Who is policy for in higher education?
As I’ve argued on Wonkhe before, the voices of students and frontline staff frequently get ignored. And the Universities UK (UUK) blueprint for higher education doesn’t dramatically break this mould.
UUK is the voice of senior managers, and senior managers tend to be rather distanced from the everyday grassroots realities of frontline staff in universities. Little wonder then that they have produced a headline-grabbing solution for funding, specifically index-linking fees, that many students and staff would not want. That said this report is less cohesive than it initially appears.
What does the blueprint tell us about the politics of funding higher education?
The most interesting chapter in the blueprint for me is undoubtedly Nick Pearce’s discussion of participation rates and predicted cohort size. He notes the predicted demographic changes:
After 2030, the number of 18-year-olds is set to decline, and a falling birth rate may contribute to a shortage of highly skilled employees in the labour market in the mid- to late 2030s. This decline could be partially offset by increased participation among students from backgrounds currently under-represented in higher education.
His suggestion here is interesting. The offsetting of demographic decline by recruiting more working-class students and, likely, increasing part-time and/or mature study, could be a path towards a very different, and much more egalitarian system of higher education.
This chimes well with the following chapter by Phoenix and Limb on greater collaboration and modularity across tertiary education. There are echoes here of the “comprehensive university”, first put forward by Robin Pedley in the 1970s. It is possible to see here the seeds of a much more democratic and egalitarian model of higher education buried beneath the snow of the neoliberal system we are surrounded by.
Ultimately it is also worth saying, if you’re going to have 70 per cent of people going to tertiary education in some form, as Pearce argues, is that not a universal service? The 70 per cent target is a good one, though less ambitious than others have been. Over the long-term the more people that attend university the stronger the argument that it should be paid for through higher taxes.
It is worth saying that demographic decline and funding higher education through debt are not entirely unconnected. We have moved towards a model of funding where young people end their studies with long-term debt that begins to kick in in a substantial way precisely when people begin to have families or consider getting on the housing ladder. There is still a bitter irony that those who went to university for free during earlier periods of HE expansion created this system, including of course David Willets who also features here as a blueprint commissioner.
On funding
The chapter on funding raises as many questions as it answers. Commissioners Shitij Kapur and John Rushforth argue at the start of the chapter that we “must not oversee an era of slow decline, either relative or absolute.” Some frank questions need to be asked of this statement. University leaders, faced with funding constraints, have relied on unrealistic assumptions of international student growth to fund the current system. Chinese investment in their own national university system, specifically with the aim of boosting ranking positions, dwarfs anything that the UK government is putting on the table. Then there is the question of decolonization – decolonizing knowledge systems built on colonial expansion ought to mean some rebalancing of university systems away from Global North dominance.
Which universities are they talking about when they refer to decline? Because we all know that the reality of a quasi-market built on top of a deeply hierarchical system has resulted in students being hoovered up by institutions at the top of the pecking order with consequences for universities that serve as key local anchor institutions and provide access for much larger numbers of working-class students. This is particularly acute from where I write. Durham recruits fewer students from County Durham than all the other universities in the North-East and the Open University. Sunderland has seen wave after wave of course closures with the loss of politics and languages five years ago and a chaotic current wave of redundancies.
Most efficiency savings, or “streamlining” of universities don’t make them more efficient. Most staff in universities would be able to give you multiple examples of poor management from the top that has resulted in money being wasted. Most often that is with extravagant new buildings or campuses but there are other things that quite simply make no sense. Expensive outsourcing, use of private finance contracts for accommodation that may reduce long-term rental income from student halls, consultancy fees for things that could easily be done in house if senior management actually trusted their own staff.
Where are the voices of staff?
Another interesting argument in the funding chapter is that it might be possible to lower ratios of staff to students. It is not clear exactly what is intended by “pedagogical advances [might] mean quality can be maintained with lower staff student ratios.”
The after-thought in the penultimate paragraph of this chapter to consult and engage with staff over decision-making is laughable. No one who works on the ground in universities really believes this. University senior management only consult when they have already made decisions and rarely, if ever, do those consultations result in any change in their decisions. Even when they turn out to be bad decisions that don’t meet the strategic aims set by said senior managers, they rarely face the consequences anyway as they are normally out the door by that point.
There is a tension here between the two models of higher education that are implied by the different chapters here. One would see potentially quite a radical transformation of the sector towards a much more universal model of higher education provision, with stronger links to further education. This would work best with a rebalancing and a reduction in hierarchy and resource between elite universities and post-92 institutions. Any progressive model of higher education funding has to demand redistribution of resources and students between different universities.
The chapter on funding and finance does not imply any structural shift in the role or model of universities. Elite universities would remain elite, albeit with greater “efficiencies” imposed on them. There is little space here for a progressive rebalancing of the system.
Another way is possible
What would a progressive demand be for higher education funding and the future of the sector? There should be no compromise in raising the demand for a fully-funded system of higher education funded through general and corporate taxation. Remember that the 2019 Labour manifesto produced a costed-model of how this could be paid for. UCU, the NUS and UNITE, GMB and UNISON’s HE branches should continue to demand this and oppose and protest any regressive changes.
However, it will be hard, if not impossible, to achieve this with the current government. That said continuing expansion of higher education makes a more progressive model of funding more likely over the longer-term. We are heading for a world where more and more workers will be weighed down by greater levels of student debt that they will have to repay over an ever longer period. Does it honestly make any sense whatsoever for people to continue repaying into their 60s? It may not be here now but the politics that we see in the US demanding student debt cancellation may well follow here. It’s hard to see how it won’t.
Pragmatically, the return of the maintenance grant and inflation-linked maintenance loans would improve things for students in the short-term. Index-linked tuition fees on the other hand, especially under the regressive revised terms of the Plan 2 and Plan 5 loans, must be opposed. A short-term demand should be for a much larger restoration of the capital and teaching grant to avoid fee hikes. More progressive loan repayments that rebalance lifetime repayments towards, as opposed to away from, higher earners and a return to the shorter loan repayment periods of earlier fee systems would also be progressive steps that would de-commodify higher education funding for students.
The backdrop to all of this is political. The end of the 2023-24 UCU strikes emboldened university senior managers. The wave of redundancies and cuts that followed the end of the dispute is not a coincidence. Students and the NUS have also not mobilised strongly around free education since the mid-to-late 2010s. If we want a progressive and free universal system focussed on access and with less hierarchy and inequality between universities, the political basis for that within and beyond the sector will have to be built.
It has been possible to improve access to university and expand participation without empowering staff and students. The political consensus around this mostly survived the austerity years though mature and part-time student numbers tell a different story. This has also happened alongside slow, persistent and now accelerating cuts at post-92, middle-tier universities and austerity in FE Colleges. This only reinforces inequality within the sector and results in less subject choice for working-class students.
De-commodifying higher education for students and rebalancing power and resources within the sector are the only long-term solutions if we truly want a progressive system of higher education. This will never be imposed from the top. As a class, the ruling elite of higher education simply aren’t interested in it. The only people who can demand and build the political momentum necessary for a university system that truly serves the people are students and higher education workers.
We build it ourselves or it will not be built.
“Where are the voices of staff?” No where, they are ignored as irrelevant by the senior management, and with the demise of the PERSONnel departments some years ago this was bound to happen, (in)human resources see staff as an unfortunate necessity that can be easily replaced once worn out like a cog in the machine, ignoring the fact that the staff ARE the university, not the buildings nor the administrators that were originally employed to support them, stand up to them and they’ll find a way to get rid of you…
Re. ‘Where are the voices of staff? Nowhere, same in all these supposed ‘expert reviews’ eg. Becky Francis’s one of the National Curriculum q.v. which has already flagged the final end of uni depts of education in favour of online provision of teacher training!
This article raises important points about the growing disconnect between senior management and the real needs of students and staff. The push for an egalitarian higher education system is now very necessary, especially if we want to ensure wider participation and fair access for all.
It’s clear that a progressive funding model, where education is seen as a public good rather than a commodity, is the way forward. But change won’t come from the top down—it will require collective action from everyone in the sector to push for a fairer, more inclusive system.