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 damn 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 roughly a third less in real terms thanks to inflation, and nowhere near enough to cover the rising costs of actually teaching a degree – 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.
Recruiting overseas probably felt to vice-chancellors like the least painful way of balancing the books, but now they have been thrown to the wolves for it by a government playing the oldest trick in the book of desperation: if something is in short supply – from council housing to well-paid jobs to university places – blame foreigners for having too much of it, rather than your own shortsighted failure to provide enough of it.
Yet so far this election year brings a deafening silence from both main political parties about fixing this increasingly urgent underlying problem. Keir Starmer has ditched Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to abolish tuition fees, but is yet to flesh out his promised “fairer” system for student funding. Meanwhile, Conservative education secretary Gillian Keegan, who left school at 16 for an apprenticeship herself, clearly wants to expand the number of careers teenagers can get into without going to university, including maths teaching, with a new “earn and learn” degree-level apprenticeship unveiled this week. But what is missing is a frank conversation about where this expansion leaves a presumably shrunken higher education sector.
Will some universities just be allowed to go bang? Are we sliding back to the days when middle-class kids mostly went to university, and on into the really elite careers, while working-class kids mostly did not – only this time with parents paying upfront for that privilege? Perhaps the single biggest problem for British universities navigating this crisis is that nobody really wants to talk about the painful business of solving it.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist