The UK is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the funding model for universities is dependent on international students. Changes in the visa regime have made the UK a less appealing country relative to other countries, so international enrollment has fallen. The UK needs to either increase tuition fees to US levels to compensate for the lost income, reverse visa policies to make the country more appealing to international students, or come to terms with the fact that their university system will be many times worse than it used to be.
With the current issues many may not exist in a couple of years. If they have to make money for themselves, but if less students are applying, then there is less income to exist on. Throw in the demand for better pay and it’s a downward spiral that is difficult to stop.
You would be mad to study in the UK as an international student , only to get paid peanuts. Same with any European University. Its either a good university or no use degree
The golden age of the uk is over. It’s time to accept it, I guess.
One of our biggest exports is education. People don’t like thinking that way as they view education as something non commercial.
We as a country earn billions from international students that prop up our system. Scots pay extra tax to fund theirs. Americans pay hundreds of thousands and we beat them regularly in rankings.
Some of them if they cant sustain themselves with international student fees need to return to what they were and in some cases still are – polytechnics and offer vocational courses targeting careers which the UK has shortages in personnel in.
That’s what privatisation do to things, some things cannot be privatised (education, health service, strategic infrastructure and resources). Where money is leading factor it goes to shite in time
“Golden age” – as in holding British students to different academic entry standards to cash in on rich students from abroad?
It was over when the goal became for 50% of people to go. Since then it’s just been going through the motions.
The Golden Age of rinsing naive 18 year olds to take on excessive debt they don’t quite understand and heap on never ending interest on said debt for the next 30 years*
I work in a top level university and have been in the sector 15 years. As with most public institutions, there is a massive overspend on the managerial class and with it, HR costs, pensions etc. Brexit massively impacted attracting global funding that universities came to rely on after government funding was cut. Vanity projects building new lecture halls and conference centres that were completely redundant because of Covid and now most things are online or at least hybrid. Teaching is completely undervalued and its only measure is student satisfaction. Students paying £9k to £20k a year expect a customer service relationship – top grades with little input from them because they’re paying for it. Without excellent teaching, they’re just big research centres, which without funding, they’re nothing. The bread and butter of a university is delivered by staff on fixed term or zero hour sessional contracts on a poor hourly rate. The over reliance on international students at postgraduate taught level is an issue. I often encounter classrooms where no one speaks English well enough to engage and they cheat on their language entry exams and buy assignments from the internet because having a British degree still has currency. This is incredibly isolating for the international students who genuinely want to learn abroad in the UK and for the few UK students on these courses. The bottom line is there was a public spending cut to a once billion pound industry and we are now seeing it’s devastating results. The Conservative government waged a culture war on universities. The arts and humanities and social sciences are founded upon Marxist critique and university graduates are more likely to vote centre to left of the political spectrum, which didn’t guarantee a Tory future.
It’s slightly weird how many people not only love our university system, but also think it’s a good thing to e.g train however many thousands of Chinese engineers. Britain’s modern university system can largely get fucked. Maybe the government should consider saving the top fifteen or so. The rest of them can crumble.
Remove the caps and promote competition! Create a regulatory board for competition. The free market will allocate recourses properly
A model that relies on foreign students is doomed to fail. And it should. Uk universities are due a reform since quite some time
Personally I feel there are too many universities in the UK, I think allowing so many polytechnics and the like to become universities in the early 90s was a big mistake and this is a direct byproduct of it.
So many universities all seeking funding, but because there’s so many of them the funding sources were thinning out.
They went after all the lovely international student money, but now that source is starting to dry up. A lot of universities spent a lot of money to try and attract international students and they’re going to regret that. My old university, Ulster, spent a ridiculous amount of money building a new campus in Belfast because it’s an easier place to attract international students to as opposed to all its other campuses which are basically out in the sticks. It’s no wonder the university is in severe financial troubles.
There are a lot of universities that aren’t really needed, and they should be allowed to faill or at least merge some of them into neighboring universities. Think of the savings in back office and academic staff costs if you did that.
This international student model was doomed to fail and frankly never benefited anyone except the people already making bank at the unis. Swathes of rich Chinese and Indian students come to the U.K. only to not integrate in the social life or even learn English. So many universities entirely hollowed out their own cultures and the towns they’re situated in. There’s also just so many fake scams and emails written in Chinese to promote essay writing services.
It’s funny how the concept of money was a human invented construct which now prevents us from achieving so much which is essentially free. In this example, we are saying someone can’t tell someone else about something they know more about because of the monetary value we’ve placed on it. They could be told the information but we’re not going to anymore. Crazy to think about.
Why can’t we go back to the old way of things in which going to uni was something that was prestigious and not something you need to tick a box just to get a sub £35k job?
I understand that some jobs require a formal qualification such as a doctor or a lawyer etc but most jobs that “require” a degree would be perfectly fine with some sort of inhouse training or apprenticeship.
I get there was previously a level of elitism and classism with uni but the modern alternative of having working class kids riddled with debt to earn somewhere in the region of the median salary is not any better.
The system only benefits employers
This will (rightly or wrongly) have a massive impact on places which are heavily dependent on the Universities.
Not to mention a lot of them being the biggest employers in some of these areas. I lived in an area where this is the case (Lincoln).
Obviously places will have to adapt in the event of failure, but a lot of them have banked on cashing in on the student economy.
We need to stop being a short-term, bean-counter economy and start funding these institutions ‘at a loss,’ knowing that in the long term it will pay off. They should at least fund the degrees that address the skills gap.
Who cares if we make a loss anyway? Any UK citizen getting a degree and achieving something in the world is far better than saving £20 or whatever on tax, which we seem obsessed with as a country. We’ve had these cuts, and they have done nothing for us. After all these years, the UK is a far less hopeful place than I remember growing up.
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The UK is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the funding model for universities is dependent on international students. Changes in the visa regime have made the UK a less appealing country relative to other countries, so international enrollment has fallen. The UK needs to either increase tuition fees to US levels to compensate for the lost income, reverse visa policies to make the country more appealing to international students, or come to terms with the fact that their university system will be many times worse than it used to be.
With the current issues many may not exist in a couple of years. If they have to make money for themselves, but if less students are applying, then there is less income to exist on. Throw in the demand for better pay and it’s a downward spiral that is difficult to stop.
You would be mad to study in the UK as an international student , only to get paid peanuts. Same with any European University. Its either a good university or no use degree
The golden age of the uk is over. It’s time to accept it, I guess.
One of our biggest exports is education. People don’t like thinking that way as they view education as something non commercial.
We as a country earn billions from international students that prop up our system. Scots pay extra tax to fund theirs. Americans pay hundreds of thousands and we beat them regularly in rankings.
Some of them if they cant sustain themselves with international student fees need to return to what they were and in some cases still are – polytechnics and offer vocational courses targeting careers which the UK has shortages in personnel in.
That’s what privatisation do to things, some things cannot be privatised (education, health service, strategic infrastructure and resources). Where money is leading factor it goes to shite in time
“Golden age” – as in holding British students to different academic entry standards to cash in on rich students from abroad?
It was over when the goal became for 50% of people to go. Since then it’s just been going through the motions.
The Golden Age of rinsing naive 18 year olds to take on excessive debt they don’t quite understand and heap on never ending interest on said debt for the next 30 years*
I work in a top level university and have been in the sector 15 years. As with most public institutions, there is a massive overspend on the managerial class and with it, HR costs, pensions etc. Brexit massively impacted attracting global funding that universities came to rely on after government funding was cut. Vanity projects building new lecture halls and conference centres that were completely redundant because of Covid and now most things are online or at least hybrid. Teaching is completely undervalued and its only measure is student satisfaction. Students paying £9k to £20k a year expect a customer service relationship – top grades with little input from them because they’re paying for it. Without excellent teaching, they’re just big research centres, which without funding, they’re nothing. The bread and butter of a university is delivered by staff on fixed term or zero hour sessional contracts on a poor hourly rate. The over reliance on international students at postgraduate taught level is an issue. I often encounter classrooms where no one speaks English well enough to engage and they cheat on their language entry exams and buy assignments from the internet because having a British degree still has currency. This is incredibly isolating for the international students who genuinely want to learn abroad in the UK and for the few UK students on these courses. The bottom line is there was a public spending cut to a once billion pound industry and we are now seeing it’s devastating results. The Conservative government waged a culture war on universities. The arts and humanities and social sciences are founded upon Marxist critique and university graduates are more likely to vote centre to left of the political spectrum, which didn’t guarantee a Tory future.
It’s slightly weird how many people not only love our university system, but also think it’s a good thing to e.g train however many thousands of Chinese engineers. Britain’s modern university system can largely get fucked. Maybe the government should consider saving the top fifteen or so. The rest of them can crumble.
Remove the caps and promote competition! Create a regulatory board for competition. The free market will allocate recourses properly
A model that relies on foreign students is doomed to fail. And it should.
Uk universities are due a reform since quite some time
Personally I feel there are too many universities in the UK, I think allowing so many polytechnics and the like to become universities in the early 90s was a big mistake and this is a direct byproduct of it.
So many universities all seeking funding, but because there’s so many of them the funding sources were thinning out.
They went after all the lovely international student money, but now that source is starting to dry up. A lot of universities spent a lot of money to try and attract international students and they’re going to regret that. My old university, Ulster, spent a ridiculous amount of money building a new campus in Belfast because it’s an easier place to attract international students to as opposed to all its other campuses which are basically out in the sticks. It’s no wonder the university is in severe financial troubles.
There are a lot of universities that aren’t really needed, and they should be allowed to faill or at least merge some of them into neighboring universities. Think of the savings in back office and academic staff costs if you did that.
This international student model was doomed to fail and frankly never benefited anyone except the people already making bank at the unis. Swathes of rich Chinese and Indian students come to the U.K. only to not integrate in the social life or even learn English. So many universities entirely hollowed out their own cultures and the towns they’re situated in. There’s also just so many fake scams and emails written in Chinese to promote essay writing services.
It’s funny how the concept of money was a human invented construct which now prevents us from achieving so much which is essentially free. In this example, we are saying someone can’t tell someone else about something they know more about because of the monetary value we’ve placed on it. They could be told the information but we’re not going to anymore. Crazy to think about.
Why can’t we go back to the old way of things in which going to uni was something that was prestigious and not something you need to tick a box just to get a sub £35k job?
I understand that some jobs require a formal qualification such as a doctor or a lawyer etc but most jobs that “require” a degree would be perfectly fine with some sort of inhouse training or apprenticeship.
I get there was previously a level of elitism and classism with uni but the modern alternative of having working class kids riddled with debt to earn somewhere in the region of the median salary is not any better.
The system only benefits employers
This will (rightly or wrongly) have a massive impact on places which are heavily dependent on the Universities.
Not to mention a lot of them being the biggest employers in some of these areas. I lived in an area where this is the case (Lincoln).
Obviously places will have to adapt in the event of failure, but a lot of them have banked on cashing in on the student economy.
We need to stop being a short-term, bean-counter economy and start funding these institutions ‘at a loss,’ knowing that in the long term it will pay off. They should at least fund the degrees that address the skills gap.
Who cares if we make a loss anyway? Any UK citizen getting a degree and achieving something in the world is far better than saving £20 or whatever on tax, which we seem obsessed with as a country. We’ve had these cuts, and they have done nothing for us. After all these years, the UK is a far less hopeful place than I remember growing up.