What is the biggest problem bedevilling universities right now?
Talk to academics, students or parents, and there’s no shortage of contenders. Universities are buzzing with rumours about institutions that might be about to go bust, or at the very least scrap the course your child’s heart was set upon. Students mainly worry about money – to the point where the NUS found one in 10 were using food banks – as do parents forced to top up maintenance loans that barely cover the rent.
Meanwhile, academics puzzle over the growing number of students who seem to be skipping lectures. Is it because they are taking part-time jobs on the side to pay the rent, or are too many kids, whose hearts aren’t really in it, obediently ploughing through something they’ve been told is their only route to a decent job?
These are all perfectly reasonable questions that absolutely nobody is answering because public debate about higher education still revolves obsessively around culture wars on campus, spats about private school kids getting into Oxbridge, and a dangerously misleading row currently being whipped up over foreign students supposedly taking places from British teenagers. Never mind that if every foreign student declined their place tomorrow, the net result would probably be a ***** sight fewer places available for British kids, given the number of universities that would collapse overnight without the overseas fees that are currently plugging a black hole in state funding.
But you don’t have to take my word for that: judging by the sudden fall in overseas student numbers some universities have experienced following a government crackdown on visas, we might now find out in real time what happens when young people stop wanting to pay over the odds to study in a country that is loudly hostile to their presence.
The first thing that evidently happens is universities call your bluff and openly demand a rise in tuition fees, as Universities UK’s Vivienne Stern did at the weekend. The real reason they’ve been frozen since 2017 is that it has thoroughly suited successive governments not to take a political hit from raising them: the mirthless joke among special advisers used to be that higher education was the one public service whose recipients actually thanked you for cutting its funding, with students and parents relieved every time fees didn’t go up. What they didn’t realise was that to compensate for dwindling fee income – now worth in real terms roughly what it was 14 years ago, and nowhere near enough to cover the real cost of teaching – universities would hike rents in halls of residence to sometimes painful levels and hold academic pay down to the point that strikes became inevitable, with miserable consequences for students.
