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With the new academic year getting underway this week, there is great excitement for academics and students alike. But in recent years there has also been a growing anxiety emanating from the financial crisis that many universities are experiencing, which has been described by many UK vice-chancellors as reaching a “tipping point,” and there are suggestions that several higher education institutions might go under.
Academia is another essential area of the British social and economic fabric that was neglected by consecutive Conservative governments between 2010 and this summer. Aided by infighting within the Conservative Party over immigration, it fell victim to these administrations’ failure to understand the immense contribution of the academic world to individuals, to the advancement and enhancement of human existence, to economic development and to the quality of society as a whole.
It was former Prime Minister Tony Blair who told his party conference in the early 2000s that his government’s priority “was, is and always will be education, education, education,” with the objective of overcoming decades of neglect and making Britain a learning society, “developing the talents and raising the ambitions of all our young people.” Part of this plan was to introduce an ambitious, although completely random, target of half of all UK youth to go to university — a target that was reached nearly two decades after it was first set in 1999.
There was nothing wrong in principle with this ambition, but it needed to be accompanied by adequate resources, a change in the way universities are financed and also by changes to curricula and the training of academics in order to deliver degrees fit for this expansion in higher education and for the UK’s social and economic needs.
Until this expansion of tertiary education, the focus of most universities was on excellence in research, while teaching was secondary. This approach could succeed because only a tiny number of high school graduates who excelled in their studies went on to university, hence they needed less time in class and benefited, or at least could cope, with mainly independent work. This is no longer the case; much of the teaching at these institutions has shifted from being research-based to research-informed, largely due to a lack of adequate budgets.
The current situation is unsustainable and the UK’s new Labour government has already acknowledged that universities have been starved of funding for the last 14 years, thanks to a freeze on government funding coupled with a decision to keep domestic undergraduate tuition fees at £9,250 ($12,300) a year since 2016. In real terms, this has meant the sector losing about a third of its income. To make up for this gap between income and expenditure, many universities have been forced to borrow heavily, leaving them with huge debts.
To add to this financial predicament, another significant source of income has been under attack: the contribution from overseas students, whose fees are not capped. They can be charged as much as £63,000 a year for certain degrees at the prestigious Cambridge University, though an average of £25,000 to £30,000 is more common.
Irresponsibly, this source has become conflated with the illogical and toxic discourse on migration. Students from abroad who arrive in the UK to study are included in the net migration numbers and thus have become part of a conversation that has turned extremely venomous in the UK, as it has in other parts of the West. This is because such students fall under the UN’s definition of “long-term migrants,” despite the fact they are not allowed to stay beyond the period of their studies unless they apply for a different visa and that about 97 percent of such graduates do not stay in the UK. This distorts immigration figures and adds unnecessary pressure on universities to limit foreign students.
Moreover, it is estimated that the economic benefit to the UK brought by international students is in the region of £42 billion annually. Yet, as a result of the hostile environment created by the previous government, in the first half of 2024 there were 16 percent fewer applications for study visas than for the same period in 2023. The consequences are quite clear and devastating for many universities in terms of their ability to carry out cutting-edge research and maintain British academia at the top of the international league table of universities.
The UK’s new government has already acknowledged that universities have been starved of funding for the last 14 years
Yossi Mekelberg
It is a huge loss to the country’s soft power, which benefits from the nearly 700,000 overseas students and their families whose experience of studying and living in the UK makes them ambassadors of goodwill for life, in addition to becoming partners in long-term research and business ventures.
If Britain’s new government does not want universities to collapse, it must come up with an alternative financial model that does not leave young people with huge debts, on top of coping with a low-wage economy, house prices that are out of reach for new graduates and an ever-increasing cost of living. Studying at university might be a privilege, but for the state not to facilitate it is a penny-pinching luxury it cannot afford.
Spending time at university is, for many young people, a rite of passage as they grow as individuals and as members of society, gain independence, acquire knowledge, learn skills and critical thinking for life, improve their employability and forge long-term friendships and networks. Depriving the country’s youth of these opportunities and compromising the quality of the teaching and learning experience in higher education harms not only them and their future prospects, but society as a whole.
For years, universities have been forced to compromise on the quality of their teaching and learning experiences due to a lack of resources. Many have frozen permanent hiring and instead rely on adjunct lecturers who are paid a pittance and have no progressive career path. Heads of universities, by agreeing to this low-cost academia, have normalized the lower standards that deter domestic students from taking a degree and overseas students from paying high fees for an experience that all too often fails to meet their expectations or live up to objectively measured academic standards.
This new academic year and new British government should lead to fresh thinking about how to finance British academia, which is one of the most important drivers of social mobility, of wealth generation and of a more thoughtful society, as well as being a flagship of the UK’s soft power. However, what is also required is a new pact between academia and society that each must serve the other in a sustainable and affordable manner, facilitating the way forward for both homegrown and international students to prosper and excel. It will not happen without investment in our higher education and it will not come to fruition if universities are reluctant to reform in order to meet the huge societal and technological changes the world is going through today.
• Yossi Mekelberg is a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg