Unpopular universities on brink of going bust
As three universities teeter on bankruptcy, former lecturer DOMINIC SANDBROOK says an explosion of Mickey Mouse courses and student places have led to ...
THREE universities are close to bankruptcy, according to a leading management consultancy firm.
Matt Robb, an education specialist for EY Parthenon which works in higher education, said some universities are not attracting high enough numbers of students because of their locations.
One of the unnamed institutions facing trouble is in the North West, while two are on the South coast. One of them is already in talks with insolvency lawyers, he said.
Others are being forced to rely on ‘bridging loans’ to stay afloat. The revelations come amid fears some universities are losing students because other more prestigious ones are expanding their numbers.
This has been made possible by the government scrapping the numbers cap, meaning universities can recruit as many students as they like.
Mr Robb told the i newspaper: ‘Some of them may never have been financially viable in the first place – in which case, if they are about to go bust, then if there is no compelling public interest, let them go bust.’ Nineteen English universities were in deficit for 201617, up from seven the previous year and many are former polytechnics.
This is the story of a British industry that consistently deceives and disappoints its customers. it encourages them to run up thousands of pounds worth of debt to buy its products, which often turn out to have been wildly mis-sold.
The more this industry sells, the more it dilutes their quality. it treats its workers like drudges, loading them with paperwork and making it impossible for them to give their customers the care they need. Yet it pays its bosses eye-watering salaries, far in excess of their counterparts in similar industries.
if this industry were an independent business, the Government could be forgiven for shrugging its shoulders. But it is not.
it is heavily subsidised by the British taxpayer, whose money is diverted into evergrander buildings and ever more extravagant rewards for the bosses, even as its customers feel more and more cheated.
The industry in question, of course, is British higher education.
so when i read that three unnamed British universities, one in the North-West and two on the south Coast, are in danger of bankruptcy, i was not entirely sorry.
Of course, bankruptcy would be awful for the institutions’ students and staff, the majority of whom are utterly blameless. But the plain fact is that something has gone desperately wrong with our universities.
And instead of throwing good money after bad, the Government should seize this opportunity to end the era of reckless expansion, and have a long think about how they can best serve Britain’s youngsters rather than betray them.
To put it bluntly, there are too many universities, too many degrees and too many students. in the late Eighties, when i was a teenager, fewer than 800,000 people a year — 15 per cent of school-leavers — went to university.
Today, some 49 per cent of school-leavers go into higher education before the age of 30. We now have 160 universities or further education colleges, employing 400,000 people and educating a staggering 2.3 million people.
Ever since the Blair years — it was New Labour that settled, arbitrarily it seems, on a target of getting 50 per cent of school-leavers into university — politicians have cited these figures as signs of great progress.
They never stop to ask if we should really be encouraging youngsters to spend three of their most vigorous years studying ‘body contour fashion’, ‘ tournament golf ’ or ‘beauty promotion’, all of which are current degrees. Nor do they ask themselves if it is ethical to send graduates into the world burdened with average debts of £50,000 each — the highest rate in the Western world — in exchange for a degree that is often barely worth the paper it is written on.
if you talk to almost any academic in Britain, they will tell you that something is desperately wrong. Almost without exception, they say that their classes are too crowded and there is increasingly limited opportunity for lectures and tutorials, while managers are putting them under pressure to dumb down because of the numbers of students admitted who cannot intellectually cope.
MYOWN epiphany came more than 15 years ago, when i was teaching history at the University of sheffield, a fine institution with bright and enthusiastic students.
it was a miserable autumn afternoon, and as the rain poured down, i was sitting in a hut teaching some 40 students about the causes of the Great Depression.
The student who was due to give the main presentation had not turned up. his friend explained that it had been ‘ pound a pint’ night in the student union the night before, so i embarked on a mini-lecture instead.
And as i droned on, a thought hit me. Why are they all here? What are they getting out of it?
i can already hear the howls from university managers. According to their adverts, university gives students unique ‘transferable skills’. Graduates, they claim, will earn a ‘premium’ of £100,000 over their lifetime, thanks to a degree certificate. The first of these points is, to be frank, a complete lie. A history degree gives you no skills that you would not get from a degree in plenty of other subjects.
it certainly gives you little that you would not also get from A-level studies, training in all kinds of white-collar jobs, or just reading a book and being a reasonably intelligent adult.
As for degrees such as the University of Chichester’s new course in ‘e-sports studies’, which invites students to run up £27,750 in fees for the privilege of playing video games such as FiFA and Counterstrike, i am afraid this is out-andout larceny.
Chichester’s website claims this degree ‘will enable you to forge a career in this vibrant and fastgrowing industry’. i hate to sound cynical, but do they seriously expect anyone to believe this?
As for the supposed premium, this is largely illusory. in reality, thousands of graduates leave every year to find themselves manning the machines in a coffee bar or pestering people to change their electricity supplier. Figures from the Office of National statistics show that five years after leaving university, graduates in popular subjects such as English, agriculture, and psychology actually earn less than the national average.
if you have a passion for Emily Bronte and excellent A- level results, by all means do an English degree. But what if you don’t? Why waste three years doing something you are only mildly interested in and have never shone at?
if they had an ounce of social responsibility, the universities would encourage less academic youngsters to get an apprenticeship instead, or to find a niche in the world of work.
But they don’t. in reality, they welcome all comers with the beaming smile of a used-car salesman. No matter how ill- equipped you may be for university life, there is always an institution willing to take your money.
At the Universities of Bedfordshire, Leeds Trinity and London Metropolitan, you can stroll in with three Cs at A-level. indeed, such is their greed and desperation that weaker establishments will admit students with a handful of Ds.
As a result, thousands of students, utterly unsuited for academic life, are packed into lecture halls like steerage passengers on the Titanic. They find their experience intimidating, overwhelming and deeply disappointing — and all this at a cost of £9,250 a year.
NOWONDEr, then, so many give up. Nationwide dropout rates after the first year have soared for three years in a row. London Metropolitan lost a staggering 19.5 per cent of its students after the first year. Bolton lost 17 per cent; Middlesex 16 per cent.
it is no coincidence that the worst rates are at former polytechnics, which have conspicuously failed to close the gap on the old universities. Of the worst performing universities in the country, the majority are old polytechnics.
At Cambridge railway station, expensive adverts proclaim the city to be the ‘ home of Anglia ruskin’. They are not fooling anyone: the prestigious Times rankings place Anglia ruskin 122nd in the country. By contrast, the other university in Cambridge is No. 1.
To make matters worse, our universities are simultaneously prostituting themselves to foreign students who sometimes can barely speak a word of English.
Ten years ago, the London school of Economics notoriously awarded the son of the late Colonel Gaddafi a doctorate, despite the fact that, according to his tutor, he was ‘totally uninterested in economics, lacked the intellectual depth to study at that level, and showed no willingness to read, let alone do coursework’.
But this was not an aberration. This is now the norm. The LSE’s only crime was to get caught.
A few years ago, i talked to a senior academic at a redbrick university who was just back from Kurdistan. his job, he told me, was to identify poor countries that had recently suffered wars or disasters and been given aid money by the UN or the EU. his mission was to get his hands on that money. if that meant giving Kurdish students doctorates on, say, William shakespeare, even if they could barely write a sentence in English, then that was fine by him. Where does this money end up? it goes to people like Bath spa’s recent vice chancellor Christina slade, paid £429,000 last year on top of her £250,000 salary, £20,000 housing allowance, £20,000 benefits allowance and £ 89,000 pension package.
Or her contemporary, the University of Bath’s Dame Glynis Breakwell, who made £450,000 a year, lived rent free in a £1.6 million house, and yet was greedy enough to demand £8,000 for ‘laundry and housekeeping’ expenses before having to leave this year.
To put these figures into context, the chief executive of Bath’s local council earns £150,000 a year, while the boss of the local Nhs trust earns £185,000 a year.
The truth is that for too long our society has been wasting time, money and talent in pursuit of an objective that every reasonable person admits is completely deluded. Not every youngster has a first-class academic mind, and not every further education college is an Oxbridge of the future.
For far too long, politicians and university managers have been perpetuating a gigantic fraud and, in doing so, have betrayed generations of students. it is time it stopped.