The sad state of UK higher education

Return To All Posts
  • 27/09/2024

    The sad state of UK higher education

    The next five years will be worse for English universities than the past five years have been. And the five after that could be worse still. 

    The above is a quote from Alison Wolf (Baroness Wolf of Dulwich) writing in the Times Higher Education in 2015. The title was revealing: Can higher education’s golden age of plenty continue? For me 2015 did not seem an age of plenty. I took up a permanent post in 1990 in Newcastle, and over the successive decades became inured to year-on-year reductions in funding that directly supported student teaching. Research relied on external grant money without any funds for pilot or left field ideas. Core academic infrastructure was stripped, and less money flowed to the shop floor. Class sizes went up, and universities became increasingly impersonal — not just for students but for staff. Clinical academics felt like unwanted guests in the wider university and few now would recommend anybody following in their footsteps unless they had private incomes or they were both extraordinary and lucky. Fibs became more and more common.

    University academic leasers have been dealt a poor hand by successive governments, but with notable exceptions — think Louise Richardson at St Andrews and then Oxford— they have been a dull bunch who have played fast and loose with the categorical imperative that for many of us provided the fundamental justification for publicly funded higher education.