Our universities need to change

Britain’s universities have got to make a decision: what are they for? Are they a wing of the welfare state, offering subsidised education delivered by well-paid academics? In which case, there are more students than the country can afford. Are universities instead independent businesses serving customers? In which case, the students demanding financial compensation over the lecturers’ strike have a strong case. The higher education establishment likes to milk both the taxpayer and the student, and given that students can be taxpayers too, this is doubly unfair on them.

At the same time as changes to staff pensions are projected to cost lecturers £10,000 a year in retirement income, vice chancellors enjoyed an average pay rise of more than £10,000 in 2016-17, bringing salary packages up to an eye-watering £268,000. A senior lecturer, meanwhile, can earn anything up to £56,000, well above the national average, and many readers will be envious that they have enjoyed defined benefit pension schemes for so long. But among new teachers and researchers, things are tougher: in 2016 it was reported that more than half of academics were on insecure, non-permanent contracts, some lasting just nine months.

The status quo is unfair, and a symptom of a higher education sector that jumped on the new money offered by tuition fees without re-thinking its core mission. Fees have crept up, and successive governments have failed to strike the right balance between how much is paid back, and when, and what support is given to poorer students. The result is growing debt. At the same time, universities have offered more and more places – the cap was lifted in 2015 – without always offering more choice. Where are the part-time degrees? The two-year degrees? The vocational training? The outreach to mature students? Students should have been treated as consumers, with universities begging for their business. Instead the worst of state and market mechanisms transformed undergraduates into human cash machines.

University can be a wonderful, useful experience. But it’s not for everyone. Years of offering “places for all” have not delivered in terms of productivity or wages, and lecturers as well as students are now paying the price. The Government must be courageous enough to propose real, systemic change.