How to destroy UK Higher Education: A Plan by the Onward think tank
Nick Timothy and Gavin Rice have written a Report for the think-tank Onward. It is certainly the case that UK Higher Education (UKHE) is in a parlous state so some fresh thinking is very welcome. Given that UK Higher Education generates at least £116bn for the economy, we certainly need it. Sadly, this report’s recommendations would be a disaster.
Before we get into the report, it is worth going over just some of the very real challenges UKHE faces as a sector. The Queen Mary University of London UCU branch currently lists 53 Higher Education Institutions which are either shedding jobs or in financial peril. So, what is going on? At the heart of everything wrong is the funding model that was implemented in 2012. This increased domestic student fees from £3,225 per year to £9,000. These were raised again in 2018 to £9,250. Initially, the fees were a success. Aside from an initial dip in numbers, students, effectively borrowing the money from the state, seemed undeterred by the changes. Meanwhile, university incomes increased by 25%.
However, this success was short-lived. Aside from small fee increases in 2018, fees have been frozen and not increased. Thanks to inflation, turbocharged during the cost-of-living crisis, the £9,250 paid by students in 2024 would have had the value of £6,250 in 2012 prices. In short, the primary funding source for the sector has been reduced by nearly a third in real terms and each year the belt tightens. To make matters worse, the state only funds 80% of government-sponsored research — the remaining 20% has to come from other sources.
This leaves universities with a problem. They must either cut spending via rationalisation, which typically involves closing courses and cutting staff. This diminishes student choices while undermining education and research quality. They can diversify their income streams via enterprise; however, this tends to produce only limited returns. The third option has been to recruit from the international student market, where fees are uncapped. International students, therefore, subsidise their domestic peers. Unsurprisingly, given the funding model, the sector has in recent years recruited heavily from abroad.
Of course, not that long ago, the government was all for this arrangement. In 2019, the Department for Education (DfE) and the Department for International Trade (DIT) launched an International Education Strategy which set universities a target ‘to increase the value of our education exports to £35 billion per year and the number of international students hosted in the UK to at least 600,000 per year’ by 2030. Yet, rising immigration figures, which have proven stubbornly resistant to government efforts to reduce inward migration, have seen the attitude of policymakers to international students turn sour. In particular, there has been an effort to reduce the number of students bringing family members to Britain. Yet the danger here is that if international students do not come to study in the UK their fee income will be lost and already parlous HEI finances will become entirely insufficient.
Recently, the former Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick, complained to Conservative Home about the proliferation of international students. Students, he alleges, enrol on, say, a ‘one-year business administration course at a lesser university with a high dropout rate where individuals bring dependents and stay on, but don’t stay on to do a job which to any of us would be considered a graduate level job.’ Precisely what these courses are, Jenrick did not say. However, given that he specified “one-year business administration” and that there has been a significant expansion of student numbers on postgraduate courses, presumably, he means Business Masters’ degrees.
Jenrick also does not specify what he means by a ‘lesser university’, though presumably he, a Cambridge graduate, means post-1992 institutions. One has to wonder what his colleague, Ben Bradley MP, a graduate of Nottingham Trent University (NTU) — his local university — and appears to have done rather well for himself, made of this characterisation. It is also not the case that NTU and similar institutions typically are the heaviest recruiters from the international market. Indeed, NTU recruited just 8.8% of its undergraduate cohort from abroad in 2021/22, as compared to a whopping 52.6% at the highly prestigious University College London.
The other major problem here is that some subjects are relatively cheap to teach while others are not. A Department of Education study, examining multiple HEIs costs in the 2016/17 year found that subjects such as English cost £8,801 to deliver while medicine costs £17,991. The government tops up some of the shortfall, but not all of it. In essence, cost-cutting and the “efficient” running of low-cost subjects subsidise the delivery of more expensive subjects. This reduces the quality and variety of the teaching on offer in low-cost subjects.
Since caps on student numbers were removed in 2015 and the funding model has become ever more strained, universities with greater social capital have recruited more and more students but teaching staff numbers have not increased commensurately. This increases teaching revenue but at the cost of educational quality and student experience. It also has a deleterious impact on staff well-being and working conditions. On the other end of the sector, particularly the post-1992 universities which have less social capital, student numbers have been in collapse. This has led the UCU to call for the re-instating of student caps.
The long and the short of all of this is that the situation that UKHE faces is extremely grim. So what do Timothy and Rice have to say? Unfortunately, little positive. The section of the report dealing with UKHE is a mere six pages in length, but it is littered with errors and incoherent arguments and the regime of change recommended would spell disaster. Let us deal with the major issues in turn.
First, they note that some subjects prove more lucrative than others, law, economics and medicine typically net graduates a tasty return in terms of future remuneration. Sadly, subject areas such as creative arts and languages do not. In fact, ‘Some 15% of undergraduates would have been better off financially had they not gone to university and this does not fully reflect opportunity cost’. Yet these are problems with the economy. It is certainly a fact that some professions, which tend to attract graduates with particular qualifications, provide disgracefully low pay. It is patently absurd to criticise universities for an anaemic, low-wage economy. The authors also fail to understand what university is for; it is not to create graduate premiums, it is to educate students and the true value of education cannot be measured only in money.
Second, ‘Between August 2022 and August 2023, over 40,000 students dropped out of HE courses’, that ‘With an average of 20% of graduates failing to attain a lifetime earnings premium and actually being financially worse off than if they had not attended — that is to say, they are underemployed — this means that approximately 80,000 graduates each year end up worse off.’ They conclude that ‘This is a poor deal for students themselves and damaging for economic performance.’ Yet this is cherry-picked data. The authors elected to choose the 2021/22 academic year during the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented crisis which led to an abnormal number of students withdrawing. As the Guardian reported in March 2022, ‘In England there was a 28% annual increase in withdrawals by the fourth week of February, with the rate increasing as the academic year progressed.’
Third, the authors note that the UK suffers from a skill gap, writing, ‘Of those with a bachelor’s degree, nearly one in three (31%) work in roles that do not require these qualifications. Meanwhile, vocational training among UK employees is consistently lower (39%) than the EU27 average (49%).’ The solution to this, they explain in their recommendations, is that ‘lower quality universities should be reformed into technical and vocational institutes offering only courses with added value. These should be funded either through the student loans process or a lifelong learning guarantee.’ Of course, the problem with this is that universities already offer vocational degrees, but they are (as discussed above) extremely expensive to run and students vote with their feet. Some 999,150 students were enrolled on non-science-based degrees between 2019/20 and 2021/22 as compared to 884,705 on science degrees. Perhaps it is unfortunate, but some students are interested in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Timothy and Rice should know. Timothy read Politics, while Rice read Philosophy, Theology & Law.
This proposal is designed, in effect, to reintroduce polytechnic education and to massively limit choice and force young people down particular life paths, which is surely wrong and indeed cruel. The polytechnic experiment has also been tried before, it failed in no small part because students increasingly wished to study academic as opposed to technical subjects. To quote Andrew McGettigan, ‘the percentage of students following engineering had declined from a high-point of 44% to 18%, science students were also at 17% in 1992.’ Meanwhile, the 1991 White Paper ‘Higher Education: A New Framework’ concluded that, presumably as a result of shifting demand, ‘all polytechnics have now developed sufficient self-critical academic maturity to be offered the full range of degree awarding powers.’ (p. 25)
This radical restructuring of “lower quality” institutions (like Jenrick, the authors do not define this term nor provide their metric for assessing quality. Though it appears to be based on the flawed league tables which are themselves based on flawed metrics), will require massive casualties. A great many courses would be required to close, huge numbers of academics and professional staff laid off and replaced (from where, are there many experienced educators of technical subjects waiting in the wings?) and buildings redeveloped if not pulled down in their entirety to be swapped for purpose-built facilities. Yet, this is doomed to fail without radically reforming the funding model, as noted technical courses are expensive, so how high will fees be increased to pay for this technocratic education utopia, and would prospective students stand for it? In reality, if implemented, many if not most institutions inevitably would close. This would have profoundly negative economic consequences for those towns and cities which enjoy the benefits of university staff and students spending their money there. The human, not to mention financial cost, would be extraordinary and not limited to university staff.
Ultimately, what these recommendations, built on a limited understanding of UKHE, would achieve is to destroy the sector. The objective is a doomed experiment in social engineering using the universities, many reformed as polytechnics, as a crude cudgel with which to bash the young into technical professions. It is clear that the aim would be to spare high-prestige institutions this cull, but that is a wholly naïve prospect. Without reforming the funding model — the actual problem with UKHE — many of those are just likely to collapse. In short, this report misdiagnoses the problems with UKHE. Rice and Timothy present “solutions” that would be akin to a vast meteorite smashing into the sector, destroying all in its wake, and forcing the survivors to rebuild from the ashes. They would make the UK poorer, worse educated and, certainly for young people, miserable.
