A Decade of Crisis

I recall a conversation with a colleague around 2016 about what the imminent removal of the student number ‘cap’ was going to do to our history department. Before 2015-6, most university degrees in the UK were allocated a number of student places, say 100 or 150, and once full they could no longer accept any more students that year. This number was connected to the number of academic staff available to teach them and support them. In our conversation, my colleague said that removing this ‘cap’ was the beginning of the end for departments like ours. He said the changed rules sent all the wrong signals to universities across the country about how to behave when marketing their degrees to students. He said that, despite all the warm words about students, the changes would badly affect mature, part-time, and returning learners and those coming into university from routes other than A-levels. He predicted that inflation would erode the value of the capped tuition fees, and that the Tory government would attack the other ways university teaching was funded. He was right, on every single count.  He retired not long after.

Here’s the thing: universities are all part of a big, important, and varied system of education, they are communities, sites of knowledge production, and of collective and collaborative problem-solving. However, they are no longer treated, funded, or indeed governed, as if they are any of these things. Instead, universities have been incentivised to become ‘market competitors’ that follow industrial tendencies. They alienate and disempower their core productive labour force. They seek to maximise their income with large cohorts of fee-paying students, and minimise the expenses involved in producing research, or in teaching the students they have. Institutions treat each other as opponents in a zero-sum contest, rather than as fellow members of an immense system of learning and innovation who can grow and thrive together. In all this, managers have been encouraged by government policy. The damage all this has done is frankly immense, and it has been a decade-long process to arrive at this point.

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I work at Canterbury Christ Church university. Canterbury is a ‘post-92’ university that grew out of a longstanding and prominent teacher training college, with roots in its Church of England foundation. It became a university only in 2005, though it has been awarding undergraduate and taught postgraduate degrees since 1995. Having since expanded into a wide range of new areas such as medicine and engineering, the university’s student population is now quite diverse across social, economic, lifecycle, and geographical distinctions, and it continues to prioritise being a ‘widening participation’ university. Our UCAS entry requirements are often lower, and students tend to spend more time in classroom settings than at other institutions.

When I was first hired in 2013, it was to work in a Department of History, American Studies, and Archaeology alongside about 20 other academics. Two years later, that department was gone, folded into a larger ‘school’. Despite such administrative changes, which increasingly became annual exercises, I remember some real bright spots. I designed and taught a final-year special subject module for the first time around 2015. I could design and change the composition of classroom activities when I thought I should. Once I even got a sabbatical term to finish a book!  It generally felt like there were slightly fewer rules, but those we did have mostly made sense to me. Our exam boards really did scrutinise every module, every mark. Our conversations about how to deliver better teaching and offer students new opportunities felt feasible and real. I helped run a thriving study-abroad programme, with many American students coming to visit us for a term. I worked in a place where student community and culture were relatively easy to support, amidst a city bursting with arts, culture, and heritage possibilities. I taught cohorts of over 100 students.  Back then, it felt like a punishing amount of work (it was). Now, it would feel like job security.

Things felt much more desperate by 2019. By then I had experienced several rounds of institutional retrenchment. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been hired full-time. People left and they were not replaced. My retired colleague’s predictions were all slowly coming true, and I was coming to realise just how exposed—and how much of a political target—the university sector was. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I remember being scared for myself and my students as we were made to mask up and do socially-distanced classes in person, well before any vaccine roll out. I did all that on a 20% salary sacrifice, part of an agreement we voted on to keep my university even then from collapsing into financial distress. By 2022, we had voluntary redundancy schemes on an annual basis. Every year saw a new threat to the survival of the history programme. We were, and indeed still are, one ‘unsustainably’ bad recruitment round away from closure and “teaching out” the remaining student year groups to graduation. Doing my job at university increasingly felt like a cold and clinical exercise, one where the human costs were easily discounted, and human agency and decision-making was slowly taken away from academic staff. My students were a resource, and I was just a cost.

I think it can be a radical position simply to repair what is broken and to preserve what is valuable from crude financialisaton or elite indifference, rather than to reimagine it wholesale. That is currently my approach to working in a UK university. Much of my working world in 2015 is unrecognisable to me now, and my daily aim is just to preserve what remains. Just to salvage something at all. Because buried amidst all this, there was something good, something worth preserving. Teaching students is still great, even though they’re fundamentally—and understandably—more nervous about the future and constrained by circumstances. Occasionally good things still happen, but these are brief sparks in the gloom. This all might sound like rose-tinted nostalgia or an uncritical eulogy, but I wonder how many academics with a similar career duration would identify with the pulse of this narrative arc. Over the last ten years, brick by brick, I have felt as if what made universities great in this country was being dismantled, consulted on, ceded, somehow given away. Even former Vice-Chancellors of large universities are starting to sound the alarm, as Nigel Thrift (former Warwick VC) does when he writes that ‘academics are creatives, not drones, and they need to be treated as such.’

My own vision of a good university system, unlikely as I am to ever experience it, would be one free at the point of use like the NHS and paid for by a broad-based taxation on individuals and businesses, who all benefit enormously from universities whether or not they or their employees ever attended one. Universities have often been a site of utopian possibility, of making the far-flung and seemingly impossible become real, of pushing out what we know and how we know it, sites not just for training people but for educating them, not just job factories but an important site of growth and unfettered curiosity in the lives of millions, which millions more remember fondly. Universities have been all these things and more and they can still be them again.

Whether aiming for radical transformation or repair and preservation, what we need to change urgently is the collective conversation about the manifold value of higher education in the UK. Importantly, we need to change who we are having that conversation with. We need to talk more to parents of teenagers, about how the current crisis is going to potentially pulverise the prospects of young people in this country, and we need to talk directly to politicians. As staff and students at all levels, it is more important than ever that we unite around a shared vision for universities as a public good – even if the ways they are paid for are not obviously public in nature. We must make the case that universities are intricately connected to national and international prosperity and to solutions for the often-overwhelming challenges we now face.

We must start to campaign, now, to preserve and defend higher education in the UK in the teeth of global assaults on research and teaching. We must understand these events within the context of wider attacks on facts and knowledge, which are acutely visible in the United States right now. I wake up daily in 2025 fully expecting to see footage of tiki-torch brandishing “Musk Youth”, yelling about ‘DEI’ and bankrolled by billionaires, violently assaulting an American campus somewhere. Meanwhile, the siren songs of hallucinating chatbots sing to us into somnolence, obscuring what is real (and offering to do our homework).

The flavour of crisis we are experiencing in UK higher education is far less about malice, and far more about political indifference. It is systemic and fiscal, more a debate about policies and priorities, and less of a full-on ideological assault on education’s social and economic value. Because of how we are trained, historians tend to begin our thinking and our writing by putting things into wider context. That has been done well already, and wider awareness of the issues is slowly growing. The public at large might not yet realise how disproportionately the arts and humanities are being targeted by cuts and retrenchment, but they will soon. Instead of any further colouring in of the dimensions of this crisis, I want to sketch some possibilities for ameliorating it.

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This whole conversation starts and ends with students, and to a considerable extent with where they end up going to university. In 2025, university students in the UK are getting a raw deal. Their tuition payments have become the site of Treasury finicking and nasty interest rates, their options for study are getting knocked down like bowling pins, their loans and grants and really the whole structure of support they should be getting is nothing short of anaemic. They have to work longer hours while studying and they enter a dysfunctional job market upon graduation. One of the profound ironies about the present situation in UK higher education is that students are indeed ‘at the heart of the system’ now, as was breathlessly promised ahead of coalition reforms in 2011, just not in a way that actually benefits them. Their personalised tuition debt underwrites the entire funding regime, with only the distant promise of a write-off for them after forty years of repayments.

Their theoretical free choice to apply to any UK university and the social mobility implied by being a first-generation student and attending Oxford or UCL have trumped all the other important considerations about this crucial period in their lives, such as how far away from family they want to be, or how expensive living in a particular urban centre is going to be for them, or whether or not they will even get the kind of support and small group teaching they deserve if they all attend the same three universities. The whole system assumes that individual students can know everything they need to make a single ‘rational choice’ about which university is best for them. It insists that the choices they do make, as individuals, should not be limited – even if this is a way of reducing harms for all students, collectively. In concert with all this apparent ‘free choice’, access to university education is becoming ever more unequal across lines of class, ethnicity, culture, gender, and geography.

Commentators on higher education love to misunderstand how and why students choose degree subjects in the first place, usually without asking students themselves. Yes students would like solid job prospects in places they want to live upon graduation (not really something universities can guarantee, just to be clear), yes of course they would like exposure to and practical networking in workplace situations. But does anyone actually think that all students really want from their degrees is the three-year equivalent of a CV-writing workshop? Columnists write as if funnelling students into certain subjects is acceptable to meet vague ‘national priorities’ or the needs of a particular sector. But prompting ever more students to enrol on engineering or medical degrees, while trashing the civil service and the creative industries, will not do anything to fix this country’s economic malaise, rather the opposite. If we need ever more nurses, more teachers, has anyone considered simply paying those professions better? And the only ‘mickey-mouse’ degrees I’ve ever seen evidence for exist in poorly regulated pockets of privatised or ‘partnership’ provision (basically, franchising) which universities are using to shore up their income. In other words, it is the current system that incentivises the very thing that many politicians claim to oppose: it is fleecing thousands of students, because students are where the money is. There is no serious legislation, or sector regulator, currently stopping any of this.

We’re in this mess partly because we refuse to see higher education, collectively, as an interdependent system. Instead, the prevalent discourse has been one of individual applications, choices, finances, attainment, and outcomes. Universities compete for students and then graduates compete for jobs, while academics compete for grants and for some modicum of stability. But we know this kind of competition is not necessary to a good education, nor is it the main register of successful companies and workplaces. It is well understood that best classrooms and the best labs are collaborative places where people work together to articulate insights and overcome challenges. Why do we refuse to align the principles behind good research or a good classroom with those governing access to the wider university system? What evidence do we have of the actual benefit of making universities compete in this way?

The point is to plan, and act, like universities are a genuinely public system – something I wrote about previously for a House of Lords inquiry into the suitability of the Office for Students in 2023. We must do this because the current arrangements are perverse; they are the worst of all worlds for almost everyone. A scenario I outlined then – even before the crackdown on overseas student visas introduced under Sunak which has expanded the HE funding crisis further – bears repeating:

“what happens if every student who got AAB in their A-levels decided to apply only to Russell Group institutions and to Oxford and Cambridge? This is currently perfectly permissible and those providers could decide to accept all these applicants. Moreover, what would happen to the rental markets of the cities and areas which these institutions anchor, and to the educational and living conditions of those students? First of all, a high number of providers would either fail and potentially need to declare bankruptcy and exit the system or downsize so radically they risked failure in the medium term. A similar effect could be produced by a drastic net reduction in overseas student recruitment, where fees are currently uncapped, which we witnessed during the Coronavirus pandemic and where the effects were only mitigated by government funding.”

Universities do not exist in isolation and the overlapping circles of community in any ‘university town’ are concentric and densely layered. Letting 50,000 students a year choose to study at Manchester university is, quite predictably, going to make it very expensive for students to live in Manchester and very expensive for universities to teach and support them.

Otherwise sensible people choose to misunderstand the thinking behind a ‘student numbers cap’. Placing a ‘cap’ on the number of students in one place has no necessary relationship to the number of students in total that can study a subject at university across the UK. All these numbers can simply be adjusted to meet net demand. The point is to distribute that demand across the system and to change the incentives that drive university and government decision-making to enable longer term planning and stability, which is what the sector sorely needs.

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Something we can miss about utopias is how close, sometimes even indistinguishable, they can be to dystopias. The current situation in UK universities showcases this uncomfortable proximity. Culturally we still want to see education as a site of utopian promise, of intellectual, scientific, and creative freedom, as a location where new knowledge is created, and existing knowledge is mastered. But economically, politically, and most importantly in practice at actual universities, we now appear ready to refuse that vision, and to settle for a shrunken, traumatised sector narrowly in hoc to the imagined interests of this or that industry, this or that political mission. Right now, for instance, institutional leaders are told they must make their universities ‘key to economic growth’ as if, somehow, universities have not been central to that exact thing for the past 70 years or so? Perhaps universities cannot ever function successfully and sustainably until our national conversation about them does the same.

I understand that the UK public have other things on their minds; people currently encounter ‘broken Britain’ every day. The university sector is rarely included in the category of ‘broken’ – but it is. I often get asked now whether I think a university will close its doors for good. I hear constant chatter about mergers. I get asked if our history programme will survive the next few years if nothing changes. Students ask me about course closures, like those announced for English Literature. They’re quiet and they’re worried. I have to answer that I don’t know. Maybe universities are just ‘re-sizing’, changing shape, some subjects come, some go, no big deal right (in fact it’s a huge deal). But, surely, like public sanitation, healthcare, and railways, surely universities are here to stay. They cannot go, they cannot be allowed to fail. The problem is, some could, even though every single time it happens it will be a disaster for the local area. Surely, we ask, no government is that indifferent to consequence? The historian is perennially obliged to say: look again. This has happened before, albeit typically elsewhere in the world; it can happen here.

Even if an institution’s doors are not closed forever, another bad ending is now clearly in view as many universities cut back on the range of subjects they offer. Whether by indifference, ignorance, mismanagement, or malice, a kind of financial ‘death-spiral’ can be produced where fewer subjects are taught, which leads to fewer graduates in that area, who then teach even fewer future students down the line. Universities are huge local employers, holding ‘anchor’ spots in entire regional economies. Having one collapse into administration can wreck a regional economy in a very short time span.

We are already starting to see ‘subject cold spots’ appearing across the UK, places where it is now impossible to take certain degree subjects locally. Opportunities for a great education in London (costs aside) might not be affected at all, while the ability to go to university in Wales for the subject you want might now vanish entirely. In this context, it is plausible that a whole university could shut entirely. But it is a steady decay into something small, defensive, tragic, and unrecognisable that is the far more likely end for UK universities: a shrivelled and hollowed-out sector. No one and nowhere is safe. Colleagues across the country whose jobs are under threat, or whose job prospects have gone up in smoke, are now seeing the interconnected nature of this crisis.

It is this that we must campaign hard to prevent. There are several simple interventions that government could make that would profoundly transform the whole sector and set it on a stable path for the longer term. Government could easily implement a distributive system of student places to spread out subject demand and to shore up university departments in England and Wales. The basic financial arrangements of the sector are clearly broken, with tuition fees always currently capped but all the money given to universities dependant on the number of students they recruit. Government can bring back block teaching grants to ameliorate the effects of this. It can make student’s lives better by reinstating proper maintenance grants, not just loans.

The government could stop using international students as a political football by rescinding the ban on their family members accompanying them, by refusing to fleece them financially with Home Office visa fees, and by actively regulating how universities recruit and treat international students. I also consider it a toxic proposed solution to the sector’s financial woes to merely continue to grow international student numbers when we simultaneously refuse to regulate international tuition fee levels that are so visibly predatory.

The government can require the public pensions in the sector to undergo proper revaluations. Because my pension is government run (Teachers Pension Scheme), I actually cost more to employ than a colleague at an identical stage of their career who is a member of any other pension scheme in the sector. This puts universities like the one I work in at a further disadvantage, and is a move that would help finances across the entire education sector, not just in universities.

Overall, the sums involved to fund these measures don’t hold a candle to the changes already implemented through national insurance or in the last budget. Plus every £1 spent on higher education returns about £14 to the wider economy in the longer run. So, would these changes cost more public money up front? Yes. Would fixing the foundations of the system cost less than managing chaotic mergers and failing institutions all across the UK? Also, definitely a yes.  While properly solving the UK university crisis might be politically unpalatable, it is not difficult to solve in practical or policy terms.

I hope we can find a collective voice and earn the attention of the public in time to affect the outcome. We need to make visible the slow crisis of numbers and money, of jobs lost, and futures foreclosed. On university campuses, students, staff, parents, and citizens must be given the chance to raise the issues confronting them and to hear about the issues confronting the sector. One thing I would like to see is a rally for higher education outside Parliament, perhaps organised and promoted by major UK scholarly societies. I’ve been experiencing this crisis ever since that 2015 conversation with my colleague, though it took me years to see it clearly. I will continue to play my part in trying to shape a way out of the mire. And in the meantime, as long as I have still have an academic job, you can find me still trying to see those sparks amidst the gloom; teaching my students and supporting my colleagues as best I can, and working to preserve the remnants of something good amidst the ruins of something that was great.