Of all the muddled post-election messaging from the UK’s new government and, equally, the new Office for Students leadership, one statement has appeared to set the tone. Sir David Behan, interim chair of the OfS, declared in an interview last month that “the golden age of universities” is “probably over”.
I have learned two things about golden age discourse from my career as a literature professor. The first is that golden ages are almost always located in the past. The second is that the idea of a lost golden age is more often used to justify inaction than action. Things were better long ago, but that state is impossible to recreate so let’s just muddle along with the realities we have inherited.
To be fair, it is unclear precisely what Behan had in mind. Maybe he was thinking about the post-2012 era of £9,000 fees that injected cash and a degree of optimism – among managers, if not students – into the English sector before inflation ate away at the fee’s value. Maybe, as a good neoliberal, he had been catching up with a 2020 KPMG report arguing that several decades of expansion for Western universities was drawing to an end. Maybe he had come straight from a meeting with Jacqui Smith, the new minister of state for skills, who has been keen to express her sublime degree of comfort with the prospect of institutional bankruptcies. Or maybe he was winging it.
Labour has brought good vibes to its engagement with the sector, but universities cannot run on vibes alone, and signals remain difficult to interpret. One report, subsequent to Behan’s intervention, suggests that civil servants are planning for a two-stage process to relieve the pressures, at least in England: a fee increase in the short term, followed by an extensive review of financing. Indeed, that remedy sounds so obvious that whether the government pursues it looks like an early-term sanity test.
In this context, my questions are simple. Why are we not hearing a clear and united voice from within the English sector arguing for an immediate increase to the domestic undergraduate fee cap? If we have inhabited a system that has manifestly worked in some respects but caused problems in others, why should we stand by and watch while politicians use the problems as an excuse for inertia?
To be sure, fees are divisive. Few academics supported their introduction, and the University and College Union has remained steadfastly opposed. Increasingly, they divide the population – indeed, they now divide academic departments – between those with student debt and those without.
But while it is easy to carp at vice-chancellors’ pay and the erection of “shiny” buildings – which, regardless, are surely preferable to buildings falling apart – fees have underwritten the quality of English universities. Moreover, we have seen how quality translates into reputation, attracts international students and can (granted, not necessarily) translate into better working environments. I have two children who would be affected by any increase to fees, but I have no qualms arguing that high-quality higher education comes at a cost. That quality has been hard won and could easily be lost.
Across the years, academics have held their noses while Conservative governments merrily manipulated the system in their own interests. Notoriously, changes to loan repayment mechanisms introduced in 2022 brought precisely zero extra income into universities but significantly changed the balance of financial burden between the state and the graduate. Further, by freezing maintenance loans, politicians have created conditions requiring some students to work during term-time, increasing social inequalities. And they first nudged universities towards a dependence on international students, then pulled that rug from under our feet. Throughout, they sustained the pretence that universities are stuck in their ways, wilfully ignoring – in their courses, teaching methods, technology, engagement with industry – the innovation going on all around us.
There are plenty of questions that anyone with a passing interest in universities could propose for a review. What is the appropriate balance of financial burden between graduate and the state? Do we want maintenance loans or means-tested grants? Do we need to return to student number controls? To what extent, if at all, is it ethically acceptable for international students to be subsidising the education of home students? Indeed, there are plenty of things we might want to change. But those who argue that the system is fundamentally broken, as though all the challenges facing us are long term and wicked, risk compounding our problems.
So let’s support Labour in any initiative to ask fundamental questions about higher education. But let’s not pretend that a review will sustain the quality of our courses next year or provide support for colleagues whose jobs are at risk today. And let’s also be realistic about the probability of this austerity-fixated government ever finding significant extra public money to support higher education.
I suggest it is time to accept that fees are a reality of the ocean in which we swim, and an immediate increase in them is the only life raft on the horizon.
Andrew McRae is professor of English at the University of Exeter.
