Forcing universities to open vocational courses is no funding solution

The Russell Group’s estimate that its members now lose £2,500 a year for each home student they teach underlines the urgency of finding a way around the impasse that has seen home undergraduate fees in England frozen at £9,250 since 2017 – even as inflation has seen their costs skyrocket.

As is now common knowledge, they’ve been making up the shortfall by using international students as cash cows, but first the pandemic and now new visa restrictions curbed the extent to which universities could continue to milk them.

The result is a new headline every few months about a university department being cut. This year, 40 per cent of higher education providers will be in deficit, including 74 of England’s universities. The Office for Students predicts that, by the academic year 2026-27, nearly two-thirds will be in deficit, and its interim chair, Sir David Behan, says that universities “can’t just carry on”.

According to several peers at a House of Lords debate on higher education funding in September, the answer to the funding crisis is – as the debate’s organiser, former Natural Environment Research Council chief executive Lord Krebs put it – “greater diversity of purpose among universities”.

What they haven’t appreciated is that British universities are already quite diverse and aren’t “competing to climb up the same ladder” quite as much as they might seem to be. While the UK doesn’t have many subject-specific universities, individual departments within universities have been specialising and developing their own unique strengths for many years.

For example, the University of the Highlands and Islands is, by most metrics, an unimpressive university to go to – not even listed in several league tables. But if you’re interested in the history and culture of the Scottish Highlands, the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) results suggest that it’s the best place to go – better than any Russell Group university. The Institute for Northern Studies led the university’s area studies submission and came first for research impact, beating St Andrews and Edinburgh, which also, to some extent, have specialisations in Scottish studies.

Similarly, some universities, such as London South Bank University, are already largely functioning as technical colleges and have very close links with employers such as the NHS. I’m told by teachers there that there’s a large emphasis on social mobility and the power of education to empower individuals. Universities like these can’t be accused of handing students fine arts degrees and sending them off to become baristas.

Universities like these are much more responsive to their geographical situatedness and the needs of their local communities than the rankings credit them for.

How could further diversification in higher education be attained, and should it be? One way would be for universities to offer even more courses – presumably the Lords would prefer vocational rather than classical additions. Alternatively, entirely new technical colleges could be established. But both options would, obviously, worsen the funding crisis, not fix it.

Alternatively, universities could cut their non-specialised courses, staff and departments and focus on what they’re good at. This is probably what the Lords have in mind. The chief problem with this, however, is that it would cause a shortage of courses relative to the current demand for classical subjects, particularly if you imagine places like the University of the Highlands and Islands or Bangor University closing down everything that doesn’t directly relate to Scotland and Wales respectively. Already, north Wales and the Scottish Highlands suffer from brain drain. This would only be worsened by aggressive attempts at greater diversification.

Some might say that more vocational education is exactly what places like north Wales need to reduce the brain drain, but that potentially leaves us with a tension between what those communities want and what they need. If Highlanders and the Welsh want to study arts and humanities, it’s no good telling them that they’d be better off as nuclear physicists and chucking all the other local provision; they’re just going to go elsewhere.

Most speakers in the House of Lords debate agreed that the government shouldn’t let market conditions decide the fate of British academia. At the same time, we mustn’t go too far the other way, ignoring what British people (the market) actually want to study at university. If there’s genuinely no demand for arts and humanities then closing departments is inevitable. But the key point is that creating new vocational courses that the market doesn’t want isn’t going to do much good either, for university finances or the national economy.

Whatever funding solution the new Labour government settles on, it ought to take into account the great diversity that already exists among English universities and the extent to which they focus on serving their local communities as well as the international research community.

B.V.E. Hyde is a metascientist at the University of Bristol and the Research on Research Institute at University College London.