Rightly rejecting the idea of lifting the cap on tuition fees in English universities, the higher education minister, Robert Halfon, last week urged the HE sector to read the signs of the times. “I just think we have to be real,” said Mr Halfon, “that we have to live in the world as it is, which is an incredibly difficult one faced by cost-of-living challenges.”
He was responding to increasingly loud warnings from vice-chancellors that a university funding crisis is becoming acute. Given the mounting level of debt already being taken on by less well-off students, it would indeed be wrong to pile yet more financial pressure on them. But when it comes to addressing the wider context of festering discontent on England’s campuses, it is Mr Halfon and the Conservative architects of a failing system who need to get real.
This summer, thousands of unhappy graduates emerged from Covid-blighted degree courses with blank certificates, their work ungraded due to a marking boycott by lecturers. Some vented their frustration publicly during graduation ceremonies.
The bitter industrial dispute between academics and their employers – which has now lasted five years – is not over. Next week, the University and College Union will hold an emergency meeting to decide whether to ballot over further strike action in the autumn. Having suffered substantial real terms pay cuts for 13 years, lecturers are demanding a double-digit pay rise. The casualisation of teaching contracts for younger academics has also contributed to unprecedented levels of disaffection, along with fears of a coming wave of redundancies.
The ongoing bargaining process with university employers is complicated, however, by a looming financial crisis at dozens of institutions. Had annual tuition fees, capped at £9,250, risen in line with inflation since 2012, they would now stand at £12,000. According to one analysis, universities are making a loss of £2,500 on every home undergraduate. An overreliance on international students increasingly looks like a hostage to fortune, as countries such as China look to boost their own HE sectors.
It takes a funding model of rare dysfunctionality to alienate and poorly serve all the major stakeholders in the system. A demographic boom in the number of 18-year-olds between now and 2030 will further ratchet up the pressure.
So what now? The pseudo-marketisation of England’s universities, theoretically turning them into competing businesses and students into fee‑paying consumers, helped create this mess. It also allows politicians such as Mr Halfon to distance themselves from it. But Conservative governments’ determination to get the state off the financial hook for HE has delivered underfunded institutions, underpaid lecturers and stressed students.
By fuelling growth and fostering innovation, universities provide a vital public good for society as well as a private one for individual undergraduates. They need better public backing and a new conversation about how that can be done. A decade after the marketising experiment began, a reimagining of the role of central government in a strategically crucial sector is long overdue.