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@nottingham.ac.uk
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