If you listened to ministers, you’d think that there’s a crisis of “wokeness” on campus. Every young person is apparently simultaneously an overvulnerable snowflake terrified of opinions and a yowling fighter in the culture wars. But although there might well be a problem with the diversity and range of ideas in the academy, choosing to focus on it amounts to pointing at a fire in a wastepaper bin while the buildings burn down. The real problems are the result of government abandoning all management of the university world.
There used to be a cap on individual universities’ student numbers. Each of them got a figure imposed from the centre, and each received an appropriate level of funding. So far, so good. Every institution had a certain number of places, and they worked out what A-level offers they could make, based on those numbers, combined with past experience of how students would fare compared to predicted grades. Those universities at the “top” asked for As, in the “middle” Bs, and so on.
But when George Osborne abolished that system in 2015/16, allowing every institution to take as many students as it liked, any sense of stability began to crumble. Many huge universities, with strong brands and big names, went on a recruitment drive that has threatened to gut everyone else. Arts and humanities courses, cheap to teach and easy to expand, have become noticeably bloated. Some have become impossible to manage: quality has inevitably suffered.
That is causing an even bigger structural problem: the hollowing out of the university hierarchy. Although some less well known and smaller universities can chug on with relatively low numbers of students, or do quite well by recruiting local students who don’t want to pay to live away from the parental home, others cannot. A new “squeezed middle” has emerged, unable to fill seminar rooms and lecture theatres, and tempted to get out of arts, humanities and some social science markets altogether.
