“I plan to keep clear of politics and this is explicitly a technocratic perspective on higher education (HE) policy and how universities should respond.”
Political Scientist here: this plan of yours is logically impossible - there is no policy without the politics.
I might humbly submit that university leaders’ collective failure to understand this is at the root of the problems the sector is in. For such an important UK industry, universities have long been woeful both individually and collectively at the political tasks that are essential to secure their interests, and as a result have become useful punching bags for government.
Where financial services has managed to socialise its risks and privatise its profits by narrating itself as the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy (it is not), universities have allowed themselves to be regarded as a public service by the public, regulated like one by government, including becoming responsible for providing other public services such as mental health support, but with its revenues and risks privatised.
Fair enough. I should have said 'narrow politics'. Though in my defence ... I have straightforwardly published here a 'manifesto' that can scarcely be said to pull too many punches!
And there’s not much I’d disagree with in that manifesto. But before the case can be made, universities have to do something more fundamental, which is to craft a narrative around the importance of the sector which captures the public. At the moment universities in the eyes of the public (and media) are a number of contradictory things: elitist and ‘micky mouse’, old fashioned and woke, a necessity for young people or a pointless racking up of debt, strategically crucial to the economic and geopolitical competitiveness or vaingloriously obsessed with marginalia.
The government - in my view wrongly - is not going to make the case for universities. Universities have to make the case to government, by reimagining their status with the public, both locally within their communities and strategically in the national political discourse. What’s happening in the US represents a real opportunity to have that conversation, but university leaders need to coalesce around a strategy and then proactively get out there - in the Mail and the Express and the Telegraph I’m afraid - and shape the narrative.
I very much agree with this. To construct the narrative however we need a broader sectoral recognition of the need for change … this is the first step.
Very interesting. Agree with most (not on the OfS - it may need reform, for sure, but HE definitely needs a regulator), especially on the unfeasibility of an elite model for a system of mass education, and the excessive fragmentation of HE at present. Relating to ‘the voices calling to focus research in a small range of institutions or to reinstate the binary divide are backward-looking and unrealistic’ - certainly (and I also know of plenty of awful snobbery in the RG, for example one privileged academic who told another from a working class background that she shouldn’t expect to be able to get a job in the RG) but the 1992 Act was not the best way to get beyond this. It should be superseded by a new act which makes provision for a wide range of different types of providers, including technical education, and other alternatives that go beyond the university/polytechnic dichotomy. Replacing this with a de facto ‘one size fits all’ model, as I feel the 1992 Act did, was not the solution, and creates unrealistic expectations for both staff and students.
It's hard to disagree with any of the points made, although I think there are limits to efficiency gains from digitisation and centralisation.
I'm supervising some PhD work digitally and it is much more time-consuming and less productive than supervising in person. I imagine when printing was invented university teachers said that it would be the end of in person teaching; people could just read a book. Digitisation of teaching is much the same. Good quality on-line education is expensive to produce so it is only economic to create a few units for each subject, and in my experience it doesn't replace the face to face interaction that students come to university for.
Centralisation may be the cause rather than the solution to management problems. For example centralised purchasing seems like a good idea but you have to employ specialised staff, they soon introduce red tape, eg authorisation of suppliers, and they end up being a barrier between the consumers and what they need. As an example, in an institution the centralisated purchasing department bought two years supply or whiteboard markers which it turned out didn't work for more than a day. Centralisation soon leads to duplication. Everyone keeps double records of eg expenditure on research grants because experience teaches them not to trust the centralised accounting function. Applications for research grants have to go through rigorous central oversight that is more difficult than getting the grant.
Centralised functions tend to expand; officers need deputies; new rules are invented; people need to be employed to enforce the rules etc etc. Eg one of my old instituions had 22 qualified accountants on its staff. Other organisations of that size would need about two. Yet the organisation had no meaningful management accounting, and as per Prof Serious's previous article, no idea what teaching and other activities cost, or how much income they generated.
People working in centralised functions tend to view their academic colleagues with suspicion and mistrust. Largely this is because they are remote from what academics do. Most people in centralised functions have no idea what a university is for or what drives academics' work. Mostly it assumed that academics are idle wastrals who will squander resources and shirk their teaching and research unless controlled by the centre's imposition of ever expanding rules and performance indicators.
It gets to the point where members of senior majagement spend most of their time interacting with the centralised bureaucracy and rarely meet academics below the rank of deputy dean.
I'm old enough that I can just remember a time when nearly all admistration was done by three or four people in each faculty who were known to, and socialised with, the academic staff. Deans and deputy vice-cnancellors were appointed for limited terms when they would return to academic duties. Grant holders were trusted to spend their grants wisely.
My solution: halve the number of non-academic posts. It would force decentralisation and cut the costs that bureaucracy imposes on the people who generate the income. In a year a 'bad' central administrator can absorb a person-year of academic time by requests for information and red tape. A 'good' administrator can absorb five person years of academic time.
This comment has gone on for far too long. Edit it or bin it as you decide.
I am very grateful for this response. It reflects, I think, a broadly held view amongst academics. All organisations to a certain extent look back to a 'golden age'. There is some justice in the case of UK universities: we had an 'elite' system; far fewer students; high degrees of professional autonomy; a less demanding base of students - more assured of their futures; limited regulatory oversight; a broadly favourable funding environment; the ability to attract overseas students in a less competed setting; the science, technology, research and innovation were not broadly understood to be key to economic security.
In short - what might have worked - to a certain extent then, will not work now. Nostalgia here plays a large part. I recall the system for its strengths but also its substantial weaknesses. I personally prefer a hybrid model - with some services centralised, some business-partnered, and some localised. I will not set this out in full - it would be an article in its own right.
But here is the rub ... whilst I understand and respect your view I think you need to look 'up and out'. It is not faceless bureaucrats imposing on academics it is rather other academics - just like yourself - and professional services colleagues trying to adapt to a new set of operating realities. These will not change by, in effect, saying it will all be much better if we pretended that things are the same.
On digital I agree with your observations - it will require very significant investment - but the challenge is not simply efficiency but quality at scale.
"Overseas students are one of the UK’s principal and most successful services exports."
I say this as someone who works at a lower tariff institution that pays its way with these students, but I really question how true this really is now. It seems to me that there are legitimate questions to be raised about how good a business international students, particularly at the value end of the market, really are. My view is — often not great!
Lists of universities admitting the most international students show an increasing representation of budget options — Hertfordshire, UEL, BPP, Coventry etc — where the fees are in the £15-17k range. Once you discount the inevitable (offshore) agent commission, these universities see as little as £13-14k in income from these students. The Policy Exchange report recently which found an implied overseas > domestic subsidy of as low as 2.9k per head broadly checks out in my view. The only way to make money on these courses is to admit a lot of people, with deceptively poor SSRs.
Based on everything I know and see, I think the Universities UK modelling which asserts that non EU students are contributing £96k a head to the UK economy is just wildly improbable. It must be far less than that at my level of the market, and there are considerable externalities, in the form of housing demand and the costs associated with various forms of visa fiddling and welfare.
Everything I see in the sector — think of these bizarre satellite campuses in seedy shops, which RoUK universities are putting up in London to run distance-learning Masters (!) — suggests a system in desperate need of intervention. My own institution has rapidly expanded in size on the back of international recruitment, and is planning to double in size again in five years. The whole sector seems to regard growth at and cost as the only way to stay sustainable. How many millions of low-cost international students can the country really sustain?
I can't see how it can be allowed to go on the way it is, and the government's intention to clamp down on institutions with low completion seems reasonable (albeit bad for me personally). I think a minimum price for international students would also be reasonable.
I've made this point elsewhere, but as an industry the international student trade to me looks increasingly like a slightly bizarre mirror-world version of tourism, with a similarly limited outlook for real economic growth, and many of the same social trade-offs.
This is a most interesting comment and has caused me to think. I am not sure that in the UK we are in a position to look at any form of services export trade and decide it is beneath us! That being said I am uncertain how robust it is and I am certain we should be exploring different models. But ... as I am sure you can see ... if growth (presumably in UK students) and/or overseas students are not the answer I am unclear how you would propose to fund universities short of government intervention and retrenchment in the proportion of young people going to university (which would be extremely unpopular and require the construction of an alternative skills system).
I'm not aware of any university that thinks it can remain sustainable without continuing to grow, often quite rapidly, and largely in international markets. Maybe you know of some counterexamples, but every university I encounter seems to be planning to go on expanding. I guess the question would be, how large can the student population get before the externalities become insupportable? Can it double again? The country is barely building any infrastructure or housing. There will be limit sooner or later and I think the fraying of the social fabric in some places is getting increasingly hard to ignore.
I don't really have a good solution because I don't think it's in the hands of universities, and I don't think the current cross subsidy model will remain sustainable on current trend. When growth in numbers stops, by whatever means, they will need to put the fees up and the government will need to restructure the sector. My feeling is it would be in the interests of universities as whole for the current government to do this, rather than the one we get next.
I will restrict my response to the narrower funding issue, where I feel I have more to contribute. Growth in student numbers was a policy commitment by the government set out in the 2001 Labour Party manifesto (“We will aim to expand higher education, with the ambition of 50 per cent of young adults entering higher education by the end of the decade”). The largest part of the growth (up to 47% participation rate) was achieved within the system of numbers control. In other words the expansion of HE was not unilaterally undertaken by universities but by Labour and Conservative governments alike. The problem now is that scale is the only way to work on a very narrow relative margin but - as I think I can state with authority - achieving this through sectoral consolidation demanding. Growth of the kind you describe may appear the only option.
“I plan to keep clear of politics and this is explicitly a technocratic perspective on higher education (HE) policy and how universities should respond.”
Political Scientist here: this plan of yours is logically impossible - there is no policy without the politics.
I might humbly submit that university leaders’ collective failure to understand this is at the root of the problems the sector is in. For such an important UK industry, universities have long been woeful both individually and collectively at the political tasks that are essential to secure their interests, and as a result have become useful punching bags for government.
Where financial services has managed to socialise its risks and privatise its profits by narrating itself as the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy (it is not), universities have allowed themselves to be regarded as a public service by the public, regulated like one by government, including becoming responsible for providing other public services such as mental health support, but with its revenues and risks privatised.
To fix that, we’re going to need some politics.
Fair enough. I should have said 'narrow politics'. Though in my defence ... I have straightforwardly published here a 'manifesto' that can scarcely be said to pull too many punches!
Well quite ;)
And there’s not much I’d disagree with in that manifesto. But before the case can be made, universities have to do something more fundamental, which is to craft a narrative around the importance of the sector which captures the public. At the moment universities in the eyes of the public (and media) are a number of contradictory things: elitist and ‘micky mouse’, old fashioned and woke, a necessity for young people or a pointless racking up of debt, strategically crucial to the economic and geopolitical competitiveness or vaingloriously obsessed with marginalia.
The government - in my view wrongly - is not going to make the case for universities. Universities have to make the case to government, by reimagining their status with the public, both locally within their communities and strategically in the national political discourse. What’s happening in the US represents a real opportunity to have that conversation, but university leaders need to coalesce around a strategy and then proactively get out there - in the Mail and the Express and the Telegraph I’m afraid - and shape the narrative.
I very much agree with this. To construct the narrative however we need a broader sectoral recognition of the need for change … this is the first step.
Very interesting. Agree with most (not on the OfS - it may need reform, for sure, but HE definitely needs a regulator), especially on the unfeasibility of an elite model for a system of mass education, and the excessive fragmentation of HE at present. Relating to ‘the voices calling to focus research in a small range of institutions or to reinstate the binary divide are backward-looking and unrealistic’ - certainly (and I also know of plenty of awful snobbery in the RG, for example one privileged academic who told another from a working class background that she shouldn’t expect to be able to get a job in the RG) but the 1992 Act was not the best way to get beyond this. It should be superseded by a new act which makes provision for a wide range of different types of providers, including technical education, and other alternatives that go beyond the university/polytechnic dichotomy. Replacing this with a de facto ‘one size fits all’ model, as I feel the 1992 Act did, was not the solution, and creates unrealistic expectations for both staff and students.
It's hard to disagree with any of the points made, although I think there are limits to efficiency gains from digitisation and centralisation.
I'm supervising some PhD work digitally and it is much more time-consuming and less productive than supervising in person. I imagine when printing was invented university teachers said that it would be the end of in person teaching; people could just read a book. Digitisation of teaching is much the same. Good quality on-line education is expensive to produce so it is only economic to create a few units for each subject, and in my experience it doesn't replace the face to face interaction that students come to university for.
Centralisation may be the cause rather than the solution to management problems. For example centralised purchasing seems like a good idea but you have to employ specialised staff, they soon introduce red tape, eg authorisation of suppliers, and they end up being a barrier between the consumers and what they need. As an example, in an institution the centralisated purchasing department bought two years supply or whiteboard markers which it turned out didn't work for more than a day. Centralisation soon leads to duplication. Everyone keeps double records of eg expenditure on research grants because experience teaches them not to trust the centralised accounting function. Applications for research grants have to go through rigorous central oversight that is more difficult than getting the grant.
Centralised functions tend to expand; officers need deputies; new rules are invented; people need to be employed to enforce the rules etc etc. Eg one of my old instituions had 22 qualified accountants on its staff. Other organisations of that size would need about two. Yet the organisation had no meaningful management accounting, and as per Prof Serious's previous article, no idea what teaching and other activities cost, or how much income they generated.
People working in centralised functions tend to view their academic colleagues with suspicion and mistrust. Largely this is because they are remote from what academics do. Most people in centralised functions have no idea what a university is for or what drives academics' work. Mostly it assumed that academics are idle wastrals who will squander resources and shirk their teaching and research unless controlled by the centre's imposition of ever expanding rules and performance indicators.
It gets to the point where members of senior majagement spend most of their time interacting with the centralised bureaucracy and rarely meet academics below the rank of deputy dean.
I'm old enough that I can just remember a time when nearly all admistration was done by three or four people in each faculty who were known to, and socialised with, the academic staff. Deans and deputy vice-cnancellors were appointed for limited terms when they would return to academic duties. Grant holders were trusted to spend their grants wisely.
My solution: halve the number of non-academic posts. It would force decentralisation and cut the costs that bureaucracy imposes on the people who generate the income. In a year a 'bad' central administrator can absorb a person-year of academic time by requests for information and red tape. A 'good' administrator can absorb five person years of academic time.
This comment has gone on for far too long. Edit it or bin it as you decide.
I am very grateful for this response. It reflects, I think, a broadly held view amongst academics. All organisations to a certain extent look back to a 'golden age'. There is some justice in the case of UK universities: we had an 'elite' system; far fewer students; high degrees of professional autonomy; a less demanding base of students - more assured of their futures; limited regulatory oversight; a broadly favourable funding environment; the ability to attract overseas students in a less competed setting; the science, technology, research and innovation were not broadly understood to be key to economic security.
In short - what might have worked - to a certain extent then, will not work now. Nostalgia here plays a large part. I recall the system for its strengths but also its substantial weaknesses. I personally prefer a hybrid model - with some services centralised, some business-partnered, and some localised. I will not set this out in full - it would be an article in its own right.
But here is the rub ... whilst I understand and respect your view I think you need to look 'up and out'. It is not faceless bureaucrats imposing on academics it is rather other academics - just like yourself - and professional services colleagues trying to adapt to a new set of operating realities. These will not change by, in effect, saying it will all be much better if we pretended that things are the same.
On digital I agree with your observations - it will require very significant investment - but the challenge is not simply efficiency but quality at scale.
"Overseas students are one of the UK’s principal and most successful services exports."
I say this as someone who works at a lower tariff institution that pays its way with these students, but I really question how true this really is now. It seems to me that there are legitimate questions to be raised about how good a business international students, particularly at the value end of the market, really are. My view is — often not great!
Lists of universities admitting the most international students show an increasing representation of budget options — Hertfordshire, UEL, BPP, Coventry etc — where the fees are in the £15-17k range. Once you discount the inevitable (offshore) agent commission, these universities see as little as £13-14k in income from these students. The Policy Exchange report recently which found an implied overseas > domestic subsidy of as low as 2.9k per head broadly checks out in my view. The only way to make money on these courses is to admit a lot of people, with deceptively poor SSRs.
Based on everything I know and see, I think the Universities UK modelling which asserts that non EU students are contributing £96k a head to the UK economy is just wildly improbable. It must be far less than that at my level of the market, and there are considerable externalities, in the form of housing demand and the costs associated with various forms of visa fiddling and welfare.
Everything I see in the sector — think of these bizarre satellite campuses in seedy shops, which RoUK universities are putting up in London to run distance-learning Masters (!) — suggests a system in desperate need of intervention. My own institution has rapidly expanded in size on the back of international recruitment, and is planning to double in size again in five years. The whole sector seems to regard growth at and cost as the only way to stay sustainable. How many millions of low-cost international students can the country really sustain?
I can't see how it can be allowed to go on the way it is, and the government's intention to clamp down on institutions with low completion seems reasonable (albeit bad for me personally). I think a minimum price for international students would also be reasonable.
I've made this point elsewhere, but as an industry the international student trade to me looks increasingly like a slightly bizarre mirror-world version of tourism, with a similarly limited outlook for real economic growth, and many of the same social trade-offs.
This is a most interesting comment and has caused me to think. I am not sure that in the UK we are in a position to look at any form of services export trade and decide it is beneath us! That being said I am uncertain how robust it is and I am certain we should be exploring different models. But ... as I am sure you can see ... if growth (presumably in UK students) and/or overseas students are not the answer I am unclear how you would propose to fund universities short of government intervention and retrenchment in the proportion of young people going to university (which would be extremely unpopular and require the construction of an alternative skills system).
Thanks for the reply —
I'm not aware of any university that thinks it can remain sustainable without continuing to grow, often quite rapidly, and largely in international markets. Maybe you know of some counterexamples, but every university I encounter seems to be planning to go on expanding. I guess the question would be, how large can the student population get before the externalities become insupportable? Can it double again? The country is barely building any infrastructure or housing. There will be limit sooner or later and I think the fraying of the social fabric in some places is getting increasingly hard to ignore.
I don't really have a good solution because I don't think it's in the hands of universities, and I don't think the current cross subsidy model will remain sustainable on current trend. When growth in numbers stops, by whatever means, they will need to put the fees up and the government will need to restructure the sector. My feeling is it would be in the interests of universities as whole for the current government to do this, rather than the one we get next.
I will restrict my response to the narrower funding issue, where I feel I have more to contribute. Growth in student numbers was a policy commitment by the government set out in the 2001 Labour Party manifesto (“We will aim to expand higher education, with the ambition of 50 per cent of young adults entering higher education by the end of the decade”). The largest part of the growth (up to 47% participation rate) was achieved within the system of numbers control. In other words the expansion of HE was not unilaterally undertaken by universities but by Labour and Conservative governments alike. The problem now is that scale is the only way to work on a very narrow relative margin but - as I think I can state with authority - achieving this through sectoral consolidation demanding. Growth of the kind you describe may appear the only option.