I have published this video this morning. In it, I ask whether Labour is really going to let some UK universities go bust, which they almost certainly will if it does not step in to save them? Do they really want to be the party that oversaw the start of the decline in UK education? That's a long way from the legacy they'll want.
The audio version of this video is here:
The transcript is:
Do we want the UK's universities to go bust?
I asked the question for a very good reason. There looks to be a chance that at least some of them will.
According to the Office for Students, which is the government agency that looks at these things, around 40 of the UK's 120 or so universities are at present in deficit.
When I hear from the universities themselves and what they're saying to the media, I gather that seventy of those universities are at present sacking staff, or are looking at closing courses, or cutting or even shutting down whole faculties.
Now, this is big. Why is it big? Because there are around 2 million or so students at universities in the UK, and there may be more than 200,000 people working at the UK's universities, and I might be underestimating that.
My point, therefore, is that this is a serious part of the UK's economy, which looks to be in a very vulnerable state.
And that part of the economy has also been exceptionally important for the UK's foreign earnings. And we need those foreign earnings because, as most people know, we import more goods than we export, and so it is things like earnings from the universities sector that help make up the difference.
So, what's going on? Well, everyone knows that there are more universities now than there were when, well, I was an 18-year-old. At that time, about 1 in 8 young people in the UK went to university, and I was one of those fortunate ones. Now, it's coming on for 1 in 2 go to university, and that's obviously a massive change within this country.
But there's another factor, too. When I went to university the number of people from outside the UK on my course was relatively limited. Now, there are very many courses at UK universities where foreign students are in the majority, and that's particularly true when it comes to postgraduate education, where the UK makes enormous foreign earnings as a consequence of the activities of our universities training students in specialist subjects. So, again, this really matters.
And if the UK does potentially leave some universities bust, the impact is going to be very dramatic too on the local economies involved. In the city where I work, Sheffield, the impact of the university, of Sheffield itself, and Sheffield Hallam University, is enormous.
You can't walk around the city centre without seeing the presence of universities and the impact that they have on the local economy.
You can't walk around for much of the year without noticing the very large number of students who are present as well. That activity has an enormous impact on the well-being of that city.
And there are other places where this is even more dramatic. Go to St Andrews in Scotland and see how important the university is there. Or go to somewhere like Bangor in Wales, or Aberystwyth in Wales, and again, see the enormous impact that universities have in those places.
So, we can't just say that this is an issue that is a nationwide concern. It's also a very local concern if a university is to fail.
It's also a massive issue for the students at any university which is in financial trouble. And some definitely are. Will they see their course through? We don't know what will happen if a university goes bust. Will people who've arrived for the first year get through to the third year and get their degree? There's no guarantee in place. No one knows.
And what happens to the status of people who have a degree from that university, but which is, well, just no longer there to be able to even confirm that fact? If an employer wants that information, what is the impact on them as a consequence of their university having failed? I suspect it will be real.
I know that most people who once have left university aren't asked very much about their degree. And I know it's even more common for people who have left university to say, “Well I never used much of what I learned there in my subsequent career”. But neither of those things are entirely true. Because people who've been to university learned a particular way to think. That's what we really teach. It is about discipline and research and formulating answers to questions that are complex in their nature. And where the person who is going to do well at university has to process a great deal of information and present it in a very orderly fashion to the satisfaction of their examiner. That is a skill that you don't get anywhere else.
So, we do need universities. We need universities to train skilled people.
But we also need universities to earn foreign income for the country.
And we need universities to maintain local economies in many parts of the UK.
But we've not been supporting them to do that. The amount of fee paid for each student attending at a UK university has been fixed for about a decade now. Now, of course, this is paid now through student loan arrangements. But in reality, the government does cough up the cash to the university so that they can provide the service. The fact that the student might owe that money back at some time in the dim and distant future, if ever at all, is beside the point. The fact is, cash is expended now, and the amount of cash being expended per student is declining. This has been compensated for by an increase in fees for overseas students, but now visa arrangements are making it very, very much harder for UK universities to recruit overseas, and the impact on some courses is dramatic, again, particularly in the postgraduate sector.
So, do we face a risk that this area of learning, this area where we have been at the forefront of the world, where we still have some of the best universities in the world, is going to decline?
And I know it's common for people to say, we don't need the university of wherever because it's no more than a further education college. But hang on a minute, further education colleges also have a very serious role in teaching people skills that they need, maybe of a technical nature, and there's nothing wrong with having technical skills.
We may be shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't protect this sector is my point. Very seriously, very serious damage to our economy could arise unless we really think about what we're doing.
And yet the new Labour Education Secretary, Bridget Philipson, has already said that she might let universities fail. It's up to them to sort out their finance, she says. And, of course, to some degree, that's true. But education is a national concern. Education is about the well-being of our future. You can't be laissez-faire about that. You can't leave it to a university marketplace. Labour needs to get its act together on this issue, and rapidly.
The Tories didn't. They did want to wash their hands of the university sector.
Labour should not be. Look back at Harold Wilson. When he was Labour Prime Minister, he wanted to bring education to everyone through the creation of the Open University. Since then, that sector has expanded enormously, not least due to the work of Tony Blair. Whether you like him or hate him, he had a big role in the expansion of education for everyone. And now we're at risk of seeing that going into reverse.
Is that what Labour's legacy is going to be? A country where education ceases to be valued? It would be very worrying if it was.
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If it’s true that democracy has been corrupted in the UK particularly since the advent of Thatcherism and we see this in the current Labour Party which now appears to be a Shills for the Rich Party then there is a need or rather an opening for a Democratic Party that genuinely focuses on grass roots democracy both inside and outside its party. The Trade Union movement needs to take stock about continuing to fund a Labour Party captured by the rich and help spearhead the creation of such a new party.
But you have to agree there are many pointless courses from poor institutions?
No
Please provide precise examples
Hi Richard,
Those Universities like Hallam, used to be Polytechnics. They used to educate people for vocational jobs. In my opinion, they were given university status, because the vocational jobs had disappeared, so government covered it up by sending everyone to “university”. Many of those former Polytechnics provide poorer degree standards.
Government needs to be honest about this. They should be returned to Polytechnics, not closed, and go back to teaching vocational subjects, which are equally as important as degrees.
Probably not a very popular view, I imagine
Regards
I think they provide different types of degree
And there is no harm in that
In some subject areas they are better
I think the problem is a lot deeper than that. If Sheffield Hallam is called a university or a polytechnic hardly matters. What matters is that it exists to teach what needs to be taught, in a way that the students can learn. To my mind the problem arose when tertiary education was made to compete for students and to be financially self-supporting. That produced fundamental changes in the types of courses taught by ‘original’ universities and the way they were taught.
My own university, Durham, acquired a campus at Stockton, and many of the Durham staff taught there in addition to teaching at Durham. I recall one older professor hissing that he was going to be required to set ‘quizzes, QUIZZES’ he felt that was not university teaching; it reminded me of the response of older teachers at my grammar school when it became a comprehensive. The attitude of both was that the students were of lower ability, and would not understand ‘their’ way of teaching. Other younger staff and research associates were more supportive. My point is that the establishment at Stockton fulfilled a very useful purpose and provided a good tertiary level education for its students. The problem was always trying to shoehorn it into being part of Durham University, rather than it being an educational establishment in its own right.
Much to agree with
Not quite true that such as Hallam don’t provide relevant vocational degrees.
Their applied environmental degree courses, such as Countryside Management, and with partners like the Peak Park have made valuable contributions in a work sphere that barely existed 40 years ago.
@ Sean,
“…teaching vocational subjects, which are equally as important as degrees…”
From that, I get the impression that you aren’t aware that polytechnics did teach to degree level, before they became universities, but couldn’t award the degrees themselves. The awards body was the CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards),
University fees were capped at £9000 in 2012, increased to £9250 in 2017 but fixed since then. It was always meant or be a maximum, but essentially every university charges the same amount. It it has increase by inflation since 2012 it would be £12,500, or since 2017 it would be £11,700.
Hardly surprising really that they are struggling if in effect their funding for domestic students has in effect been cut by a third.
The elaborate machinery of loans and repayments over decades is all a bit of a shell game as the money to fund the Student Loan Company comes from the government, and the losses from loans which are never repaid (after 30 or 40 years) also land with the government.
For a time, tranches of student loans were sold to securitisation vehicles with an expectation that only about half of the loans would be repaid. As far as I can see, the government crystallised its loss by selling the loan book for a fraction of its nominal value. I can’t find a current price for the A and B notes, or the profit participating X notes that were issued by the securitisation company for 5p in the pound.
Much to agree with
I think the UK should look at what other countries do as well as how its current university fee structure developed. In particular, I worry about the seemingly almost universal view in the UK that increasing fees have been driven by the expansion of university places. In France anybody that passes their ‘bac’ at the end of school automatically gets a uni place – and more students go, and more get degrees, than in the UK. Yet France does not have fees.
My daughter is about to finish a 5-year university course in France. Both her fees and living costs have been paid by the state throughout. She could get a 3-course meal at her uni every day for 1€. She could hire a bike for 1€ a YEAR. She could go from home to her uni in Strasbourg by train for 60€ – a journey further than Newcastle-London. She spent a term in Portugal, entirely funded by the state and EU (and she’s doing chemistry, not languages).
So alongside looking at how the UK got where it is, and what a more rational and just solution might involve, I think the UK should also be asking: How can France do this, but not us ?
Indeed, isn’t it also done, at least to some extent, within the UK – in Scotland?
I agree with you
I know the Danish system well, having worked a lot in my time at Copenhagen Business School. There every person has a right to a free education up to PhD level
And they can afford to do it as a state
The result – a higher productvity country, as in France
Thank you, Geof and Richard.
I spent some time at university in France, including Strasbourg,* and echo what Geof says, especially about the catering :-).
In addition to this issue, what both of you say brings up one of my pet peeves. Why are the British MSM and elite obsessed with (the sinking ship) USA and do they neglect what goes on in our neighbourhood and where our future lies. Uncle Sam will be forced to go home eventually. If any of you watch French tv news, you will marvel at how domestically focused and practical the output is. I try to watch daily.
It’s not just Europe and bread and butter issues like education. How about coverage of the Palestine summit organised in Beijing and support from the global south?
*Not uncommon for people of Mauritian origin as we are multilingual. See also Suella Braverman.
in 2001 I went to Denmark with a group of Somerset Secondary teachers to look at how Danish schools did the new subject of citizenship. Actually they didn’t do it as a subject but we considered it was part of the ethos of the system. The British council, who funded it, wanted us bring back things we could use and they didn’t like it when I said that there are few things we can just take out of one system to graft into another.
At the time control of the education in the communes was very decentralised. Some thought they should adopt our ‘American’ system of accountability. I also suggested that was not a good idea. ( I was probably on an MI5 watch list ! )
We were taken to the Pedagogical Institute (famous old boy Peter Schmeichel ) where we found them researching topics in a way we used to do with ‘project work’, before it was replaced with prescriptive methodology policed by Ofsted. Since I left teaching I gather many schools have moved away from the standard Ofsted model -much like the 2012 Health and Social care Act was scrapped and there is an emphasis on integration of services.
I was impressed by Denmark as a society. I feel that that ideology in England -if not the whole country-has forced education into a straitjacket which, while it may have lead to higher PISA scores for politicians to misunderstand and boast about, a lot of that is valuable has been lost in the quest for a neo-liberal , semi-privatised system of schools (academies) and cuts to state spending.
I was an OU student in the first year of opening. One of Labour’s best achievements.
Thanks
Thank you and well said, Richard.
Let’s compare how far right Labour has travelled from Wilson’s expansion of higher education, which included my university, Brunel, soon to join London, to the brink we are at.
It will be interesting to see what the brains behind Starmer decide. The Blair family fortune was first built on university town lettings. That is still a big part of their portfolio. However, Euan Blair has diversified into vocational training and AI and brought in his mate Sunak as an investor.
Further to Blair, it had to be patiently explained to him that the commercialisation of tertiary education exposed institutions to the risk of bankruptcy.
Indeed….
There are serious questions to be asked about post 16 Education in the UK that need to be addressed.
We are not educating or retaining enough skilled workers, Construction, mechanics (try finding a lorry mechanic) or questioning the way Universities operate in the UK.
As Danny Dorling points out many Europeans go to their ‘Local’ university rather than moving away, in the UK we have the worst of all worlds with many Universities attracting students from across the world but not providing accommodation
When so many students go home after three years at university there is good reason to question why they go away
Thank you, both.
A dozen or so years ago, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria asked the same question when comparing US universities with European ones.
US state universities were then busy attracting foreign students at the expense of locals.*
* The local grammar school went through such a phase before covid interrupted the exercise. Buckinghamshire has selection for secondary schooling. The school, an academy, allocated places to students from China at the expense of local children and had them board with local families, some of whose children went to the school.
The last government cut funding for Arts courses to fund Stem courses. Result: less money, staff cuts and so on.
I have a son at the University of Sheffield and he is totally happy with his course for now.
My daughter however has had a much harder time at the University of Liverpool trying to get an exchange programme to work abroad and it looks like we and a number of families might be putting in a complaint and her course rep report will be damning. Talk about disorganised and ill-informed advice to young people wanting to make a life!!!!
Letting universities fail?
Maybe we should have let some of the big banks fail first in 2008!!! And prior to that.
But no – oh no!!! – we can’t do that apparently. We always get our priorities wrong.
Incidentally, in the town where I work, the local authority has just bought some ex student accommodation units to use as their own temporary accommodation to stop it haemorrhaging general fund budgets to B&B and going bankrupt.
But you are left wondering, how much did that cost the local university to build? How much did they lose on that? The basis of demand for that building has shrunk because of poor governance from London. Something has gone seriously wrong somewhere.
It’s the same old bollocks, the same old evil system in this country:
1. Encourage people to invest in something.
2. Max it out.
3. Then deliberately change the environment.
4. Watch them fail.
5. Pick up the assets cheaply.
6. Blame those who originally invested for not being wise or greedy and not good at managing risk.
How often have we seen this pattern from British governments?
Too often – and who are the back seat drivers? Those picking up distressed assets or involved in their disposal.
Disgusting.
Yes. Next question.
It’s too late to avoid overseeing the start in the decline in UK education, that happened 20 years ago.
It seems like another ‘performative’ system – a simulated ‘market’ with simulated student ‘debts’ the majority of which will never be repaid. Seems yet another example – like the water ‘market’ or the rail ‘market’ – where we are more comfortable with a pretend ‘market’ than with real socially-run provision.
One does get the impression that turning higher education instiutions into competing businesses with cut throat competition could have a deleterious impact on academic standards, cutting corners, over -publishing, temptation to recruit fee-paying overseas students who are not up to standard, casualisation of academic employment. etc etc
But as you say Richard – it would be good to see Labour acknowledge its past record on spreading educational opportunities for all, and try to develop a plan to avoid the looming catastrophy.