The funding crisis in British universities was manufactured by both Tory and Labour governments
Universities across Britain are at crisis point. They are announcing budget deficits and responding by slashing jobs and courses.
If they go ahead, these cuts will slam the doors shut for working class people looking to pursue higher education. They are an assault on the working class and their hopes and aspirations.
For some universities, the risk is existential. The Times newspaper reported that the University of Dundee in Scotland “may not exist in two years”. The University recently announced that it was preparing to cut about 20 percent of the workforce in effort to make up a £35 million deficit.
The web page “UK HE shrinking” says there are nearly 100 institutions with plans for restructures and redundancies.
University managements have pointed the blame at the fall in the numbers of international students.
They have been allowed to charge eye-watering fees to these students. But when the Tory government tightened up border controls this squeezed the sector’s income. Some universities are in genuine financial difficulty. Others are using the crisis as an excuse to slim down education and cut courses that are not seen as profitable.
UCU union member Marc Peacock from Goldsmiths University told Socialist Worker, “Fundamentally the funding model is broken. It’s not mismanagement. This is what they wanted to do to universities—it’s ideologically motivated.”
Historically universities served as training grounds for the aristocracy and upper middle classes. But they still played a role in understanding the mechanics of society. Radical ideas were tolerated.
Both the Tories and Labour have tried to harness the power of universities to benefit capitalism. They did this to benefit British businesses. But they also needed greater numbers of ordinary people to go to university.
At the heart of the problem is a failing model of marketisation. The government expects universities to act like businesses with students as consumers
In 1992 the Conservatives abolished the two-tier model that distinguished between elite universities and polytechnics. They adopted an agenda of “widening participation” of a more diverse group of students.
The cuts will roll back these gains. Now Edinburgh University boss Peter Mathieson is demanding a “radical rewiring” of the university with fewer courses for students.
Bosses at Kingston University want to close down the humanities department including a world famous centre for philosophy. Kingston UCU member Nicola Field told Socialist Worker, “It’s an attack on the right of working class students to engage critically with society and institutions and to contribute to society critically.”
Nicola said that staff need time to develop quality teaching that challenges students. Instead, teaching is being replaced by “courses that corral students into business-style corporate thinking”.
University of Chichester professor Hakim Adi was made redundant in 2023. Bosses closed down the unique course he managed, a masters of research in the history of Africa and the African diaspora. It was a popular course. But bosses said it was not “economically viable”.
Hakim told Socialist Worker at the time, “Universities are being run like businesses. They see a course like ours and think, ‘Well African history is niche and unnecessary. Scrapping it can save us some money.’”
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has attacked “woke” lecturers. The Tories have little interest in teaching students anti-racist history or philosophy.
Labour education secretary Bridget Phillipson hasn’t been as crude. But she has demanded universities become more “efficient” and do more to align themselves with the government’s agenda for economic growth.
In practice this means more focus on courses in business and management, alongside the STEM subjects—Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths—to fit Labour’s agenda of being an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and tech superpower.
Marc said, “If you look at arts and humanities it’s a reversal of any progress that has been made over the last few decades in accessibility of these courses. They are socially enriching courses. It’s great that people study to be scientists. But not everyone wants to do that. Society would be quite dull if everyone was an engineer.”
Phillipson still talks about helping “everyone access higher education”. But the extent of the funding crisis means her words ring hollow.
At the heart of the problem is a failing model of marketisation. The government expects universities to act like businesses with students as consumers.
Phillipson has told them to manage their own budgets and not expect help from the taxpayer. It leaves universities reliant on charging students tuition fees and on research that brings grant money.
Fees to do an undergraduate degree in England were introduced in 1998. They were raised to £9,000 a year in 2012 and to £9,250 per year in 2017. The value of this in real terms has been eroded by inflation. The Labour government plan to raise this to £9,535 next year barely makes a dent in the issue.
Students were sold the benefits of the tuition fee model. They were told that only those earning a high wage would pay the loans back.
But the loan repayment threshold has been held down and the repayment term increased to 40 years. Now more than 80 percent of students are expected to pay off the student loan in full. That’s with rising food and housing costs meaning they are more indebted than ever.
University managements are in fraught competition to attract the most students. They pay international agents to find lucrative international students. York St John made £20 million in international tuition fees income and paid out a third of it—£6.7 million—to international agents in 2022 to 2023.
The market in higher education has also inflated the salaries of senior management teams. Universities say this is necessary to attract the best “talent”. Despite the crisis, university bosses are still pocketing salaries that are typically over £300,000 per year plus expenses.
But playing the game of marketisation won’t work for universities. Their marketing campaigns might promise the world. But cutting courses and staff sends universities into a death spiral where fewer students will choose to study there.
Marc said that cuts there mean “A lot of the university doesn’t function properly in terms of admin”. “Why would an international student come over only to get part way through and their course gets cut?” The bosses are saying that job cuts are inevitable.
But university workers don’t agree.
York St John was faced with redundancies last year. The UCU branch said that “it is true that the sector is in a state of crisis after years of marketisation and mismanagement.” But they didn’t accept the need for job losses.
They pointed out that in their case the effect of inflation on tuition fees had been offset by an increase in the number of students from 6,700 to over 10,000.
At Cardiff University there were plans to shut down its nursing department. But academics at the Welsh university put together an alternative plan.
It involved ending compulsory redundancies, freezing recruitment, deferring investment in infrastructure and drawing on some of the university’s reserves.
They also said bosses should call on the Welsh government to rethink university funding and that visa restrictions should be reversed. They proposed that senior management should be required to take management training.
The UCU union says that tuition fees should be abolished. The union’s research says higher education could be funded by charging a levy of around 1 percent to businesses that employ graduates.
University workers across the country will be on strike this week to demand their employers remove the threat of job losses. It will take determined action to stop bosses targeting workers. The problems with higher education go back decades and are made in Westminster. Industrial action should also be tied to a political campaign to demand a new model of free education for all.
University management teams are justifying their cost-cutting plans by pointing to the alarming financial deficits that many institutions are currently facing.
This deficit has been made worse by the plummeting numbers of international students applying to study in Britain.
In January 2024, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government attempted to “deter migration” by bringing in visa restrictions that prevented international students from bringing dependents with them. The Tories also significantly increased the cost of visas and the NHS surcharge. As a result, international student numbers dropped by up to 40 percent.
This has had a serious impact on university finances. It has also become a convenient cover for university bosses to distract from their own financial mismanagement and from the fundamental problem of the sector.
The crisis we are facing today is the product of higher education being shifted away from being understood and funded as a public good.
Both Conservative and Labour governments encouraged universities to act like businesses. They shrunk block teaching grants for universities, making them reliant on tuition fees for income generation.
International students became a key source of revenue. With no cap on their fees, study in Britain for international students today ranges from £9,000 to £30,000 per year.
These fees are in addition to other expenses—visas, NHS surcharge, English language testing certificates, pre-sessional summer courses, books, food, accommodation, transport.
It is an enormous investment for the students and a huge boost to the British economy. We cannot save universities by engaging in more aggressive recruitment and by treating international students as cash cows. Not only is the exploitation of international students morally reprehensible, it is also destined to fail.
Geopolitical and economic crises can put this strategy at risk. It is reliant on countries like China sending students abroad—which they are no longer doing at such a scale.
And it does nothing to address the root cause of the failure of the higher education system. More worryingly, it pits the interests of university workers and students against one another, as if our jobs were dependent on their exploitation.
Universities are enriched by the presence of students from a range of different backgrounds.
We should defend students’ right to be here. But we cannot do so on the basis of their “economic contribution”. Instead, we need to make the case for higher education as a public good.
Katy Highet
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