In highlighting foolish decisions by some university leaders, Philip Augar (“England’s higher education market is broken”, Opinion, May 6) underplays how the 2012 higher education funding changes (on which I worked) were always likely to produce the current situation.
They were a huge, unprecedented experiment. The £9,000 fee suddenly enabled serious money to be made from providing low-cost degree courses such as law. The regulatory regime was intended to encourage new entrants, and more than 400 higher education providers are now registered with the Office for Students. The accounts of the big for-profit providers show many can make very decent surpluses from this model (helpfully underpinned by the UK taxpayer providing fee loans for their students).
The whole system is designed to drive competition, which obviously involves winners and losers. That is fine, but some universities are seen as “anchor institutions” in their cities and regions. My own, Cumbria, was established in 2007 to become such an institution (fortunately we make surpluses). If it is thought undesirable for such an institution to go out of business, it makes no sense for the regulatory and funding regime to imply this does not matter, or to be set up in a way that increases the risk. For-profit institutions are efficient, and efficiency is good, but they are not (and aren’t trying to be) anchor institutions.
Before 2012, English higher education was much more of a managed market. Government then created a new regulatory regime, trusting that the benefits of greater competition would outweigh its downsides. Government now has to decide whether that assumption has proved correct, because it is the regulatory regime, far more than the managerial failings, that has driven behaviours and created the higher education world that now exists.
Martin Williams
Chair, University of Cumbria;
Director, Higher Education Policy for England (2007-2013), London SE24, UK
