and HS2.
Like most discourse generated by technocrats, the UUK report is littered with corporate jargon. Students are consumers, universities are businesses. The industry’s health is judged by financial returns on public investment (currently for every £1 invested, £14 is generated). This is despite the fact that only 16% of the cost of a degree is funded by the government, while students shoulder the majority of the burden. UUK, OFS and other acronymised bodies rarely report that loan interest rates have rocketed to 13.5%, the graduate employment rate has dropped by 6.4%, 57% of students have reported mental illness and the privatisation and chronic shortage of student housing have forced many to live among rats, mould and damp.
“Higher education is simply not relevant to the average voter”
Instead, a problematic, neoliberal assumption underlies the UUK report: that higher education is primarily an economic machine to “drive” regional growth and “soft power” rather than an educational and social experience. The government’s new Skills England division acknowledges the absence of a skilled or technologically-literate workforce and I hope – alongside a focus on lifelong learning, hybrid courses and a reform of the means-testing loan scheme – there might be some re-thinking of what it is we’re trying to do with HE.
One of the more salient points made about politics today is that the real predictor of voting habits is no longer class, but age. The average British voter is over 45. What this means is that higher education as an experience is simply not relevant to the electorate. HE’s relationship to economic growth, migration and Britain’s reputation however, is. I can’t help but feel that the UUK report is reflective of a much wider problem Britain has with reforming its crumbling institutions. Instead of seizing the crisis in both funding and function as an exciting opportunity for a systematic overhaul of HE, the government continues to treat all social problems as economic ones.
Freddie
Today, thanks to a long decline in academic standards and a lack of proper regulation, a British degree is worth less than ever. The narrative which so many young people are sold when deciding whether to go to university – that it is both an incredible social experience and a career-enhancer worth incurring tens of thousands of pounds of debt – is becoming more detached from reality every year.
Since the Major government’s decision in 1992 to convert all remaining polytechnics into degree-awarding universities, enrolment has shot up to over 38% among 18-year-olds as of 2021, and the percentage of First class degrees awarded has risen from 7% in 1994 to 30% by 2023. These statistics suggest that our universities have been incredibly successful at producing capable graduates; the reality is otherwise. The ever-growing proportion of ‘good honours’ (Firsts and 2:is) awarded at UK universities, rising from below 50% in 2000 to around 80% by 2019, masks the reality of declining academic standards and degrees becoming worth less, not more, than ever before.
“Grade inflation is a mirage, and graduates are the ones who pay the price”
UK school students have not notably improved on international metrics since the turn of the millennium, and a 2016 OECD study of 23 countries ranked English graduates in the bottom third for basic skill levels. Universities are handing out better grades every year, even though students aren’t improving. The explanation for this conundrum is grade inflation. It suits all parties: students who seek to graduate with good honours, faculties and universities that can now showcase their ever-increasing prestige, and government ministers who wish to maintain the narrative that higher education is one of the country’s greatest recent success stories, whilst avoiding the hard work of actually tackling the deep-rooted issues in the sector.
The trouble is that this is a mirage, and graduates are the ones who pay the price, as employers, faced with ever-more 2:is and Firsts from reputable universities on the CVs they peruse, simply cannot pick up the slack. UK graduate employment rates have been stagnant since the Great Recession, and graduate median salaries have declined over the same period. Perhaps the most shocking statistic is that, even as of 2010 when the sector was in a far better overall state than today, it was estimated that 58.8% of UK graduates were employed in non-graduate skill level jobs, then the third highest proportion in the EU behind only Greece and Estonia.
One of the few promising signs is that stakeholders may be wising up to the fact that the system they have collectively championed since the Major government turbocharged its unchecked expansion in 1992 is failing to deliver for young people and the country. A high-profile recent report by Universities UK has urged ministers to consider increasing tuition fees to arrest the long decline in spending per student (from £11,029 in 2012 after the last significant fee increase, to a projection of £9,158 for 2024), accompanied by a reintroduction of maintenance grants to prevent students’ personal finances being hit further, as well as expanding careers services for recent graduates, restoring the teaching grant and possibly rejoining the EU’s Erasmus+ scheme.
Though these are all welcome reforms and will no doubt benefit students across the country if implemented, there remains a continued failure to address the essential issue of the devaluation of a British degree and its consequences for graduates. A possible solution would be to withdraw university status (and funding) from underperforming institutions and invest in alternative higher education provision, such as degree apprenticeships and National Diplomas, to provide a serious alternative to university for those who wish to progress onto tertiary education – an issue that has been ignored for far too long in favour of the unchecked expansion of the university sector.
We can hope that serious changes such as these will be implemented, and that they could help to return the UK higher education sector to being one of the nation’s great success stories. However, too many young people in this country will not benefit from these possible reforms and have already been saddled with tens of thousands of pounds in debt and a degree worth less for their future than ever before; they deserved a better outcome, and we must ensure that the next generation of UK university students are given it.
