The rapid integration of AI tools like ChatGPT into academic life has raised significant concerns about academic integrity. Universities worldwide are grappling with how to manage this new frontier of technology. My recent research at King’s Business School sheds light on an intriguing challenge: student non-compliance with mandatory AI use declarations. Despite clear institutional requirements to declare AI usage in their coursework, up to 74% of students did not comply. This raises key questions about how we think about academic honesty in the age of AI, and what can be done to improve compliance and foster trust.
In November 2023, King’s Business School introduced an AI declaration section as part of the coursework coversheet. Students were required to either declare their AI use or confirm that they hadn’t used any AI tools in their work. This research, which started as an evaluation of the revised coversheet, was conducted a year after the implementation of this policy, providing insights into how students have navigated these requirements over time. The findings reveal important challenges for both educators and students in adapting to this new reality.
Fear and ambiguity: barriers to transparency
In interviews conducted as part of the study, students frequently voiced their apprehension about how AI declarations might be perceived. One student likened it to “admitting to plagiarism,” reflecting a widespread fear that transparency could backfire. Such fears illustrate a psychological barrier to compliance, where students perceive AI use declarations as risky rather than neutral. This tension is exacerbated by the ambiguity of current policies. Guidelines are often unclear, leaving students uncertain about what to declare and how that declaration will impact their academic standing.
Moreover, the rapid evolution of AI tools has blurred traditional lines of authorship and originality. Before the rise of AI, plagiarism was relatively easy to define. But now, as AI tools generate content that is indistinguishable from human-authored work, what does it mean to be original? The boundaries of academic integrity are being redrawn, and institutions need to adapt quickly to provide clearer guidance. As AI technologies become more integrated into academic practice, we must move beyond rigid policies and have more nuanced conversations about what responsible AI use looks like in different contexts.
Peer influence: AI as the “fourth group member”
A particularly striking finding from the research was the role of peer influence in shaping students’ decisions around AI use and its declaration. In group work contexts, AI tools like ChatGPT have become so normalized that one student referred to ChatGPT as the “fourth man” in group projects. This normalization makes it difficult for students to declare AI use, as doing so might set them apart from their peers who choose not to disclose. The pressure to conform can be overwhelming, and it drives non-compliance as students opt to avoid the risk of being singled out.
The normalising effect of AI usage amongst peers reflects a larger trend in academia, where technological adoption is outpacing institutional policy. This raises an urgent need for universities to not only set clear guidelines but also engage students and faculty in open discussions about AI’s role in academic work. Creating a community of transparency where AI use is openly acknowledged and discussed is crucial to overcoming the current challenges.
Solutions: clearer policies, consistent enforcement, and trust
What can be done to improve compliance with AI declarations? The research offers several recommendations. First, institutions need to develop clearer and more consistent policies around AI use. The ambiguity that currently surrounds AI guidelines must be addressed. Students need to know exactly what is expected of them, and this starts with clear definitions of what constitutes AI use and how it should be declared.
Second, enforcement of these policies needs to be consistent across all courses. Many students reported that AI declarations were emphasized in some modules but barely mentioned in others. This inconsistency breeds confusion and scepticism about the importance of the policy. Faculty training is crucial to ensuring that all educators communicate the same message to students about AI use and its implications for academic integrity.
Finally, building trust between students and institutions is essential. Students must feel confident that declaring AI use will not result in unfair penalties. One approach to building this trust is to integrate AI use into low-stakes formative assessments before moving on to higher-stakes summative assessments. This gradual introduction allows students to become comfortable with AI policies and to see that transparency will not harm their academic performance. In the long run, fostering an open, supportive dialogue around AI use can help reduce the fear and anxiety currently driving non-compliance.
Moving forward: a call for open dialogue and innovation
As AI continues to revolutionize academic work, institutions must rise to the challenge of updating their policies and fostering a culture of transparency. My research suggests that fear, ambiguity, and peer influence are key barriers to AI declaration, but these challenges can be overcome with clearer policies, consistent enforcement, and a foundation of trust. More than just a compliance issue, this is an opportunity for higher education to rethink academic integrity in the age of AI and to encourage ethical, transparent use of technology in learning.
In the end, the goal should not be to police AI use, but to harness its potential for enhancing academic work while maintaining the core values of honesty and originality. Now is the time to open up the conversation and invite both students and educators to reimagine how we define integrity in the evolving landscape of higher education. Let’s make AI part of the learning process—not something to be hidden.
I hope this serves as a starting point for broader discussions about how we can navigate the complexities of AI in academic settings. I invite readers to reflect on these findings and share their thoughts on how institutions can better manage the balance between technological innovation and academic integrity.
Chahna Gonsalves is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing (Education) at King’s College London. She is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Association and Associate Fellow of the Staff Educational Development Association.
In Latin America, higher education has undergone intense transformation. In the 1950s, there were around 700,000 students; by 1970 the number had increased to 1.9 million, reaching 8.4 million in 1990, 25 million students in 2011, and 30 million in 2019. HE systems in these countries vary greatly. There are countries like Argentina, Chile and Uruguay that are universalised (with a gross enrolment rate of over 60%), while countries like Brazil and Peru are going through the process of massification. The participation of the private sector is very uneven. Argentina and Uruguay have a high proportion of HE in the public sector, while Brazil, and Chile, conversely, have a predominance of enrolments in the private sector. Brazil and Chile opted to keep a relatively small and closed public system and open up space for the private sector. In Argentina and Uruguay, the demand for higher education was met by the public sector.
Latin American HE systems are organised, in general terms, into institutional types that distinguish university institutions from other non-university academic organisations. However, there are relevant differences in dimensions such as governance, size, selectivity and educational offer. Everywhere the university sector tends to have greater administrative and academic autonomy than its non-university counterpart, concentrates on offering long-term and academically oriented courses, and is more selective in academic and socioeconomic terms, as in Brazil, Peru, and Chile. On the other hand, non-university institutions concentrate on vocational or technical-professional courses, of short duration and teacher training, as in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, or are characterised by an offer focused mainly on teaching, with little involvement in research, as in Brazil.
Our group received a 2022 SRHE Research Award leading to a report: Measuring the relationship between institutional diversity and student equity in Latin America countries. The award enabled us to systematise information and analyse HE systems in the five Latin American countries mentioned above. From a conceptual point of view, we drew up a typology of higher education institutions and discussed it with experts.
A distinctive feature of this typology is the method by which it was constructed: different from what is usual in studies of this kind, we did not use administrative categories or theoretically discovered groups. In our analysis, the institutional types, or groups of institutions, arise from empirical data submitted to statistical procedures shown in the literature.
Following this approach, we found that in addition to the contrast between public and private higher education institutions (HEIs), the size of institutions influenced the dynamics of expansion. Notably, Brazil’s higher education system expanded by reducing institutional diversity and concentrating student enrolments. An example could be seen in the first group of HEIs that appeared in this analysis, with a strong enrolment concentration (88 private institutions enrolling 2,730,061 students) and the prevalence of online education. This increase in enrolments was balanced by a noticeable decline in enrolments at traditional and elite institutions.
Our findings suggest that other Latin American countries exhibit institutional patterns similar to that in Brazil. Each system is divided between universities, which tend to be more selective both socioeconomically and academically, and other institutions that focus on lower-prestige, short-term, non-university programs. Universities have an important organizational role in higher education and keep a high degree of legally defined autonomy.
On the other side, the institutional models chosen for teacher training play a key role in shaping differences between countries. The same can be said of the role of private sector that sets Brazil, Chile, and Peru apart from Argentina and Uruguay. However, this distinction is not absolute, as differences among the more privatised HE systems can be traced to the strength or weakness of regulatory institutions. A striking difference among these countries is the extent and role of distance education.
Brazil’s system, dominated by private institutions and heavily reliant on online courses, presents challenges for research into institutional diversity and modality of delivering higher education. The private HE sector in Brazil developed as part of the diversification associated with the first steps of enrolment expansion in the 1960s. However, in the 1990s, enrolment in the private HE sector in Brazil surpassed that of the public sector. The expansion of the private sector was encouraged by changes in education policy and the growth of the middle class, which began to demand more places in higher education. By 1995, enrolments in private institutions were already higher than in public ones, and this trend was consolidated in the following years. Distance learning has also grown exponentially, from 10 courses in 2000 to 10,534 in 2023. In that year, two thirds of the 4,983,992 first-year students opted for distance education, almost all of them (97 per cent) in private institutions.
These figures characterise the Brazilian HE system and have led to an intense political debate on the regulation of distance education and the quality of education in the private sector. In terms of research on institutional diversification, the formation of huge educational conglomerates that bring together very similar institutions seems to point to economic factors of isomorphism. It is possible to hypothesise that the institutional logic oriented towards market action is generalised in the private sector, crystallising an opposition to the logic prevailing in the public sector, which is more oriented towards academic agency. This opposition is emphasised in the more superficial political debate and obscures the subtleties and specificities of the process of diversified expansion of higher education. For example, the impossibility (human and geographical) of offering face-to-face courses in remote regions of the country. Or the possibility of producing innovation in public research universities in partnership with large technology companies.
Analysing the Brazilian case produced debate and made it possible to highlight some key issues for comparing the countries taking part in our project: the role of the university in higher education as a whole; the timing and speed of the expansion of HE; whether HE comprised one or several systems in each country; the different training paths, careers and types of degrees; the modality of delivery of HE; public or private funding of HE; the existence of institutions for the collection and dissemination of data.
We used the concept of institutional types to express the diverse reality of institutions in idealised typical forms – rational in their functioning and unilateral in defining the dominant feature. To organise this variety of elements in a coherent and compatible way we focused on the governance dimension of the higher education system. The concept of governance allows us to understand the logics of institutional functioning within the HE system and in national society. Governance models define the contours of HE systems, set up the role of the university, the types of careers and degrees, and the ways in which relevant data are collected and disseminated.
As there are several studies on the constituent elements of governance of higher education systems in the countries studied, we decided to sort this material by considering historical lines of their evolution. Starting with the creation of the first institutions, we studied the constitution of specific legislation, the process of expansion, the definition of purposes, the evolution of funding, structure, forms of supervision and evaluation.
The refinement of our conceptual tool (the typology of higher education institutions) highlighted these issues, directing our focus to the dimension of governance. Meanwhile a methodological problem appeared with great force: the different nomenclatures to name the processes, facts, agents and results of the functioning of HEIs in each country or group of countries. The simplest example is the term ‘licenciatura’ – difficult to translate into English – which in Argentina refers to graduates of the university system in the more traditional academic or professional careers, while in Brazil it only designates teacher training at university level.
An initial aggregation of what we already know can be seen in the table below. It was drawn up through dozens of meetings and on the basis of the available literature and that produced by the group’s researchers, as well as official data provided on the websites of ministries of education. As is easy to see, this is still scattered information that needs a more refined conceptual treatment.
To make any kind of comparison between HE structures in different countries it is necessary to analyse them carefully, based on an in-depth understanding of each country’s reality. Each object of interest or each dimension of the institutional typology unfolds into a research question to be analysed in detail.
Our study has provided important tools for analysing fundamental issues, relevant for informing public policies and the actions of public or private institutional leaders. We offer socially and historically informed answers to questions about what higher education is, and what and whom it is for in different countries.
And this is just the beginning: our project includes stages for analysing the efficiency and equity of the different ways of organising higher education. It envisages understanding how higher education impacts on graduates’ careers, on their professional destinies. At the same time, it strives for explaining the extent to which the impacts of higher education are independent of the social origin, gender or race of the students.
This article represents the hard work of the LAPES team: André Pires, André Vieira, Leonardo Rodrigues and Renato Santos. I thank each and every one of them and take full responsibility for any mistakes. More information about our team and our work on our trilingual website: https://www.celapes.org/en
The thing about golden ages is that people mostly don’t realise that they’re living through one, expecting the nice stuff that’s happening to go on for ever. In retrospect, the Institute of Education, when it was a more-or-less autonomous college of the University of London, was an almost-nearly-perfect university institution. It was big enough – about 400 academic staff when I was there – but not too big; although of course you didn’t know everyone personally, you were on a nodding acquaintance with a lot of them. It was academically-focused, naturally, on education, so there was a common intellectual thread, but, given the nature of education as an area of study, this meant that a range of disciplines – philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, history, and more – were in the mix, producing a stimulating creative setting. And that was before you counted the teacher-training specialists: I was in awe of my colleagues who were able to give fresh-faced graduates the confidence to stand in front of London school or college classes. So there was a lot going on, all packed into a few Bloomsbury buildings.
This function of scale, intellectual connectivity, and physical proximity produced a high level of social capital, in particular the kind that the political scientist Robert Putnam (2000) has called “generalised reciprocity”. This means that you are in a setting where people you don’t know personally will (probably) help you when required, and you in turn will do your best to help someone else who may be unknown to you. This implies the existence of large reserves of trust, which in turn (as many studies have shown – see for example Fukuyama (1995)) promotes organisational efficiency. Things get done quickly without lengthy discussion: I might ask the Academic Registrar to bend the rules on student admissions, for example, and she would probably agree because she thought I was a basically sensible bloke. Well, I think that’s what she thought: the example I have in mind involved accepting someone on to a master’s course whose highest academic achievement was five O-levels. As the student concerned went on, with a little help from us, to become a PVC in a major university, I think you might say that we called it right.
When the discussions began about the Institute merging with UCL – it finally took place at the end of 2014 – colleagues sometimes asked those of working on higher education policy and management what we thought of the idea: some of us had actually studied previous university mergers (for example, Shattock, 2010; Temple, 2002; Temple and Whitchurch, 1994). I usually replied that there would be good news and bad news. The good news was that we’d be part of a world-leading university in a global city, so that student recruitment problems would be a thing of the past, and it wouldn’t do research earnings any harm either. (While the Institute’s stand-alone reputation attracted plenty of interest from international students, the Curse of the Rankings – as a single-faculty institution, the IoE wasn’t included – meant that many found it difficult to obtain financial support from their home countries.) The bad news was that, as a small cog in a big machine, the IoE would have to fit in with UCL ways of working, which would be unlike those we had all been used to. Things would be done in more bureaucratic ways (I use the word in its sociological sense, not as a lazy insult), in a low-trust environment without the social capital-rich networks that we’d known previously. Also, the IoE top brass who had negotiated the merger deal (“Don’t worry, it’ll work out just fine”) would move on, and their replacements would be appointed by UCL to manage what had become just another UCL faculty. Sympathy with quirky IoE methods wouldn’t be in their job descriptions.
I think I’ve been proved right.
References
Fukuyama, F (1995) Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity London: Hamish Hamilton
Putnam, R (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community New York, NY: Simon and Schuster
Shattock, M (2010) Managing Successful Universities (2nd ed.) Maidenhead: SRHE & Open University Press
Temple, P (2002) ‘Reform in a Fragmented System: Higher Education in Bosnia-Herzegovina’ Higher Education Management and Policy, 14 (2), 87-98
Temple, P and Whitchurch, C (1994) ‘An International Perspective: Recent Growth Mergers in British Higher Education’ in Martin, J and Samels, J (eds) Merging Colleges for Mutual Growth Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.
Higher education in England is in financial trouble, and maybe more. If former NUS President Wes Streeting were Education Secretary, no doubt he would be proclaiming that, like the National Health Service, ‘higher education is broken’. It may not be, yet, but many think that the higher education funding system, at least, is broken. So, there is talk of (yet another) review; those with long enough memories will feel that we’ve been here before. More than once a review of HE has been conveniently timed to straddle a general election, to ensure that any or all hard decisions fall to the incoming government. That was how, after the Dearing Report, we got student tuition fees in the first place. There was no review straddling the July 2024 general election, perhaps because the last government was too obsessed with culture wars and fighting amongst themselves. Probably not because they thought that overseas student visa restrictions and the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 were all that was needed to fix HE.
Consequently the new Labour government must deal with HE’s problems, and some of them are too urgent to wait for any kind of review. It is said that the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff Sue Gray had prepared a number of ‘disaster scenarios’ which need contingency plans, one of which involves a large university going out of business. More than half of all England’s universities are facing financial problems which have driven them to declare voluntary or compulsory redundancies; the situation is desperate. In such times we look for guidance where we can; this blog’s headings take inspiration from Yogi Berra, the legendary baseball player and manager, renowned for saying things that are somehow meaningful without making any sense. Another HE review? It’s déjà vu, all over again.
You can observe a lot by watching
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told universities in July they should not expect a government bailout, despite many being in financial difficulty, as Sally Weale reported for The Guardian on 22 July 2024. New HE Minister Baroness Smith of Malvern said, in effect, that “We’ll let universities go bust” in a Channel 4 News interview, as reported by Chris Havergal for Times Higher Education on 16 August 2024. However just after the Labour Party Conference The Times reported on 28 September 2024 that the government would index-link tuition fees and restore maintenance grants for the poorest students, so that fees would rise to £10,500 over the next five years. Still some £billions a year less than three years ago, but a welcome sign of change – if it is realised. Keep watching.
Predictions are hard, especially about the future
Sisyphus might have sympathised with HE about previous attempts to solve the HE funding problem. After the Dearing Review and New Labour’s election in 1997 it seemed that there might be a mutually acceptable halfway house, with tuition fees paying first some and then during the Blair/Brown government’s tenure about half of the costs of undergraduate teaching. The boulder was slipping down the mountain in 2010 as the money and faith in the government ran out and the Browne Report was commissioned. The Lib Dems made an election ‘pledge’ to abolish fees but reneged as soon as they were in coalition with the Conservatives: instead fees were trebled to cover most undergraduate costs. The Willetts-led progressive student loan scheme might even have been broadly acceptable, but index-linking of fees stopped after just one year. University finances became increasingly precarious, especially after the government conceded to pressure from the Office for National Statistics and accepted that student loans should appear on the balance sheet this year rather than many years in the future, ending the ‘fiscal illusion’.
At first universities escaped the worst of Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity for public services. Osborne even agreed to take the cap off student numbers, in the interests of market forces ‘driving up quality’, as Willetts, Jo Johnson and too many others wrongly believed they would, leading to the institutionalisation of a wrong-headed pseudo-market in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (HERA). The student loan scheme was working in theory but not in practice – too many critics could easily win headlines about ‘students who will never repay’. The boulder might have seemed near the top of the mountain but now it has rolled back down again.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it
Many universities did their best to behave as if they were in a HERA kind of market. They recruited international students in ever-greater numbers, for undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, charging fees which would cross-subsidise both teaching and research. Several universities not based in London opened London campuses, recognising the appeal off the capital for their target overseas market. Some opened campuses overseas. Those less able to attract overseas students looked to ‘sub-contractual arrangements’, previously better known as franchising, to shore up their student recruitment. Each initiative was kicked back. Government restricted visas for the families of students, hitting postgraduate recruitment hard in 2024. This jeopardised the availability of and access to many subjects in large areas of the country, without making any meaningful contribution to reducing immigration. The Office for Students cracked down on sub-contractual arrangements as they took over all regulatory responsibilities for quality and standards. They even tackled the more egregious ‘successes’ of ‘alternative providers’, the new entrants to HE. So what is to be done?
Richard Adams reported for The Guardian on 5 September 2024 that Shitij Kapur, the vice-chancellor of King’s College London, had told the annual UUK conference that HE needed £12500 fees – but would seem completely out of touch if it asked for them. On 30 September 2024 Universities UK issued a punchy report – Opportunity, growth and partnership: a blueprint for change – by a senior and influential group of politicians, vice-chancellors and others. In it Kapur and John Rushforth (Executive Secretary, Committee of University Chairs) said: “UK universities have been remarkably entrepreneurial and successful in the last decade. Despite a fixed and shrinking domestic resource, they have managed to engage internationally and generate the revenues to support research and domestic education of the highest quality. However, that innings has run its course. If universities are forced to play the same game for longer, we jeopardise the sector and its international reputation and success. It is time for universities and government to sit down together and agree a new financial model for the system that works for students, serves all our regions and ensures the future growth and prosperity of the UK.”
The UUK report was tuned to the new government agenda and asserted the crucial role of universities and other HE providers in helping to achieve growth and success. The wide-ranging blueprint was nevertheless fairly narrowly focused on demonstrating the instrumental value of HE in promoting economic and social growth, unsurprisingly given its target audience. Many in universities will still regret that the idea of HE as a public good is now more narrowly confined than in, for example, the 1963 Robbins Report, which suggested four main “objectives essential to any properly balanced system: instruction in skills; the promotion of the general powers of the mind so as to produce not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women; to maintain research in balance with teaching, since teaching should not be separated from the advancement of learning and the search for truth; and to transmit a common culture and common standards of citizenship”. But we live in different times, and must be thankful for smaller mercies on this fork in the road.
Bridget Phillipson also said in July “The culture war on university campuses ends here”, as she announced a pause in implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (2023). HEPI’s Nick Hillman said: “I think it is now time for the Conservative Party – if they are serious about showing they’ve changed – to say the war on universities is over.” Judging by the leadership contenders’ speeches at the Conservative Party conference in October, we fear not.
If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how the hell are you gonna stop them?
Anti-university sentiment is widespread in Brazil, China, Russia, and parts of Eastern Europe. In the USA, Republican Vice-Presidential nominee JD Vance has spoken approvingly of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who forced the Central European University to relocate from Budapest to Vienna. Vance said that Orbán has made “some smart decisions … [on campus dissent] that we could learn from in the United States”, but already several high-profile university presidents have stepped down after failing to navigate a course between student protest, staff, boards of trustees and politicians in Senate hearings.
The fork in the road might mean a choice between anti-university sentiment leading to a smaller student population, and continuing growth and development of an expanding HE sector. Despite right wing rhetoric there is no evidence that demand for HE is declining: people still want to come to the ballpark and they still enjoy the game, as the National Student Survey continues to demonstrate. But there are nevertheless understandable reports of student dissatisfaction about some aspects of what can be an impersonal student experience on account of large student numbers. More pressing is the continuing student dissatisfaction with debts after student loans. However many times it is explained that ‘student debt is not like other debts’, graduates continue in reality to see large and depressing numbers in red on their student loan account, and there is no wider public understanding of how repayments work.
Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded
In a blog for HEPI on 5 September 2024, Peter Scott (UCL) outlined some of the current problems of English HE and argued that the best solution would be the reintroduction of a student numbers cap: “Imposing an overall student number cap would restore a stronger sense of stability and predictability into the future, which might just reassure the Treasury as it contemplates an inevitably unpopular decision to allow the maximum fee to be (modestly?) increased. It might also reassure politicians more generally that higher education, and universities in particular, will not be allowed continuously to ‘crowd out’ other forms of tertiary education and training. Similarly it is difficult to see how far down the road of realising its new financial sustainability remit the Office for Students can go without at least considering reinventing institution-by-institution student number controls, within broad tolerance bands like the former maximum aggregate student numbers, to reduce turbulence and damagingly unpredictable consequences.”
The old HEFCE regime of managed growth and change involved student number controls with some marginal tolerance for expansion and the possibility from time to time of bidding for more. The danger of an overall student number cap in the present environment is that it might freeze some undesirable aspects of the status quo. We now have a regulator not a funding council, and it is a regulator which – as required by HERA – is bound to treat potential university closures as a natural consequence of market forces. The problem with university closures is they can easily drag down a whole local economy as well as creating huge gaps in locally or regionally accessible HE provision.
It ain’t over til it’s over
HEPI published Debate Paper 39 on 25 September 2024, in which Tim Leunig (LSE), a former very senior civil servant, argued for a fiscally-neutral set of changes to restore university finances. Employer contributions was a repeated theme of HE discussions at the Labour Party Conference in September, and a significant part of Leunig’s argument was for a 1% surcharge on employers of graduates. His ten-point package of proposals was for:
“1. A 20-year, rather than 40-year, repayment term on student loans.
2. No increase, even in nominal terms, of the amount owed.
3. A minimum student loan repayment of £10 a week after graduation.
4. An additional repayment of 3% of income between the income tax and student loan repayment thresholds.
5. Letting graduates reduce their pension contributions in order to make higher student loan repayments more affordable.
6. Reintroduction of an interest rate supplement for graduates earning over £40,000 a year, set at a maximum of 4% for those earning over £60,000.
7. A new 1% National Insurance surcharge for employers that recruit graduates.
8. New maintenance grants for students with parental incomes up to £65,000, with full grants of around £11,000 for those with household incomes below £25,000.
9. Provision of maintenance loans for all students not receiving a full grant, provided their parents’ income is below £100,000 a year.
10. Additional teaching grant averaging £2,000 per student.”
English HE needs a rescue package right now, and in the slightly but not much longer term the funding system needs an overhaul. It remains to be seen whether something like Leunig’s package of proposals might be adopted. At this stage no-one knows: it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.
SRHE News EditorRob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. Twitter @RobCuthbert
Governments across the globe are increasingly adopting student debt cancellation or forgiveness policies. Recent proposals in the US, Chile, and Colombia have reignited discussions about the student loan crisis and the need for alternative funding solutions in higher education. But why are governments pursuing these policies, and what does it mean to cancel student debt?
The demand for student debt cancellation emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a time of economic hardship for many households burdened by high-risk loans. While banks and financial institutions received massive bailout packages, ordinary citizens faced mounting debts with little relief. This stark disparity fuelled a movement for a general “jubilee” or widespread debt forgiveness. The logic was simple: if banks could be saved from their financial burdens, why not the people?
Cities like New York, London, Madrid, and Athens became centres of protest against government policies that seemed to protect the financial elite while ignoring the needs of ordinary citizens. In the US, the Occupy Wall Street movement became the focal point for debtors, calling for cancelling all debts, including student loans. Similar anti-austerity movements erupted worldwide, with student protests in countries like the UK, Chile, Colombia, Quebec, and South Africa challenging tuition hikes and market-driven education policies. These movements also pushed for free education and an end to student loans (Cini, 2021).
In this climate of widespread discontent, the call to cancel student debt became a symbol of resistance against the rising cost of education and overwhelming debts. Activists argue that student debt not only increases the financial burden of higher education but also undermines social mobility. For many, student loans trap them in a cycle of debt that limits their opportunities and financial freedom.
Initially, debt cancellation was seen as a radical proposal outside mainstream education policy. Even some progressive movements, such as Corbynism in the UK, hesitated to endorse full debt forgiveness, opting instead for free education and the restoration of grant systems[i]. However, the 2020s saw a dramatic shift, with countries like the US, Chile, and Colombia making debt forgiveness a central policy issue.
In the United States, President Joe Biden has introduced two major plans for student debt forgiveness. His latest proposal includes forgiving $10,000 in federal student loans for most borrowers and up to $20,000 for lower-income debtors (Rios-Jara, 2022). The plan also includes the SAVE plan, which ties repayments to borrowers’ incomes, marking the most significant reform to the American higher education system since Obama’s presidency. Despite legal challenges that have stalled these initiatives, the government has already forgiven $143.6 billion in student loans for nearly 4 million borrowers[ii].
In Chile, President Gabriel Boric, a former student leader, promised to introduce a comprehensive debt forgiveness policy. His government recently unveiled a plan to cancel a portion of student debt, ranging from $500 to $3,000 USD for all borrowers with government-backed loans, based on their academic success and if the are in default or not[iii]. This proposal aims to eliminate the participation of commercial banks in the student loan system and replace it with an income-based contribution system. This reform reduces overall debt and ensures education is more accessible. The plan expects to erase all debt for approximately 20% of borrowers. In total the plan will eliminate 65% of total loan debt, being biggest cancellation debt package ever probed.
Both governments have justified their debt cancellation efforts by highlighting the crippling effects of student debt on graduates. Many borrowers find themselves unable to pay off their loans due to stagnant wages and high monthly payments, preventing them from investing in long-term life goals. In the US, there are 45 million student debtors, holding a collective debt of $1.753 trillion[iv]. In Chile, 2 million borrowers owe a total of $12 billion[v], and it is one the countries with the biggest student debt in Latin America.
Debt also exacerbates social inequality. In both countries, graduates from low-quality institutions with predatory lending practices are often left with larger debts and lower earnings, making them more likely to default. In the US, advocates argue that student debt disproportionately affects students of colour, limiting their upward social mobility. In Chile, the government has emphasised the gender dimension of the issue, as women—who represent the largest group of debtors—face a significant wage gap, making it harder to repay their loans and fully benefit from higher education.
In Chile, the government has also framed debt cancellation and loan reform as a matter of efficiency, addressing the failure of the current system to improve repayment rates. Similar to the US, Chile’s loan system relies on government-backed loans involving commercial banks. However, the anticipated efficiency from bank involvement has not materialised, with only 55% of borrowers keeping up with payments. The proposed reforms will remove banks from the equation and return financial aid administration to public institutions, as the US did under Obama’s 2011 reforms to federal student loans.
Debt cancellation policies represent a relevant attempt to rectify these long-term challenges, but questions remain about their effectiveness and whether more comprehensive alternatives are needed to tackle the broader failures of market-driven higher education systems. For instance, activists have criticised Joe Biden’s plans for maintaining a loan-based system rather than pushing for a more transformative reform that includes free education. In this debate, one distinctive feature of President Boric’s proposal is the complete elimination of student loans, replacing them with an income contingent graduate contribution system.
Graduates’ contributions are calculated based on the length of their studies and their annual income. The approach combines the flexibility of income-contingent loans with an updated version of a short-term graduate tax. What each graduate contributes will be determined not by the cost of their degree but by their ability to contribute based on their income. Under this mechanism, individual debt will be erased, and loans will stop being issued, moving the higher education system into a new stage where free education and graduate contribution are the main columns of student financial aid.
Whether debt cancellation will fully resolve these issues remains to be seen, but it marks a significant shift in how governments are addressing the unintended consequences of student loan systems. The push for debt forgiveness reflects not just an ideological critique of neoliberal policies but the frustrations of millions of graduates struggling under the weight of unmanageable debt. They feel betrayed by broken promises of social mobility and fearful of the financial uncertainty that student loans have brought into their lives. To face these issues, governments with a long history of student loans are looking for new ways of funding higher education, moving beyond market solutions and looking for new forms of higher education public funding policies that leave behind market instruments but also the traditional policies of public education.
Héctor Ríos-Jara has a PhD in Social Sciences from University College London (UCL). He works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Economic and Society Research Center (ESOC) of Universidad Central de Chile.
[i] Rios-Jara, H. (2022). Between Movements and the Party: Corbynism and the Limits of Left-Wing Populism in the UK. Populism, Protest, New Forms of Political Organisation. A. Eder-Ramsauer, S. Kim, A. Knott and M. Prentoulis, Nomos. 2: 130-149.
[v] Subsecretaría de Educación Superior (2022). Primer Informe del Crédito con Aval del Estado (CAE): Características de la población deudora e impactos.
