Britain's universities are facing a growing crisis. About one in five of them is now considered at financial risk. Courses are being cut, staff are losing their jobs, and some university towns could face serious economic damage if institutions fail.

But this crisis is not an accident.

In this video, I argue that the problems facing universities are the predictable result of government policy. For well over a decade, education has been treated as a market. Students have been turned into consumers, universities have been turned into businesses, and educational purpose has been subordinated to financial targets.

The consequences reach far beyond university finances. I explain how critical thinking has been squeezed out of education, why testing now dominates learning, and why many students arrive at university without the communication and analytical skills they need.

I also explore how universities became dependent on expansion, overseas student recruitment, and increasingly fragile business models, leaving many institutions vulnerable when conditions changed, as they have with the introduction of new immigration policies.

Most importantly, I ask what education should actually be for. I suggest an alternative based on three principles: curiosity, communication and community.

If universities matter to our economy, our democracy and our communities, then the current crisis should concern us all.

This is the audio version:

The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.

This is the transcript:

Universities in the UK are being killed, and I mean that. The universities in this whole country are being killed as a direct consequence of UK government policy, which is providing them with no future and is going to leave the towns where they're located, in some cases, without a major employer, and staff without a place of work, and maybe some of their students without a degree. This really matters.

Now, I know that there are many people in the UK who think that university degrees have a declining value, and I'm not going to argue with that view in this video. But what we now know as well is that around 20% or one in five of the UK's 120-odd universities are now facing financial risk. Nottingham is the latest. It's cutting staff and closing courses, and it's facing strikes as a result. But these events are not isolated or accidental. UK universities are being killed by policy design.

This outcome was always predictable. It's the consequence of the neoliberal thinking that has underpinned our education in this country for well over a decade now, almost two. And that's because the Conservatives brought a new style of thinking into education when they returned to office in 2010, and the consequences are now being seen.

They treated education as a commodity, something that the student consumed. They redefined education as a market transaction. And in this context, students became consumers purchasing economic advantage, either from their degree or their A levels or GCSEs. Universities then became suppliers in a managed marketplace. And that is why education in this country is failing.

Under Michael Gove, who was education secretary for several years whilst David Cameron was Prime Minister, he and his then assistant, Dominic Cummings, who became notorious with regard to Brexit and his role with regard to Boris Johnson, radically redefined the supposed purpose of education.

Learning, they said, was all about creating an economic return. Universities existed, in their argument, simply to enhance a student's earning power. Economic growth became the justification for the expansion of education, and education for personal and social development disappeared. And we saw that in schools, with regard to things like music and arts and theatre and all those other softer subjects which make the person a whole human being. And we saw it at universities in the same sorts of area, but also with regard to the commodification of that whole education process.

What neoliberalism could not understand was that education should help people to understand themselves. And then it should help people to understand others. And then it should encourage curiosity and questioning; questioning, which should in turn lead to real learning: the sort of learning that a person develops for themself so that they deeply understand a subject and can embrace it, use it, and then explain it to others. As a consequence, education should be about strengthening society and community, but none of these goals fitted neoliberal assumptions.

As a result, critical thinking was systematically removed from all tiers of education. It's gone from schools, and now it's going from universities. Students are simply taught to absorb information. That is what Michael Gove's education reforms were all about.

He said we'd go back to basics, but basics meant learning precisely what he thought the state should inform a student about, and there was no role to ask questions.

Worse still, there was no role to question the answers, and in that case, students were simply taught to reproduce approved answers; the type of thinking that neoliberalism had fed to them. And testing dominates educational achievement as a consequence. Do you know it or don't you? That's the only question that is asked. And independent appraisal by the student, by an examiner, by anyone else, has been entirely squeezed out of the educational system, and creative thinking is increasingly discouraged as a result.

The result is what I would call educational incapacity. Many students, ones that I saw when I was teaching, could not write an essay in their second year at university. Why? That's because grade A A-Levels do not apparently require this skill anymore. Many students struggled to construct an argument. They couldn't construct a counterargument either. There was no narrative flow through their work. They didn't understand how they had to weave those arguments and counterarguments together to undertake an appraisal of evidence and then present their own arguments as a consequence based upon everything that they had read.

Conclusions were asserted rather than developed. And as I discovered, many of my colleagues, and many people throughout the whole education system, were frequently failing to remedy these weaknesses. I tried to do so by dedicating a session to teaching my students how to write an essay to meet my needs. The wise ones followed my advice. Those who were not so wise submitted the essays they'd written in the style they'd learned at school, or rather, not learned at school. They, of course, got the lower marks. The point is this: they did not know a basic skill, and they got to university without it, and that is indication of a major failure in our education system, or is it?

The fact is that the old elite model of education has survived university expansion. Let's just talk for a moment about what that old elite model of education was. It was based on the thinking of Rockefeller, in fact. The Rockefeller Foundation in the USA in the early 20th century was all about the creation of philanthropy to control society on behalf of an elite who believed they had the right to set the terms on which society would operate, and they had a massive impact.

I've discussed this issue on my blog of late, but let's stick to the core point here, which is that they thought over a century ago that a small elite in society should be taught how to think. Everyone else should be taught how to comply or how to do. They should become the artisan workers who would supply the products that they were told to create by that small elite. And that small elite would then extract value from those workers so that they could live in a style which they wished to enjoy.

Now, university expansion, as it was first imagined, by Labour in particular, did not actually change that objective. Extraordinarily, as the Conservatives became more and more influential on university expansion during the 80s and 90s, and then again since 2010, they made clear that technical education was what they really wanted universities to supply. Remember that Michael Gove's quote, “We don't need experts.” What he was saying was that he didn't need too many highly educated people in society. He thought we had enough of them, and they were already setting the goals very nicely to suit his objectives. The rest should be doers, not thinkers.

And economics teaching reveals how this has worked. When I went to university fifty years ago, economics was taught as narrative. It was evidence-based. It was about doing your reading. It was about looking at arguments. It was about comparing schools of thought and the history of understanding in this area. Context was everything to understanding.

Now that has all been replaced. You don't write essays anymore to pass an economics degree; you write maths. Formulas now dominate the subject. Assumptions are no longer critically examined. The history of economic thought is not on most economic syllabuses, and as a consequence, rote learners who can reproduce the formulas they've been given are the people who get the high marks in economics.

But they come out having not the slightest idea about how the world works, or how an economy works, or how a company works, or how even an individual might function. In fact, empathy has normally been taken away from them during the course of their study, and there's plenty of academic research to back that statement up.

Don't blame the students, though. Politicians designed this education system to create this outcome. Schools have become factories for testing performance right from a very young age; from 7, 11, 14, 18, whatever else. Students are assessed time and time and time again. And rote learning has displaced critical engagement, and universities have now inherited the consequence, which is young people who have been taught not to think, but to simply answer the question given the information they've been given.

That failure now is continuing in our university system, and the university business model imposed by neoliberals simply makes everything very much worse. Universities have been required to behave like businesses. They are all independent institutions with their own funding base, their own business model, their own sales pitch, and all their own systems, which is an enormous waste and duplication with a massive potential for cost saving if only they operated on standardised systems, and there's no reason why they shouldn't.

And financial viability became the overriding objective of every single university. Educational purpose became secondary. Recruitment targets for students became essential because that was the only way in which they could attract sufficient money to keep the system going. And growth became essential according to the neoliberal model, because that was the way in which security could be generated. In that case, revenue generation shaped all of a university's decision-making.

But this business model was bound to fail.

It became dependent on overseas students. It became dependent upon selling master's and other postgraduate programmes as revenue generators. And because expansion became a financial necessity, it was matched by austerity in the supply of the education process. There were too few teachers, there was too little marking, there was too little face-to-face engagement, and grade inflation became a marketing strategy instead of supplying a decent education. A fragile and transparent model was created by design, a neoliberal design that had failure built into it.

And that market is now turning on universities. Universities sold what neoliberalism demanded, but the product has too often failed to meet expectations now.

The students know it. They can see that they're not advancing in the way that they were told to expect, and education quality has been undermined.

The resulting crisis is unsurprising, and as a result, we now need a new education system with a different purpose.

The obsession with facts should end.

The obsession with the examination of those facts should end.

Current testing systems have anyway lost their credibility. I know that. Employers are increasingly ignoring traditional indicators and exam results, and are instead retesting applicants for jobs. Why? Because they know that those exam results do not matter anymore.

As a result, we can all say with certainty that the existing model of education has broken down because it isn't actually producing the outcomes that anyone, students, educators, or employers want. This system is failing.

So, what should we put in its place? I would suggest we need three Cs for a new education system. There used to be three Rs. I'm plucking three Cs out of the air, not randomly, I should stress, and suggesting that these should become the purpose of education.

The first C is for curiosity. Now, curiosity is key to education. Without a curious participant, without a curious student in other words, you simply don't get participation in learning. Curiosity drives participation, and when it's done right, you get somebody who wants to learn. Instead, we now have education aimed at people who are alienated by it as a result.

The second C is communication, and communication should be at the heart of education, and I'll return to that point in a moment.

And the third C is community, because everything about education is about relationships. The whole of neoliberal thought has been about the fact that they think education is about the student as a silo, an economic unit. But the student, when they become a participant in the workplace, when they become a participant in life beyond education, is not a silo. They are one of a team, one of a community, one of a town, one of a city, one of a club, one of a company, one of whatever else, and that is all about community and the ability, therefore, to go back to the previous section to say, it's all about communication.

These are the qualities that matter throughout life. They matter more than any test of memorisation, which is what education has been reduced to.

Communication is the key missing skill, in my opinion. Young people should be taught to speak clearly. Making presentations is important. Being able to talk about an idea coherently is vital if a young person is to be able to participate in almost any form of social activity. It doesn't matter what you're talking about; it doesn't matter whether it's academic. It could be sporting, it could be social, but if you can't speak clearly about what you want and explain your ideas, you are not going to get on in life. But this verbalisation skill is far too underrated.

Students should also be taught to write coherently. But that does not necessarily mean that they need to write an essay about Jane Austen, much as I like Jane Austen, and I do. But they should be able to communicate what they mean clearly and coherently to the person they're sending whatever it might be, a text, an email, a letter, an essay, whatever. All of those things matter, and they should be able to construct them in a way that the user can understand. But at present, I, as an examiner, as I used to be, could not always understand what my students were trying to tell me. They did not do well as a result, and I tried my best to make sure they understood what I wanted.

It's also true that students should learn to communicate numerically. And in this sense, maths has failed as badly. There are far, far too many young people who feel that maths is not for them, and that's because they aren't told why they need to communicate numerically, and what numerical meaning is. They aren't taught maths as if it's a real, living, communicating tool within the context of real life, instead of in the absurd way in which most maths is taught. And I can tell you for certain that most sixth-formers have no idea what differential calculus is all about. And most people, much younger, who are being taught to do quadratic equations, have not the slightest idea why. And even earlier than that, most people never understand what a percentage is. Well, if you aren't taught the whys, instead of just the how-to-dos with regard to maths, of course, you can't communicate numerically.

So, this matters much more than technical rules. I've seen the absurd syllabus for young people when it comes to English before the age of 11, where they have to learn all these rules of grammar, none of which I know, and I have written and published millions and millions of words. You can survive without those rules of grammar, but you can't survive if you don't know how to communicate your message clearly and coherently.

Education has forgotten all of this, and we are all the losers as a result. Education should focus on meaning and conveying it, but that's not what it talks about. It's only interested in testing structure.

The politics of care would then deliver a very different vision of education as a result. Education is, as far as I'm concerned, fundamentally about relationships and learning about living within communities. Human flourishing depends upon cooperation. Education should be learning about how to, quite literally, cooperate. Add that in as a fourth C, if you want. Don't blame students, teachers, or universities if that's not the skills that our students end up with. Blame the neoliberal framework that is killing education.

That is what is at fault. Michael Gove, David Willetts and others who were the supposed education gurus have left us with this crisis of universities that are financially failing, of universities that are failing their students, of universities that are not delivering the people this country needs, and now, of universities that might fail the communities that host them because they could go bust, with enormous economic regional consequences.

Education is in a crisis, and we need to sort it out, and we need to sort it out fast, and to do that, we need to understand that education is not about delivering a product; it's all about delivering communication and communication in community. When we understand that we might get the education system that we need.

That's what I think. What do you think? There's a poll down below. Please let us have your views. Please do share this video if you like it, and if you want to support us by buying us a coffee, we'd be very grateful.

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