Union members back push for student number controls

Student number controls should be reintroduced in England to end the “zero-sum game” that has allowed some institutions to prosper at the expense of others, according to academics who are attempting to instigate a big push on the issue within the University and College Union.

A motion will be debated at the UCU congress next week that calls for a “high profile campaign for the better management and distribution of student numbers across all higher education institutions”.

The union, the motion says, should commission research on “models of student distribution which can create recruitment balance in HE,” with those backing the motion saying this could involve universities being given a moving percentage target that regulates expansion year-on-year.

Student number controls were scrapped for England by the Conservative government in 2015-16, allowing some institutions – many of them members of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities – to expand rapidly.

Among the UCU branches backing the motion were those at the universities of Kent and East Anglia, which have both suffered financially after missing student recruitment targets when would-be undergraduates went elsewhere.

Balihar Sanghera, a senior lecturer in sociology at Kent who supported the motion, said higher education was marked by “increasing financial precarity” because universities were operating in a “zero-sum game in which some achieve surpluses at the expense of causing deficits at others”.

This had “caused huge misery for us all; both those institutions who are doing well and those that are struggling”, he said, pointing out that some universities that have rapidly expanded have suffered from a lack of accommodation, large class sizes and an influx of teachers on precarious contracts, while elsewhere once successful departments were facing closure.

Dave Hitchcock, senior lecturer in early modern history at Canterbury Christ Church University and one of the architects of the motion, said impressive programmes had been “hollowed out” since the cap was lifted. This was not because of their quality, he argued, saying that many achieve top scores for student satisfaction or research output.

“But reputationally they maybe aren’t as shiny,” Dr Hitchcock said. “It is a quiet tragedy that has been rumbling away in UK higher education for about a decade and we are about to see some really sad consequences of it.”

The campaign, he added, was not about capping the overall number of students going to university but developing a mechanism that would “disincentivise unlimited recruitment" at individual institutions. He said he had received support from colleagues of “all sorts of ideological positions” and it was now time for the union to decide whether to take a stand.

Reintroducing student number controls in England was said to be “under consideration” by the Westminster government earlier this year, although no further details have since materialised.

The 2022-23 admissions cycle signalled the start of more cautious offer-making by the universities that had previously expanded rapidly, with lower tariff institutions making up some ground in a move that some said was evidence new controls were not needed.

Nick Hillman, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute who helped abolish SNCs while an adviser in the Conservative government, said it was “nonsense” to “think the best way to help the sector is to demand policymakers trample on institutional autonomy”.

“Universities rightly decide for themselves how many students to recruit, and many opt to turn down huge numbers of well-qualified applicants each year,” he added.

“The idea that the best way to improve educational opportunities at a time of rising demand is to request the Treasury to save us from ourselves is puerile stuff.”

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com