The rise and fall of the ivory tower

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

The UK’s higher-education sector is in crisis, with 40 per cent of universities and other higher-education institutions expected to run a loss this financial year. Fewer 18-year-olds are electing to go to university. Courses are closing, academic redundancies are on the rise, students are dissatisfied, staff are demoralised, bureaucracy is increasing, and, if you believe the hype, standards are falling. More universities are at risk of bankruptcy.

Should we be bovvered?

Figures produced on behalf of Universities UK claim the sector is worth £116 billion to the economy, supporting more than three quarters of a million jobs, of which nearly half (382,500) are indirect, through businesses that benefit from the economic stimulus universities create. The fallout of a financial meltdown could be considerable.

But some commentators think it may be time for a shake-out of a bloated sector in order to move to a slimmed-down educational offering. University for the brightest and best, but not for the rest?

What is causing the perceived imminent collapse of the UK’s educational establishment? One factor may be students voting with their feet as a post-Covid reaction to the way that they were treated: locked down, online and isolated. Another concern is the high cost of higher education – with students paying £9,250 per year, but some only receiving one or two lectures a week. Then there’s the thorny issue of ‘useless’ degrees. Students have long been promised better paid jobs by getting a vocational degree. But is it a myth that unis can solve the skills crisis, while undermining the academic purpose of higher education as an outcome?

Perhaps the cause is that lecturers’ wages are too high because of trade unions’ excessive demands – or maybe it is the exorbitant salaries paid to vice-chancellors and their army of functionaries. And there is disquiet with standards, either from curricula that are now perceived as more concerned with expounding political viewpoints than teaching critically neutral subject matter, or because grade inflation has brought universities into disrepute. Inevitably, some point to Brexit as the problem. After all, foreign students have long been encouraged to come and fill the funding gap, paying upwards of £30,000 in annual fees.

Will the new Labour government be able to turn things around? Is this an inevitable corrective for a sector that expanded too far – or are we in danger of losing valuable departments, institutions and educational opportunities? And what about the impact on local economies if student numbers fall?

SPEAKERS
Jennie Bristow
reader in sociology, Canterbury Christ Church University; author, The Corona Generation: coming of age in a crisis and Growing up in Lockdown

Maeve Halligan
student; musician; member, The Hooligans; student representative, Academic for Academic Freedom (AFAF)

Dr Neil Thin
author; honorary research fellow, social and political science, University of Edinburgh; former director of teaching, SPS Undergraduate School

CHAIR
Austin Williams
director, Future Cities Project; honorary research fellow, XJTLU, Suzhou, China; author, China’s Urban Revolution; series editor, Five Critical Essays.