We need to rethink university financing - SOAS’s Vice-Chancellor and Chair of Trustees
SOAS Vice-Chancellor Professor Adam Habib and Chair of SOAS Trustees Lord Dr Michael Hastings have called for a rethink in the financial challenges facing English universities in a new article published by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) an independent UK think tank.
As the Office for Students (OfS) warned in November last year that 72% of English universities would be in deficit by the end of the academic year if nothing changes, Professor Habib and Lord Hastings urge the sector to think beyond its comfort zone and to rethink how we address university financing.
The jointly-written piece calls for an urgent need for an honest conversation led by government; examining what has fiscally worked, and what has not; closer reflection on the fiscal viability of small classrooms as well as the percentage of research time granted to all teaching and research contracts.
They argue that the changes implemented around three decades ago to expand access to higher education to at least 50% of school leavers led to more cost associated with attracting and retaining more students. These costs, whether they were for improved premises or better pastoral services, spiralled and were essentially subsidised by international fees. However, pressure around finances intensified as the previous government increasingly adopted a hostile environment towards immigration and indeed foreign students.
The debate can only be enriched and the recommendations made more robust if we are prepared to think beyond what we are comfortable with.
Professor Habib and Lord Hastings urge the sector to look at the limits of cross-subsidising from international students and consider new ways of partnering with institutions, particularly in the global south, to develop joint development of curricula, co-teaching and co-assessment, could bring down cost structures of higher education.
Writing in the piece, Professor Habib and Lord Hastings said: “Higher education in the UK has priced itself out for ordinary international students looking solely for a higher education qualification. The only rationales for postgraduate master’s students accessing UK universities, given their high-cost structure, are either post-study employment or the learning of a specific qualification not available in alternative higher education settings. The former is increasingly becoming politically unfeasible, and the latter is not a sufficiently large market to financially sustain British universities.
“The strategic challenge of managing higher education institutions in the contemporary era is the management of tensions between competing imperatives. It also requires thinking outside the box, innovating and finding new markets, and servicing these at new price points, while continuing to meet the social obligations implicit in the mandate of universities. This is what we believe is sometimes missing from the deliberations on making British universities financially sustainable. The debate can only be enriched and the recommendations made more robust if we are prepared to think beyond what we are comfortable with.”
The full article is available on the HEPI website.
