A higher education system in Wales or for Wales?

The speaker was Professor Dylan Jones-Evans OBE – physicist turned entrepreneurship professor, visiting professor at Aston and Finland’s Turku University, founder of the IDEAS Community, and prolific commentator on Welsh higher education.

The title was “A higher education system in Wales or for Wales? The crisis facing Welsh universities”, and the room was packed with a who’s who of Welsh higher education – chancellors, vice-chancellors, governing body chairs, policy types – with another fifty or so watching online. And Jones-Evans did not hold back.

He began personally, rooting the argument in Welsh identity and the history of public investment in education:

I was the first in my family to attend university. I was not the first to believe in the importance of education. In Wales, education has always been highly valued. My great-grandfather, a quarryman in Gwynedd, was one of many who donated his pennies to help establish the University College of North Wales in Bangor back in the late 19th century. These were not small things. They came from people who had very little, who would never themselves set foot inside the university, but who understood that education is worth building, and that the sacrifice of one generation could change the possibilities of the next.

From there, he moved quickly to his central framing – that this is not a rough patch but a structural crisis:

Welsh higher education is not simply going through a tough period. It is facing a structural and financial tsunami. That distinction is important, because a tough patch suggests something temporary. But this is not temporary. The pressures are deeper, longer term, and now impossible to ignore.

He then set out what he called five connected failures afflicting Welsh higher education – a failure to respond to changing demand, a failure to build resilience into the financial model, a failure of governance, a failure to differentiate between institutions, and a failure of policy. These were not presented as separate problems but as a mutually reinforcing system of weakness.

Demand and competition

On student demand, Jones-Evans argued that Wales has been caught out by a more competitive UK-wide market. Welsh universities no longer primarily compete with each other – they compete with strong English institutions just over the border, with big city brands, with specialist providers, and with a student mindset increasingly shaped by employability and outcomes. He pointed to the absence of a compelling national recruitment proposition:

Study in Wales” needs to be a serious proposition in the market, highlighting quality, affordability, community, employability, and the advantages of studying in a small system. Too often, however, it has felt more like a slogan than a strategy.

He noted that Wales is in fact a net importer of students – over 52,000 English students attend Welsh universities, compared with around 33,000 Welsh students studying in England.

But the composition of the student body tells a different story. Only 39 per cent of full-time undergraduates at Welsh universities are Welsh domiciled, with 51 per cent from England. At postgraduate taught level, two-thirds of full-time students are international, with only one in five being Welsh.

His point was sharp – Welsh higher education is simultaneously shrinking in Welsh terms while expanding through imported demand, and that creates profound exposure to external shocks.

Financial fragility

On finances, he painted a bleak picture. Total deficit across the eight Welsh universities last year was around £116 million – not concentrated in one troubled institution but spread across the system. He singled out Swansea University, which he said ended the year with around one month of liquidity, and noted that the University of South Wales had moved nearly £5 million from endowed reserves into unrestricted funds to support restructuring, with loan repayment stretched out to 2045:

That may be justified in accounting terms, but it still indicates that something has gone badly wrong if an endowment meant to safeguard the university’s long-term mission is being used to cover short-term financial difficulties.

On governance, he argued that university governing bodies had failed to stress-test institutional financial models before pressure mounted. Capital investments continued while staff cuts deepened.

He used the University of South Wales as an example – an institution that lost nearly 9,000 students from its southeast Wales hinterland over the past decade while becoming increasingly dependent on international fee income, then found itself committed to a £60 million building project just as that income collapsed.

He also pushed hard on civic. Universities are not just based in Welsh cities – they shape them. Bangor University sits at the centre of a cathedral city whose high street has declined sharply, yet the university appeared detached from that reality. Newport lost thousands of students when the University of South Wales withdrew from the city:

When a university withdraws from a community, the effects are tangible. Students vanish from the high streets, footfall drops, spending decreases, and confidence diminishes. What looks like an internal institutional decision becomes a civic event.

On the structure of the system, he argued that not every Welsh university can or should aim to be everything to all students. He called for much greater differentiation, with clearer decisions about which institutions are research-focused, which should specialise in applied and vocational education, which need to be grounded in regional skills, and where collaboration should replace duplication:

Should we bring the Valleys institutions together as a single multi-campus institution under one vice-chancellor? Should we create a new polytechnic in Wales, uniting the post-92 institutions as an applied university across multiple locations, linked to the FE sector? Could we pursue geographic mergers or alliances to align tertiary education more closely with the economic needs of different parts of Wales?

He acknowledged that mergers can simply create a larger fragile institution. But, he added, refusing even to examine such opportunities in a small and financially stressed system “is not strategic confidence – it’s avoidance.”

He saved his most noticeable number for participation. Citing UCAS data, he said only 29 per cent of Welsh 18-year-olds pursue higher education – the lowest rate in the UK, against 36 per cent for the rest of the country:

That’s not just a funding challenge. That’s a failure of aspiration, a failure of access, and a failure of national ambition.

He argued that if Wales were ambitious enough to increase participation to 40 per cent, the additional students could generate more than a hundred million pounds for Welsh universities over a typical three-year degree cycle.

He then called for the most integrated and flexible tertiary system in the UK – one where further and higher education are interconnected through clear progression routes, modular learning, and the ability for learners to move in and out of study at different stages of their lives.

What’s actually going on with Welsh students?

Much of this was compelling – forensic on finances, sharp on governance, and right to demand a national strategy where none exists. But the diagnosis of why fewer Welsh students are entering higher education, and where those who do go end up, was less satisfying.

Jones-Evans treated the 29 per cent participation figure primarily as an aspiration and marketing problem – the system hasn’t made the case to young people, the “Study in Wales” brand is weak, the offer isn’t attractive enough. He moved quickly from the statistic to a hypothetical about what 40 per cent would look like financially, which is more of a rhetorical device than an analysis of what’s going wrong.

In reality, the Welsh-domiciled undergraduate numbers problem has at least three distinct drivers, and only one of them is really about universities.

The first is Level 3 attainment. Wales has lower and declining participation in academic Level 3 pathways compared with England, with more learners concentrated in FE and vocational routes. If fewer 18-year-olds are reaching the qualifications threshold for higher education entry, no amount of branding fixes the participation gap. That’s a schools and colleges question – but in a tertiary system supposedly designed to integrate FE and HE, it’s important to join those dots.

The second is later entry. The UCAS 18-year-old rate is a useful measure, but it’s not the whole picture. If Welsh learners are more likely to enter at 19, 20, or 21 – through Access courses, foundation years, or FE progression – then the headline figure overstates the problem. There’s no shame in later entry, and in a system that claims to value flexible progression, treating it as a failure is counterproductive.

The third – and the one Jones-Evans got closest to without fully developing – is Welsh-domiciled students studying in England and not coming back. He had the cross-border numbers and used them mainly to make the net importer point. But he didn’t really ask why they study elsewhere, and what happens to those 33,000 Welsh students after they graduate in England.

The brain drain question

Across Europe, the phenomenon of students leaving to study full-time in another country – and then a large proportion not returning – is well documented and politically charged.

In a bloc whose whose big thing is freedom of movement, it causes particular anxiety in smaller, less wealthy, or peripheral systems. The Western Balkans, the Baltics, Romania, Poland – all have experienced versions of this pattern, and in each case it has raised urgent questions about whether universities, student experience, or something more structural is driving the outflow.

Wales is not usually discussed in brain drain terms. But the structural dynamics are recognisable. A smaller system with narrowing provision sits next to a larger, richer one with stronger graduate labour markets, bigger city brands, and more institutional prestige. Students cross the border for a full degree. Many settle where they studied.

The European research on why students choose to study abroad – comprehensively reviewed by the OECD and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre – points much more strongly to a combined migration-and-opportunity story than to a narrow “student experience” one.

University quality, reputation, and campus life do matter. But for full-degree movers, they usually sit inside a broader decision about life chances. Students often choose to study elsewhere because it gives them access to stronger labour markets, higher wages, better long-term mobility options, and a clearer route into an adult life they consider more desirable than the one available at home. In other words, the university is the vehicle, not the whole destination.

The OECD’s work on post-graduation migratory behaviour then finds that staying on after study is associated with destination-country labour markets, migration regimes, institutional quality, and diaspora presence – not with how good freshers’ week was.

The European Training Foundation’s Western Balkans work is explicit that low return rates among graduates create further loss of talented and highly skilled people for the sending country. And country-specific studies – such as research on Polish students in Germany – consistently find that non-return is structurally higher among full-degree students than among those on short-term exchanges, because degree-seekers become more embedded in the destination country’s institutions and labour market.

The main conclusions across this research are fairly consistent. Non-return is most likely where the destination offers a strong graduate labour market, easier post-study settlement, an existing network, and where the home system offers weaker institutional or economic prospects.

Where the home country provides credible graduate opportunities, the picture changes. But you can’t market your way out of a structural opportunity deficit.

The demographic crunch underneath

There is also a harder demographic reality beneath all of this that Jones-Evans acknowledged only in passing. Wales has had more deaths than births every year since 2017. In the year to mid-2024, there were roughly 35,600 deaths and 27,500 births – a natural change deficit of about 8,100 people. Cardiff and Newport were the only local authorities where births exceeded deaths. Every other part of Wales is naturally shrinking.

Meanwhile the fertility rate in Wales fell to 1.35 in 2024 – below England’s 1.42 and well below replacement level. The birth rate has been falling since 2010. The population aged 65 and over is projected to reach nearly a quarter of the total by 2032 and over a million by 2060. And the number of children aged 0 to 15 is projected to fall by over 10 per cent in the next decade.

All local authorities except Newport are expected to see that decline. The entire growth in Wales’s headline population number is driven by migration – the same income source whose volatility has thrown Welsh HE into crisis.

For the 18-year-old pipeline specifically, we are now looking at the children born from 2007-08 onwards entering HE – right when the birth rate decline kicked in. Welsh Government pupil projections suggest total pupil numbers will be 9 per cent lower by 2036.

Even if participation rates held steady, the raw pool of potential Welsh-domiciled undergraduates is shrinking. Combined with the Level 3 gap, later entry patterns, and cross-border outflow, the structural demand problem is considerably more serious than Jones-Evans’s “raise aspiration to 40 per cent” ambition acknowledged.

What he got right

None of which is to say the speech was wrong. Welsh higher education does need a national plan. As he put it in the Q&A:

We need a plan. We need a strategy. We just haven’t got one for higher education in Wales. It’s like any business – you need to know where you’re going. At the moment we have eight institutional strategies all competing against each other, no coherent national strategy behind higher education, and that doesn’t even include all the colleges.

He’s also right that there needs to be a genuine “Study in Wales” proposition – not a slogan but a serious offer built around quality, affordability, employability, and the advantages of a smaller system.

He’s right that the tertiary education agenda gives Wales a major opportunity to build flexible progression routes, modular learning, and proper credit transfer so that learners can move in and out of study at different life stages. He’s also right that differentiation matters, that not every institution can sustain a broad curriculum, and that honest conversations about mergers and structural options should not be treated as heresy. And he’s right that the research funding gap is real and damaging.

But ultimately, the speech – like much of the Welsh HE debate – kept circling back to what universities should do differently, without fully confronting the fact that the most powerful forces shaping student behaviour probably sit outside the higher education system.

The European evidence is clear. A Welsh student choosing Bristol or Manchester over Swansea or USW is not primarily responding to a branding failure. They are responding to an opportunity landscape – thinner graduate employment in much of Wales, hollowing-out towns, a narrowing academic offer as institutions cut, and the rational calculation that studying where the jobs are is also living where the jobs are.

Jones-Evans touched on this when he talked about Bangor’s struggling high street, Newport’s loss of students, and the link between university strategy and civic renewal. But he framed these as things universities should fix, rather than recognising the deeper structural point – that higher education policy alone cannot compensate for an economy that doesn’t generate enough reasons for graduates to stay.

Wales can have a national HE strategy, proper differentiation, better governance, devolved research funding, and a genuinely flexible tertiary system. But until the labour market in Wales gives young people a credible answer to “and then what?”, the most talented and mobile will keep doing what the European evidence says they do everywhere – leaving for the degree, staying for the life.