As Dani Payne notes elsewhere on the site, one of the major problems for universities in lobbying for funding is a lack of clarity on where the money goes, and a set of global (ish) figures that make the UK system very expensive.
Wherever else the UK’s Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) data does for Finance Directors, it apparently doesn’t achieve the T in its name for the public funders and/or loan financers of higher education – and so the default way to understand it all becomes the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s data.
And the chart I’ve been repeatedly referred to by baffled officials right around the UK from that source is this one from the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance report.
That is supposed to be showing expenditure per head on tertiary institutions per student in US dollars in 2020. And on the face of it you can see why, in the absence of other explanations, officials might be briefing ministers that universities should be able to take a dose of spending restraint without completely destroying the UK’s competitiveness in higher education.
