How can we make UK higher education sustainable? - timeshighereducation.com, 25.02.2016

Universities need a new funding model, say Andrei E. Ruckenstein, Mark E. Smith and Nicola C. Owen, who want academics to take the lead in tackling the problem.

When our institution, Lancaster University, was founded during the “plate-glass” expansion of the 1960s, it was part of a UK higher education system that catered to an elite 4 per cent of the eligible population. Virtually all costs, for both teaching and research, were covered by the government, and it was unquestioned that all university teaching should expose students to the latest thinking across disciplines, best expounded by active academic researchers.

Only 50 years later, 45 per cent of the eligible UK cohort attends university, while only between 25 and 30 per cent of the operating costs of higher education institutions are covered by public funds, and funding for research and tuition is not keeping up with inflation.

This state of affairs is the result of an increase in demand for undergraduate education that continued well beyond the 1960s, especially after the removal of the binary system in 1992. Such expansion implies levels of public investment that are difficult to justify given the huge national public sector deficit that has steadily grown since the 2008 financial crisis. When you also factor in the government’s ideological commitment to market-driven mechanisms, it is not surprising that austerity measures were followed by a large increase in student fees and the removal of student number caps; these transfer much more of the burden of managing increasingly constrained and uncertain budgets from the government on to universities and their students.

We certainly do not argue for a return to an elitist system; Lancaster’s widening participation record should leave no doubt as to our commitment to making higher education open to all those who can take advantage of it. However, we do believe that it is time for an honest and open debate about how meeting the increased demand for knowledge and skills can be squared with a sustainable funding model. Many of the issues are relevant to the global higher education landscape, and there are important international perspectives to a broader discussion of the UK context (in particular, reflections from the US have helped to form our thinking). But in what follows we focus on the domestic challenges, which we believe are particularly urgent at this point in time.

Most conversations about the massification and marketisation of UK higher education focus on the increasing reliance of universities’ budgets on tuition fees and concerns around the cost to the public purse of the projected growth of loan defaults (to which the government responded in November’s Spending Review by somewhat controversially freezing the repayment threshold). Moreover, the new perception of students as paying customers is heightening public scrutiny of the return on the investment that society is making in higher education. In particular, concerns about graduate employability in some specialised sectors raise questions about the relevance of what our students learn to prepare them for the rapidly changing workplace.

But the deeper problem that challenges research universities is that the expansion of higher education has come hand in hand with a commensurate increase in research activity that, in the context of our current system, is not financially sustainable. This critical fact is generally not appreciated outside academic circles, and is sometimes misunderstood even within them. According to the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s latest Financial Health of the Higher Education Sector report, the plain fact is this: in 2013‑14, there was an £883 million gap between the costs that English universities incurred – much of it research costs – and the amount that they were able to recover. The underlying trends identified in the report suggest that this deficit is likely only to widen over the next few years.

In an age in which the competition for top researchers is increasing and regulatory and reporting burdens are growing, the full costs of research can be met only by recruiting more full-fee-paying students. This major source of tension between research and teaching in research universities raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of the system. While a contribution from tuition fees to the research mission is entirely justifiable in a research-led teaching environment, there is increasing pressure in the opposite direction: to spend tuition fees on only the most directly targeted services and facilities for teaching.

25. Feb. 2016
25. Feb. 2016