There’s a pessimism establishing itself around undergraduate higher education recruitment, specifically in England but more generally in the UK.
The accepted wisdom in some quarters appears to be that young people (your traditional 18 year olds with A levels, who I will be primarily focused on here as the largest group of prospective undergraduates) are being put off higher education because it isn’t very good – there’s “woke madrassa” angles on this (young people being famously anti-woke, of course) alongside the more insidious claims of a drop in the quality of provision, or in the expected lifetime benefit accruing to graduates.
From the other end of the political spectrum, I’ve heard arguments that university is (after two decades of more egalitarian access) now too expensive for those from less privileged backgrounds to contemplate. And somewhere in the middle there’s the continued drumbeat of the idea that international students are somehow taking places that would otherwise go to home students.
