A crisis of their own making: Covid-19 and the pressure on Higher Education in the UK

Since the Conservatives returned to power in 2010, the ‘free market’ has also been increasingly introduced into Higher Education (HE) in the UK. A hike in tuition fees to £9000 per year as the dominant way of financing the sector plus the removal of the CAP, allowing universities to recruit as many students as they want, has fundamentally transformed HE. In this blog post, I will argue that it has also prepared the grounds for the current crisis with many British universities facing large shortfalls in income and potentially bankruptcy (The Guardian, 6 July 2020). 

In order to remain competitive in this struggle for students, universities changed their strategies. On one hand, they invested heavily in new infrastructure projects in order to be attractive to future students. In 2013-2014, UK universities spent £2.5 billion in infrastructure projects (The Guardian, 22 September 2016), often financed by risky loans from private financial markets. The focus on infrastructure projects came at the expense of investment in staff. Salary cuts in real terms with annual increases below inflation levels, ongoing downward pressure on pensions and increasing casualization have characterised the sector for years. As the University and College Union (UCU) reported in 2019, 37,000 teachers are on fixed-term contracts, often hourly paid and a further 71,000 teachers are employed as ‘atypical academics’, again with many of them paid on an hourly basis (UCU 2019: 3).

 

What seemed to have worked, however, for several years also thanks to a generally good reputation of HE in the UK, is now unravelling fast during the pandemic. With international borders closing during spring 2020, it was first overseas students who decided that they would not come to study in the UK in Autumn 2020. This fall in high fee-paying overseas students led to first job cuts in many Universities. At my own employer the University of Nottingham alone, between 400 and 500 staff members were sent into ‘voluntary’ redundancy in July 2020 to make up for the predicted shortfall in income.

 

Additionally, many universities committed themselves early on to face-to-face teaching in a clear move to remain competitive on what was left of the ‘student market’, mainly consisting of home and EU students. Offering students, however, a close to normal University experience was a risky undertaking, as becomes clear now, when we face the second wave of coronavirus infections. Not only have universities contributed significantly to drastic local hikes in coronavirus infection rates by bringing thousands of students close together in university student halls, they also find it increasingly difficult to argue that their arrangements for study reflect the real deal justifying full tuition fees. With contact hours cut in less than ideal circumstances and students having to spend periods of self-isolation on their own in student halls, criticisms by students and parents are mounting.

 

Asking students to spend large sums of money for their education has turned them into consumers and as consumers they behave. More and more students demand to be allowed to go home, study online and be reimbursed for their accommodation fees. Increasing calls on a tuition fees rebate considering the unusual delivery of teaching add further pressure on University finances. While the government refuses to provide additional finances for the sector, all it is willing to do is to allow universities to remain open during the second lockdown in England starting on 5 November.

 

All the government does is to enable universities to continue with their charade of ‘business as usual’. What is clear, however, is that if the calls for reimbursement of accommodation fees and/or a rebate of tuition fees are successful, more universities will have to enact painful cuts, some may even go under. Current management, whose careers are often based on having implemented the government’s marketization strategy, are at a loss when it comes to finding alternative solutions. Having internalised the free market ‘benefits’ of competition, they are unable to see any alternative way.

 

HE in the UK used to have an excellent international reputation. The shift towards the market combined with the pandemic is seriously hollowing out the sector. It may take years and a significant change in policy towards a proper publicly funded system for HE to recover from this double-shock.

Andreas Bieler

Professor of Political Economy

University of Nottingham/UK

Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk

Personal website: http://andreasbieler.net

4 November 2020