So we have finally arrived. The state – or the Office for Students which is pretty much the same thing – can now tell universities which courses they can offer, or at least limit the number of students they can recruit on targeted courses in the hope they will be promptly closed.
That is the bottom line of the government’s latest, and presumably final, response to the Augar committee which reported to Theresa May, three Prime Ministers ago.
There are two possible responses to this news.
First, we have been a long time travelling this road. For more than half a century the state has encroached more and more on the autonomy of universities, even – or maybe that should be, especially (as in the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act) – when it claimed to be doing the opposite. OfS through its existing regulatory framework already has the power effectively to close courses, and its antecedent funding councils also had significant powers over universities, although they tended to be of the nuclear variety and so unusable. Accordingly the government’s latest plans are not some kind of coup that has come out of the (deep) blue. They are the culmination of a long-time direction-of-travel in national higher education policy.
