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When will the underrepresentation of Black professors end?

by Zarus Cenac

On the SRHE Blog, in May and July, I wrote about the underrepresentation of Black people amongst professors in the UK higher education sector. In response to my May blog post, a commentator brought up the idea of a time delay between “the demographics of academia” and “changes in the wider population”, and that “estimating what is a reasonable lag is challenging and probably highly contestable” (Golding, 2026, para. 1). The present blog post takes a step along that path. There is an underrepresentation of Black female professors and Black male professors (Paper Whispers, 2025; Figure 1) – for females and males separately, I estimate how many years it may take for the underrepresentation of Black professors to end (Figure 2). This is done by estimating when the percentage of professors who are Black will eventually match Black representation in part of the UK population who are around a certain age (Figure 2). I also look for an indication of whether underrepresentation has been tangibly improving for Black female professors and Black male professors (Figure 2). Additionally, I consider which is the better of two similar methods for calculating the percentage of professors who are Black (eg, Figure 4a and 4b).

Figure 1

The Underrepresentation of Black Female Professors and Black Male Professors in UK Higher Education Institutions

A bar chart is shown – for females, .95% of professors are Black and 3.75% of 45-to-64-year-olds are Black. As for males, Black people are 1.19% of professors and 3.44% of 45-to-64-year-olds.

Note. Data (2024–25 academic year) from Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA, nd-a) and 2021/2022 UK Census data (Office for National Statistics, 2025) were used regarding Figure 1 and in analysis. As before, statistical analysis was used to explore the representation of Black professors – see Box 1 for a description of this analysis.

Black representation over time: Professors

There have been observations on what the representation of Black professors looks like at different points in time (eg, Gibney, 2024; Rollock, 2025). For instance, between the 2021–22 and 2022–23 academic years, there was a 0.2% increase in the percentage of professors who are Black, with the percentage being 0.9% in 2022–23 (Gibney, 2024), and the percentage of female professors who are Black was 0.6% in 2019–20 and 0.8% in 2022–23 (Rollock, 2025).

I used HESA data for the academic years 2014–15 to 2024–25 (HESA, nd-a) to calculate the percentage of professors who are Black amongst females and amongst males (the green circles in Figure 2). Based on representation across those academic years, predictions were made for Black representation in academic years after 2024–25 by fitting a (quadratic) trendline to the data for females and for males – the trendline is the green, dotted line in Figure 2. Despite trendlines predicting a continued increase in Black representation in the professoriate, it should be expected that the percentage will plateau at some point (see the plateauing indicated in Figure 3 regarding non-professors).

Figure 2

Predicting When Black Professors are no Longer Underrepresented

Scatter graphs showing the academic year when the representation of Black people amongst professors is predicted to match Black representation in 54.5-year-olds for females and males. That academic year is about 2043–44 and 2037–38 respectively for females and males.

Note. Underrepresentation is predicted to end in the academic year when dotted lines cross. HESA (nd-a) data and 2021/2022 UK Census data (Office for National Statistics, 2025) were used for Figures 2 and 4. HESA (nd-a) state the number of professors by ethnicity categories: Asian, Black, Mixed, Other, White, and unknown ethnicity. In Figure 2 (and Figure 1), the representation of Black professors was calculated only using persons of known ethnicity. Additionally, using Census data (Nomis, 2013; Office for National Statistics, 2025), for females and males, Black representation amongst 45-to-64-year-olds in the UK was i) estimated for 2011 and ii) calculated for 2021/2022 (Box 2). For simplicity, census year (Office for National Statistics, 2025) was treated as the year when the academic year starts, eg, with the 2021/2022 Census data treated as the 2021–22 academic year.

Black representation over time: 54.5-year-olds in the UK population

The representation of Black people is lower in the professoriate than amongst people in the UK population who are between 45 and 64 years old – an age range which should reflect the ethnic composition of the professoriate well enough (Cenac, 2026). The midpoint of this age range is 54.5 years of age. For females and males, UK Census data are available for various ages and age ranges, for example, 15 years old, 50-to-54 years old, and 65-to-69 years old (Office for National Statistics, 2025). I estimated the year when ages and age ranges are 54.5 years old. To estimate when an age range is 54.5 years old, I calculated the midpoint of the age range, for example, the midpoint for the 50-to-54 age range is 52 years – the midpoint was used to represent the entire age range.

For ages and age ranges, UK Census data (Office for National Statistics, 2025) were used to calculate the percentage of females and males in the UK population who are Black. Figure 2 shows those percentages and the year in which the age/midpoint is 54.5 years old (orange circles). To estimate/predict what Black representation is like amongst 54.5-year-olds in the UK population for females and males at various times, a moving average line was used – the line can be seen in Figure 2 as a line which is orange and dotted.

The estimated representation of Black people amongst 54.5-year-olds seems to be acceptable as a stand-in for Black representation in 45-to-64-year-olds in the UK in the recent past if we consider representation in 45-to-64-year-olds in 2021/2022 and estimated representation in 45-to-64-year-olds in 2011 (see Box 2).

Figure 3

Level of Black Representation in Non-Professors

Scatter graphs present the percentage representation of Black people amongst non-professors for females and males for the academic years 2014–15 to 2024–25. For females, percentage representation goes from 1.51% in 2014–15 to 3.61 in 2024–25. For males, Black people were 2.10% of non-professors in 2014–15, rising to 4.88% in 2023–24, and at 4.86% in 2024–25.

Note. Data (which are of academics who are not professors) are from HESA (nd-a), and percentage representation was calculated from non-professors whose ethnicity is known.

Predicting an end to underrepresentation

The ethnic diversity of the UK has been predicted to be higher in 2051 than it was in 2001 (Rees et al, 2011). So, it should not be surprising that Black representation amongst 45-to-64-year-olds seems to have been increasing (see the purple circles in Figure 2). Therefore, when examining whether the underrepresentation of Black professors is improving, it is important to take into consideration changes in representation within the UK population (Figure 2). For females and males, between the academic years 2014–15 and 2024–25, the increase in the representation of Black professors does not seem to outpace the estimated increase in the representation of Black people who are around 54.5-years-old (Figure 2). Therefore, between those academic years, there appears to have been no tangible improvement in the underrepresentation of Black female professors and Black male professors.

It is possible to estimate the academic year when there will no longer be an underrepresentation. This can be done by seeing the academic year when dotted lines for professors and 54.5-year-olds cross over each other. That academic year is approximately 2043–44 for Black female professors and approximately 2037–38 for Black male professors. So, in the 2026–27 academic year, we are an estimated 17 years away from underrepresentation disappearing for Black female professors, and an estimated 11 years away for Black male professors.

Gains in Black representation amongst female and male academics who are not professors (Figure 3) suggest that there is reason to be optimistic that Black representation in the professoriate will increase for females and males. However, if Black representation amongst female non-professors is plateauing (at around 3.6%), then the trend amongst female non-professors (Figure 3a) does not bode well for an end to the underrepresentation of Black female professors by the early-to-mid 2040s (Figure 2a).

The percentage of professors who are Black, and the prediction of when underrepresentation disappears, depends on which of two (slightly different) methods is used to calculate the percentage (Figures 2 and 4). Using HESA data, the percentage of professors who are Black is calculated by dividing the number of Black professors by some sort of total number (eg, Gibney, 2024), and the two methods differ in how this total is defined (Figures 2 and 4).

Method 1: Known ethnicity only. When calculating the percentage representation of an ethnic group, or ethnic groups, the percentage can be calculated just from individuals for whom ethnicity is known (eg, HESA, 2026a). So, in this method, people of unknown ethnicity are not included in the total when calculating the percentage of professors who are Black (eg, Gibney, 2022; Figure 2).

Method 2: Overall. From looking at HESA (nd-a, 2026a) data, there seem to have been times when the percentage of professors who are Black (eg, Essilfie-Quaye et al, 2025; Gibney, 2024), or the percentage of female professors who are Black (Rollock, 2025), was calculated from a total number which includes people whose ethnicity is unknown. Under that method, when a percentage is calculated, a Black person could be part of the Black category or part of the unknown ethnicity category.

Compared to Method 1, Method 2 leads to a slightly lower percentage of professors who are Black (Figure 4a and 4b; also see Le Roux, 2022), and predicts that underrepresentation disappears a little further into the future (Figures 2 and 4). As briefly covered in my second blog post, the percentage of professors who are Black may seem smaller (but not very much smaller) than it really is. Method 2 would lead to a slightly further underestimation than Method 1 (Figure 4a and 4b). So, Method 1 may be a somewhat better method than Method 2 for considering the percentage representation of Black professors (eg, see Le Roux, 2022) and for estimating when underrepresentation will end.

Figure 4

Different Methods of Calculating the Percentage of professors who are Black

It is demonstrated, in scatter graphs, that Method 2 calculates a lower level of Black representation in the professoriate than Method 1 does for females and males. Other scatter graphs represent the prediction of the academic year when the underrepresentation of Black professors ceases, for females and males, under Method 2.

Note. For Figure 4c and 4d, analysis regarding Figure 2 was undertaken again, but without limiting analysis to professors of known ethnicity – it is predicted that Black professors will no longer be underrepresented by 2045–46 for females and 2038–39 for males. Considering data and literature (HESA, nd-a; Rollock, 2025), some of the percentages for Black female professors (overall) in Figure 4a are in Rollock (2025) to one decimal place.

Context and future research

There seems to be a dearth of literature which examines how percentage representation changes with time in academia and in the national population to see whether the extent of ethnic/racial underrepresentation in academia changes. So, it is hoped that the approach used in the present blog (Figure 2) is useful for exploring the underrepresentation of ethnic/racial groups in academia outside of Black professors. In previous research, a graph has shown 1) the number of geoscience PhDs gained by people in specific (underrepresented) ethnic/racial groups for various years (amongst the USA’s citizens or people with permanent residency in the country) and 2) the number of people in ethnic/racial groups in the USA for various years (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018). The graph has been referred to when stating that, when considering four decades, “the representation of students from underrepresented minorities … has essentially been stagnant when compared with the proportion of the relevant groups in the US population” (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018, pp. 292–293); the present blog post examines the percentage representation of Black people in the professoriate and in the UK population (Figure 2) – if not done so already, it may be useful to examine (across the years) the percentage representation of ethnic/racial groups in academia beyond the Black professoriate (eg, in achieving PhDs) alongside percentage representation at the national population level for an indication of whether ethnic/racial underrepresentation is changing and when the underrepresentation may stop.

In my first blog post, I described how a statistic known as Cohen’s h can quantify the extent that Black professors are underrepresented, and I considered how that statistic can be used to define when underrepresentation is no longer large enough to be noteworthy. Therefore, Cohen’s h could be used to estimate the academic year when the difference between Figure 2’s orange and green lines is no longer noteworthy – that year would likely be sooner than the year when underrepresentation is forecasted to stop.

Whilst this blog post predicts when underrepresentation will end for Black female professors and Black male professors (Figure 2), these predictions are not intended to be conclusive. Ideally, future census data (Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, 2026; Office for National Statistics, 2026; Scotland’s Census, 2025) and HESA data (HESA, 2026b) will be used to update these predictions in the approaching years. Moreover, previous research on predicting the future representation of ethnic groups in the UK (Rees et al, 2011) suggests that the method for predicting an end to underrepresentation (Figure 2) can be refined.

Conclusion

There has been an increase in the percentage of the professoriate who are Black (Gibney, 2024). Nevertheless, there does not appear to have been a reduction in the underrepresentation of Black female professors or Black male professors between 2014–15 and 2024–25 (Figure 2). Despite this lack of reduction in underrepresentation, it is provisionally predicted that the underrepresentation of Black female professors and Black male professors will end in 2043–44 and 2037–38 respectively. However, the prediction for Black female professors seems unlikely given the plateauing indicated in the representation of Black female non-professors (Figure 3a). Hopefully, predictions will be strengthened through subsequent data and improved methodology; it is intended that this blog post encourages efforts to monitor and predict the underrepresentation of Black professors over time so that there can be a clear idea of where the situation is heading.

Box 1

Statistical Analysis: Underrepresentation

Data and analysis. Data of professors in UK higher education institutions for the 2024–25 academic year (HESA, nd-a), and UK Census data from 2021/2022 censuses (Office for National Statistics, 2025), were analysed. R Version 4.5.2 (R Core Team, 2025) was used to run z-tests – tests for seeing if there is a statistically significant underrepresentation – and to calculate Cohen’s h effect sizes (Cohen, 1988; Zieffler, 2025) – to signify the magnitude of the underrepresentation. A z-test found that, statistically, the representation of Black females is significantly lower in female professors than amongst females who are between 45 and 64 years of age (2(1) = 171.08, p < .001, Cohen’s h = .19). Likewise, a z-test demonstrated that Black males are significantly less represented amongst the male professoriate than they are amongst 45-to-64-year-old males (2(1) = 241.78, p < .001, Cohen’s h = .15). Cohen’s hs indicated that these underrepresentations are not negligible (see my first blog post). Caveats. Between 2021/2022 and 2024, there probably was a slight increase in the representation of Black females and males amongst 45-to-64-year-olds (Figure 2). So, comparing 2024–25 data of professors to 2021/2022 census data (as was done in the present blog) is likely to somewhat underestimate the underrepresentation. Probably, the number of individuals in HESA’s professor category does not reach up to the actual total of professors (HESA, nd-b). However, as discussed in my second blog post, the percentage of Black people in that category likely does well enough as a stand-in for the actual percentage of professors who are Black. It should be mentioned that whilst the proportion of professors who are female has risen, females nevertheless account for a minority of professors (Advance HE, 2024), with 32% being female in the 2024–25 academic year and the majority being male (HESA, 2026a) – in the current analysis, percentages were calculated separately for females and males.

Note. References: Advance HE (2024), Cohen (1988), HESA (nd-a, nd-b, 2026a), Office for National Statistics (2025), R Core Team (2025), Zieffler (2025), my first and second blog posts.

Box 2

Black Representation in 45-to-64-year-olds in the UK: 2011 and 2021/2022

Going by Figure 2, in the UK, Black representation in 54.5-year-olds seems to be in the ballpark of i) the estimated Black representation amongst 45-to-64-year-olds in 2011 and, ii) the percentage of 45-to-64-year-olds who are Black in 2021/2022. Percentages for 2021/2022 were calculated directly from census data. I estimated the percentages for 2011, and this estimation involved a few steps which are described next. 2011: England and Wales. Data are available for the 2011 Census for 45-to-64-year-olds in the population of England and Wales for females and males by ethnic background (Nomis, 2013). I used that data to calculate the percentage of 45-to-64-year-olds who are Black in 2011 for females (2.63%) and males (2.37%) in England and Wales. 2021/2022: UK, England and Wales. Using 2021/2022 Census data (Office for National Statistics, 2025), I divided the percentage of the UK 45-to-64-year-old population who are Black (3.75% for females, 3.44% for males) by the percentage of the England and Wales 45-to-64-year-old population who are Black (4.17% for females, 3.79% for males) for females and males separately. 2011: UK. Dividing the 2021/2022 UK percentage by the 2021/2022 England and Wales percentage gave a number (.90 for females and .91 for males) which I multiplied the 2011 England and Wales percentages by for females and males. Multiplying gave estimates of the percentage of 45-to-64-year-olds in the 2011 UK population who are Black – 2.36% for females and 2.15% for males.

Note. References: Nomis (2013), Office for National Statistics (2025).

References

Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Zarus Cenac has worked at UK universities, for example, he was a visiting lecturer at City, University of London. He is currently an administrator at UCL. His interests include race and ethnicity from an interdisciplinary perspective.


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Community engagement in higher education: is its moment finally arriving?

by Thomas Farnell

Community engagement has long occupied a curious position in higher education. Universities have been expected to contribute to society beyond teaching and research, and community engagement has existed in practice for decades. Yet it has often remained fragmented, unevenly recognised and peripheral to the policies and structures that shape what universities do.

Is this now changing? There are signs that it may be. In 2026, UNESCO became the first intergovernmental organisation to specifically name “community engagement” as one of the three missions of higher education, alongside research and teaching. At the same time, universities, European University alliances, networks and national initiatives are increasingly treating engagement not simply as a collection of activities, but as part of the core identity and mission of higher education.

An old idea, narrowed over time

Community engagement in higher education can be understood as how universities address societal needs in partnership with external communities, with “communities” encompassing public authorities, businesses, schools, civil society and citizens. The underlying idea is far from new. From their origins, universities have been fundamentally societal institutions, shaped by and responsive to external needs.

The emergence of the “third mission” in the late twentieth century reinforced the idea that universities contribute to society beyond teaching and research. However, over time, this broader societal role was increasingly subsumed under an economic narrative. The third mission came to be interpreted largely in terms of knowledge transfer, commercialisation and contribution to the knowledge economy. Economic and technological contributions took precedence over broader social and civic dimensions.

The issue, therefore, has never been the absence of engagement. Rather, community engagement has often existed without being clearly named, connected or supported as a coherent mission.

Europe’s “fourth mission”: promising, but weakly operationalised

For a period, European policy appeared to offer a possible way forward. In 2017, the European Commission referred to “civic universities” in its Renewed Agenda for Higher Education. In 2020, its vision for the European Education Area went further by introducing “service to society” as a fourth mission of higher education, complementing teaching, research and innovation and together forming a “knowledge square”.

In theory, this was promising. Distinguishing a mission focused on service to society from innovation could have created clearer space for universities’ broader social and civic role. The European Universities Initiative also seemed well placed to operationalise this ambition. Yet the results have been ambiguous. While reports on the activities on European university alliances show that community engagement initiatives are widespread across European University alliances, “service to society” has not acquired the weight one might expect from a genuine fourth mission. It is remains nested within broader agendas of innovation, society and economy, regional development or the green and digital transitions.

The problem, therefore, is not the absence of recognition of universities’ societal role, but the gap between broad mission-level ambition and narrower operationalisation.

Practice is beginning to move ahead of policy

On the ground, however, something more interesting is happening. Community engagement is not only expanding as an activity; in some cases it is being treated as a defining feature of university identity and as a strategic orientation that is acquiring institutional form.

Three European University alliances illustrate this broader move:

  • The EMERGE alliance offers perhaps the most explicit conceptual repositioning: rather than treating societal engagement as a consequence of teaching and research, it describes it as its “first mission”.
  • The EUNICoast alliance is embedding community engagement as an area of institutional development requiring evidence, reflection, planning and follow-up, including institutional reporting and action plans for all member institutions.
  • The YUFE alliance, meanwhile, positions community engagement as a transversal principle integrated across the alliance’s activities through its Community Engagement Declaration 2025–2030.

In these cases, community engagement is moving from something universities do towards something that helps define what universities are.

A recognisable field is emerging

These developments are supported by a wider transnational movement. Community engagement is increasingly acquiring the features of a recognisable field: shared concepts, methods, tools, platforms, networks, institutional examples and policy advocates. The TEFCE Toolbox provided one of the first structured European frameworks for institutional self-reflection on community engagement. Since then, further resources for action planning, university-community partnerships and community-engaged curricula have been developed and gathered through the platform www.community-engagement.eu. European networks support service-learning and community-based research, while bodies such as the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities and the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education connect this agenda globally.

National and regional developments point in a similar direction, although unevenly. Flanders and Catalonia have substantial engagement activity but still fragmented policy frameworks. Ireland has gone further in recognising engagement alongside teaching and research and developing national support infrastructure for engagement. In the United Kingdom, the recent civic university agenda has provided new impetus for universities and communities to define shared place-based commitments.

So “practice ahead of policy” is important, but incomplete. In some systems, policy is beginning to catch up.

The time is now

If ever there was a time for universities to demonstrate their capacity to work proactively with communities in addressing complex societal challenges, it is now. And many universities are already acting. The challenge for policy is no longer simply to encourage isolated examples of good practice. It is to recognise and support the emerging infrastructure through which community engagement can become a coherent and sustainable mission of higher education.

Ultimately, the challenge is not to introduce something entirely new, but to name, define, connect and strengthen what already exists. Whether community engagement is called a third, fourth or even first mission matters less than whether it is recognised as a core mission and supported accordingly. Universities are moving. Policy now needs to catch up.

This blog is adapted from the author’s article in Policy Reviews in Higher Education: Farnell, T (2026) Community engagement in higher education: from fragmented practice to core mission?

Thomas Farnell is a Senior Education Policy Expert at the Institute for the Development of Education, an NGO based in Zagreb, Croatia. He has led a series of transnational European projects involving universities, local authorities and NGOs to enhance community engagement in higher education. Email: tfarnell@iro.hr


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Bringing GTAs into the career development conversation

by Kristyna Campbell and Kaiyun Feng

The 2026 report published with HEPI by Dr Charlotte Fawcett entitled More than academia: Expanding career support for doctoral researchers sheds light on a timely challenge faced by swathes of PhD graduates. Notably, that much of their studies and professional development is shaped on the premise that an academic profession will be the destination for most. Fawcett weighs in on this issue, illustrating that PhD candidates are increasingly applying themselves to professions both across and beyond academia in today’s fierce employment landscape, and goes on to explain that preparation for this reality is made more difficult by the varied availability of resources to PhD candidates, mainly through their supervisors. While the report calls for better collaboration between stakeholders and more opportunities for work experience, we expand Fawcett’s work by offering insight into professional learning and career development experienced by Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) during the doctoral journey.

Fawcett’s report gives the sector something it has lacked for some time: a clear, current picture of how doctoral researchers experience career support, set against a labour market that no longer resembles the one for which doctoral study was originally built. Its central contribution is not simply diagnostic. By tracking change since 2019, and by pairing survey data with the voices of students and careers professionals, Fawcett provides institutions with meaningful evidence to work from, and a set of recommendations for action. It is essential reading for anyone with a stake in doctoral education, and it sets a benchmark for the kind of practical, student-centred research this space needs. 

Our recent study highlights the significance of the GTA role as a site for doctoral employment, within which wide-ranging skills are fostered pertaining to teaching, research and service. Using a model that explores how GTA career trajectories were shaped by expectations and realities of the role, and aspirations beyond graduation (Feng, 2024), qualitative data from eight GTAs from different disciplinary contexts were explored. The intention of our study was to make explicit the connection between GTA professional development and career development, through consideration for how GTAs understand teaching, research and service roles and their implications for identity.

In the GTA role, doctoral candidates are encouraged to ‘try on’ identities, and to undertake dedicated skills training designed to ensure high-quality teaching and assessment practice.  Their capabilities can include interpersonal, leadership, and organisational skills. Our findings indicated that the GTA role remains oriented toward academic careers, despite the various professional pathways taken by today’s doctoral candidates, a point also raised by Fawcett. Building on this understanding, we consider possible internal institutional and experiential opportunities designed to elevate the competence and confidence of doctoral candidates applying for work beyond academic teaching roles. Like Fawcett, we argued that support in recognising and articulating the transferability of knowledge and skills acquired through employment as GTAs is needed and instead suggest that learnt skillsets should be understood as competencies that can be applied across many careers and contexts.

From our study, we sensed that the expected linear academic career trajectory was falling away as graduate numbers rise and post-doctoral positions become fewer. While, as Fawcett reports, an increasing number of career-focused resources are becoming part of supervisory toolkits, we believe the responsibility extends to other members of the institution (including disciplinary experts, careers teams, and education developers) whose tailored care may have implications for preparedness.  

Our data add another perspective to Fawcett’s work regarding a shared understanding of the benefits of GTA-related competencies. Where Fawcett finds that only 27% of PhD students believe their supervisor has useful advice for non-academic careers, a related opportunity for helping supervisors and GTAs to better articulate GTA competencies was found in our data. We asked GTAs to plot their expected, actual, and hoped-for relationships with teaching, research (doctoral studies), and service, and the participants’ responses scattered without forming any discernible cluster. This variation has been attributed to the challenge of communicating tasks, responsibilities, and learnt skills, which may be a disciplinary concern. Helping PhD students to identify and articulate their current work within Feng’s (2024) framework could, in turn, support supervisors and other significant colleagues to help with locating prospective career paths and understand the transferability of competencies developed as GTAs and doctoral researchers. While the GTA lived reality appears varied, individual-level insight now can prepare for career clarity later, pointing to a single intervention with dual benefit rather than two separate problems to solve. 

We also noted a shift in GTAs’ present-tense identities and their imagined post-graduation selves. Participants who located themselves around teaching and service when reflecting on their reality consistently repositioned themselves towards research when projecting beyond their PhD studies. This shows that participants experienced their current role and future career as distinct rather than continuous. This resonates with Fawcett’s finding that, while 82% of students feel prepared for a research career, only 40% feel similarly prepared for non-research careers, and suggests that building this preparedness is partly about how GTAs are supported to narrate their experiences, not only about the information or resources on offer. This speaks to our earlier diagnosis about how aspects of a role are articulated, and how this is translated for work within and beyond academia. One participant’s insistence that they do not ‘identify as teaching staff’, despite teaching being a substantial commitment, points to an opportunity: helping GTAs to recognise the significance of teaching and service to the development of academic identity, rather than as detours from it, complementing the signposting Fawcett recommends.

Our third contribution sits slightly outside Fawcett’s frame but strengthens the recommendations: the emotional and relational labour GTAs absorb, for example, patience, diplomacy, and responsiveness to ‘unexpected situational cases’, is central to how participants experienced the role, even where it goes unnamed in formal role descriptions and training. This matters for career-readiness in a very practical sense. If pastoral and interpersonal skills are what GTAs are actually developing, naming them explicitly, alongside ‘research’ or ‘teaching experience’, would help doctoral candidates translate what they already do into what they can put on a CV. This lends weight to our suggestion of a competencies glossary, and points to a further opportunity that Fawcett’s supervisor-focused recommendations open up: module conveners, disciplinary leads, and GTA programme teams each hold partial knowledge of what a given candidate has developed, and bringing this knowledge together, alongside continued investment in careers advice, could be a valuable and immediately actionable step for institutions. 

Fawcett’s timely report creates an important point of departure for conversations about career readiness and stakeholder provision. It highlights the myriad resources available to doctoral candidates across the academy, whilst gently drawing attention to areas in need of development. Bringing this together with our study of GTAs offers a more holistic view of careers following doctoral study. Together, the studies describe support structures and the opportunity for work experience, thus initiating a conversation about translation and transition. Instead of asking what additional support is needed, we should emphasise supporting doctoral candidates to articulate the capabilities they are developing.

Dr Kristy Campbell is a Lecturer in Education (GTA Development Programme Lead) at King’s Academy, King’s College London, supporting staff with continued professional development through workshops and professional accreditation. She is also Unit Lead for the PGCHE and MA Creative Education courses at Norwich University of the Arts. Kristy completed her PhD at UCL Institute of Education, specialising in Higher Education. Her interests include adult teaching and learning, transition, and identity. Kristy is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of Postgraduate Pedagogies, a developmental journal dedicated to showcasing the experiences of GTAs.

Dr Kaiyun Feng is a Lecturer in Education at King’s College London, specialising in higher education policy, institutional management, academic identities and professionalisation, and impact and evaluation. Previously a Researcher at the University of Cambridge, she analysed access and participation and evaluated widening participation projects. She earned her PhD from UCL Institute of Education, investigating institutional strategies for undergraduate teaching in world-class universities across China, the UK, and Canada. She leads master’s and undergraduate seminars on social policy, higher education management, and research engagement. Her evidence-based teaching is informed by her research into the teaching-research nexus and academic career development.


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Reconnecting Smart Thinkers with Communities in Search of Solutions

by Hamish Coates, Ellen Hazelkorn, Hans De Wit, Tessa DeLaquil, and Angel Calderon

This blog is based on the editorial for the latest issue of Policy Reviews in Higher Education

Executive Snapshot

All around the world, academics struggle to publish articles, editors grumble about review complexities, and communities raise eyebrows over the quality and relevance of the contributions. Unfortunately, readership and relevance seem to be inversely linked to the growing volume of papers. ‘Publish or perish’ anxieties have been overshadowed by concerns about ‘publishing in peril’ and a fading halo around university research.

These are serious issues for the academy. They are serious for editors, including for ourselves at Policy Reviews in Higher Education. Publication relevance matters professionally, and terms of the real-world of policy in which the journal plays. In our latest editorial we formulated steps towards a solution: Editing academic struggles in the era of robot instrumentalism

We also have clarified imperatives and concrete options to step ahead:

  • Academic networks and stakeholder communities should re-connect with each other
  • Journal papers should be connected through seminars, social media and blogs with the communities they are intended to benefit
  • Open webinars are a natural imperative for connecting the solutions posed in academic papers with the problems which prevail in broader communities e.g. Who will fund us? The drifting dynamics of “who pays for what” in higher education

The Big Lion in the Bush

Around the world students flock to universities in seemingly unprecedented numbers and with great zeal but questions abound regarding value-for-money as a result of rising costs and concerns about learner outcomes and quality. At the turn of century, the ‘world class era’ swept in a suite of mechanisms to define and distinguish excellence.

University rankings and other commercial firms positioned themselves as the arbiters of quality and value. In response, universities acquiesced and strove to distinguish themselves using the proffered metrics to build reputation and status and submit hordes of institutional data to be privatised by growing conglomerates. They compiled bibliometric lists to fluff-up brands and augment their purported reputation among academic communities, policymakers and wider society. Universities began to compel academic staff and doctoral students to publish as many journal papers as possible. This game has contributed to the overproduction of papers, of which many are questionable in terms of quality and relevance.

Creaks and hollowness in this game have grown to spur much angst as higher education providers in major powerhouse countries chase increasingly narrow goals. While hitherto profitable for publishers and rankings/ratings agencies, the situation is hardly sustainable. It has become difficult especially for young scholars who are compelled to publish to secure jobs and livelihoods, let alone to raise a family. The value contribution of this ‘publish or perish’ regime is yielding diminishing returns, especially in an era when computers have started citing themselves. Even more challenging is that among these young scholars, doctoral students are forced to publish articles as a requirement for the degree, and in several cases in replacement of the thesis. Not only does this increase the submission and acceptance challenge for them, but also transfers the responsibility of quality review from the supervisors to the journal editors and reviewers, already overloaded with submissions.

Millions of the world’s researchers now work in middle-income economies where far greater value could be given to highly trained faculty. And many of the world’s doctoral graduates will not pursue careers in academia yet are still required to publish as part of their doctoral programmes.

Making Differences not Just Papers

Clearly, university leaders  and researchers must work together to stake out a productive future for publishing research or face growing questions of relevance and mistrust. We contend that journal editors must step up to advocate for and design feasible options which go beyond those we find in place today. To have an impact on policy, the application and benefits of higher education research must be communicated appropriately to the wider community.

In a big lumpy world, we must embrace indeed create more diverse publication settings. Even as the robots flourish and do even better at ‘firing digital packets’ between themselves, there remains the problem of how we can promote the idea that publishing multiples of papers is not an end in itself.

It is time to promulgate institutional reforms which ensure that community service related to the academic functions of teaching and research at local, national, and international scales becomes integral to academic roles, beyond merely a focus on mass, global publication.

It is time to recognise more contextualised roles that brilliant academic talent already take in our communities and stop over-egging publication statistics.

Editors in applied fields of research must prioritise academic contributions which make real-world difference. It is ineffective to sit in offices producing ‘papers’ which sit within server farms chewing up fossil-fuelled energy and go nowhere near education communities, institutions, teachers, researchers, industries, or governments. ‘Open access’ has arguably broadened readership somewhat but has failed to reach key sections of society who live and work beyond the rich-world academy and thus address broader questions about substantive value. Indeed, it is ironic that the ‘impact’ forore operates within a paywall echo-chamber!

Academics need to get into their communities. Eating, sparking dialogue, engaging, advising, arguing and building, and linking with leaders and communities who do education, seem to endure as things that matter. It is understandable that certain countries are launching their own publication platforms.

Researchers need to find ways to better communicate their research to the broader societies they intend to serve and find meaningful ways from within their academic functions to respond to social changes. Words like ‘impact’ and ‘engagement’ have been invoked to retrofit relevance around academic practice, though with limited success. It is time to re-humanise academic life and rejoice in its corporeality.

With around half the humans and universities on the planet, it is coming time for Asia, Africa and Latin America to forge their own paths. Most rating agencies, publishers, journals, editors and reviewers are based in Europe and North America, while researcher and author communities are growing elsewhere, especially in Asia. The global system is not in balance, and with the disharmony compounded by politics and competitive tension, it is unlikely that current arrangements will be sustained in coming years, especially given that research in non-Western regions is sprouting and flourishing.

Bringing Thinking Humans Together

A paper which is good for publication is also good for promotion, and for pontification, and pioneering. As academic publication has grown, researchers have become often dangerously detached from the communities they are constituted to serve. Is it too wild to expect that editors should only publish situated papers which are potentially going to have a genuine impact on communities? No, this is not crazy thinking. It is post-digital thinking that reclaims community and collegial purpose in ways which even global tech leaders have started to advocate.

Obviously, there are infinite ways to re-kindle connections between academics and communities. Online webinars are a great way to begin. In 2026 Policy Reviews in Higher Education launched an online global series of webinars. Lamenting the lack of dialogue between policy researchers and policymakers, the journal editors had previously forged links between published papers and blogs and social media.

The webinars shift outreach and engagement to the next level. While modest in terms of contemporary social media ecosystems, such efforts are reasonably venturesome for journals which have grown beyond their initial scholar community and into a global and very much larger world. ‘Global’ has a great ring to it but also implies simultaneously ‘everything to everyone’ and ‘nothing to no-one’. Webinars restore human connection, moving papers and ideas and intellectual advocacy beyond server farms back into real professional, institutional and social lives.

The very first webinar focused on ‘Striving for recognition: University manoeuvres for societal outcomes’. As nations have called for universities to serve different communities, institutions have sought different ways to succeed. Desideria Cempaka Wijaya Murti contributed from Indonesia, Michael Fung and Sabur Butt from Mexico, and Michael Shattock from the United Kingdom. The three policy pitches provided perspectives from their respective countries / regions and highlighted emerging research trends and present thought-provoking ideas to help shape future policy directions.

Webinar number two focused on a hot topic of our times: ‘Transnational education (TNE) in the wild: Quality shocks, international anarchy, and academic disconnection. The three policy pitches approached this phenomenon from distinct yet complementary perspectives. Jason E. Lane (United States) talked about geopolitical infrastructure, Lilan Chen (Japan) provided compelling insights into student-centred quality and access, and Jeanette Baird (Australia, Papua New Guinea) gave expert insights into tertiary regulation and risk governance. Together, the discussion highlighted the growing complexity of TNE and the need to better understand its implications for students, institutions, governments, and societies.

The third webinar focuses on money, pricing, transparency, and value. It is titled: ‘Who will fund us? The drifting dynamics of “who pays for what” in higher education’. This webinar will explore questions around who pays and what kind of service to expect and need into the future.  The policy pitches will be made by Christopher Millward (United Kingdom), N.V. Varghese (India), Lorraine Dearden (United Kingdom) and Huw Morris (United Kingdom). Almost everything which is known about higher education funding refers to rich countries. With major growth now erupting in Africa, ASEAN and Eurasia, it is time to build evidence and dialogue into other situations and growth options.

We are lucky to work as professionals across the fantastic and expanding tertiary landscape. Now is a time for us to work together to co-create new futures. We have no time to wring our hands and give up higher thinking to commercial raters. We cannot afford to let computer scientists and accountants alone define all the futures. These professionals are part of our broader academic and professional community. They need our help as much as we need theirs. The challenges and opportunities before us are great. We need all experts to work together.

Hamish Coates is a global leader in higher education with major contributions to policy and innovation who designs and strengthens higher education systems, institutions and leadership.

Ellen Hazelkorn is Joint Managing Partner, BH Associates education consultants, and Professor Emeritus, Technological University Dublin (Ireland).

Hans de Wit is Professor Emeritus of the Practice and Distinguished Fellow and Former Director (2015-2020) of the Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, USA.

Tessa DeLaquil is Associate Professor at the Department for Pedagogy and Lifelong Learning at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Angel Calderon is director, strategic insights, at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

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How universities behaving sensibly could destroy access to HE

by Rob Cuthbert

Since the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, national policy for higher education has left HE institutions to the mercies of a market overseen by a regulator, the Office for Students. Each year A-Levels results shine a spotlight on the consequences, which are already visible – major financial difficulties, academic staff redundancies, reductions in course and programme offerings. What everyone knows is that these are the consequences of the wrong kind of competition and a mix of government policies which have combined to slash HEI revenues. These consequences flow from behaviour by students and universities responding rationally, as best they can, to the policy context. But if higher education policy stays the same, the behaviours which seem so rational at institutional level will destroy opportunities for access to the whole higher education sector.

Everyone knew that 2026 would be another ‘highly competitive’ results round – for universities. Applicants, on the other hand, have discovered that there are higher-tariff universities making lower-tariff offers. Increasingly, their ‘insurance’ choices are not insurance against lower grades, but instead simply offer two chances to apply to high-tariff providers. Clearing increasingly offers more flexibility and more chances, if results are not what some had hoped. And things will only get better for applicants over the next five years or more. This is good news for some – the offspring of the mobile middle classes will be experiencing a buyer’s market for some time. But it may be increasingly bad news for others, who just live in the wrong place, may not have much social and financial capital, and can’t move far to go to university or another HE provider.

Everyone also knows what Bahram Bekhradnia pointed out in his recent HEPI Report, Demographic decline and predatory recruitment: the twin threats to English higher education into the 2040s. Population decline means that the number of 18 year olds will be almost 20% lower than at present by the late 2030s. It follows that unless an increasing proportion of young people apply to HE there will be 20% fewer students in English HE in ten years’ time, with a corresponding loss of revenue. However there is no sign of an increase in the proportions applying for HE, which is unsurprising given the intensity of media coverage of student debt and the associated question ‘Is higher education worth it?’. This, of course, is despite the evidence that there is still a ‘graduate premium’ in lifetime earnings, even if it is declining. There is no sign of demand weakening, and students’ satisfaction with their HE experience remains high, even edging higher in the most recent national survey.

Phil Hill in his OnEdTech blog on 13 August 2026 spotted the parallel contradictions in UK and US education policies: “Omar Khan … published a piece at Wonkhe this week arguing that UK policy on graduate earnings contradicts itself. The government wants the graduate earnings premium to rise … It also wants parity of esteem for young people who don’t go to university. Khan calls out the problem: “no amount of rhetorical flourish can make both graduates and non-graduates earn more than the other in their monthly payslips.” … Based on the latest ED [US Education Department] data, 29.0% of undergraduate certificate programs and 6.6% of associate degree programs would fail the earnings premium rules, while just 1.2% of bachelor degree programs would fail. The actual policy is about to put a massive constraint on non-degree student programs. … So which is it? Are we building short-form pathways or auditing them out of existence? The UK can’t decide whether it wants the premium up or the gap closed. The US can’t decide whether it is promoting the alternatives or testing them to death. The earnings premium is not solely an American idea being argued in American terms. Not only is the earnings premium idea bipartisan in the US, it is international and may be growing in scope.”

Phil Hill’s associate Glenda Morgan underlined the parallels between the US and the UK in her On Student Success website. “Two recent reports – one on American public higher education from NCHEMS and another on English universities from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) – show what this looks like in practice. Higher education systems are, like it or not, stratified by prestige, selectivity, wealth, and recruiting power. That is a description of institutional position, not a judgment about educational quality or public value. But what happens when the number of prospective students stops growing? In a stagnant or shrinking market, institutions cannot all maintain their enrollment by capturing a larger share. Growth becomes increasingly redistributive: one institution’s gain is more likely to produce losses elsewhere. Better-resourced institutions expand into markets traditionally served by other colleges and universities. Institutions with less power in the hierarchy respond by adding programs, recruiting new student populations, or moving into the territory of still more vulnerable institutions. Each decision may be rational for the institution that makes it. Collectively, however, these decisions can leave higher education systems more hierarchical, less stable, and less capable of serving students who depend on affordable and geographically accessible options”

UK government policy restricting applications by foreign students, driven by concerns over immigration, has severely reduced the alternative revenue-generating options for most universities, as recently recognised by the mainstream media. Louise Eccles, Robert Watts and Yennah Smart wrote in The Sunday Times on 8 August 2026, previewing A-level results day: “Foreign student slump forces A* universities to accept BBB grades”. At the same time there are now 700,000 (31%) of UK students, facing the prospect of huge debt from student loans, who choose or are compelled to stay in the family home and become commuters to a university within reach.

Applications from the UK are increasing for STEM and related disciplines, which applicants probably believe will offer better career and financial prospects for graduates. (FFT Education Datalab provides authoritative analyses of trends and variations in patterns of achievement.) Institutions respond by taking a medium or long-term view and reshaping their academic offering in response to changes in application patterns. Rather than making across-the-board reductions. many institutions choose to eliminate entire subjects or fields of study. The British Academy’s recent report, Cold Spots: Mapping Inequality in SHAPE Provision in UK Higher Education, spelt out the danger underlined in the recent SRHE blog by Christopher Playford and colleagues at Exeter: “Some students travel far from home to attend university. But many do not, and many cannot. The rising cost of higher education means that for students from lower-income families, mature students, commuters, carers and those with strong local ties, the possibility of studying close to home can determine whether higher education is realistic at all. Local provision of higher education therefore affects what courses are available to young people.”

UK government policy choices have made things worse for HE, by encouraging the mis-framing of HE as ‘academic’ and FE as ‘vocational’ and putting HE and FE sectors into competition rather than supporting the FE-HE collaboration which is essential, and seems to be appreciated much more in Wales and Scotland than in England. Other policy initiatives have significantly reduced HE revenues, with increased National Insurance charges for employers, a levy on overseas student fees, and changes to student visa requirements reducing demand from overseas applicants. There were media reports on 21 August 2026 that the government might agree to cut overseas fees for EU students as part of its broader attempts at rapprochement with Europe, further reducing revenue for already cash-strapped universities. These reductions have far outweighed the benefit from ending the long-term freeze of undergraduate fee levels. Real-terms institutional income has been reduced to levels not seen since 2010, well below the economic cost of delivering undergraduate education.

Institutions are behaving rationally in their own interests, within the prevailing policy context. Applicants are behaving rationally and consistently in responding to the incentives and opportunities presented to them. It is the policy that needs to change – we urgently need financial incentives or rewards for institutions seeking to maintain opportunities for reasonably local and regional study across the country. Without such changes the HE sector may see the participation rate decline, in sharp contrast to the global trend almost everywhere else. That would be an astonishing response, in one of the UK’s most globally successful sectors, to the UK’s need for economic growth. This is a particularly English problem: different government structures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland offer more opportunities for intervention. But the market in English HE has failed to protect access, and things will get worse unless the government chooses to intervene. Those earlier policy creations, the University Grants Committee and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, as funding agencies delivering most of the funds for teaching, would have found it feasible, perhaps even comparatively straightforward to address the problem. The question is whether government now wants it to happen, and whether the Office for Students as regulator has the competence and capability to do what needs to be done.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. X/Twitter @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.


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Revealing university identity: a methodological reflection

by Michelangela Verardi

The blog is based on the outputs from my DBA in Higher Education Management (University of Bath) thesis entitled: ‘University identity: Statutes and Architectures”

Understanding what a university is – not only what it claims to be – requires a methodological approach capable of grasping identity in motion. Identity in higher education is rarely singular, it shifts across texts, spaces, and lived experience. To capture this complexity, I developed what I call the three‑card trick method: a triangulated approach designed to reveal organisational identity by examining how it is declared, embodied, and interpreted.

This method was tested through work with two Italian private universities that offered naturally contrasting contexts for methodological refinement. Their differences mattered only insofar as they enabled the method to be stretched, challenged, and sharpened.

The three‑card trick draws inspiration from the dynamic model of identity proposed by Hatch and Schultz (2001), who describes identity as a continuous movement between internal culture, expressed identity claims, and the images reflected back from external audiences. Identity, in this view, is not a fixed essence but a circulation. Their caution, following Baudrillard (1997), that identity signs can become detached from underlying reality – drifting into simulacra – reinforces the need for a method that can test alignment between what institutions say, what they materialise, and what people experience.

The three cards I propose are the statutes, the architectures, and the community narratives. Each represents a different mode of institutional expression. The method aims not simply to analyse each card but to understand the dynamics of identity produced by their interaction.

The first card, the normative corpus, includes statutes, codes of ethics, internal regulations, and other formal documents through which universities define their mission, values, and governance arrangements. These texts constitute the institution’s official voice. They are stable, durable, and often crafted with significant care, especially in systems where they must meet regulatory scrutiny. Analysing them involves reading not only what is said but how it is said, what is emphasised, and what is left unsaid. Rather than focusing on legal technicalities, the method treats these documents as identity artefacts: expressions of the university’s formal self‑understanding. To analyse this first card, I carried out a close textual reading guided by legal hermeneutics criteria, paying attention to wording, silences, and framing to uncover the identity logic embedded in formalised norms. The normative corpus provides the frame through which a university declares who it is, what it stands for, and how it intends to act. Yet these documents also reveal strategic adjustments, selective formulations, and silences that may reflect external pressures of bureaucratic control or evolving internal orientations.

The second card, architecture, concerns what the university expresses without words. Buildings, spaces, and material artefacts convey identity continuously, whether intentionally or not. Architecture shapes how people move, gather, celebrate, and learn; it anchors institutional memory; and it projects messages to newcomers, visitors, and the wider public. In this method, campuses are examined as symbolic landscapes. The analysis draws on a researcher‑generated visual archive – photographs, observations, and campus maps – to interpret space in terms of its semiotic and functional qualities. Three types of spaces are considered. Lived spaces are the places in which daily academic life unfolds: classrooms, courtyards, cantinas, shared areas. Representational spaces are used for ceremonies, governance, or ritual moments and often communicate concentrated symbolic meaning. Symbolic artefacts include statues, inscriptions, paintings, or any object that repeatedly signals aspects of identity. For this second card, I applied a visual‑interpretive method, using systematic photo‑analysis to understand how spatial arrangements and artefacts embody identity messages. Architecture is often where identity is most enduring – and where discrepancies become visible.

The third card, community narratives, focuses on identity as lived and interpreted. Through semi‑structured interviews, enriched by tools such as photo‑elicitation, participants are invited to interpret their own spaces and articulate what the university represents to them. This method avoids direct questions about identity, instead creating space for the emergence of themes related to belonging, values, distinctiveness, and institutional meaning. Narratives play a crucial role in understanding how identity circulates. They capture how members internalise or resist official claims, how they interpret symbolic spaces, and how they perceive the institution’s evolution. For this card, I used thematic analysis to draw out recurring patterns across interviews, tracing how individuals make sense of the university’s character and development. Community narratives sit at the intersection of expressing, impressing, reflecting, and mirroring, showing how identity is reproduced or transformed through lived experience.

The power of the three‑card trick lies in combining these forms of evidence rather than treating them separately. Analysing only the normative corpus risks confusing idealised statements with actual practice. Relying solely on architecture risks attributing static identity to institutions that are evolving internally. Listening only to narratives risks privileging individual interpretations without recognising structural or symbolic constraints. Triangulation allows identity to be seen not as a fixed point but as a set of movements. It highlights coherence when the three cards reinforce one another, and it exposes misalignment when one card diverges significantly from the others. Importantly, the method is not designed to declare whether an institution’s identity is true or authentic. Instead, it reveals how identity is declared, embodied, and experienced; how it evolves; and how it becomes contested or stretched under external pressures. When the three cards move in harmony, identity appears legible. When they move apart, the institution may face identity friction – an early signal that adjustment or reflection is needed.

In an era of increasing regulation, marketisation, and pressure to differentiate, universities often feel compelled to communicate distinctive identities while simultaneously conforming to external norms  and pressures. The three‑card trick provides a practical, conceptually grounded method for observing identity in this tension. By keeping all three cards in sight, the method helps institutions recognise what they are truly communicating, intentionally or otherwise, and how they might align their identity more coherently as they evolve.

Dr Michelangela Verardi is a senior technologist and grants manager at the University of Milan, where she oversees the legal and organisational frameworks for artificial intelligence research projects in health science. A qualified lawyer, she brings extensive expertise in university governance and institutional legal affairs, following a long tenure as Legal Office Director at Bocconi University. Dr Verardi holds a DBA (Doctorate in Business Administration) in Higher Education Management from the University of Bath and serves as an adjunct professor at Accademia del Lusso. Her research interests include university identity, branding and IP protection, the internationalisation of academic systems, and the judicialisation of university policies.


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A new social contract and a revival in public funding for higher education

by Vincent Carpentier

Longstanding tensions between funding and massification of higher education have significantly intensified, bringing a sense of vulnerability to the system, its institutions, staff, and students. I argue in a recent paper (Carpentier, 2026 – “Is there a case for the revival of public funding in UK higher education? Lessons from history.” Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–9) that a relentless decline in upfront public funding derailed cost-sharing in higher education, launching a process of public-private substitution with strong implications for sustainability, stability and equity. I connect this shift to the erosion of the post-war consensus initiated by the 1973 crisis and intensified by the 2008 crisis. I discuss how revived public funding towards a reformed higher education system might contribute to and benefit from a revisited welfare state, renewing the social contract away from an increasingly unequal socioeconomic system.

The long retreat of public funding

Public funding was a key driver of the first phase of massification of the 1960s under a binary system shaped by universities and the public sector of higher education spearheaded by polytechnics. Grants to institutions and their students, driven by aligned political, economic, and social rationales, were considered as integral parts of the construction of the welfare state driving the post-1945 social contract.

Figure 1: Income structure of higher education institutions and enrolment (universities only before 1992) UK 1921–2024.

Source: Carpentier, 2026

This public investment peaked at 90% of higher education income in the early 1970s. It was then interrupted by the 1973 crisis which challenged the postwar consensus with supply side lower taxation policies seeking to limit public funding of the social sphere and encourage its privatisation. The translation of that process to higher education led at first to a slowdown in expansion in the 1980s before becoming the template of a much more marketised second phase of massification (under a newly unified system with the polytechnics having become universities in 1992). Cost-sharing – which had started with the introduction of international fees in 1967 and their rise to full-cost in 1981 – was extended to home students with the introduction of loans in 1990 and of £1K means-tested upfront fees in 1998. Differences within the UK are important to consider as Scotland abolished fees in 1999 unlike the other nations (Shattock and Horvath, 2020).

In 2006, home fees tripled to £3K and became deferred, funded by income contingent state-backed loans. What were then called ‘top-up fees’ coincided, as part of a cost-sharing agenda, with sustained grants to institutions and students: however, the share of public funding had already declined to 50% by 2008. The global crisis intensified that decline. Home fees tripled again in 2012 while teaching grants to institutions were largely scrapped in 2010. Grants to students were gradually replaced by loans and suppressed in 2016: public funding only represents 20% of institutional income today (28% if an estimation of non-refunded loans subsidised by the government is included).

Shift from cost-sharing to public/private substitution of funding

I argue that this concomitance of the rise in fees and reduction of grants represents a shift in the dynamic between public and private funding: fees started to replace rather than top up public funding. This process of public/private substitution, which derailed the cost-sharing agenda after the 2008 crisis, had many implications. Firstly, substitutive fees do not generate additional resources and therefore do not address issues of financial sustainability affecting institutions and their staff (Carpentier and Picard, 2024). Moreover, substitution increased the vulnerability of institutions and the whole system which, in the absence of the shield of public funding, became over-reliant on volatile private resources such as home and international fees. Substitution also intensified a longstanding unequal institutional differentiation. The inequalities between universities and polytechnics at the heart of the binary system of the first massification of the 1960s were reproduced by those between pre/post-92 and Russell group universities of the unified system of the second phase of massification (Carpentier 2021).

Substitution also affects equity as higher fees coincided in a context of austerity with the gradual replacement of grants by increasingly less generous loan system with rising repayment costs (Callender, 2017): this deactivated the cost-sharing mechanisms designed to mitigate for the negative impact of fees on access and students’ debt (de Gayardon and Callender, 2025; Ghaffar and Hordósy, 2026). Finally, substitution affects how higher education is or is perceived: lower public funding and higher fees reflecting marketisation (Robertson and Martini, 2023) and hypercommodification (Boliver and Promenzio, 2025) slowly undermined the real and perceived public good of higher education (Marginson and Yang, 2025) while strengthening its conception as a private good. That private good was itself increasingly undermined by a falling graduate premium and unemployment (unequally according to institutions and social capital), aggravated by higher inflation and loan interest rates. Both public and private cases for higher education are now increasingly difficult to make.

Inequalities and the erosion of public services and socioeconomic vulnerabilities

The issues raised by substitution threatening higher education are symptomatic of wider ideological choices regarding the links between economic and human developments that characterised the post-1973 socioeconomic model. That favoured competition over collaboration, the individual over the collective, focusing on public deficit while minimizing private debt, considering social spending as a byproduct of growth rather than an investment. Those approaches shaped the growth model of the 1990s based on deregulated globalisation, financialisation and lower social protection – which generated unsustainable levels of inequality masked by private debt and cheap imported products until the explosion of the subprime market kicked off the 2008 crisis. Inequalities were initially acknowledged as a source of the crisis  (Piketty, 2024) before being overlooked and intensified by austerity policies (Farnsworth and Irving, 2018).

Covid-19 showed (Tooze, 2021) the cost of not having addressed inequalities and the erosion of public services in terms of vulnerabilities of economies and societies but also demonstrated the value of what remained of the welfare state as collective shielding (Carpentier, 2021).  Again, this acknowledgement vanished with the “return to normality”. Stagflation and energy crises are reminders that we ignore the impact of the crisis of neoliberalism on inequalities at our peril, especially as they fuel neonationalist tensions within and between countries. This should lead to reflect on finding another route out of the crisis through a revisited welfare state and to consider how higher education might contribute to it and benefit from it.

A new social contract: transformative crises and the case for countercyclical spending

Is the post-1945 progressive social contract based on the welfare state a one-off historical product of unmatched human and physical destruction? Can socioeconomic transformations addressing inequalities only be triggered by catastrophic events? The human impact on climate change seems serious enough to require a new social contract still nowhere to be seen. Looking back at Kondratiev cycles offer hopeful examples of earlier crises which, unlike 1973 and 2008, were deeply transformative (Carpentier, 2015). The crises of 1833, 1873 and 1929 all triggered countercyclical social spending funded by progressive taxation leading to technological and social innovations. Each crisis revived productivity while reducing inequalities and incrementally transformed the socio-economic system and crystallised into the post-war consensus (Fontvieille and Michel, 2002).

A revival of fair taxation today to finance countercyclical spending might be the opportunity to drive a new social contract correcting an unsustainably unequal socioeconomic system characterised by the emergence of technological innovations without social transformations and regulations protecting people, their economy, society, and environment. Higher education should contribute to that change alongside other levels of education (Scott, 2021) and the whole social sphere. Reversing public/private substitution through revived grants to institutions and students is urgent to ensure that higher education shifts its focus from its own unsustainability and instability to tackle inequalities and address the interrelated political, economic, social and environmental challenges ahead (Carpentier and Unterhalter, 2022; McCowan, 2025). Rebalancing the funding of higher education is about realigning its economic and other rationales (Ashwin et al, 2026) and reviving a public service of higher education anchored to a revisited welfare state able to drive a renewed social contract reconciling economies and societies.

Vincent Carpentier is Professor of Higher Education and Society at the UCL Institute of Education. His teaching and research activities are located at the interface of history of education and political economy. His comparative research explores the historical relationship between educational systems, Kondratiev cycles and social change. He is particularly interested in exploring the long-term connections and tensions between funding, expansion and institutional differentiation of higher education systems at both national and global levels.


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End of the road for higher education student loans?

by Gavin Moodie

Although we’ve come to the end of the road

Still, I can’t let go

As an expat Aussie I have been sad to see the unremitting erosion of public support for what is arguably Australia’s most innovative modern higher education export, income contingent student loans. While Australian student financing may not yet be as ‘unsustainable’ as England’s, the former Labor leader and current vice chancellor of the University of Canberra Bill Shorten argued that Australian universities are in a ‘political cul-de-sac’, with ‘a tired funding model’.

This blog seeks to understand how Australia’s higher education finance reached its Neighbourly cul-de-sac Ramsay Street, why it is perhaps not yet quite unsustainable, and the difficult choices confronting policy makers over the next 5 to 10 years in Australia, England, and elsewhere in the UK.

Introduction and early years: 1989 – 1996

The national Australian Labor Government introduced substantial tuition fees accompanied by income contingent loans in 1989 on the recommendation of the Committee on Higher Education Funding chaired by the astute late Neville Wran, former Labor premier of Australia’s biggest state, New South Wales. A consultant to the committee was Bruce Chapman, an advocate for income contingent loans for higher education and a range of other public policy problems such as farmers’ drought relief and penalties for insider trading and other white collar crimes.

The Wran committee recommended that total student charges should be about 20% of estimated costs in 8 categories of disciplines, which it aggregated into 3 contribution levels. While the Government agreed that student contributions should be about of 20% of system costs, it introduced a single price that avoided the complexities of students paying different rates for different subjects, and the possibility that higher charges may discourage students from enrolling in higher cost courses.

The Wran Committee also recommended an employers’ training levy, which was similar to the UK’s apprenticeship levy except that it could be spent on any form of employee training. Australia’s training guarantee was reasonably successful, but it was vociferously opposed by at least some employers and the Government discontinued it in 1994 after only 4 years of operation. This is consistent with employers’ long term substantial cuts to their induction and development of their own employees in Australia and Canada, as well as the UK.

Government charges by cost and expected income: 1997 – 2004

In 1997 the newly elected conservative Australian Government cut funding to higher education and increased student charges to about 40% of the presumed cost of higher education. The Government established 3 bands of student charges based on a combination of the presumed cost of subjects and graduates’ expected earnings.

In the lowest band were humanities and social sciences that were funded at a lower rate and whose graduates had lower earnings. Also in band 1 were languages and the creative arts. These were higher-cost disciplines, but most graduates’ earnings were lower than average.

In band 3 were disciplines with high costs and high graduates’ earnings: dentistry, medicine, and veterinary science. Also in band 3 was law: it was a low-cost discipline but graduates had high earnings. Band 3 charges were 1.7 times band 1 charges. All other disciplines were in band 2 which were charged 1.4 more than band 1: health, science, and engineering because they were high cost; and business because graduates had high incomes.

University fees by cost, expected income, and Government priorities: 2005 – 2020

From 2005 the Conservative Government changed student contributions from Government charges to institutions’ fees, and established four maximum fee amounts. It introduced a new fee band for the expensive STEM disciplines and for business which is funded at the base rate but has high graduate incomes, though lower than law which was still in the top band.

The Government also published government contribution amounts in 12 bands. The combination of maximum fee amounts and government contribution amounts gave total financing in eight bands. Agriculture, dentistry and medicine were in the highest financing band, which was 2.6 times the lowest band for business and humanities.

The Government also sought to influence students’ behaviour by setting low maximum fee amounts and to influence institutions’ behaviour by setting higher government contribution amounts for the ‘national priority’ disciplines of education and nursing. Institutions’ total revenue for education was 1.2 times the base rate and 1.5 times for nursing.

Job-ready graduates: 2021 –

In 2021 the then Conservative government further cut higher education funding and increased maximum student fees to be a weighted average of about half of total teaching financing, although this differs markedly by discipline, as we shall see. The Government also extended its attempts to influence both students and institutions’ behaviour with financial incentives intended to create ‘job-ready graduates’.

The Government set the lowest student fees for agriculture, education, English, foreign languages, mathematics and statistics, and nursing. It added humanities and most social sciences to business and law in the top fee rate of 3.7 times the base rate. Humanities and social sciences students now pay annual fees 28% higher than dentistry and medicine students, whose maximum fees are 2.9 the base rate.

The Government’s contribution is lowest for business, humanities and social sciences, and law; it is highest for agriculture, dentistry, medicine, and veterinary science, which is 24.6 times the base rate.

The combination of maximum student fees and Government contributions generates total financing for dentistry, medicine, and veterinary science 2.5 times the base rate for business, humanities and social sciences, and law. Total financing for engineering and science is 1.6 times the base rate.

Students pay markedly different proportions of the total financing for their courses. Business, humanities and social sciences, and law students pay 93% of the total financing of their course; engineering, science and medicine pay around 30% of their course’s financing; and education, languages, mathematics, and nursing students pay around 20% of their course’s financing.

These differences are widely considered unfair. It is also doubtful that they have changed students’ and institutions’ behaviour as they were designed to. Humanities and social sciences enrolments have fallen since the introduction of job-ready graduates, but that has continued a long established trend likely influenced by other factors such as prospective students’ interests and perceptions of employment prospects.

Enrolments in English and other languages have fallen even more than the humanities and social sciences, despite the government cutting their fees by 40%. An econometric study concluded ‘Overall, we estimate that the studied policy change led 1.52% of students to demand courses they wouldn’t have demanded under the old fee structure’.

This is entirely consistent with economic theory and Australia’s experience with its previous changes to students’ fees. The whole point of income-contingent loans is to insulate students from the up-front price of education, and that is just what they do, even when humanities’ students fees were increased by 113% and creative arts students’ fees were increased by 64%.

The Australian Labor government was elected in 2022 on a platform that included reversing job-ready graduates, and it was re-elected in 2025 with the same commitment. Yet Labor has kept job-ready graduates for longer than the previous conservative government, to the intense annoyance of many students and staff.

Debts, interest rates, return on investment

The size of Australian Government debt was a concern in the early years of income contingent loans when enrolments and thus accumulated unpaid debt was growing strongly and there were relatively few graduates yet in well-paying jobs repaying their debt. It is not such a big concern now: outstanding student debt is equivalent to 8% of all Australian government debt, which is around 50% of gross domestic product (in contrast to the UK where government debt is 101% of GDP).

The proportion of student debt not expected to be repaid increased from 16% to 25% from 2010 to 2016. However, this is sensitive to repayment conditions, and for 2024 the proportion of new debt not expected to be repaid was 12%.

The size of students’ debts has been concerning. Graduates’ average debt is currently about 30% of average annual earnings and takes just over 10 years to repay. But this varies greatly by individual circumstances. We have seen that the Government has set the maximum fee for arts subjects in the top band, meaning that arts graduates are likely to incur a total debt of half average annual earnings. Arts graduates have lower incomes than other graduates, and many are women who work part time at times during their career. Many are likely to take up to 40 years to repay their debt, if at all.

Graduates’ expected earnings was one of the Australian Government’s criteria for setting maximum student fees, and that remains the only explicitly progressive part of Australia’s student loans. The Australian Government charges interest on student debts, but only to preserve the debts’ real value. Australia does not charge higher income earners higher interest on their student debts, although they may have to repay their debt more quickly than lower paid graduates, as higher paid graduates are required to repay higher amounts each year than lower paid graduates.

Nevertheless, as in England, during a period of high inflation there has been controversy over which of the several measures of inflation to use, and when indexation should be assessed. Also as in England, there have been reports of new graduates’ annual repayments not even covering annual interest charges so their debt continues to increase. Accordingly the Labor Government promised to make repayment conditions more favourable to students, and to cut graduates’ debts once by 20%. Cutting graduates’ debt has been popular, despite being arbitrary and regressive, and arguably contributed to Labor’s re-election in a landslide in 2025.

Despite Australian students’ concerns about fees, debts, and interest rates, graduates have high economic returns, although these vary by gender and discipline.

Substantial differences from England

Further substantial differences between Australian and English higher education have important implications for student fees and loans in each country. The Australian Government retains student number controls. It removed number controls in 2012, some three years before most student number controls were removed for England in 2015/16. Australia introduced its so-called ‘demand driven system’ after a period of pent up demand for higher education, which saw very big increases in enrolments as enrolment caps were removed.

At the time the Australian Government provided about 60% of the financing for each student place, and of course it provided all of the up-front funds for student loans, so the demand driven system substantially increased Government spending on higher education. This was too much for the Australian Government, which ended the demand driven system and reintroduced number controls in 2017. One of the outcomes is that the Australian Government may limit increased expenditure on higher education by limiting its expansion, and not just by worsening students’ loan conditions.

Most Australian higher education students live with their parents. Nearly 80% of Australian higher education students commute from home, even to elite universities. While the proportion of UK 18-year-olds commuting from home is increasing, it is still only 30%. Living in purpose built student housing is a very different experience from commuting from home, and is probably one of the reasons for the UK’s unusually and commendably high student retention and completion rates. Commuting rates also has implications for institutions’ range of programs, which need to be reasonably comprehensive to meet the needs of local students. But a great advantage of commuting is that it greatly reduces students’ living costs, and thus their need for income support.

Universities’ social licence

An important limitation of Australian universities’ financing is their erosion of their social licence. A longstanding concern has been with Australian vice chancellors’ very high pay, amongst the highest in the world for public universities. The average Australian vice chancellor’s pay is almost double the Prime Minister’s. More recently there has been concern at the number of highly paid executives employed by universities: ‘More than 300 Australian university executives make more money than state premiers’. Closely related are complaints at universities’ changed governance, known broadly as the imposition of managerialism.

The very high pay and conditions of Australian universities’ senior executives is in almost feudal contrast to the very high number of academics they engage on precarious employment conditions. Australian universities’ staffing data collection and reporting are very weak on this issue, but the union estimates that about 45% of public Australian university employees are on casual contracts. This is related to widespread underpayment of casual staff.

As in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere, Australian universities have relieved their public funding pressures by recruiting high numbers of international students. Some 35% of Australia’s higher education students are international, 80% of whom live in Australia on a temporary entry permit. There are the familiar concerns that Australian universities lower standards to recruit and graduate large numbers of international students who crowd locals out of accommodation, all to fund senior executives’ lavish pay. Accordingly, the Australian Government is cutting the number of international students. Regardless of the merits of these arguments, there is little public sympathy for increasing universities’ funding from their current three main sources: government grants, domestic student fees, and international student fees.

Difficult choices for policy makers

The late great sociologist of higher education Martin Trow observed that:

“No society, no matter how rich, can afford a system of higher education for 20 or 30 percent of the age grade at the cost levels of the elite higher education that it formerly provided for 5 percent of the population.”

That observation applies equally as we transition to universal participation of more than 50% in post-school education, from mass participation of from 16% to 50% which our countries financed by income contingent loans. That is to say, the current pressures on higher education financing will not be relieved, as some have suggested, just by cutting the number of senior university administrators and their pay, allocating more funds to higher education from increasing taxes on the rich or on companies, or by increasing student fees.

I suggest that there are two main options. The most frequently suggested, especially in England, is to retreat from universal and even mass participation in higher education by cutting greatly the number of higher education students. A second commonly suggested option is to cut radically the cost of providing higher education.

Advocates of each option need to address two consequential issues. To what extent would the much smaller or cheaper system retain stratified elite, mass and universal parts, as Trow envisaged? Secondly, how would access to the elite, mass and universal parts of the system be allocated? I would answer these questions by considering the relative importance I would give to egalitarianism, and to expensive forms of higher education such as research intensity.

Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow, University of Oxford Department of Education. He worked at 6 Australian universities over 38 years. @GavinMoodie. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gavin-Moodie


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Digital accessibility debt in higher education: how institutional decisions create structural exclusion

by Kevin Andrews

Digital accessibility in higher education is often discussed as a compliance requirement. Universities are expected to meet legal duties, publish accessibility statements, and make reasonable adjustments when barriers arise. Over the last decade the policy environment has strengthened considerably. In the UK the Equality Act 2010 established obligations to remove barriers for disabled students and staff, while the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations introduced additional scrutiny of institutional digital services. More recently the Jisc Accessible Digital Futures project has highlighted the opportunities created by emerging digital and AI technologies when accessibility is considered early in design and procurement.

These developments signal an important shift. Accessibility is no longer treated solely as a matter of compliance or accommodation. Instead it is increasingly recognised as part of the digital infrastructure that supports teaching, research, and student experience. Yet despite this growing awareness, accessibility failures remain common across higher education systems. Students still encounter inaccessible learning platforms, course materials that cannot be used with assistive technologies, and institutional processes that place the burden of adaptation on disabled individuals.

This persistence of barriers suggests that the problem is not simply one of awareness or policy guidance. Rather, accessibility failures often arise from the way institutions adopt and govern digital technologies. To understand why the problem continues even where intentions are good, it is useful to think in terms of accessibility debt.

Accessibility debt in higher education systems

Accessibility debt accumulates when digital systems are adopted without accessibility being fully considered from the outset. Like technical debt in software development, the consequences may not be immediately visible. Platforms may appear to function adequately until disabled students begin to rely on them at scale. At that point the cost of remediation becomes significant, requiring workarounds, retrofitting, or labour-intensive accommodations.

Universities are particularly susceptible to this problem because their digital environments are complex and layered. Institutional technology ecosystems typically include learning management systems, student portals, library platforms, assessment tools, lecture capture technologies, and a growing number of AI enabled services. Many of these systems are supplied by external vendors and integrated with one another over time.

Even when individual platforms claim compliance with standards such as WCAG 2.2 AA, accessibility problems can emerge through the interaction between systems. A student may navigate successfully through one platform only to encounter barriers when moving to another tool that forms part of the same learning environment. Over time these problems accumulate as institutions add new tools without addressing existing accessibility limitations.

How institutions create accessibility debt

Procurement and governance decisions are central to the accumulation of accessibility debt. In principle, accessibility requirements can be evaluated during vendor selection. In practice this process is often difficult. Suppliers may provide incomplete or ambiguous accessibility documentation, and institutional buyers may lack the expertise needed to interpret those claims.

The Accessible Digital Futures project identified procurement as a major challenge for the UK higher education sector. Universities frequently struggle to obtain reliable information about whether digital and AI powered products meet accessibility standards. Even when accessibility statements are available, they may not reflect how the system performs in real institutional contexts.

Institutional governance structures add another layer of complexity. Universities are typically decentralised organisations where digital decisions are made in multiple places. Academic departments adopt specialised teaching tools. Administrative units introduce new platforms to manage services. Individual instructors experiment with emerging technologies. Each decision may appear limited in scope, but collectively they shape the accessibility of the institutional digital environment.

Under these conditions accessibility responsibility can become fragmented. Policies may exist at the institutional level, yet practical decisions about technology adoption occur across many different teams. Without clear governance and accountability, accessibility considerations are often introduced late in the process rather than guiding decisions from the beginning.

Why retrofitting accessibility rarely works

When accessibility barriers become visible, institutions often respond by attempting to retrofit accessibility into existing systems. This approach is understandable but rarely efficient. By the time problems are identified, platforms may already be embedded in teaching and administrative processes.

The scale of institutional digital infrastructure makes remediation difficult. Learning management systems may contain thousands of courses with legacy materials. Institutional websites can consist of hundreds of thousands of pages. Third party platforms may require vendor cooperation to address technical barriers. Even well-resourced remediation efforts can take years to complete.

In the meantime new technologies continue to be introduced. Emerging tools such as generative AI, immersive learning environments, and advanced analytics systems offer significant potential benefits. The Jisc project highlights how these technologies could support more inclusive forms of digital learning if accessibility is considered early. However the same technologies may create new barriers if institutions repeat existing patterns of procurement and governance.

The result is a cycle in which accessibility problems are repeatedly addressed after the fact rather than prevented through earlier decision making.

What structural change would look like

Reducing accessibility debt requires institutions to treat accessibility as a governance issue rather than a purely technical one. Responsibility cannot sit solely with disability services or specialist accessibility teams. Decisions about procurement, platform adoption, and digital strategy shape the accessibility of the entire institutional environment.

Procurement practices are one important lever. Universities need clearer processes for evaluating vendor accessibility claims and stronger expectations that suppliers provide reliable documentation. The European Accessibility Act having recently gone into force may increase pressure on technology providers to meet accessibility standards, but institutional buyers will still need the expertise and governance structures necessary to interpret those requirements.

Accessibility expertise must also be integrated earlier in institutional decision making. Too often accessibility specialists are consulted only after technology has already been selected. Involving accessibility expertise during planning and procurement can significantly reduce the need for costly remediation later.

Finally, institutions must recognise the cumulative nature of accessibility debt. Addressing individual barriers is necessary but not sufficient. Progress depends on examining the institutional systems that produce those barriers in the first place.

The higher education sector is currently undergoing rapid technological transformation. Digital platforms and AI driven tools are reshaping how universities teach, assess, and support students. Initiatives such as Accessible Digital Futures rightly emphasise the opportunity to ensure these changes produce more inclusive educational environments.

Whether that opportunity is realised will depend less on technological capability than on institutional governance. Accessibility failures rarely arise from a single decision. They emerge gradually as accessibility debt accumulates across procurement choices, platform ecosystems, and fragmented responsibility. Recognising and addressing that structural dynamic may be one of the most important steps universities can take toward genuinely accessible digital futures.

Kevin Andrews is a Certified Web Accessibility Specialist working at the intersection of digital accessibility, technology governance, and higher education systems. His work focuses on how institutional technology decisions shape accessibility outcomes for disabled students and staff. He brings both professional expertise and lived experience of disability to his work on accessible digital infrastructure.  


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Reconceptualising transnational education through decolonial approaches

by Nilakshi Das

Transnational Education (TNE) represents a rapidly expanding form of cross-border provision, underpinned by an economic imaginary that positions the UK as a ‘key player’ in the global higher education market. While earlier internationalisation strategies focused primarily on bringing overseas students to Britain, TNE reflects a shift towards delivering British higher education to students globally through offshore provisions. The rapid expansion of TNE has elicited growing academic debate about its potential to reproduce the political, economic and epistemic hegemony of the Global North, reinscribing earlier colonial hierarchies and patterns of dependency.

Before the emergence of TNE, the internationalisation of UK higher education was primarily organised through the academic mobility of overseas students, shaped by Britain’s imperial and post-imperial educational networks. During the 1960s, technical assistance programmes and scholarship schemes, such as the Commonwealth Scholarship programme, facilitated student mobility to British universities. In the 1970s, as overseas student numbers gradually increased, differential student fees were introduced alongside tightening immigration regulations, a shift that continued throughout the Thatcher government in the 1980s into the present day. By the late 1990s, the University of Nottingham had established one of the earliest overseas branches, with the general idea that the curriculum in the host country would largely mirror the home institution. From the 2000s onwards, TNE expanded in scope and provision through franchised programmes, joint and dual degrees, distance and online courses in new markets, particularly across the Middle East and Asia. These arrangements allowed UK universities to expand their global presence and competitiveness beyond traditional overseas student recruitment.

Political economy of TNE and latest policy ambitions

The latest articulation of TNE goals includes the Labour government’s new strategy for national renewal by ‘turbocharging education’ as an engine for economic growth, with a target of £40 billion in education exports by 2030. This decision reflects increasing political pressure to cut net migration by reducing overseas student recruitment. Recent policy recommendations have radically argued that universities should be ‘selling education, not immigration’, with growing concerns that student visas are being used as a backdoor route into the UK labour market. Against broader anxieties around immigration in which international students are repositioned as migration liabilities, TNE offers a politically viable solution by exporting education in favour of substituting inward student mobility. As universities’ budgets shrink due to ongoing visa restrictions for international students, TNE engagements are expected to further increase (Hartmann and Lee, 2026).

According to the latest data, the number of students studying entirely overseas through UK TNE increased by 8% in 2024/25, and has risen by 37% since 2020/21. TNE student numbers are now close to the number of international students studying in the UK, with approximately one in six students in UK HE being educated across overseas campuses. Yet, despite this rapid growth, there is a lack of public data on student experiences at TNE. While aggregate data records the number of students enrolled in TNE programmes and level of education, there is limited publicly available information on student progression, degree outcome and labour market prospects. The experiences of students and educators involved in these programmes often tend to remain marginal within UK policy debates.

As higher education increasingly operates through a ‘big business’ model, institutional priorities have rapidly shifted towards generating revenue and maintaining competitiveness. In doing so,commitments to uphold student welfare, equality, and meaningful international collaboration are often sidelined in favour of positional advantage. Therefore, the expansion of TNE under growing market competition raises further pressing questions about equity and power within global HE systems.

Towards a decolonial approach to TNE

Most of the latest policy and institutional analyses of TNE tend to adopt an instrumentalist perspective focusing on business indicators, such as risk assessment, return on investment, international branding and reputation, quality assurance and transnational management strategies. As a result, TNE is mainly understood through frameworks of foreign investment and transnational service delivery further entrenching the logic of the market that frames education as a tradable commodity rather than a global public good (Lauren Clarke, 2021). While these considerations are important for universities operating in a competitive global environment, they risk overshadowing broader questions about equity, inclusion and the social purposes of higher education.

Adopting a decolonial approach to TNE can help address questions around embedding Western systems and structures of education in the Global South. Debates around the coloniality of TNE are not entirely new. Some scholars have drawn parallels between contemporary TNE arrangements and colonial models of education between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Colonial education systems were often characterised by limited access for the local population, a lack of relevance to local realities, the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge systems, the exclusive use of English as the primary medium of instruction, institutional authority with control originating from colonial centres and limited curricula featuring vocational degrees (Teferra and Altbach, 2004). TNE arrangements have been articulated as operating through a similar binary model in which a ‘core’ of sending institutions from the West sets the agenda for a marginalised ‘periphery’ of receiving partners, perpetuating historical legacies of colonialism (Caruana and Montgomery, 2015).

Against this background, there are growing calls for more introspective approaches to TNE that challenge post-colonial structures of dependence and compliance, while remaining attentive to the risk that transnational partnerships may reproduce these hierarchies through networks of alliance with local elites in host countries. Ravindra Sidhu advocates an ‘engaged pedagogy’ and an ‘ethics of care’ in the design and governance of TNE partnerships, emphasising the need to recognise the histories, aspirations and agency of local communities involved in these programmes.

Drawing insights from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship that emphasise justice, inclusion and agency will enable TNE strategies to better examine their implications on student success, outcomes and experiences as well as their wider impact on local communities and higher education systems in host countries. At the same time, greater attention to the national and cultural contexts in which TNE operates, particularly where differing political and institutional norms raise ethical challenges around academic freedom, governance and accountability, can support more informed institutional decision-making and partnerships. These perspectives will ensure that the expansion of TNE is not guided by short-term commercial imperatives but by broader commitments to equity and responsible global engagement, avoiding polarised strategic approaches (Sanderson, 2023).

Nilakshi Das has recently completed her PhD in History of Science. Her PhD was funded by the ESRC and jointly undertaken at the University of Leicester and the University of Warwick. Nilakshi holds an MSc in Education from the University of Oxford and an MA in Sociology from the University of Manchester, funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship. She is a Fellow of the Institute for Historical Research.