With universities in England about to see tuition fees rise to a maximum of 9000 per year from 2012, with most institutions planning to set their fees at or near this limit, it seems undeniable that the financial climate is set, for some greater education providers at least, to turn into an problem of rising concern. This concern is likely to become echoed in the minds of numerous university students, whose average debt upon graduation is set perhaps to best 40 000, according to some estimates.
In a speech given in February, 2011 Sir Drummond Bone, a former university vice chancellor, commented that financial divisions within UK greater education, driven by government cuts, changes to allocations in research funding and the increasing shift of the financial expense of greater education from the state directly onto students, will impact on institutions in distinct ways. The impact of these changes, Bone suggests, may be most severe for institutions that recruit rather than select their student intake, and which have a predominance of arts-based subjects which will see the complete removal of the state-provided teaching grant (THE, 10.2.2011, p.8). Sir Drummond adds that such a differentiation will be a new knowledge for UK greater education, entailing consequences including perhaps a reduction and restriction on postgraduate numbers, as the debts accrued by undergraduate students act against the possibility of postgraduate study or push students towards far more utilitarian options at postgraduate level (ibid.). These and other consequences also indeed seem likely.
However, Sir Drummonds remarks concerning the extent to which numerous in UK universities are unprepared for the consequences of economic recession seem perhaps to ignore what may be viewed as a lack of foresight on the portion of a few of those in senior positions in such institutions, who may reasonably have been expected to see at least some of this coming. For example, it is clear that during many years following the collapse of the dot com bubble at the turn of the millennium to the financial crash of 2008, the UK and many other economies experienced a very pronounced period of economic growth coupled with a corresponding asset price bubble, both driven largely by loose monetary policy and correspondingly loose lending. Such patterns are virtually inevitably followed by perhaps incredibly sharp economic corrections, the consequences of which are felt frequently for a quantity of years and usually involve periods of perhaps steep retrenchment in areas of government spending. Furthermore, in England, all this took location in the context of a steady political drift towards the introduction and enhance of university tuition fees along with a progressively a lot more marketized greater education sector, mirroring a general trend in this direction across much of the UK public services sector since the 1980s. Notable landmarks were reached with the introduction of university tuition fees for the very first time in 1998 and their subsequent trebling in 2006.
For the most portion, UK universities are largely insulated from the day-to-day exigencies of the actual economy, thus having a degree of time to reflect and to plan. Given also the time spans during which all this unfolded, including the progressive move towards tuition fees and the introduction of greater competition into the sector, it comes as perhaps something of a surprise that a lot of of those leading the UKs universities seemingly did not have as a major and clear strategic priority the adjustment to what has long seemed likely to be a medium-term scenario, namely something akin to what is now being experienced. Sir Drummond notes that some UK universities may have to undergo adjustments in the next few years that may be incredibly fraught (ibid.), but having a modicum of foresight did this really should be so a lot the case?
Comments are closed.