Part of the reason British universities feel unloved is that they appear to be too self-absorbed with their own worries and woes to win over the hearts and minds of the people that matter.
Sometimes they come across as oblivious to the much tougher challenges and misery facing other areas in society, such as the literally crumbling school sector and ailing care sector or the plight of local government as central government tightens the financial screws.
It probably doesn’t help when some of those speaking for the sector, like one-time Conservative minister for science and higher education Lord Jo Johnson, suggests universities should be allowed to increase tuition fees for home students (from £9,250 in England) to £12,000 a year – providing they have a gold or silver badge from the Teaching Excellence Framework.
Whatever the merits of the argument that fees for English students have been frozen since 2017 and need to catch-up with inflation, just think how a fee-rise of between £8,000 or £9,000 for three years of study is going to play with the general public in a General Election year?
And just wait for the outrage when undergraduate students who started their courses last September get a job and discover that unless they are top earners they will have to repay their student loans for 40 years, instead of 30 years, and that repayments start when they earn anything over £25,00 per-year, instead of £27,295 as the previous plan required.
Those changes look very much like another sneaky ‘Tory tax’ increase and are deliberately designed so individuals pay more to go to university and the State’s contribution drops from 44p in the pounds to just 19p, as Money Expert Martin Lewis warned last year.
Loans barely cover rent
And let’s not forget current student financial support (loans) barely covers the rent for most students.
My grandson is studying engineering at a Northern Russell Group university and comes home every weekend to keep his job going at the local Marks & Spencer store to make ends meet. His parents help out, too! Imagine what it is like for today’s students in the middle of a cost of living crisis without parental support or a regular job.
I know universities are doing their bit with hardship funds and that many are struggling financially themselves, despite a couple of boom years when they received more international tuition fees than predicted during and just after the Covid pandemic. The UK was one of the few countries open to foreign students, so international students had little choice about where to go if they wanted to study abroad.
Now rival countries are back in fierce competition for globally mobile students and it doesn’t help that the UK government is sending out all the wrong negative messages about foreign students adding to immigration and the Conservatives being desperate to bring down net migration, which hit 745,000 in 2022.
Many university vice-chancellors have already hit the panic button. Clearly they didn’t put enough away for a rainy day while the sun was shining and we’re now in the midst of job cuts and the axing of less popular, but important, subjects such as modern languages.
Jumping overboard
Some university leaders are jumping overboard and announcing their “retirements” as the storm clouds gather, with academic union general secretary Jo Grady accusing Kent’s vice-chancellor Karen Cox of looking like “an arsonist trying to flee the scene” after announcing “a bonfire of undergraduate courses”.
It is clearly high time for the university sector to have a rethink about it can win some friends in high places, including as many as it can in what many expect will be a Labour government after the General Election.
University chiefs too often seem to talk among themselves when the going gets rough and the debate turns to things they don’t like, such as controlling migration.
They are just so defensive and unwilling to engage with critics!
Is university worth it?
A good example was the recent BBC programme, Is University Really Worth It? in which comedian Geoff Norcott weighed-up whether it was worth saving so that his son, “Little Geoff”, could go to uni when the time comes, or whether he should just buy a new car that he desperately needs. He decided the car would be a better bet.
The only university boss willing to defend going to university was the out-going vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, Professor Chris Husbands, and you could argue he had nothing much to lose.
One of the biggest issues facing UK higher education is how to stop the Tories playing on the immigration fears of those voters who are abandoning the Conservatives for the more populist Reform Party and preventing universities from getting any more blame for mass migration by recruiting more and more international students.
Graduate Route review
Never mind, that an earlier version of the Conservative administration asked universities to recruit more students, especially from India and Nigeria, or that it was the Tories that reinstated the post-study Graduate Route, which allows foreign students to stay in the UK for two years after graduating.
The Graduate Route proved an outstanding success, but it was so loosely drafted that it doesn’t set any salary thresholds, or indeed any need to actually find work.
Now, it under review by the Home Office’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), who earlier this year completed a rapid review of care workers. This led to the minimum salary for care workers coming to the UK to work increasing from £20,960 to £23,200. The minimum pay for roles not eligible for the health and care worker visa but on the Immigration Salary List was also increased to £30,960 (Previously this was £20,960).
Other skilled workers coming to the UK for employment must now earn £38,700, which puts them out of reach for junior researchers from abroad.
Putting off foreign students
All of these moves are already putting off foreign students, who from the start of 2024 can no longer bring family with them if they are doing a one-year taught masters’ degree.
Numbers of overseas postgraduate students for the January intake plummeted and experts predict the number of international students in the UK will fall back under the 600,000-target in 2024.
Before that, the MAC review of the Graduate Route is expected to report its findings on 14 May and the latest net migration figures are due out around the same time, together with the much delayed 2022-23 figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) should finally be published, which I think might push up the number of international students even higher than when they were last published and hit 679,970 for 2021/22. That was much higher than the government target of 600,000 by 2030 in its 2019 international education strategy.
Predict ministers like Home Secretary James Cleverly saying all this justifies the government getting tougher to bring immigration under control – never mind the loss of sky-high international tuition fees, which are keeping many UK universities financially afloat and helping to subsidise home students and research activities.
It is going to be a long hot summer for UK higher education. Roll on the General Election!
Also see:
- My first blog of the year, ‘Tories make migration and foreign students election issue’
- ‘Indian students fight to protect post-study Graduate Route’, University World News
- ‘Things Can Only Get Better. Eventually’ by Nottingham University’s Registrar Paul Greatrix
Main image: Expressing the international student voice, London Higher and Middlesex University
