SRHE Blog

The Society for Research into Higher Education

Tag Archives: crisis


by Leave a comment

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.


by 1 Comment

Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis – by Bryan Alexander

2026, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp195.

Reviewed by Paul Temple

Bryan Alexander is a lucky guy. If his new book had been published a year ago, it would have missed the full impact of the Trump/Vance assault on American higher education, and so would now be considered a historical curiosity: “Listen, children, this is a tale of how, in olden days, the government saw our universities as vital national assets with professors who provided our country with knowledge and learning”.

As it is, with what has the feel of up-against-the-deadline editing, Alexander is able to squeeze in references to President Trump’s “extensive campaign against universities and colleges” and report Vice-President Vance’s encouragement “to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country” (p12). And yet, at least to this foreign reader, this last-minute editing (if I’m right about that) causes this unprecedented policy revolution to be seriously downplayed, as if it were just another item in the action list that Alexander suggests American universities need to manage, along with demographic change, the impact of AI, climate breakdown, and cultural changes about progressive values.

The difference, though, surely, is that while universities can plan for and perhaps mitigate the impacts of these various overarching concerns – and the book offers a list of plausible actions in response to them – a direct and very immediate attack on institutional autonomy and evisceration of research funding by your own governments, at federal and sometimes state level, believing that they have a popular mandate, is a here-and-now existential crisis

At the very end of his concluding chapter, just one page from the end of the book, Alexander returns to consider this threat and notes the less-than-impressive response to it by a disunited, uncertain American higher education sector. But the book, without seeming to realise it, highlights the problem of creating an effective university response. This is because quite a few of the actions that Alexander proposes to help higher education “[climb] back to Peak” (p139) – embedding climate activism in the curriculum, doing more “to redress historical wrongs” (p154), better recognition of issues of gender identity, and more – are precisely the type of “woke” issues that so enrage the supporters of the Trump/Vance project. Hence my sense that some late editing hasn’t been enough to pull together a pre- and post-Trump analysis of the future of US higher education.

Are there any lessons from this story of national self-harm for those of us not suffering under the Trump/Vance lash? An obvious one is for higher education to cultivate as wide a constituency of supporters as possible, as a protection from populist politicians looking for easy targets. Yet Alexander argues that American universities spend a fortune on communications specialists, lobbyists at national and state levels, and others working in the “academic narrative industry [which is still] apparently falling short” (p141). It has, it seems, not prevailed over the counter-narrative, “that higher education indoctrinates young minds into…transgenderism, cultural Marxism, censorship, and antisemitism” (p142). Assuming that Reform UK is the nearest British equivalent to MAGA Republicanism, its higher education policies (for now) seem to be rather tame and, apart from those aimed at reducing student debt, unlikely to be overwhelmingly popular with younger voters, anyway: reducing overall student numbers, narrowing rather than widening participation, encouraging two-year degrees, and generally telling young people, and their parents, that the government knows best.

What is striking is that Reform does not seem to be taking a culture wars approach towards higher education, nor even a traditional right-wing, small-state line, but plans to involve itself in the detail of higher education organisation. (There’s surely an opening here for a centre-right political response on the lines of, “unlike Reform, we don’t think it’s the government’s job to tell universities what to do”.) We shall have to see how popular this “Robbins got it wrong” line is with potential Reform voters when they realise that it will be their families’ children not going to university.

SRHE Fellow Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.


by Leave a comment

What emergency remote teaching revealed about how we treat international students

by Cosmin Nada, Thais França and Biana Lyrio

Universities around the world, and particularly in postcolonial contexts, are investing significantly in international student attraction. International students feature prominently in brochures, recruitment campaigns, and institutional rankings. But what happens when this spotlight fades and students are left to navigate systems that were never truly designed for them? Our recently-published article, The pandemic as a ‘revelatory crisis’ – the experiences of international students during emergency remote teaching in a postcolonial context, suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for HE stakeholders to continue turning a blind eye to the epistemic injustice and systemic exclusion of international students.  

The research examined the experiences of international students during the abrupt shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT) in Portuguese higher education (HE). Interviews were conducted with degree-seeking students from China, Brazil, Syria, and Portuguese-speaking African countries (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe), alongside focus group discussions across four Portuguese cities. To capture institutional perspectives, HE staff members were also interviewed. Drawing on critical pedagogical theories, rooted in the work of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, the article analyses how the pandemic did not merely create new problems but rather exposed and amplified inequalities that had been there all along.

One of the most striking findings of the article concerns the persistence of what Freire famously called the banking model of education: the idea that teaching means depositing knowledge into passive students. For international students, this dynamic takes on an added layer: it is not just any knowledge being deposited, but knowledge rooted in Western and Eurocentric frameworks, which is automatically positioned as inherently superior. The rich cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds that international students bring with them are routinely ignored or, worse, treated as deficits in need of correction. This is not merely a pedagogical shortcoming: it is a form of epistemic violence, rooted in colonial logics that continue to structure how knowledge is valued in most HE institutions worldwide.

The study also reveals that international students are often navigating educational systems that were not built for them. From curricula that assume a uniform cultural background to assessment methods that penalise linguistic diversity, HE institutions in Portugal – as in many other postcolonial contexts – treat international students as problems to be ‘managed’ rather than as valued members of the academic community. During ERT, these pre-existing deficit views and institutional stereotypes were dramatically amplified. Already struggling with the complexities of studying abroad, international students found themselves either invisible in the digital classroom or exposed to rigid pedagogies unadjusted to their needs. Moreover, the support systems that might have partially compensated for these failures in face-to-face settings vanished almost entirely in the online environment.

Rather than pointing the finger at individual HE staff, the study calls for a more systemic interpretation. Many of the HE educators we spoke with were themselves struggling, overwhelmed by the sudden transition to online teaching, often lacking both the digital skills and the pedagogical training to deal with diverse classrooms, while receiving minimal to no institutional support. This points to a significant elephant in the room in HE: in many contexts, including Portugal, academics become educators with little or no previous structured training in how teaching and learning works, let alone in how to engage meaningfully with diversity in the classroom. In other words, the decision to recruit international students is typically made at institutional level, yet the consequences of that decision fall on individual staff members who are given few resources and almost no preparation to adapt to the needs of diverse students.

Even well-intentioned educators, when operating within the colonial atmosphere that persists in most HE institutions and while lacking the pedagogical knowledge to do otherwise, end up reproducing oppressive practices. The findings show how transmissive, lecture-based, and non-interactive teaching methods – already dominant before the pandemic – were simply transferred to the online environment. When care, empathy, and dialogue are absent from pedagogy, even educators who genuinely seek to support their students can inadvertently reinforce the very exclusion they aim to prevent. Without deliberate and informed efforts to build inclusive classrooms, the default mode of teaching may be perpetuating the marginalisation of those who do not fit the assumed ‘norm’.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable finding of this study is what the pandemic revealed about contemporary internationalisation. Portuguese HE institutions – like many across the world – actively recruit international students following a neoliberal logic, treating them essentially as revenue sources. For instance, Portugal’s new International Student Statute marked a shift from viewing students from former colonies as beneficiaries of educational cooperation to positioning them as fee-paying customers. Yet, in this process, the pedagogical and institutional structures remained largely unchanged (and hence equally unwelcoming). During ERT, this contradiction became impossible to ignore: institutions prioritised continuity over quality, maintaining revenue streams while effectively abandoning any potential commitment to care-informed, culturally responsive teaching. Students repeatedly reported that, in such circumstances, their international mobility experience simply ‘wasn’t worth it’.

The article is clear that minor adjustments will not suffice. What is needed is a fundamental transformation of how HE institutions approach international students. Institutions must invest in equipping academic and non-academic staff with the necessary knowledge and competences in diversity and care-based pedagogies. In addition to staff training, it is fundamental that they create participatory structures where international students’ voices are heard and where they can actively contribute to curricular and pedagogical decisions as equal co-creators of knowledge.

The pandemic has passed, but the challenges it exposed remain. As universities now face new pressures – from the widespread use of artificial intelligence to geopolitical uncertainties, and to the reversal of internationalisation and cooperation agendas – the lessons from this crisis are more relevant than ever. If HE institutions are to remain meaningful actors in forming future generations of workers and citizens, they must stop treating students as commodities to be recruited and start working towards the provision of a truly meaningful and powerful learning experience for all.

Cosmin Nada is an education expert and researcher based at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa. With over a decade of experience in conducting research on education, he focuses on migration and education, diversity and inclusion, internationalisation of higher education, social justice, educational policies, and wellbeing in education.

Thais França is an Assistant Researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa. Her research focuses on the everyday experiences of racialised and gendered subjects. She is Vice Chair of the European Network on International Student Mobility and Coordinator of the Inclusion+ project (2024–2026): Tackling the Challenges of Erasmus+ Mobility Inclusion and Diversity at HE Level.

Biana Lyrio is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT-Portugal). She is a doctoral student in Urban Studies, a joint programme between Iscte-IUL and the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University Lisbon.


by 5 Comments

Follow my leader? I don’t think so.

by Paul Temple

The team that ran the MBA in Higher Education Management at the Institute of Education in London would meet each July for a year-end review and to think about what improvements we might make to the programme in the coming year. In most years, someone would suggest re-naming the programme as “the MBA in Higher Education Leadership”, or perhaps “Leadership and Management”. I always objected to the change, on the grounds that while I could say what I thought “management” was and had some ideas about how it might be taught, I had no idea what “leadership” actually was and even less of an idea about how we might teach it. Of course, everyone has examples of great leadership being enacted: my own favourite is Ernest Shackleton addressing his crew standing around on the Antarctic pack-ice in October 1915: “The ship and stores have gone – so now we’ll go home”. But telling us what outstanding leaders say and do isn’t the same as telling us what leadership is.

Actually, though, the real reason for my objection was the thought of having to present the case for a change of course title at Institute committee meetings at which, I foresaw with perfect clarity, those present, having no special knowledge of the subject and no responsibility for the decision’s outcome, would obey Watson’s First Law of Higher Education: that an academic’s degree of certainty on any given topic is directly proportional to its distance from their actual field of expertise.

I was reminded of all this by a review of the “managers vs leaders” debate in a recent issue of The Economist (28 October 2023). One distinction noted there from Kotter in 1977 was that management is a problem-solving discipline aiming to create predictability, whereas leadership is about change and the unknown. This is close to the aphorism which we sometimes used when asked about the distinction: management is about doing things right, whereas leadership is about doing the right things. (Shackleton was certainly leading his crew into the unknown, but he had people with him who were excellent problem-solvers.) The Economist review quotes research by Bandiera et al at the LSE that suggests that CEOs “who displayed the behaviour of leaders were associated with better company performance overall”, although some firms, the researchers concluded, would be better off with “manager” CEOs. Helpful, eh? What the review notes, though, is that the success of the leadership-oriented CEOs’ companies may depend on top-class managers sitting with them round the boardroom table. In other words, as you might have guessed, successful organisations need both good leaders and good managers in their top jobs.

Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, Helen MacNamara, his deputy, and Martin Reynolds, the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary, are civil servants working at the very pinnacle of British public service. It is, I think, a safe bet that their annual appraisals consistently identified their outstanding leadership qualities: if they had been seen merely as excellent managers they would be working at somewhere like DVLA in Swansea, not in the Cabinet Office or 10 Downing Street.

And yet, as the Covid inquiry has revealed in awful detail, in the worst British peacetime crisis in modern times this group of supposedly brilliant leaders were collectively unable to ensure that the centre of government operated with even an ordinary level of effectiveness. Yes, they had to deal with a catastrophically useless Prime Minister and the – how shall I put it? – difficult Dominic Cummings (I blogged about him here in February 2020), but – look, guys – sorting out problems like these are what you’re there for. Leaders, as opposed to poor old plodding managers, are there to deal with impossible situations (OK, so I do have a definition of “leadership” after all): Shackleton didn’t say to his crew, “Well, sorry, but I’ve no idea about what to do now.” This is actually more or less what Case – just to remind you, the head of the Civil Service – says: “Am not sure I can cope with today. Might just go home.” Well, you and I have probably felt the same sometimes, but we weren’t supposed to be running the country during a crisis.

Other failings of this group of supposed top leaders? A notable one was when the rest of us were wondering if it would be OK to meet a friend in the park, MacNamara was taking a karaoke machine into work to ensure the party went with a swing. And of course there was “Party-Marty” Reynolds, sending an email inviting staff to a bring-your-own-booze party at Number Ten. Meanwhile, my next-door neighbour was dying alone in hospital, his family and friends unable to say goodbye to him. Perhaps it’s time for a bit of a rethink about leadership.

Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.

Image of Rob Cuthbert


by Leave a comment

On not wasting a good crisis

by Rob Cuthbert

Editorial from SRHE News Issue 41 (July 2020)

It seems that in English higher education, some people have been determined not to waste the Covid19 crisis, either as an opportunity or as a threat. How well have they done? Consider the efforts of the Office for Students, Universities UK, and the government in England.

The Office for Students

The OfS were quick off the mark with their ‘Consultation on the integrity and stability of the English HE system’. They had not hitherto seemed too concerned about integrity and stability, given the government’s advertised willingness to let universities close as a consequence of the market established by the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (HERA). Nevertheless the OfS drafted proposals to prevent “any form of conduct which, in the view of the OfS, could reasonably have a material negative effect on the interests of students and the stability and/or integrity of all or part of the English higher education sector.”

The proposals, aimed at controlling the behaviour of HE institutions, brought an instant storm of criticism. They were condemned as draconian, excessively broad, vague and retrospective. OfS Chair Michael Barber claimed to the House of Commons Select Committee that they were an appeal to universities’ ‘generosity of spirit’, but no-one was convinced. Indeed, in terms of the original proposals there did seem to be breaches of good conduct, but they were mostly by Government, the media and the OfS itself, not by HE institutions.

As governments of different parties introduced progressively higher fees, students taking out loans for fees and living expenses began to graduate and begin their careers with large debts. Did this “have a material negative effect on the interests of students”? Quality assurance shows that the overwhelming majority of HE provision has been and remains satisfactory or better; government has encouraged new ‘alternative providers’, but a significant number of these new entrants provided inappropriate courses of dubious quality. Did these market initiatives destabilise the HE system and jeopardise its integrity and quality?

Recent HE ministers have repeatedly referred to ‘low quality courses’. Jo Johnson called for: “… the phased closure of poor-quality and low-value courses under teach-out arrangements to ensure that students can complete their studies.” (The honourable exception to this ministerial failure is Chris Skidmore, who tweeted on 16 April 2020: “Might invent Skidmore’s law- anyone who mentions low quality/value in HE without specific reference to a real institution/course are themselves creating low quality/value arguments which should therefore be discounted.”) Most mainstream media reinforced the ‘low quality courses’ narrative, with The Times prominent: an egregious example by Ross Bryant, ‘Underperforming universities should be allowed to fail’, on 27 April 2020;  Alice Thomson on 31 March 2020: “Institutions panicking about finances have to shift their focus away from expansion and back to gold-standard teaching”. Camilla Turner in The Daily Telegraph on 10 May 2020 fuelled the narrative: ‘’Mickey Mouse’ degrees could be weeded out as universities face financial crisis”. Some would say the narrative has “a material negative effect on the interests of students”, whose academic credentials are called into question, and jeopardises the “stability and/or integrity of all or part of the English higher education sector”.  It might even involve “Making false or misleading statements (including comparative claims) about one or more higher education providers with a view to discouraging students (whether or not successfully) to accept offers from, or register with, those higher education providers.”

The Office for Students itself has still not completed its Register of Providers. OfS said in February 2020 the 2019-2020 Register was still incomplete “so if a provider is not registered at the moment, no conclusions should be drawn about it based upon that fact.” Could that “reasonably have a material negative effect on the interests of students and the stability and/or integrity of all or part of the English higher education sector”? At government insistence the OfS has promoted the Teaching Excellence Framework and its advantages for students, presumably on the grounds that it helped their interests. More recently it postponed the next TEF indefinitely, even though there are dramatic changes to the quality of the student experience everywhere – up-to-date information about Teaching Excellence matters as never before. Dropping the TEF at this stage “could reasonably have a material negative effect on the interests of students and the stability and/or integrity of all or part of the English higher education sector” – unless TEF never had anything to do with teaching quality in the first place, in which case pursuing it had already damaged the stability and integrity of the system.

The OfS proposals said it was inappropriate for anyone to be “Reacting to a major crisis or emergency affecting the UK in ways which may take advantage of behavioural biases”. However it reacted to the crisis by proposing obligations on individual behaviour, obligations to predict or anticipate the behaviour of others, and sanctions if even in retrospect a pattern of behaviour by others emerges which could not have been predicted. This was indeed to “take advantage of behavioural biases” which might induce people to tolerate, in an emergency, measures which would be unthinkable under normal circumstances. In the event the OfS withdrew and confined itself to outlawing ‘conditional unconditional’ offers, and perhaps unconditional offers more widely. By overreaching itself, OfS seemed to have wasted the crisis.

Universities UK

Universities UK also moved early, in April 2020 making proposals to government for a £2billion crisis package to support universities through the pandemic and beyond. UUK said: “Without government support some universities would face financial failure, others would come close to financial failure and be forced to reduce provision. Some will be in places where they are the only local higher education provider with damaging impact on the local community and economy. Many of those institutions most affected have higher levels of external borrowing, lower levels of cash reserves, and higher proportions of BAME students.” Former UCAS head Mary Curnock Cook blogged for HEPI on 15 April 2020 about ‘A student-centric bailout for the universities’, with a piercing critique of the soft spots and gaps in the UUK proposals. David Kernohan crunched numbers on the UUK proposals in his blog for Wonkheon 10 April 2020. He noted that doubling research funding would do little for many universities, and that the student number proposals would still enable selective universities to create major problems for those lower down the pecking order.

The DfE website reported on 4 May 2020 that “Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has announced a package of measures to protect students and universities, including temporary student number controls, £2.6bn of forecast tuition fee payments for universities being bought forward and an enhanced Clearing system. … to stabilise admissions, support students and allow universities to access financial support from the Government where it is necessary.” The DfE headline was ‘Universities need our help – we must maintain education’s jewel in the crown’, echoing a 2012 Russell Group publication, but the measures fell well short of the UUK proposals. This made clear the potentially devastating effects on many universities outside the Russell Group, with a probable shortfall in student numbers. It was hard to credit that UUK had suggested student number controls in its own proposals, and even harder to believe that all universities had agreed to the UUK’s skewed package in the first place. Chris Cook wrote a long and careful analysis of the perilous situation facing UK universities for TortoiseMedia  on 26 May 2020.

Here was Wonkhe’s immediate assessment. David Kernohan of Wonkhe  took a look at ‘Clearing Plus’, which was being presented as (but was not) a way for applicants to trade up to a ‘better class of university’. Nick Hillman of HEPI said: ” While we need time to digest the finer details, this seems like a carefully-calibrated package that delivers much of what the higher education sector called for without over-exposing taxpayers.” Well, he probably would, wouldn’t he, as a former special adviser to David Willetts. Former minister Jo Johnson, popping up as President’s Professorial Fellow at King’s College London, said that after the pandemic: “The Office for Students will need to design and put in place a multi-billion pound stabilisation fund to prevent the collapse of scores of vulnerable English universities. Access to this fund should be subject to strict non-negotiable conditions, including the phased closure of poor-quality and low-value courses under teach-out arrangements to ensure that students can complete their studies.” Shadow Minister Emma Hardy’s open letter to HE on ResearchProfessional News on 6 May 2020 didn’t add much beyond her disappointment that the government package didn’t accept UUK’s proposals.

A second round of support simply shored up the bail-out of the Russell Group. The support package announced by government on 27 June 2020 provided extra research funding: a mixture of grants and loans for up to 80% of income lost because of a shortfall of international students in 2020-2021, and £280million for stated research priorities. That will be little consolation to the many vulnerable universities less blessed with research funding and less dependent on overseas student fees.

Judged by the effects on all of its members, UUK not only wasted the crisis, they may well have made it worse. 

Government

The long-running ‘low quality courses’ narrative and the almost-forgotten Augar report proved to be groundwork for a series of government initiatives still unfolding, beginning with a blunt Ministerial statement abandoning the 50% HE participation target and proposing to expand technical and vocational provision elsewhere. Jim Dickinson had blogged for Wonkhe on 11 May 2020 that: “… the headlines in the DfE package were all about treating the issues facing the higher education sector as a liquidity crisis rather than a solvency crisis. Optimists figure this is because it’s only Part One of any plan, and Numbers 10/11 of Downing Street prefer to sort things in terms of impacts of immediate problems than assessing the size and scope of modelled/potential problems which they assume a) might not be as bad as they look, and b) discourage efficiencies and sacrifices if “cushioned” too early, or for too long. … And then, as if by magic, David “somewheres or anywheres” Goodhart appears – with a Policy Exchange report that’s officially on “skills”, but is really on reorganising tertiary. … Research funding for the “best”; mergers, shorter strings and localism for the “rest”.”

Jack Grove in THE on 11 May 2020 wrote: “English universities at risk of financial collapse will receive significant government assistance only if they agree to merge or to accept a “further education future”, vice-chancellors have predicted. … some university leaders … fear that the reintroduction of student number controls − which allow universities to recruit 5 per cent more this autumn than they did last year − signals the Treasury’s intention to intervene far more in higher education, which might include denying some institutions access to research funding.”

The doomsayers were vindicated when Minister Michelle Donelan made a speech on 1 July 2020, in the grossly inappropriate context of an online conference about improving HE opportunities for disadvantaged students. Richard Adams reported for The Guardianon 1 July 2020 on her speech: “Since 2004, there has been too much focus on getting students through the door, and not enough focus on how many drop out, or how many go on to graduate jobs. Too many have been misled by the expansion of popular-sounding courses with no real demand from the labour market,” Donelan said. “Quite frankly, our young people have been taken advantage of, particularly those without a family history of going to university. Instead some have been left with the debt of an investment that didn’t pay off in any sense. … And too many universities have felt pressured to dumb down – either when admitting students, or in the standards of their courses. We have seen this with grade inflation and it has to stop.”

The government is poised to offer new policies on skills and qualifications for school-leavers in England, rebalancing away from universities and emphasising social mobility through skilled, well-paid jobs secured through further education and apprenticeships. A white paper on further education is promised, along with a green paper on higher education that will limit courses where a high percentage of students drop out or where few go on to graduate-level employment. Donelan’s comments appeared to repudiate her own government’s guidance to the Office for Students. Asked about the use of contextual admissions by universities to help under-represented groups gain entry, Donelan said: “To be frank, we don’t help disadvantaged students by levelling down, we help by levelling up.”

Chris Husbands (VC, Sheffield Hallam) spoke for many in a powerful rejoinder in The Guardian on 2 July 2020: ‘University changed my family’s life. So why do ministers want fewer people to go?’ As Alison Wolf, now once again a government adviser, pointed out long ago, the oft-mooted expansion of non-university technical education is always regarded as a good thing – ‘for other people’s children’. We must wait and see whether this time the government initiative will be any different from the many other times similar things have been attempted. This time her daughter Rachel Wolf, another long-term adviser to the Prime Minister who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative manifesto, is also making the running. Whether the government has wasted the crisis remains to be seen.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics