Biting the hand that feeds higher education

It is always interesting talking to the people at the sharp edge of university operations, those who spend their days worrying solely about the business model and its viability or otherwise.

Perhaps interesting is the wrong word – clarifying might be a better one.

In one such conversation recently, I meandered on to risky territory, raising the question of how microcredentials, lifelong learning and a focus on skills might fit into the operating model.

Seeing what I took to be a look of mild exasperation, I quickly added a caveat – it was perhaps hard to envisage such a future given the funding model and consumer demand were still so heavily geared toward the status quo of full-time, undergraduate education.

The exasperation turned up a notch from mild to moderate.

It’s worse than that, they said: it’s impossible to stay in the black on pretty much anything currently except international students.

This is, I think, something that is broadly understood in the sector – it was this time last year that Mark Corver, founder of dataHE, told the THE Campus Live event that the frozen domestic tuition fee in England was now worth only £6,500 at 2012 prices, equivalent to a reduction of 30 per cent.

One must assume that this is understood in government too – and yet “understood” seems not to be enough.

What, one wonders, are we waiting for? For our world-class universities to cease to be world class? (Spoiler alert: as our World University Rankings have shown, their erosion versus international competitors continues year-on-year.)

For universities to move out of whole areas of academic provision to shore up their finances within a broken system?

For universities to axe swathes of their work on other activities – addressing social inequality, for example – that are undoubtedly social goods, but add to an unsustainable cost base?

For universities to collapse altogether?

None of this is exaggeration. Higher education institutions are having to review what they do and how they do it and make decisions that directly affect their ability to fulfil their full potential.

So for now, at least, UK higher education – and it is not the only country in this position – is reliant on revenue from international students in a way that is not only unhealthy, but is actually courting disaster.

In light of this precarious position, you might assume that everything that could be done to preserve the UK’s allure would be being done. But if you do, you haven’t been paying attention.

The discussions about net migration are so politically toxic for the party that gave us Brexit that international students are seen as a problem rather than the thing keeping universities afloat.

This has resulted in increasingly fraught debates about international student visas, debates that can dampen demand even if they do not turn into concrete action and are guaranteed to do so when they lead to changes such as the tightening of the rules on dependants’ visas.

In our cover story, we explore how these dynamics are playing out at the level of research staff, where there is a chasm between the UK government’s stated aim of being a “science superpower”, and the costly bureaucracy around talent flows that seems almost designed to frustrate that aim.

The impact on individuals, typically exceptionally talented researchers, can be crippling, particularly with regard to the financial cost of visa requirements.

One molecular biologist with a family to support describes not being able to take his son to his classmates’ parties, so tight are his family finances.

To say that Britain wants to lead the world in the most competitive fields, while not only charging such crippling entry fees but actually increasing them, is deeply disingenuous.

As Alison Noble, the Royal Society’s foreign secretary, argues, the UK must “consider ways to reduce these costs if we’re going to compare favourably to our global competitors”.

Perhaps, as we enter the last year of the current government’s term in office, such a hope is forlorn for the time being.

But whatever the next administration does to get to grips with the funding calamity universities find themselves in, addressing this self-defeating attitude to global talent must be an urgent priority.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com