English universities are, by many measures, consistently among the very best in the world, outperforming most if not all other competitors. For example, take the pace at which the English population can acquire higher education and skills. Bachelor’s degree completions in the UK after 4 years are 72%, against an international average of 39%. Many of the UK’s competitors have systems of higher education where the time taken to achieve a Bachelor’s level is much slower, which itself is a problem for them. The UK is world-leading in the time to completion and graduation into the skilled workforce.
Yet, public discussion of universities is predominantly ungenerous, mostly critical and based on perceptions quite removed from the international reality. This Summer for example, rather than highlight the internationally competitive successes of English HE, the UK Prime Minister instead chose to highlight so-called ‘rip-off degrees’ offered by institutions predominantly focused on providing higher education to citizens of modest means, from neighbourhoods characterised by relative poverty. That’s a group of institutions and voters one would have thought the politicians would want to cherish not criticize!
The complex interactions among globalization, global imbalances, and a dangerously fragile financial system have been framed and analysed by Martin Wolf using his three ideas of shifts, shocks and fragility.[1] To what extent can ‘shifts, shocks and fragility’ be useful concepts in thinking about the conditions in which English universities find themselves in 2023; how they got to this place; and what might lie ahead?
