You’d be forgiven for thinking the Eurovision Song Contest and the modern European higher education settlement have nothing much in common.
But both are creatures of the same post-war conviction – that shared institutional life, cultural or intellectual, could quietly do the unifying that elected politicians couldn’t.
Both assumed that internationalism was self-legitimating – that “united by music” or the Enlightenment-tradition university could float above whatever politics they happened to sit inside.
The contest itself dates from 1956. Mass participation, Bologna-era integration, joint research funding and student-mobility infrastructure were assembled later and unevenly – but on the same legitimating idea.
Both scaled up dramatically across the second half of the twentieth century, and both now find themselves operating in an environment where culture, identity, money and legitimacy are live political battlegrounds rather than background conditions.
And both have spent the better part of the last decade trying to repair substantive legitimacy disputes through procedural fixes – voting formula revisions, jury reintroductions and broadcaster eligibility rulings on one side, output metrics, autonomy scorecards and freedom-of-speech regulators on the other.
Both still claim authority in the language of the original bargain. Neither can rely on it any more.
A good moment, then, for the Policy Institute at King’s College London to publish a volume on how the higher education side of the parallel is faring.
Ne partez pas sans moi
European higher education in the 2020s: where are we heading? is an edited collection anchored by an overview chapter from Baroness Alison Wolf and Eliel Cohen, followed by country chapters on England (Wolf), France (Christian Gollier, Toulouse School of Economics), the Netherlands (Cisca Wijmenga, formerly Rector Magnificus at Groningen), Sweden (Christofer Edling, Lund) and Switzerland (Yves Flückiger, formerly Rector at Geneva and President of swissuniversities).
Rather than treating any one country’s crisis in isolation, it puts the structural pressures side by side and lets the comparison do the analytical work.
In 1938, roughly 2 per cent of young Europeans entered tertiary education – the figure approaches half now. Government spending on tertiary education has remained broadly stable at around 1.2 per cent of GDP across the period – the OECD average, with north and north-west Europe somewhat above it – while per-student spending has been on a long downward trend in most systems as student numbers outpaced the funding envelope.
Wolf and Cohen deploy Baumol’s cost disease – in sectors where output depends on people being in the room with each other (live performance, healthcare, teaching, research), you can’t raise productivity the way manufacturing or tech can, but you still have to pay wages that keep pace with the parts of the economy that have, so costs rise relative to output and the gap widens over time.
You can’t substitute capital for contact without degrading the product, and the research on contingent faculty and lecture recording confirms as much. It’s a trade-off most analyses bury under productivity language.
The political response across most of Europe has been to preserve the appearance of free or near-free higher education while reducing what that education contains – classes got bigger, teaching hours fell, academic salaries slipped behind comparable professional groups, and short-term contracts proliferated.
The exception was England (with Wales and Northern Ireland tagging along), where income-contingent fees produced a funding level notionally higher than most continental systems and bought a longer reprieve from the worst of those compromises.
The substitution has had its own problems – and English universities are now catching up on bigger classes, declining contact hours, slipping salaries and casualisation regardless.
Domestic publics wanted their children at university. Ageing electorates didn’t want to pay higher taxes to fund the expansion. International students became the relief valve – recruited to cover the shortfall that domestic funding couldn’t, charged what the market would bear.
The symbiosis is tightest in England, where international fees now make up 23 per cent of total university income – but it’s visible everywhere, and it’s now everywhere politically exposed.
In the Netherlands, international student numbers have fallen for three consecutive years, down nearly 5 per cent in 2025–26 alone. In England, the government has announced a £925-per-student annual levy on international enrolments from 2028. The relief valve is being tightened from both ends.
Boom bang a bang
Against that shared backdrop, each country chapter offers a distinctive contribution. Wolf’s England chapter is a case study of the shared pattern taken to its logical conclusion – highest per-student spend in the sample, highest reliance on international fees, highest political instability around the funding architecture.
Gollier’s France chapter is the volume’s most fun provocation – a polemic on a broken social contract delivered with the controlled fury of someone who has watched France slide down the international rankings for twenty years.
The image of junior lecturers – a decade of training, a few postdoc years appended – facing a gross annual salary of €30,000 while the best universities elsewhere offer five to ten times as much is deployed as an argument about what happens when you simultaneously prohibit fees, prohibit selection and prohibit performance evaluation, rather than as a sentimental aside.
The polemic forces the social-contract question into the open in terms a French public can argue with – which is the sort of thing they do there.
Wijmenga frames the Dutch situation as a series of “threats” – financial cuts of approximately €1 billion, the internationalisation backlash (the Partij voor de Vrijheid’s (PVV) populist culture-war framing having spilled into mainstream policy), the language clampdown, and demographic headwinds.
She also offers up the graduate-retention data – 57 per cent of international students still in the Netherlands a year after graduation, 25 per cent after five years – which tells us something important about what internationalisation produces in practice.
Edling is unusually candid about what stratification within Swedish higher education looks like – the older, research-intensive universities capture the higher-grade students, attract the funding, hire the merited professors, and leave the newer institutions to manage the pedagogical consequences of mass admission within the same financial framework. It is widely known and not much spoken about.
Flückiger’s Swiss chapter is meanwhile the most methodologically disciplined of the country contributions – his use of the European University Association Autonomy Scorecard, on which Switzerland scores 91 out of 100 for staffing autonomy gives him an analytical framework for the rankings-funding correlation that other contributors mostly assert.
The comparative vocab the collection builds – Baumol’s cost disease, the research arms race, the autonomy scorecard, the symbiotic loop between rankings and international fees – is portable. Readers in any one system will recognise their own situation and, usefully, see that it’s not purely local.
That said, the politics move faster than the volume does. Last month the French higher education minister Philippe Baptiste announced that almost all non-EU students will pay €2,895 at bachelor’s level and €3,941 at master’s level from 2026/27 – enforcing, by ministerial fiat, the differentiated-fee regime that has existed on paper since 2019 but that French universities, invoking the famous social contract, mostly declined to implement.
It’s partial vindication of Gollier’s analysis, delivered at lower levels than his polemic implied and by means he would likely find unconvincing.
And in the Netherlands, Wijmenga’s “Threats” chapter is roughly half-overtaken by events on funding and language, though her culture-war and demographic points hold.
The newly formed Jetten coalition – D66, CDA, VVD, in office since January 2026 – has reversed the Schoof-era €1.2bn cuts, largely scrapped the Internationalisation in Balance language restrictions, and committed €1.5bn extra to education and research.
That’s rich
Nevertheless, the volume’s underlying argument is that the post-war bargain underwriting European HE massification has broken.
Governments expanded because populations wanted access and because growth economists thought it would pay back. The cost compromises that made expansion fiscally workable – bigger classes, casualised teaching, declining contact hours – were tolerated because the underlying expansion was popular, and both halves of that arrangement have now given way simultaneously.
Demand has softened, the graduate premium is shrinking, polling consistently favours apprenticeships, and Keir Starmer used the 2025 Labour conference to declare Tony Blair’s 50 per cent participation target “no longer right for our times.”
And the efficiency compromises are no longer tolerated either. Swedish students, in a country whose union structures Edling himself describes as sitting on every significant decision-making body, are near the bottom of European contact-time rankings on Eurostudent data, and Wolf concedes directly that bigger classes and casualised teaching degrade the product rather than productively substituting for investment.
It makes the volume’s central comparative frame – Wolf’s claim that English per-student spending is high by European standards – do less work than it appears to. The apparent English (and Welsh) funding outlier is partly a classification artefact, and the difference matters because the comparison risks mistaking institutional income for public commitment.
On the OECD’s annual per-FTE figure including research and development, Wolf’s claim is defensible – the UK comes in at around $35,545, third in the OECD.
But the same dataset disaggregates public from private expenditure, and there the picture shifts considerably. UK government spending per tertiary student runs at approximately $7,896 – roughly 48 per cent below the OECD average, and less than a quarter of Norway’s $31,787, with Germany contributing $22,473 per student from public funds, Sweden $26,276, the Netherlands $20,819.
The British state’s outlier status is on absence, not generosity. Wolf gestures at this in a footnote, noting that the English expenditure numbers “probably understate the size of the actual public contribution,” but doesn’t present the disaggregated comparison directly.
That footnote contains a real methodological problem. The OECD’s binary public/private classification treats English income-contingent loan-funded fees as private expenditure, which deflates the apparent UK government share.
But the English loan system contains an embedded public subsidy – the Resource Accounting and Budgeting charge, estimated somewhere between 25 and 35 per cent, representing the share of loans that will never be repaid and the write-offs at the end of the loan term. That subsidy is real and large, but invisible in the per-FTE government figure.
Running in the other direction, continental systems – Swedish CSN loans, the Dutch grants-then-loans-then-grants-again sequence, French CROUS maintenance support – each carry different subsidy and insurance profiles that don’t surface in OECD’s binary split either. A proper comparison would need nominal government per-FTE plus the long-run subsidy embedded in each country’s student-finance architecture, expressed in a harmonised series. Nobody publishes that.
The duration problem then compounds it. UK on-time bachelor’s completion sits at around 67 per cent, against an OECD average of 43 per cent and a Dutch figure below 30 per cent, while Sweden’s average graduation age is 28 – a straightforward fact about the system, as Edling notes, and also a fact about what the per-annual-enrolment spending figure actually measures.
Many continental systems have a de-facto bachelor’s-plus-master’s as the baseline credential for graduate employment, meaning that on a per-completed-graduate basis – which Wolf doesn’t run – the UK’s apparent annual lead against Switzerland and the Nordics narrows considerably or reverses. The OECD doesn’t isolate bachelor’s-only spending in publicly available form.
The corrections cut in different directions for the UK and don’t resolve into a simple verdict either way. The larger point is that you can’t meaningfully compare resourcing across European systems using OECD headline per-FTE numbers as if the underlying architecture were equivalent. And the multiple governments attempting to reduce time to completion may not understand the risks they’re running on what those graduates will end up able to do.
A volume on European higher education built on those numbers is asking questions its data can’t fully answer. And the volume’s implied answer – more public funding – ends up structurally inadequate to the bargain-collapse it diagnoses, asking for the bargain to be refunded without acknowledging that both sides have simultaneously given way.
Its other prescriptive attempts – Flückiger’s plea for full Horizon Europe re-association, Wijmenga’s defence of internationalisation, the research-arms-race framing throughout – implicitly depend on a level of cross-border mobility that the political environment the volume itself diagnoses (populism, housing crises, immigration backlash) is actively closing down.
All kinds of everything
If demand-led growth and the efficiency-compromise model are both off the table, the live question becomes which graduates the system produces, in which fields, in which regions, and whether they stay. And that question has a shape aspect as well as a size one.
The English three-year intensive bachelor’s specialises early – discipline chosen at sixteen or seventeen, three years of mostly that discipline, minimal cross-disciplinary credit, extracurriculars treated as a separate sphere. The Dutch and German models specialise later and broader, with the master’s as the expected baseline credential for graduate employment.
The Nordic free-standing-courses tradition that Edling notes – around 82,000 Swedish FTE enrolled outside formal programmes, assembling qualifications from individual modules – permits breadth even when programme structures don’t require it.
The Swiss apprenticeship-permeable system produces graduates who have often combined work and study in ways that change the shape of what they know and can do, and the experiments in interdisciplinary, project-based or student-led learning in various pockets produce graduates whose undergraduate experience included sustained collaborative and self-directed work.
The volume treats graduate output as a quantity rather than as a shape, and the questions that follow from that are left unasked – whether the English three-year specialised bachelor’s is well-fitted to a labour market where adaptability matters more than disciplinary depth; whether rounded-graduateness is part of why other systems show more resilience to the crumbling premium; what the apprenticeship-permeable Swiss model produces that the English one doesn’t.
What’s another year?
The other problem is that the volume calls itself European, but its sample is wealthy-Western – England, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, with Germany prominent in the footnotes and absent from the authorship, and nothing east of the former inner-German border.
The “shared structural challenges” frame survives considerable variation among those five systems. It has more trouble surviving Latvia or Hungary. Wolf treats the English Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act – legislation requiring English universities to register compliance with free speech duties with the Office for Students, England’s sector regulator – as a significant example of populist pressure on university autonomy.
The actual European case where populism captured the universities themselves – Orbán’s foundation-model institutional takeover, the expulsion of Central European University, the targeting of gender studies programmes – is absent.
More pointed still for the volume’s central argument is that Eastern Europe has been asking the do-our-graduates-stay question for two generations, and watching the answer come back negative at scale.
East-to-West brain drain inside Europe is structural and persistent, and the systems most visibly affected by the broken post-war bargain – where graduates leave in large numbers, where regional universities struggle to retain faculty, where the settlement has most palpably failed – are the ones absent from the diagnosis.
That’s an analytical problem, not just a representation one. A volume keen to understand whether the post-war European HE settlement’s assumptions still hold would at least have needed one chapter from the systems where they most visibly haven’t.
It would also have been forced to engage the most politically sharp questions about EU higher education policy – does Horizon result in a concentration of funding heavily in older member states? What’s the adequate response to Hungarian-style state capture of universities, and is the EU’s current response sufficient?
Save your kisses for me
Edling is the volume’s most revealing contributor, and not entirely because he intends to be. He writes that the massification of Swedish higher education has “lowered the standards, created a division of labour between old and new universities, and reinforced the status hierarchy between them” – the supply-side diagnosis, in other words. More students, lower average preparation, diluted product.
The Swedish national student union SFS diagnoses the same outcome through a different causal story – that the 1–2 per cent real-terms annual productivity deduction applied to Swedish universities over successive budget cycles has compounded into a collapse in teacher-led contact time, leaving Sweden near the bottom of European comparators on scheduled hours per student per week.
The pattern recurs across the other country chapters. Student protests, union briefings and precarity campaigns appear as phenomena to be described rather than as arguments to be engaged with – which is evidence for the same critique, rather than a separate one. The senior-insider authorship produces a diagnosis written from the supply side, and can’t quite see the bargain breaking from the demand side, where the people the institution is supposed to serve are doing the experiencing.
The shape question is also a student-experience question, and student experience lives in the parts of university life that the rector’s office doesn’t run and that international rankings don’t adequately measure.
The question of which graduates European universities produce, in what shape, in which fields, in which regions, and whether they stay, was always there inside the expansion. The expansion just let everyone defer it.
The politics of 2026 – the immigration backlash, the crumbling premium, the minister’s fiat in Paris, the coalition reversal in The Hague – aren’t letting it be deferred any more.
Crucially, what the answers may be on excellence and competing globally aren’t necessarily the answers that work for the whole of the bloc. And what might work for making research competitive may not be the right call for mass HE producing the human capital its participants and taxpayers are up for funding.
Eurovision is in some trouble – more on that later in the week – but it won’t save itself by recovering the original bargain. It should accept the bargain is over, reinvent the contest on different terms each year, and make a virtue of arguing in public about who gets to be in the room.
European higher education needs the same honesty. More procedural fixes layered on a hollowed-out settlement won’t carry it. The volume describes what’s left of the original. The work of imagining what comes next is being done elsewhere, mostly by people the rector’s offices haven’t called yet.
