Higher Education in the UK

Abstract

On the basis of the theoretical template of universities in society, this chapter outlines the evolution of higher education in the UK. The chapter shows the way in which British universities have been shaped in the interplay between academic, political and economic forces in recent decades, and how the adopted model of university governance has exposed them to vulnerabilities that ensue in periods of rapid ruptures in society. The chapter pays particular attention to the responses that have unfolded to the COVID-19 pandemic but also more generally to how universities have balanced the orientation to global templates with that of societal expectations.

The UK has some of the oldest and top-rated universities in the world. The University of Oxford, for example, was founded in 1096 and has sat on top of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Ranking¹ for the last five years. But the sector is more diverse and complex than that caricature betrays. There are excellent ‘new’ universities, for example the University of Lincoln, founded in 1996, was named as the Modern University of the Year in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2021. There are also a number of universities that can best be described as being mediocre with low student satisfaction, poor rankings and financial challenges, but clearly these are harder to identify and name.

At the risk of over-simplification, a diverse group of different ‘mission groups’ illustrates the breadth and depth of the sector:

• The Russell Group (named after the hotel where it was formed) is a self-selected club of research intensive universities that would claim to be the elite institutions in the UK (largely driven by their research excellence and consequential high placement in global league tables).²

• The MillionPlus is a coalition of post-1992 universities positioning itself as the ‘association of modern universities’, 1992 being the time when the sector was deregulated allowing former polytechnics to become universities. These universities are more focused on their teaching mission than research (and arguably more focused on teaching than the Russell Group).³

• The University Alliance is also a coalition of post-1992 universities but position themselves as being ‘the voice of professional and technical universities’, representing ‘large to mid-sized universities working at the heart of their communities’.⁴

There are other groups and taxonomies—for example there is a Cathedrals Group,⁵ united by their church foundations, so-called red-brick universities that were founded in the nineteenth century loosely connected by their civic mission, and the more recent ‘plate-glass universities’ founded in the 1960s. There are also important geographical variations, with education being a ‘devolved competence’, meaning the Scottish and Welsh governments and the Northern Ireland Assembly have responsibility for universities in their countries, leading to some fundamental differences such as ‘free’ education in Scotland compared to (government-backed) tuition fees and student loans in the rest of the UK.

However, whilst this historical pedigree and diversity may come across as a strength, it is also fair to say that the higher education sector is in the midst of a crisis of confidence that mixes a range of issues and challenges, including financial sustainability, anti-university populism (often led by government), the challenges of Brexit and building back after COVID. But it would be remiss to suggest these challenges have arisen recently. As the former University Minister (now Lord) David Willetts notes, in his book A University Education:

Our history has left England with a system of higher education which is much more unusual than we recognise. It has great strengths yet is responsible for many of the particular challenges facing English education today …. The challenge I wrestled with as minister …. is how to protect their autonomy and strengthen them and their finances whilst opening them up to more challenge and putting them under more pressure to do a better job of educating their students.⁶

This chapter aims to provide a thumbnail sketch of the challenges faced by the higher education system in the UK. Inevitably given the diversity, it does not do justice to the topic, but sets up a broader comparative discussion as to how the public purpose of the university in the UK is evolving and how that is both being disrupted and accelerated by the COVID pandemic.

An Overview of the Key Facts and Figures Associated with the UK HE Sector

Universities UK (which is the trade body representing all UK universities, irrespective of their mission group), notes that in 2018–2019, there were 165 higher education institutes in the UK, educating 2.38 million students (1.8m undergraduate, 1.9m of the overall total from the UK), employing 439,955 staff.⁷

In 2020, nearly a quarter of 18-year-olds from lower HE participation neighbourhoods were accepted into full-time undergraduate degrees, compared to 14% in 2011. Whilst this is a significant increase, and reflects other increases in HE participation rates (former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 1999 target of 50% of 18-year-olds going to university was reached in 2019), it is still the case that large inequities exist in who goes to university. For example, as Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin illustrate in their book, Social Mobility: And Its Enemies, the overall ‘graduation gap’ between rich and poor has actually widened.⁸ The proportion of young people who graduated from universities by the age of 23 increased by 12 percentage points (from 6% in 1981 to 18% in 2013) for the poorest fifth of households compared to a 35-percentage point increase (from 20% to 55%) for the richest fifth of households.

Turning to research, in 2016 ‘the UK represented just 0.9% of global population, 2.7% of R&D expenditure, and 4.1% of researchers, while accounting for 9.9% of downloads, 10.7% of citations and 15.2% of the world’s most highly-cited articles’.⁹ This is an impressive performance which should indeed be celebrated and puts the UK universities as a global leader when it comes to research (as also evidenced by their standing in the global league tables). One long-standing explanation of this performance is the plural funding system, not least in the biomedical and health disciplines, with a strong and vibrant medical research charity sector (including the Wellcome Trust).¹⁰

Interestingly facts and figures on the civic, or social, role of universities do not appear in national summaries of the HE sector in the UK. We do know, however, that shockingly only 38 universities have signed up to the living wage,¹¹ that over half of all students volunteer in some capacity,¹² and that UK universities have reduced their carbon footprint (whilst increasing energy consumption).¹³

From an economic viewpoint the total income from the sector in 2017–2018 was £38.2 billion, with nearly half (£18.9 billion) coming from tuition fees and education contracts, a quarter (£11.3 billion) for research and the rest from endowments, donations, investments and other sources. According to a Universities UK report, in 2014, the sector as a whole contributed an additional c£21.5 billion to GDP, representing 1.2% of the UK’s GDP and supporting just under half a million jobs.

The Pre-COVID Higher Education Environment in the UK

As already noted there were a number of significant challenges facing the UK HE sector before the COVID pandemic disruption. Four of these are highlighted here as they are perhaps most pertinent to the central thesis of this book, namely the emergence of a new type of public university in the post-COVID world. They are: anti-university sentiment, long-term financial sustainability, the civic role of the university and Brexit. Each are briefly discussed below.

Anti-university Sentiment and the New Politics

For a number of years, universities have found themselves in the political limelight resulting, as illustrated in Fig. 2.1, in the negative headlines in tabloid and broadsheet newspapers alike. This in part is in response to the period of populism that is characterising the UK, but is also justified due to the generation-long mismanagement of UK universities.¹⁴

Fig. 2.1

Newspaper headlines attacking universities in the UK

As the headlines note, there is a toxic mix of issues including: value for money—are students being over-charged for second rate degrees?; fat cat salaries for vice-chancellors—are senior leaders being paid too much, and perhaps more importantly are governance arrangements fit for purpose when it comes to renumeration committees?; concerns around grade inflation—are universities accepting underqualified students to boost numbers or awarding too many high-class degrees? And, of course, Brexit—are universities a ‘EU funded conspiracy’, as one Brexiteer put it.¹⁵

It is easy to dismiss these headlines as being irrational commentary of the populist right-wing, not least given their framing and exaggerations. However that would be a mistake as they threaten the universities’ ‘licence to operate’ with society and need addressing. Indeed, education has increasingly become a predicator of voting intentions in the UK, including in the last general election (in 2019) and the EU referendum (2016), with Conservatives/Leave parties doing better amongst those with lower levels of education, and Labour/Remain parties doing better amongst those with degrees.¹⁶

One immediate consequence of this new politics has been the establishment of a more interventionist regulatory framework that has powers to, for example, require universities to justify senior salaries, demand lower fees for universities that do not admit enough students from disadvantaged backgrounds and fine universities for grade inflation. As discussed below this erosion of institutional autonomy continued in the COVID crisis, when a final rescue package for universities ‘obliged [them] to confirm that they will fully comply with their existing legal duties to secure freedom of speech’ and ‘publish which pay bands the members of their executive board and staff in administrator roles are in … [for] staff earning above £100,000’.¹⁷

Long-term Financial Instability of UK Universities

One of the reasons that UK universities needed financial support during COVID was because of the complex system of cross-subsidies between largely international premium fee students and loss-making research activities. As illustrated in Fig. 2.2, government data shows an annual research deficit of nearly £4 billion, or 44% of research income, which is plugged by international students (‘non-publicly funded teaching’ and other sources). Put simply, a few years ago the Higher Education Policy Institute estimated that each non-EU student contributed more than £8,000 to UK research on average during their degree.¹⁸

Fig. 2.2

TRAC full economic cost surplus/deficit by activity, 2018–2019 (higher education institutions in England and Northern Ireland). (https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/fa2edd32-13b7-4d52-9761-94522e441e72/annual-trac_2018-19_sector-analysis.pdf)

The issue of having a sustainable financial system for universities can be traced back to the turn of the century, if not beyond. In 1998 the Labour government launched what was then the biggest public-private partnership with the Wellcome Trust (a research charity), called the Joint Infrastructure Fund (JIF). The idea of JIF was to recapitalise the research infrastructure in UK universities after decades of underfunding. The deal with Wellcome was that such underfunding would not be allowed in the future through the introduction of a transparent funding system including ‘full economic costing’.

Full economic cost (or FEC as it is known) has dominated the research funding landscape since. At the time the government said it could not afford FEC so decided to pay only 80%, making a commitment in the 2004–2014 Science and Innovation Framework to move to 100% by the 2010s:

The government will provide resources over subsequent spending review periods to enable research councils to provide close to the full economic costs of their university-conducted research by early in the next decade, thus enabling universities to invest more of their core funding in supporting projects from other external funders and their own self-directed work.

Nearly 20 years later, this commitment was reiterated in the government’s 2020 Research and Development Roadmap, where it stated that it would ‘work with other funders to consider opportunities to fund a greater proportion of the full economic cost of research projects in universities’.¹⁹ Despite these fine words, the data illustrated in Fig. 2.2 reveal that the current level of FEC provided by UK research councils and government departments is 74%.

As discussed below, the consequences of relying on premium fees to support government-funded research have been laid bare during the COVID pandemic, leading to an opportunity to address once-and-for-all this long-term policy challenge that affected the pre-COVID HE environment in the UK.

The Rediscovery of Universities’ Civic Mission

Partly in reaction to the anti-university vibe that has dominated policy discussions on HE in the UK, there has been a rediscovery of the civic mission of the university. ‘Rediscovery’ as many universities—especially the redbrick ones, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham—were founded on such a civic mission.²⁰

Although the language of ‘civic’ is in itself misleading and divisive (as it creates boundaries and ignores virtual communities²¹), it is a signal of the soul searching that has occurred within the university sector as it looks to reaffirm its social contract and licence to operate.²² As a consequence there have been a number of important reports, including Truly Civic, by the Civic Universities Commission²³ and The engaged University, by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) and UCL.²⁴ Put alongside governmental priorities about ‘Levelling up’ the UK (i.e. reduce geographical inequities), there is significant policy focus on the place-making role of universities as ‘anchor institutions’.

All of this is welcomed, but the challenge will be ‘turning words into action’ (the subtitle of the NCCPE/UCL report), given the number of perverse incentives that universities and academic staff face. For example, the aforementioned political and financial trends could actually encourage universities to retreat—that is not to engage with largely socio-political issues that, they could argue, are outside their core mission—or to divert resources to support such activities when finances are constrained. In addition, the academic incentive system is constructed in such a way that recruitment and promotion are often driven by research metrics such as grant income and publications, meaning that academics see the university’s civic mission as a second-order activity that is not prioritised.²⁵

Despite these counter-prevailing trends, it is also the case that a number of UK universities have embraced their civic role. King’s College London, through the language of ‘service’, is one, as is The University of Manchester through its ‘social responsibility’ agenda. Both universities have uniquely positioned these activities as being part of the core academic mission of the university, alongside education and research, and both have ranked in the top ten globally in the Social Impact rankings.²⁶ Manchester, for example, has a new five-year plan for social responsibility that prioritises social inclusion, better health, cultural engagement and environmental sustainability as its key objectives. As stated in the introduction to the plan, ‘Social responsibility addresses the question “what are we good for” rather than “what are we good at”.’²⁷

Getting Brexit Done

It is impossible to discuss the HE policy environment in the UK without mentioning Brexit. The universities found themselves on the wrong side of the EU referendum debate, with the sector, represented through Universities UK (UUK), vice-chancellors and academics, being strong advocates of remaining in the EU. UUK, for example, ran a campaign ‘Universities for Europe’, whilst weeks before the referendum in June 2016, almost every vice-chancellor in the country signed a letter in The Independent (a national newspaper) saying how ‘gravely concerned’ they were about the impact of Brexit.²⁸ In this case, vice-chancellors were speaking on behalf of academics, with one survey suggesting that 90% of university staff voted Remain. ²⁹

The unusually partisan and widely held position was in the universities’ ‘self-interest’ as they received over £1 billion of research funding from the European Commission, hosted just under 150,000 students from the EU (who under EC rules paid domestic not international fees and had access to student loans underwritten by the UK government) and, for the research universities, employed about a fifth of their staff from European countries (under freedom of movement regulations). Putting aside this instrumental argument, the shared values of collaboration, internationalisation, and the global nature of knowledge, knowledge production and knowledge curation, meant that the decision to leave the EU has come as a major emotive shock to the university sector, as well as being a threat to their pre-referendum business and operational model.

Once the referendum was settled, policy attention shifted to mitigation strategies through either influencing a ‘deal’ or by creating alternative instruments to support universities in the UK. Broadly speaking these fell into three areas—student recruitment, staff recruitment and research funding—which were settled in an 11th hour trade agreement between Britain and the European Union on Christmas Eve 2020 (with it coming into force eight days later on the 1st of January 2021).

From a research funding perspective, there was much relief that UK-based researchers will continue to be able to take part in Horizon Europe—the EU flagship programme. This came as a bit of a surprise as the ‘mood music’ prior to the agreement suggested that the UK government had ruled this out. However, as a result UK researchers can continue to apply for and collaborate on this €85-billion programme which, understandably, was warmly welcomed across the sector. For example, Vivienne Stern, the Director of Universities UK International, described the outcome as ‘fantastic news for the scientific community on both sides of the channel’.³⁰

On the other hand, there was great disappointment that an agreement was not reached on the Erasmus+ student exchange programme, which supported EU citizens to study abroad for part of their university course. The UK government has indicated that this will be replaced by a new Turing Scheme with a more global focus. However the replacement scheme leaves an unpleasant smell of social engineering with an apparent focus on the ‘anglosphere’, attempting to undermine a generation-long growth of ‘European families’. Twitter was full of examples of ‘Erasmus kids’ where their parents had met as students through the exchange programme and had gone on to form families (to declare a conflict, and perhaps my biased commentary, my children fall into this category). Related to this isolationism was the ending of freedom of movement and the introduction of a new immigration system. Under this new scheme, EU academics now have to apply for work visas through a points-based system. Under this new scheme they will have no preferential treatment, being considered alongside academics from the rest of the world.

The long-term implications of Brexit on UK universities are difficult to predict, but given the global, outward nature of universities it is hard not to conclude that it is likely to have a negative effect, and at best neutral. It is very hard to envisage a long-term scenario where UK universities would be better off than if the UK had remained in the EU.

How UK Universities Responded to the COVID Pandemic

With these and other long-term policy issues swirling in the background, the COVID pandemic was widely seen as an existential threat to UK universities when the first national lockdown was called on 23 March 2020. There were dire warnings that universities would go bust without government support, due to the reliance on international students to balance their books and the assumption that the market would disappear for the academic year 2020/2021 and beyond. In July 2020, the well-respected Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that the long-run losses to UK universities due to COVID would total about £11 billion, or 29% of the sector’s annual income.³¹ As the report notes, ‘[t]he biggest losses will likely stem from falls in international student enrolments (between £1.4 billion and £4.3 billion, with a central estimate of £2.8 billion) and increases in the deficits of university-sponsored pension schemes, which universities will eventually need to cover (up to £7.6 billion, with a central estimate of £3.8 billion)’. They concluded that, under their central scenario, 13 universities would in effect go bust without a government bailout or debt restructuring.

However, because of the political alienation of universities, reinforced it has to be said by being on the wrong side of the EU referendum result, it was not surprising that the government was very cool about supporting these autonomous institutions. They did step forward with a package called Sustaining University Research Expertise Fund (SURE), that included favourable loans (and in some cases grants) linked to increased research deficits associated with actual declines in international student numbers. It is also worth noting that universities could also access more generic financial support schemes, such as the government-funded furlough scheme, which allowed them to reduce their labour costs when the country and regions went into different types of lockdowns.

To a degree the cool response from the government was prudent, with the anticipated decline in student numbers, and specifically premium-fee international students, not materialising. The actual intake for the academic year 2020/2021 was an all-time record. The number of UK domiciled students increased by 4% (due in part to a COVID-related fiasco and government U-turn on A-level results—the exams required for university entrance—leading to significant grade inflation meaning more students met their grade requirements) but perhaps more surprising was the increase in non-EU international students (42,930 compared to 40,120 in 2019). Although this was offset to a degree with a decline in the number of students from the EU, which dropped from 30,050 in 2019 to 28,440 in 2020.³²

Despite this relatively positive financial outcome, it cannot be overstated how uncertain the six months between March and September were for university staff (as captured in part in the next section on COVID stories). There was a widespread assumption that there would be mass redundancies in the sector—affecting both academics and professional staff—with the understandable concern and angst being widely reported in the trade press, blog sites and on social media. It is thus all the more surprising, against this backdrop of deep personal concern, how so many in the university sector—students, academics, professional staff, leadership—leant into the crisis. Universities in the UK (as elsewhere) made extraordinary efforts to fight the virus—testing existing medicines, developing novel vaccines, creating apps for population health surveillance, building new, easy-to-manufacture ventilators—as well as supporting their local communities through the redeployment of clinical staff, student volunteering, providing food parcels, bridging grants to local small businesses and non-profits, and protective equipment such as gloves, masks and gowns to community partners.

The counterfactual argument of how the UK would have responded to COVID without the support of the universities is a depressing but worthwhile thought experiment. It is unlikely that the AstraZeneca-Oxford University vaccine would have been developed, let alone at break-neck speed, without the long-established and world-leading Jenner Institute. It is unlikely that the spread of the virus would have been fully understood without the development of the ZOE symptoms app, in partnership with academics from King’s College London, or the Imperial College-IPSOS Mori React study. It is unlikely that the effectiveness of the corticosteroid dexamethasone in reducing mortality for those with severe COVID would be known without the RECOVERY trial, again led by a team at Oxford University.³³

All of which illustrates the value of university-led research. However, it is also important to acknowledge the extraordinary pivot that UK universities made in moving to online and blended education. The timing of the first lockdown in March was somewhat fortuitous as it occurred just before the Easter break with the next (summer) term largely being devoted to revision and exams. Nevertheless, in a matter of days lecturers moved to delivering courses on Zoom (and equivalents) for the final few weeks of the Easter term, and then over the summer developed more sophisticated curricula for both online and blended learning. Given the resistance that existed pre-COVID to the adoption of such technologies, this shift in modality may be one of the lasting impacts of the pandemic on higher education. That said, it is also the case that legitimate concerns have been raised about teaching quality, value for money (under the often misguided assumption that online teaching is cheaper), and the broader student experience.

Post-COVID HE System

An optimistic viewpoint would be that the COVID pandemic has demonstrated the value of universities, and their surprising nimbleness in responding to the teaching, research and civic challenges of 2020, and as such the social contract between these august institutions and broader society will have been repaired and no (further) reform is needed. This would be a naïve and counterproductive stance to take. To a degree the pre-COVID higher education environment described above has, if anything, been amplified by the impact of the pandemic on universities. Navigating the impacts of Brexit and securing long-term financial stability are likely to remain on the policy agenda for the foreseeable future. However, on a more positive note, there may be an opportunity to address the anti-university vibe by embracing and broadening the civic university agenda. Building on the response universities made to the pandemic—and as illustrated in the ‘COVID stories’ in the next section—there is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ‘build back better’ in terms of the social purpose of universities in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the millennium-long history of universities suggests that major reforms occur at these inflection points in society.

As illustrated in this book, this will require wholesale reforms of the mission of the university. The post-COVID higher education institute will need to take a holistic view as to its academic mission—incorporating social responsibility alongside education and research—and within that reorient its mission towards the social good. That is in educating ‘world-ready’ students, in supporting research that makes a difference, and in operating in a way that not only does no harm, but actually delivers good.³⁴ Tangible examples of this will be to build on the lessons of COVID in, for example, delivering online education, redeploying research activity on mission-oriented ‘moonshots’ and actively managing academic air travel to reduce carbon footprints. Only by embracing such an agenda will the lessons of COVID be learnt by universities.