Is a ‘co-opetition’ model the way to safeguard higher education for future generations?
Shared support functions don’t mean the end of competition among institutions, writes Mark Thompson. Instead, collective thinking could focus effort on universities’ strengths and potentially rescue the sector from ‘an unsustainable race to the bottom’
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Here’s a question: just how bad do we think things can get in our individual universities before we’re prepared to rethink the way we run higher education in the UK? How many more departments can we erase? How many more master’s courses can we pump up, too often at the expense of quality? How many more staff can we casualise, place on a fixed term or “let go”? How many more glossy boilerplate £250,000 slide decks from consultancies promising “transformation”, but delivering nothing of the sort, will university leaders soon be able to afford, anyway?
If you were an alien, looking down on our sector from above, you might be forgiven for thinking that we’d gone mad. We’re systematically slashing all the stuff we collectively care about – well-funded research environments, secure careers, departmental richness and diversity, decent lecturer-student ratios, you name it – while retaining highly repetitive support functions (one HR department in higher ed does basically the same thing as another) and cherished silos (“We’re special here”, “We like to do things differently”).
All those silos and separate functions require lots of managers and administrators, which have risen in number by 60 per cent and continue to mushroom, largely unscrutinised. It’s a bit like, say, each of Tesco’s 2,947 UK stores insisting on having their own HR, finance, ops, marketing, procurement, estates and IT offices, rather than running one set of these functions to support them all. You’d never design something like this in 2025.
You might be thinking: “But universities need to compete, otherwise we’d end up with just one university.”
My response to this, to look to another industry, is to point out that Renault and Nissan compete furiously to sell Clio and Micra cars, but not on inner brake components. In an agreement of “co-opetition”, they’re clear on where they should be competing – say, image, style, performance, upholstery or gadgets – versus where they have no business to compete. They don’t waste time and resources “reinventing the wheel” on stuff automotive customers don’t care about, providing it works.
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In the case of universities, we should compete on research, teaching and impact. Nothing else. These activities are core to universities, and how we add value in society. We need the other things, of course, and they’re important – but in 2025 many of these functions don’t need to be built and maintained over and again within each university but can instead be consumed by everyone, a bit like Netflix. Students don’t ask searching questions about their university’s CRM, finance or room-booking functions; they don’t care, providing they work.
If we were able to start standardising, sharing and consuming common services across the higher education sector, in 15 years we might be able to save, say, 20 per cent of this duplication. Divide a fifth of our close-to £50 billion spend by the average professorial salary and you get an additional 125,000 professors. While these are back-of-envelope calculations, the point is that we all know the rot is deep but that the potential upside of sorting it out is very large indeed.
So, how can we think about a co-opetition model to safeguard our precious, desperately strained sector for future generations? I believe the answer is to start moving gradually towards a collective operating model. Operating models, such as UCISA’s excellent higher education reference model (Herm) are useful as a way to quickly visualise all the functions that universities have in common. This, from Jisc, is a very high-level example (see below).
Although we can see that universities collaborate on a few of these functions (such as careers advice, talent acquisition, data management and procurement management), I believe that in a mature collective operating model, most of these functions would eventually be shared, leaving universities to concentrate once again on research, teaching and impact – and on restoring an academic environment where students and staff are no longer viewed as commodities to be balanced on a spreadsheet, chasing our own tails in an unsustainable race to the bottom.
In the absence of robust leadership on this issue from the Department for Education, as the policy department in charge of this collective mess, or from vice-chancellors evidencing a detailed interest in, and grip on, their operating models and a willingness to aggressively collaborate around them, we must find the will to start this journey ourselves. Accordingly, at the Digital Universities UK conference, we will be running an interactive session on 2 April in collaboration with Jisc and UCISA, where we’re going to flag up potentially interesting and suitable functions to start sharing, and then provide delegates with a set of ranking criteria, so we can collectively vote on the best opportunities for new shared functions. We’re then going to ask people to indicate willingness to be involved moving forwards, as we try to explore possible funding options to make some of this happen.
I’m keen to see something like the mock-up below: a higher education digital declaration along the lines of the one the local government sector achieved in 2016 (please note: this one [below] is fake!):
If you are attending the Digital Universities UK conference, and are after an intentionally practical, disruptive session that moves beyond the “transformation” platitudes and AI gold rush, please come along and help us to make a difference to us all.
Mark Thompson is professor of digital economy at the University of Exeter.
He is moderator of the session “Identifying the need for a collective operating model”, along with Jisc and UCISA, at Digital Universities UK on 1-3 April at Lancaster University.
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