HE’s social mobility engine will misfire without more student maintenance

The recent cancellation of the UK’s HS2 high-speed rail link north of Birmingham is ominous for everyone committed to closing the north/south divide, remaking the landscape of opportunity and promoting social, economic and cultural mobility.

A sobering sense of new economic realities post-pandemic appears to have taken hold of government thinking – and that evidently has implications for the more progressive policies around the “levelling up” agenda. We’re moving back into a world of caution and shoring up the status quo at the cost of longer-term solutions to challenges.

One of the most important roles for higher education is as an engine of social mobility. Just as one example, Sutton Trust research has found that 22 per cent of graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds are in the top quintile for earnings by the age of 30, compared with only 6 per cent of those who didn’t go to university. This is the power of a university education.

The issue that needs to be faced head-on is whether economic conditions can be allowed to have an unchecked impact on the choices of young people and their parents if they can’t or don’t want to be picking up more and more bills to support higher study.

The new financial environment – the higher cost of living, rising mortgage and borrowing rates and high levels of existing debt – is making a substantial difference to conversations about the viability of the university option. Access is progressively being squeezed, not only for the “disadvantaged” in receipt of free school meals, but also for less well-off families in general.

The latest Ucas figures already show a small decline in the number of 18-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds taking up university places in England, and this is likely to be a sign of things to come: the return of a university system available only to those who can afford it – not just fees but immediate living costs.

We’ve seen how rising living costs can be felt even more keenly in the north of England. Cities such as York, Leeds and Manchester have been through decades of gentrification, meaning rising property prices and big increases in rental costs. In a recent BBC News report, students in York complained of sudden increases in their weekly rent of more than £50, meaning that they are paying £800 or more each month for a room in a house shared with five others.

The region is also still living with historic issues of inequality in education provision that still haven’t been addressed. University of Bradford lecturer Lucy Eddy, cited in a recent report by the Child of the North All-Party Parliamentary Group, found that over the past decade, schools in London received on average 9.7 per cent more funding from the National Funding Formula compared with those in the north of England.

What’s needed is an explicit and visible acknowledgment of – and commitment to – higher education as a practical engine for supporting social mobility. In particular, we need more attention to flexible, perhaps temporary, packages of financial support for students that reflect real-time changes in the economic context.

In England, we also need a solution to the problems caused by the freeze on parental earnings thresholds for access to maintenance loans. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has been a particular critic of the freeze, which has been in place since 2008. The effect is that loans are still limited for households earning over £25,000; had inflation been taken into account, the threshold would now be more than £35,000. In practice, this means smaller loans and a growing expectation that parents will fill the gaps in paying for living costs.

Yet the government seems content with a potential reversal of university expansion. It has repeatedly criticised Tony Blair’s target for 50 per cent of young people to go to university since abandoning it in 2020. Indeed, in his recent speech to the Conservative Party conference, prime minister Rishi Sunak called it “one of the great mistakes of the last 30 years”, claiming that it “led to thousands of young people being ripped off by degrees that did nothing to increase their employability or earnings potential”.

We would strongly dispute such assertions. For a university such as Bradford, top of the Hepi Social Mobility Index for improving life chances for two successive years, access and support for non-traditional students isn’t just a peripheral concession to social responsibility. It gives the university a clear sense of purpose for staff and its community of students. It is integral to our vision, mission and values.

The tightening circle of financial worries is doing nothing for the reputation of higher education. It can lead to students becoming less engaged and committed to all that higher education can offer. We need to make sure that the university option stays open to as many people as possible – because social mobility is an essential feature of any healthy society.

Zahir Irani is deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Bradford.