Students should expect less of universities and more of everyone else

You can pop along to the events where the “sector” is out in force, telling itself and a smattering of party members and activists that it needs more money.

Or you can lig around all other fringes where the policy agenda might relate to students – and lament that nobody on any of the panels has thought their thing through in relation to them.

So it is in Liverpool this year for Labour – where, for example, Sussex VC Sasha Roseneil told an audience this morning that the “most urgent thing” government needs to do is reverse its decision barring international students from bringing dependants – or a “cataclysmic crash” and a “raft” of masters course closures will come.

Of course if the decision was to be reversed, we’d need to know whether there’s even close to enough suitable family accommodation near to universities. But you get the sense that questions like that are for another hotel meeting room.

Meanwhile at the Renters’ Reform Coalition fringe on whether Labour can fix the renting crisis, proposals that make sense for those that stay in rented properties for a long time start to sound shaky when viewed through the optic of students.

Labour’s proposals, for example, would put process limits on rent increases and allow tenants to stay on in properties – but the former doesn’t work when the key tactic is to increase rent between tenancies, and the latter falls apart when you’ve caved to arguments about supply cyclicality to allow landlords to evict students in the summer.

There too you get the sense that questions like that are for another hotel meeting room.

As such one refreshing moment on the fringe has been a joint Social Market Foundation/Russell Group SUs event on a fairer deal for students.

Looking to Labour

LSE SU’s General Secretary Tito Molokwu reminded the audience of the breadth of impacts that the ongoing cost of living squeeze is having:

It’s impacting student housing. It’s impacting students’ engagement in student unions. In general, a lot of students are working over 25 hours a week just to pay their rent and bills. It means that they can’t focus on their lectures and their seminars. I think a lot of students are looking to a Labour government for change and for hope and for innovative ideas. I think in particular, students want Labour to centre them in the conversation.

Universities UK’s Vivienne Stern stressed that the lobby groups asks on maintenance are just as important as those on university finances:

So reintroducing grants for those from the very from the lowest income backgrounds, and addressing the extent to which maintenance is going to keep pace with inflation are in our view, just as important as indexing the fee. Because if students are spending too much time doing part time work, if they are unable to make a choice about where they study, they feel that they’re constrained to study locally and not you know, the world is my oyster that’s a problem.

Tim Roca MP – a former President of Lancaster SU and now MP for Macclesfield – reminded the room that the repayment system matters:

If I could start the system again, I don’t think I would start with fees, to be honest. But we are where we are, and unfortunately, we’ve created a system that is actually increasingly regressive. It is not fair on students in the way that they’re being charged people on lower incomes, I think, to pay much more back than those on higher incomes. So the system is not only broken, it’s regressive. And we’re here to talk about fairness.

He stopped short – perhaps sensibly – of the obvious fix for that regressiveness (jacking interest back up on student loans), and did warn that the wider mood of the party and government was likely to be calling for efficiencies:

…the public sector has gone through really significant retrenchment in the last 15 years. And there will be an argument for some that will be made to government, that perhaps universities need to tighten their belts and make sure they really are delivering value for money. And I’m sure many are, but there will be that argument in the spending review as well, and I’m sure Vice Chancellor’s pay will be trotted out in all the usual tropes.

There’s a fix for that too, if government wanted to look East. But I digress.

UCL VC Michael Spence was keen to tackle the efficiency question – with hints at what it is that causes the expense:

What makes [some] universities expensive is this notion that it’s good to teach people in a research, active environment. So if you think about the costs of research, you don’t get all the direct, and certainly not all the indirect costs of a research grant. But more importantly than that, you don’t get anything for the 40 per cent of people’s time that their tradition is spent on research on a standard 40/40/20 contract. That that model is very expensive to run, and it’s different to the model that existed in the 1990s where a lot of students who are now educated in universities were in essentially teaching institutions – universities are much more expensive to run than high schools and much more expensive to run than teaching institutions because of this combination of teaching, teaching and research.

That did – in the context of the wider fringe paradox – got me thinking about proposals to increase the UG fee.

Pure profit

On the one hand if fees were to go up to, say, £12,000, there are entire (mainly franchised) providers who would be able to bank all of the increase in pure profit.

You might raise an eyebrow and say to yourself – well, there’s a quality issue there. But what if there isn’t? What if it’s perfectly possible to run a bare-bones teaching and assessment experience on much less than £9,250?

You can make a great argument that says that of all the potential beneficiaries of that margin – students in terms of lower debt or graduate repayments, the state in terms of lower subsidy or outlay, or private operators renting office space around the edges of our cities, you wouldn’t necessarily choose Option 3.

What you could do is require all providers to offer more “wraparound” – the mental health services, the extracurriculars, the social space, the employer engagement, and even the Humboldtian ideal of research-led teaching rather than buying a business curriculum off the shelf.

But as Spence pointed out – someone would have to fund it. And it’s not clear that any of students, parents, graduates or taxpayers would be especially keen to do so at the participation rates we aspire to.

You could just shut down that genre of provision – corralling those students into mainstream providers. But that just feels like a wheeze that allows their expensive degrees to be cross-subsidised by these cheaper ones.

For “fairness”, you end up with differential fees for differential student experiences and courses – and a danger that the “all inclusive, wraparound” experience is enjoyed by those who don’t need the social capital and labour market benefits that all bestows – while those who do need those benefits get the barebones. That doesn’t feel fair either.

So you end up with a problem – because with a flat, single fee, some providers can do comparatively little – and others sense that to compete, they have to offer the all-inclusive deal. Spence:

…universities are expected to do more and more. There was a time when universities were expected to put on lectures and run exams and have a library at a laboratory, and that was evaluated. Now both students and the community, more generally, legitimately expect universities to provide all sorts of other services in relation to their mental health of students, or their career prospects or the whole suite of things that the funding model doesn’t really provide for now, partly, universities have to make sure that they’ve got the right priorities and that they are prioritising looking after students as well as they possibly can.

For me, there’s an underlying gordian knot to all of this that should probably be unravelled.

Great expectations

If I compare the set of expectations that are placed on mainstream universities in the UK over the “student experience” with those placed on most European counterparts, much more is loaded onto vice chancellors than in other countries.

Whether we’re talking health, leisure facilities, housing or even employment support, it’s clear that universities really are expected to do too much on the funding they get to do it with. These (largely young) people then get a raw deal out of the taxpayer and its departments and structures as a result – because they become citizens who have to borrow money for services every other citizen gets from public expenditure.

So when Spence implies that to compete, that “all-inclusive” liberal arts college “experience” needs to be on offer, the question is whether he’s really right – and who we think we’re competing with. Should expectations on universities continue to grow – or will the funding never be enough?

Without what starts to look like unjustifiably large cross-subsidy from international students to their home counterparts, wherever the funding system goes next it’s unlikely to be able to offer US Ivy League experiences on European budgets.

And even if you could justify the cross-subsidies, not every provider will be able to attract those sorts of international volumes, and even if they could, the country’s tolerance for increased immigration is under real long-term pressure.

Crucially, if everything to do with students as people is funded through universities, where does that leave things like service standards or accountability? Why, on a powerpoint slide, would we say to over 2m people that anything that’s about their interests has to be routed through a university governance system – especially when we know, deep down, that they can’t afford to meet all of those expectations – causing them to resist (often reasonably) accountability over the quality, access to or standards of those wraparounds.

Where that takes you is to a much more European focus – where elected rectors look after teaching and research on more modest salaries, where more students study locally but often look more immersed, where students are funded to take longer to succeed and are trusted to build their own belonging, and where local municipalities, health systems, transport departments and students themselves distribute responsibility for those citizens more equally – and in a way that is capable of meaningful accountability.

Maybe, in other words, and do whisper it quietly – universities in the UK need to get much smaller.