If we want social mobility, fund the universities that deliver it

There’s an old distinction in higher education between being a university of a place and a university for a place.

The first is about addresses, the second is about purpose. Every university has a postcode but fewer have a genuine stake in the communities around them.

Increasingly, it’s the old polytechnics doing the civic heavy lifting. They recruit locally. They teach students who commute, work, and care. They run the courses that feed local hospitals, schools, and businesses. And they recruit students other institutions don’t.

If we’re going to argue about which universities should charge more, it’s worth considering what that debate signals to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Getting through the door

The Social Mobility Commission’s new rankings ask a stark question: of the students who meet a university’s entry requirements, does it recruit equally across socio-economic backgrounds?

The commission compared each university’s intake with the students who had the grades to get in. A positive score means a university takes more disadvantaged students than you’d expect from that group, and a negative score means it takes fewer.

Middlesex came top of the 94 universities in the report, followed by the University of East London and the University of Bradford. The commission also ran a second ranking that gives more weight to qualified students living near each university. On that measure Bradford came first and Middlesex third.

London universities benefit from a high concentration of qualified disadvantaged students nearby. Bradford topping the location-adjusted table shows this isn’t just a London story. It’s what happens when institutions take their place seriously, wherever that place is.

Nearly a third of universities are under-enrolling disadvantaged students even when they have the grades.

This isn’t about lower entry tariffs doing the work. It’s about which institutions actually open the door to qualified students from poorer backgrounds, and which don’t.

In recent years selective universities have grown, but they haven’t opened the door much wider. Between 2019 and 2025 their 18-year-old intake grew by 41 per cent. Only 17 per cent of the extra places went to students from the most deprived fifth of neighbourhoods, against 29 per cent to the least deprived. And on the Office for Students’ own data, the share of their entrants from the two most deprived fifths hasn’t moved since 2021.

The funding squeeze lands unevenly

Every university is under financial pressure, but the pressure isn’t felt equally. OfS warned in May that 119 providers, more than four in ten, could be in deficit without action.

Meanwhile the market is tilting. Between 2019 and 2025, acceptances at high-tariff providers rose by 31 per cent while lower-tariff acceptances fell by 8,300. Applications to lower-tariff providers haven’t collapsed. The students are just being recruited elsewhere.

So the institutions doing the most widening participation work are often the ones with the thinnest margins. If one of them closes, the question isn’t just what happens to its students. It’s what happens to the town, the local NHS trust, the FE college partnerships, and the next cohort who would have gone there.

A student who can’t move away from home doesn’t simply relocate to a Russell Group university down the motorway – they often end up not going at all. Place-based institutions aren’t interchangeable, and in losing one, students lose a route into higher education.

Since 2019 the 18-year-old entry rate has fallen only in the North East, Yorkshire, and the North West, while London’s has risen by nearly five percentage points. Meanwhile the number of students who live at home while they study has hit a record high.

Charging more at the top

Russell Group chief executive Libby Hackett told The Times that the government should allow some universities to charge higher fees depending on the course. She described the current flat system as not fit for purpose.

There’s a real argument underneath this and the Department for Education analysis by KPMG, found it cost £12,317 on average to deliver a degree in 2023–24 – well above the fee cap of £9,250 that year. Nobody is disputing that teaching is underfunded.

But the framing matters. Hackett said students had shown a “flight to quality” and were competing for places at top-tier universities. For a student from a low-income background, that’s a lot to hear at once. The most selective institutions say they’re the quality option. They say they should charge more. And they’re the ones least likely to admit you even with the grades.

High-tariff providers grew by going down the grades, taking more students at CCC to BBB while lower-tariff providers lost them. And they didn’t grow with mature students, whose numbers at high-tariff providers have fallen.

Where they have taken on students with different needs, curricula and support haven’t always kept pace. That puts pressure on services, staff, and spaces that some institutions haven’t planned for.

How it looks from the other side

Students don’t read fee debates as spreadsheets – they read them as signals. The signal here is that the “best” universities want to charge more, while the institutions that serve them best are left fighting for survival.

There’s also the question of who pays. Since maintenance grants were scrapped in England, students from lower-income backgrounds have left university with the highest debts – 38 per cent more than their wealthier peers. Grants are coming back, but only for “government priority” courses, so most poor students will still borrow the most. And the repayment system has got harsher.

So calls for higher fees land hardest on graduates who already carry the most debt, in a system that already asks lower earners to pay more. It’s hard to see how that goes down well with the students it most affects.

Differential pricing risks a two-tier system that locks disadvantaged students out of top-ranked institutions or high-cost career paths. Even if the loan system cushions the upfront cost, debt aversion is real. And it’s strongest among exactly the students widening participation is meant to reach.

None of this means the Russell Group shouldn’t make its case. It does mean any argument for higher fees at the top needs to come with a serious answer on access and success. That includes admitting more of the qualified disadvantaged students it currently misses.

What the sector should ask

By charging more, universities risk telling students from disadvantaged backgrounds that the “best” education comes at a price they can’t afford.

These students could be paying and owing more, for an experience that hasn’t been designed around their needs.

But if we’re redesigning funding, the question shouldn’t only be which courses cost most to teach or are ranked higher. Perhaps it should also be which institutions deliver the most public value per pound. As David Mba and Julie Farrell argued last week, prestige isn’t the same as public value. On that measure, the universities for their places have a strong claim.

Student-facing staff see what’s at stake every day. It’s the commuter who can’t afford to stay on campus for an evening, the carer fitting lectures around the school pick-up, the student who is first in their family to get through the door struggling with the hidden curriculum.

A funding settlement that rewards prestige and lets civic institutions quietly fail would be a strange way to pursue social mobility.