The FT has reported this morning that:
A Labour government should take immediate steps to stabilise the UK's university system, raising the annual £9,250 tuition fee in line with inflation, the head of the sector's main lobby group has said.
Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, which represents more than 140 universities, said if Labour wins rapid action would be needed to avoid the sector being left in limbo as the new administration beds in.
I agree that the UK university sector is at risk, but this is not the reason.
The sector is at risk because the student loan system is penal and should be scrapped. I address this whole issue and what is, in effect, student taxation in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024.
It is also at risk from migration policy that is making it vastly harder to recruit overseas students now. This should have been the whole focus of any comment the Vice Chancellor's made at this moment.
And the sector is at risk because of its commercialisation. Universities are laden with bureaucracy, the evidence of financialisation, gross micro-management and the pretence that there is a competitive higher education system when there should be a highly cooperative one that seeks to meet differing needs. The existing system does, however, suit university administrators rather well so I could always have doubted that was going to be said.
The Vice Chancellors could have said something useful. As a working academic, I can say that they did not. I suspect most working academics would agree with me.
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Completely agree.
And from the perspective of a student/aspiring academic there is also a lot wrong. This is well summarised, IMO, in this link (I failed: why academia sucks):
https://youtu.be/LKiBlGDfRU8
As a working, though officially retired, academic, I agree 100%.
Commercialisation, micro-management, competition instead of collaboration:
I’m glad I’m free from them, but sorry to see younger colleagues entangled.
The first Research Assessment Exercise in the 1980s was useful – it shook up
a system where there were too many enjoying an easy life, and workloads
often made no allowance for those putting long hours into research.
But repeating the exercise every five years or so just turns it into a competitive
game, with targets that get in the way of real originality.
Agreed
I am on that hamster wheel
The FT once again conflating the UK with England. There are no university tuition fees in Scotland.
Agreed
There are tuition fees in Scotland; they just aren’t levied on those eligible for free tuition studying at Scottish institutions. The Scottish government pays the institution (from memory, I don’t have time to check) somewhere in the region of £5½k pa.
Those not eligible are paying, usually the maximum amount, and Scottish institutions are also chasing the higher fees that overseas students pay.
Free tuition in Scotland, for those eligible, isn’t relevant here.
My generation really does owe their grand children the same opportunities we had.
It is as high a priority as climate change action.
I can see no reason why government cannot fund student fees fully, and preferably support their maintenance without creating a huge debt burden for individuals.
Of course, the subtext is that the indebted have to be more compliant, so that framework serves Gramscian hegemony well.
We ought not be placing this generation of young adults with avoidable additional burdens, as they already face a world in crisis, and need as much support as we can provide.
Further commercialisation and privatisation of both the university and FE sectors need to be resisted, and government must resume the presumption in favour of high levels of state support for education.
The benefits of a well educated and highly skilled population need to be seen in the context of the whole of society, not just the short term economy.
This may not be easily calculated in £, using reductionist CBA terms.
And we need to advocate the advantages of educational opportunities for the full range of skills, aptitudes, and preferably on a lifelong learning basis. 50% of my own working life was spent in jobs that didn’t even exist when I was 18.
Interesting that tuition fees can go up in line with inflation, but university lecturers’ and teachers’ salaries have been devalued by up to 25% for not keeping up with inflation.
Agreed
When Thatcher was savaging society, doing her “Mad Meg” rampage on every institution that didn’t conform to her Neoliberal prescription of “private competition good, public provision bad”, Larry Elliott published an article on education, referring especially to the tertiary/University sector, and how it was being compelled to become more “business-like”, submitting to commercial and business discipline.
I’m fairly certain Larry Elliott made the point that this was 100% back to front, and that the UK’s woefully ineffective, even incompetent, business sector could learn a thing or two from academia, with its clear understanding of mission and purpose, its focus on real quality of delivery and maintenance of standards, and justified confidence in its ability to do so = Mission, Means and Morale.
Of course, there’s an element of rose-tinted glasses in such a nostalgic view of the past, but his point remains = business should have been copying academia, and NOT the other way round.
Had that happened, a lot of things would now be very different.
PS: for reference “Mad Meg” is the English translation of “Dulle Griet”, the subject matter of the great painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder – see https://images.app.goo.gl/jq77kjuHLqoMTfnx6
Larry was right
They are horribly corporate now – including by having a poverty of aspiration and a paucity of ideas