A number of commentators are predicting university closures on the back of significant realignments in enrolment to universities across the sector (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/ministers-are-anything-relaxed-about-university-closures). This year's A level students seem to have been able to select better (which means "higher ranking"... which may not mean very much!) institutions than their grades would have allowed in years past. Consequently, the middle and lower-ranking institutions who would have recruited those students have lost out, and this year, the loss has been big.
Universities are now competing businesses, and some of the competition has been rather unedifying (particularly the Essex University tweet against Leeds Beckett: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/student-affairs-and-technology/sassy-or-snide-when-university-twitter-banter-gets-mean). These are competing businesses all making promises to students that they cannot possibly keep: statistics about average salaries, graduate premium, etc are made with all the confidence of a drunk Brexit commentator. Nobody knows what the future looks like, and a fast-changing labour situation promises little of the institutionally-guaranteed security of the past, whatever one's educational background is.
So, a considerable proportion of this year's intake into universities which trade on high reputations but with less experience of teaching mixed-ability classes, will end up disappointed with the performance of their educational investment.
Will they be more disappointed in Birmingham, Bolton or Buckingham? Who knows - it really depends on what happens in the world, whether they acquire any security in their lives, whether they see any difference between what they gain and what others who didn't go gain. But in an important way, it doesn't matter where they go. The effects will be the same, and they will hit all universities in the future.
The problem is not with this generation of students. It is with their children. In 25 years, will this generation of students be sufficiently satisfied with the actual return on investment of their degrees that they will recommend their children go to university? And, will they recommend a life of debt to their 18 year olds, when they could well be still repaying the debt they accrued all those years ago?
I think the likely answer is no. The implications are alarming, and although my generation will be retired (but our pensions may be in a far more precarious state than that which sparked the recent strike), we will witness this as grandparents, and see a society which has lost a vital part of the fabric which maintains civil society: a place where society goes to think.
When we look back from 25 years in the future, what will we conclude about the cause of the collapse of HE? I think we will see that setting institutions to compete against one another on the basis of market demands and false promises was a kind of cancer. It wasn't the poor performance of any one institution that caused the problem. All institutions produced the problem together by failing to work together, by failing to tell the truth to students, but instead feed them marketing nonsense, and failing to change education into something that fitted the age we were living in. Consequently we ended up with a technological working and living environment that operated with the fleet-footedness of the conscious mind, whilst education simply tried to devise ever new "curricula" which maintained a stodgy Hogwarts feel whose Disneyfied impracticality, lack of fit to daily life, and sheer expense eventually alienated the population.
I'm not sure that a major collapse of HE isn't inevitable in 25 to 30 years. The urgent question for this generation is how to create a replacement: somewhere where society's thinking can still go on. Maybe it isn't helpful to call it a "university".
Universities are now competing businesses, and some of the competition has been rather unedifying (particularly the Essex University tweet against Leeds Beckett: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/student-affairs-and-technology/sassy-or-snide-when-university-twitter-banter-gets-mean). These are competing businesses all making promises to students that they cannot possibly keep: statistics about average salaries, graduate premium, etc are made with all the confidence of a drunk Brexit commentator. Nobody knows what the future looks like, and a fast-changing labour situation promises little of the institutionally-guaranteed security of the past, whatever one's educational background is.
So, a considerable proportion of this year's intake into universities which trade on high reputations but with less experience of teaching mixed-ability classes, will end up disappointed with the performance of their educational investment.
Will they be more disappointed in Birmingham, Bolton or Buckingham? Who knows - it really depends on what happens in the world, whether they acquire any security in their lives, whether they see any difference between what they gain and what others who didn't go gain. But in an important way, it doesn't matter where they go. The effects will be the same, and they will hit all universities in the future.
The problem is not with this generation of students. It is with their children. In 25 years, will this generation of students be sufficiently satisfied with the actual return on investment of their degrees that they will recommend their children go to university? And, will they recommend a life of debt to their 18 year olds, when they could well be still repaying the debt they accrued all those years ago?
I think the likely answer is no. The implications are alarming, and although my generation will be retired (but our pensions may be in a far more precarious state than that which sparked the recent strike), we will witness this as grandparents, and see a society which has lost a vital part of the fabric which maintains civil society: a place where society goes to think.
When we look back from 25 years in the future, what will we conclude about the cause of the collapse of HE? I think we will see that setting institutions to compete against one another on the basis of market demands and false promises was a kind of cancer. It wasn't the poor performance of any one institution that caused the problem. All institutions produced the problem together by failing to work together, by failing to tell the truth to students, but instead feed them marketing nonsense, and failing to change education into something that fitted the age we were living in. Consequently we ended up with a technological working and living environment that operated with the fleet-footedness of the conscious mind, whilst education simply tried to devise ever new "curricula" which maintained a stodgy Hogwarts feel whose Disneyfied impracticality, lack of fit to daily life, and sheer expense eventually alienated the population.
I'm not sure that a major collapse of HE isn't inevitable in 25 to 30 years. The urgent question for this generation is how to create a replacement: somewhere where society's thinking can still go on. Maybe it isn't helpful to call it a "university".
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