Each new day brings another woeful tale from the world of UK HE. Just in the last fortnight we’ve seen students threatening to withdraw from their courses at Huddersfield University after being told that 198 staff are for the chop; 30 more jobs at risk at Edge Hill; Aston and Oxford Brookes scything entire courses while simultaneously employing new senior managers on £100,000 salaries; and the vice chancellor of Lincoln University blaming government policy for his institution now running a £30m deficit.
And policy is a major cause of the catastrophe. Fewer international students are coming to the UK due to the skyrocketing cost of visas and tough restrictions on the work they can undertake, according to Universities UK (UUK). Legally, foreign students can only work twenty hours a week, except this seldom generates enough income to live on. Thus they have to find an employer who will break the law to give them extra hours. The extra money is badly needed, considering that on average they pay more than twice what domestic students pay in fees. Then there’s the additional burden of shelling out to travel home for the holidays.
Whether they come from the UK or overseas, young people are being turned off studying in HE by the cost of living crisis. Tuition fees haven’t gone up since 2017, while the cost of food, rent, transport and most everything else has.
With a quarter of all British universities (over 50 in total) having announced redundancies, the betting is now on which will go bankrupt first. And things are only going to get worse, warn HE bigwigs, unless the government steps in and saves us like it did the banks in 2007-9.
The excuse for bailing out the banks was that they were a vital national asset. Why shouldn’t HE be considered the same? In this country we no longer manufacture anything much and our natural resources are limited compared to other nations. But our “creative industries deliver over £115bn in value to the UK and create jobs at three times the UK average,” argues Gordon McKenzie, chief executive of the GuildHE group of universities. It seems like an act of national self-harm to sack many of us who teach and train future generations of artists, filmmakers, writers, designers and games programmers.
There are other good reasons to protect universities too. Learning to think critically and creatively boosts wellbeing and self-confidence. It engenders better communication – and how many conflicts micro and macro are caused by miscommunication? How often do arguments with parents or partners or siblings devolve in to one side moaning that the other took something said the wrong way? Critical thinking makes us less likely to be bamboozled by politicians, advertising execs, yahoos on social media and so forth. That, in turn, makes us better citizens – or should.
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