Our university sector is in danger of joining the long list of Broken Britain
They must wonder why they bother. School leavers who get their A-level results this week have already been told by the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan “grades will be lower than last year”. There will be fewer places on many university courses for home grown students, and often no vacancies for “clearance” in many popular subjects.
If they do find a place at college, students will struggle more than ever to find a convenient place to live, certainly after the first year. They will pay at least £27,725 for three years’ tuition, most likely graduating with debts, after living costs are taken into account, of around £50,000.
That is if they graduate at all. The A-level students finishing now are the cohort whose secondary education has been most disrupted by Covid and teachers’ strikes. Those trying to graduate from university this year are their brothers and sisters in missing out on a normal educational experience. They had their sixth form and university years blighted by Covid and by industrial action by their lecturers. The lecturers’ union, the UCU, estimates half a million of their charges have been adversely affected by their Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB). Without confirmed and graded degrees many finishing studies will be unable to take up jobs, further education or visas, as they had planned.
More than sixty universities have been hit by the boycott. Would-be graduates unable to obtain a grade for their work include 27% of the finals class at Edinburgh, 20% at Durham and 50% of undergraduates and 90% of post graduates at Cambridge. Students taking end of year exams have also been unable to progress to the next stage.
There have now been five years of disruption in Britain’s universities. Strikes began over the erosion of pension rights. That was settled earlier this year between the unions and one representative body, Universities UK. Another organisation, UCEA, the Universities and College Association, was responsible for imposing a 5 to 8 per cent pay award on lecturers in April. Their union, the UCU, voted overwhelmingly to continue the MAB in pursuit of 12 per cent or inflation plus 2 per cent, whichever is the greater, and the abolition of zero hours contracts.
All this, and the government is quick to tell those going in or coming out of university that their time may not have been “worthwhile” if they are studying non-vocational courses. The government’s definition of a worthwhile degree is one that leads directly to a well-paid job within 15 months of graduation. Otherwise young people are being told they should be doing apprenticeships instead.
The reliably smug Education Secretary Gillian Keegan extrapolates from her own experience: “I’m living proof that going straight from school to university isn’t the only way to get on. No-one from my family had been to university, so I put my trust in my employers, General Motors, and later John Moores University to gain a degree through an apprenticeship.”
This government likes to boast about Britain’s universities. They are one of the few remaining manifestations of the UK’s soft power. Four are ranked in the global top twenty and sixteen in the top one hundred – far more than any other European nation. Yet this government has little love or understanding for them. Epitomised by indifference and lack of action to help those who can’t graduate, let alone their “looming financial crisis” as identified in a recent Financial Times special feature. The sector is in danger of joining the long list of Broken Britain, and its precipitate decline began during the Conservative years.
It is no surprise there has been little constructive thought about universities by ministers since the Conservatives came to power thirteen years ago. In that time Keegan is the latest of ten Secretaries of State for Education. Robert Halfon is the tenth minister with responsibility for universities. His new job description reveals the government’s attitude. He is the “Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education”. When did “universities” become a dirty word?
Halfon, MA in Russian politics from Exeter University, has embraced the Sunak government’s utilitarian attitude, while refusing to dirty his hands trying to end the marking boycott. On Sky News, he informed a non-plussed Kay Burley that “university is about education” to which he means “good jobs, good skills and advancing social justice”. He informed a parliamentary committee that the sector “was not doing too badly financially”. So much for the pleas from Vice Chancellors that if properly index linked, the £9,000 tuition fee should now be over £12,000 rather than the £9,250 it has been capped at.” They claim they are losing £2,500 per undergraduate per year, rising to £5,000 by the end of the decade.
The government’s true aim is that fewer students should go to university. Fewer UK students means fewer loans and fewer defaults on them. Few Conservatives have ever been on board for the New Labour aspiration that 50% should have been to university by the age of 30. They are not the only ones. Tony Blair’s son Euan Blair, BA Ancient History Bristol, is founder of Multiverse, a business promoting business-linked tech apprenticeships instead of university.
The Government-created Office for Students (OfS), joins OfGem, OfWat and the rest as an ineffective watchdog and regulator. It says it has no role to try to settle the university lecturers dispute beyond confirming what the High Court and Competition and Mergers Authority have already established – that students have a right to seek compensation for disrupted and sub-standard education. More than 100,000 are now party to a class action began by students at UCL.
The percentage of children at university from underprivileged backgrounds is going up and will be a priority for admissions again this year. 90% of home students today went to state school.
Limiting access to university courses and discouraging aspiration is most likely to affect those for whom going to university represents the biggest challenge. First-in-their-family students are most likely to go to the celebrated metropolitan universities and to live close to home. If OfS cut back their “low value” courses as the government’s “crackdown on rip-off degrees” is instructing it to do, there will be fewer educational ladders available. Access to university could become more elitist.
Besides, as Keegan’s Labour Shadow, Bridget Phillipson, MA History Oxford, pointed out in her reply to the government’s latest “higher education reform”, universities should be about more than business studies: “young people want to go to university not merely to get on financially, but for the chance to join the pursuit of learning, to explore ideas and undertake research that benefits us all. That chance and that opportunity matter too.”
Universities have kept their finances afloat by increasing the numbers of foreign students who pay higher fees. A three year degree can cost an international student more than twice as much – some $100,000 in tuition. At undergraduate level, the number of home students have increased from 1.2 to 1.5 million over the past twenty years. Foreign students have more than doubled from 102,000 to 257,000. They represent 45 per cent of post graduates.
The MAB threatens that golden goose. The rest of the world is less forgiving of the chaos in our higher education system. No graduation means no future for many foreign students. Others are finding it difficult to get their visas to stay here extended. The Home office says it is doing what it can but has not waived the £490 re-application fee. There are already indications that students from China, one of the most remunerative groups, are looking to switch to other countries.
Meanwhile UK universities have lost £80m of regular investment via the EU. The government is still haggling over rejoining Horizon Europe in spite of Britain’s leading scientists appealing to them on bended knee to do so. The Turing student exchange scheme, announced after the government ruled that Brexit meant leaving the Erasmus programme, has yet to match Erasmus in scale, scope or opportunity for students. Some Turing grants have gone to primary schools instead. For the record, the UK government spends some $7,000, US dollar equivalent, per university student each year compared to $15,900 in Germany, $13,600 in France and $12,600 in the US.
Creative industries protest in vain that they are collectively one of this country’s most productive and highest earning sectors. Down-graded by ministers, not graded by their tutors, and with the whole experience degraded, it is likely that some potential students, especially in the humanities, may give up on the idea of going to university. To the relief of ministers there will be fewer English graduates (like me) to quote Oscar Wilde at them about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
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