The concept of marketisation must have seemed a good idea to someone at some point. It’s a shame that it has fallen to higher education to prove the idiocy of capitalism.
Education is not a commodity to be thrown to the winds of market forces, it is a basic right and should be properly funded and supported.
Instead, we saw fees jump to £9,000 a year in 2012, followed in 2015 by the lifting of the cap on how many students a university could recruit. The ‘survival of the fittest’ rationale was blatant - good universities would do well and bad universities would close. This is way too simplistic and takes no account of specialist programmes, local provision and all the expertise built up over years. What happened in reality is the powerful Russell Group universities started hoovering up as many students as they could, this created a race to the bottom in terms of entry requirements as the less elite universities struggled to compete against the big ‘brands’.
To compound the situation, fees have not risen in over 10 years. Now, while no one would argue that fees should go up, it means that universities are operating with 2025 level costs but at 2012 levels of university income.
The fun doesn’t stop there, Brexit has meant that the number of students coming from Europe to study has fallen off a cliff, as overnight the fees trebled. This brings us neatly to the next stroke of genius – Home Office put such rigorous visa requirements in place, that the UK becomes totally unattractive to international students.
Now, the sector is in a financial mess – go figure!
Surely now the government will have to step in to shore up provision and invest in the next generation of graduates? No, according to a recent article [1], the government has gone out to tender to seek consultants to help wind-up failing universities. “The universities regulator has announced a contract of up to £4mn for professional services companies to manage a potential wave of insolvencies, as the sector faces a looming funding crisis”.
Daily we are seeing announcements of staff cuts and departmental closures. The sector is spending a small fortune on voluntary severance and redundancy payments, 2024-25 figures won’t be available for a while, but the sector was clearly troubled in 2023-24, paying out some £195m. There is some interesting analysis within these data, looking at the average settlements per employee:
• Russell Group paid out an average of £13,900 per employee
• UCLAN paid £39,772 per employee
• Leeds Beckett paid £36,917 per employee
What this suggests is that the Russell Group have been shedding lower paid facilities and support staff whereas the others have been cutting from much higher pay grades. Assuming these also include academic staff, this indicates the universities with the bigger payouts are in deeper trouble and thus cutting at the core of their operations (it would be reasonable to imagine that the post-92s will have less assets to draw from to shore up liquidity).
We have seen a slew of universities in England & Wales launch voluntary severance schemes, compulsory redundancies and in the case of the Lampeter campus of the University Wales Trinity St Davids, actual closure. This is particularly poignant as Lampeter, established in 1822 is recognised as the oldest university in Wales, and capitalism has ended its 200-year-old legacy.
In the North of England and Wales, these cuts are felt even more severely. With economies that are already fragile, such cuts, especially in the Humanities, mean that working-class students and communities face ever greater impoverishment.
An interesting outlier in all this is Cardiff University, Wales’s only Russell Group University, they have just announced plans to get rid of 400 academic staff and cut key subjects including nursing and modern languages. Their income in 2023/24 had grown to £649m but their costs reached £680m leaving a deficit of £31m that is unsustainable. So, it seems even the big boys are not immune this time.
Cutting jobs is not the answer. It is a downward spiral that will lead to poorer student experiences, overworked staff, and reduced opportunities for those seeking university level study.
SFEU stands in solidarity with those affected by these cuts and strives to campaign for a more reasoned approach to funding on egalitarian grounds. Our approach, as always, is to unite workers across the big divides in Higher Education; divides that also operate within institutions. While some unions such as UCU have begun campaigns to try to stop the rot, they have had years to do so and a “partnership” approach with management and the employers has clearly failed. In part, this is down to the lack of a greater vision within UCU: we are not looking for “balance” between various interests. Rather, we need a thorough overhaul of what education stands for, what its social use is and what place it should occupy within people’s lives. We also need a more combative form of trade union – we call this syndicalism – that goes beyond social democratic consensus and starts to take back what is rightfully ours.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/8b1bdf4b-9c3c-4205-9a66-20e0ca8ae1ff