British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, writing in The Telegraph on 17 July 2023, lamented the state of higher education in the country. He claimed that many university students were being “sold a false dream”, leaving them with “tens of thousands of pounds of debt from bad degrees that just leave them poorer,” and reassured his readers that his government was “focused on creating high-quality opportunities for all our children and young people” to set matters right. Some university courses indeed have high dropout rates and are considered to lead to ‘low value degrees’, with few prospects of meaningful employment, especially when graduate earnings are considered a metric of educational benefit. Mr. Sunak did not specify which courses he considered not worth the effort, although many suspect that some of these belong to the world of the humanities, rather than that of the sciences. He played safe in not referring to any specific courses, as people do not necessarily agree on what they believe to be so-called ‘Mickey Mouse’ subjects.
In recent decades, higher education has been considered a means to facilitate upward social mobility for the disadvantaged and thereby create an egalitarian society, simultaneously contributing to economic growth and national prosperity. University education became more accessible after the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 upgraded polytechnics into universities. This institutional transformation was followed by New Labour policies of ‘widening participation’ to close the ‘achievement gap’, which aimed to transform universities from elitist institutions into providers of mass higher education. New Labour committed to 50 per cent of the adult population to pass through higher education by 2010- to the detriment of further education colleges and apprenticeship schemes-even though Labour’s 1997 manifesto had noted that “nearly two-thirds of the British workforce lack vocational qualifications”.
Universities were not created equal. Oxbridge and 24 elite Russell Group universities continue to dominate a mixed economy of some 160 universities and university colleges in the UK. Four English universities even feature among the Top Ten in the world. But despite recent equalising trends, private schooling and social networks perpetuate inequalities that are reflected in access to university places, often confining applicants from marginalised and minority communities to lower-tier universities.
According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), 2,182, 560 students attended 285 UK higher education providers in the UK in 2021/2022. Despite the large numbers engaged in active education, the tertiary education sector faces many existential challenges of relatively recent origin. Until the late 1990s, universities were mainly state-funded and students benefited from government and local authority grants for tuition fees and living expenses. Neoliberal ideas then took over, and higher education saw the adoption of free market principles, being no longer treated as a public good in need of state subsidy. As a result,state funding of higher or tertiary education in the UK has been in freefall, ever since post-financial crisis austerity, dropping from £15.78 billion in 2010/2011 to £4.71 billion in 2021/2022. Direct state funding for higher education is currently provided through the funding councils for teaching and research.
Tuition fees were introduced in response to the Dearing Report of the National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education in 1997. The student loan system was implemented in 1998 to help with university or college tuition fees and maintenance (living costs), extra money being available to disabled students, those from low income families, and those with children. The parental earnings threshold, above which a student is ineligible for maintenance support, has, however, been frozen since 2008. The maintenance loan is widely considered inadequate to compensate for high rents, and the costs of books and course materials, transport, and social activities. Interest is charged on a loan from the day it is taken out. Student loan debt for English university graduates has soared from an average of £7, 000 in 2002/2003 to over £45,000 in 2021/2022. The combined effects of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis have left universities financially compromised, as tuition fees stay capped at £9,250 per year, having last been increased in 2012. Tuition fees are meant to cover costs of running undergraduate courses, supervision, examinations, and graduation expenses, but are considered inadequate for this purpose by most universities.
Driven by market forces, universities have wooed foreign students and introduced many courses of varying relevance to future employment prospects to boost student numbers and thereby add to their coffers. The corporatisation of universities has seen a growth in alternative sources of funding- from endowments, charitable donations, business partnerships, investments, intellectual property income, and conference income-often at the cost of innovation in teaching.
A combination of reduced funding for universities, soaring student expenses, and increasing numbers of graduates who struggle to obtain suitable adequately remunerated jobs on leaving university, especially from those low in the rankings and league tables, all demand a revamp of the higher education sector. Better support for vocational training is needed to address the nation’s skills shortages. Higher education policy should strive to achieve the right balance between academia and on-the-job training to best serve the nation’s needs, while securing Britain’s place in the global knowledge economy.
Ashis Banerjee