The next Westminster government should act quickly after the general election to make unpopular decisions around higher education funding in England, according to university leaders.
Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK (UUK), said the current complex funding landscape – as laid out by a series of reports by London Economics – resembles a “puzzle box” that the sector must solve one move at a time.
Speaking at an event organised by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) to analyse the findings of the reports, Ms Stern said the UK’s once “coherent” system has diverged in quite significant ways across the home nations.
“There is a thicket that we have to hack our way out of and the only real way to do that is to understand the often-surprising effects of moving various parts of the system,” she said.
The London Economics reports found that cutting tuition fees by approximately one-third and increasing teaching grants would increase English higher education costs by £3 billion – but that it would be richer graduates who saved money on loan repayments, with the poorest students being in essence unaffected because they are not expected to pay off their loans in full.
Meanwhile, this would be little help in addressing the funding crisis faced by universities contending with a frozen domestic tuition fee and faltering international enrolments.
Vice-chancellors have indicated support for raising tuition fees but the prospect of doing so in an election year would be “political suicide”, Gavan Conlon, a partner at London Economics, told the event.
Ms Stern said the sector should remove the idea that linking an increase to frozen domestic tuition fees to inflation is increasing them – it is merely stopping them from falling further.
That would allow the next government – whether it was formed by the Conservative Party or Sir Keir Starmer’s ascendant Labour Party – to act.
“I think an incoming government should do that really fast because it won’t be popular but if you get in there and do it quickly, I don’t think it’s going to hurt you by the next election,” added Ms Stern.
Also speaking at the Hepi briefing, Dame Sally Mapstone, president of UUK and principal of the University of St Andrews, said the sector has to be sensible and appreciate that there is going to be “some element of quid pro quo” in any funding debate.
“Crucially, we need whoever comes in as the next government to have the courage to do something quickly, the creativity to work with this fiendishly complex system, and the clarity of expression to get something in place that we can all understand. So let’s press them for that,” added Dame Sally.
With signs that many institutions are already feeling financial pressures, Ms Stern said it was not impossible that a university will get into so much fiscal trouble that it will have to “shut its doors overnight”.
“There is no answer to the question how much does it cost to deliver higher education,” she said. “It is a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question. You can do it much cheaper, but you might not want to.”
Of all the various demands by the UK sector, Ms Stern said the most important would be support to continue its drive to widen participation. Prime minister Rishi Sunak has called Labour’s target to expand higher education “one of the great mistakes of the last 30 years”.
“If I had to pick one thing amongst all others that we want from the system, it would be that we can continue to support the journey toward the expansion of opportunity to participate in higher education,” Ms Stern said.
“That has been a colossal success in the last couple of decades, that has caused all of the political pain that we have faced, but we’re not finished.”
