Britain is very good at having elite universities. Its best institutions are flag-flyers for a country that in many other ways looks past its best. Their closest competitors, America’s Ivy League universities, have become political punchbags. Academics fleeing from Donald Trump could soon hand Britain’s best outfits a further boost.
Peek below the creamiest layer, however, and higher education in Britain starts to look much less clever. Its vast array of universities educate more than half of the country’s
Britain is very good at having elite universities. Its best institutions are flag-flyers for a country that in many other ways looks past its best. Their closest competitors, America’s Ivy League universities, have become political punchbags. Academics fleeing from Donald Trump could soon hand Britain’s best outfits a further boost.
Peek below the creamiest layer, however, and higher education in Britain starts to look much less clever. Its vast array of universities educate more than half of the country’s youth—but mostly in old-fangled ways little altered from the days when only the very wealthy could attend. The mass system needs much more efficiency and innovation. On those measures, Britain’s universities are third-class.
The flaws start with exceptionally high costs. Since 2012 studying for a bachelor’s degree at almost any university in England has cost around £9,000 ($12,000) a year—a higher average fee than in any public system, anywhere in the world. For years the majority of graduates could expect to have some of their debt forgiven; that is no longer so true. Recent changes to the repayment system mean some of today’s students will still be paying for their studies in their 60s (on July 17th it was reported that the government is thinking of creating an enhanced debt forgiveness scheme for doctors, who are threatening strikes). To foreign eyes that looks absurd.
Higher education in Britain is not just expensive, it is also homogenous—and getting more so. The country herds school-leavers into full-time, three-year bachelor’s degrees to an extent rarely found elsewhere. Learners in Germany and Canada more frequently plump for courses that can be completed in a year or two. In America more than 30% of undergraduates are enrolled in two-year colleges, which dole out short, affordable “associate degrees” that can act as stepping stones to meatier qualifications. In bachelor’s-obsessed Britain, that sounds wild.
The system’s flaws will hit Britain harder in the years ahead. It is a good bet that artificial intelligence and other new tech will make jobs less secure and mid-life retraining more common. Yet Britain’s education system is becoming less accommodating of that. Part-time learners and mature students have been draining out of universities for years.
Lately even the core customers seem to be getting fed up. The share of British 18-year-olds who go straight from school to higher education has fallen back from a peak in 2021. This is a return to the mean, insist optimists, after an enrolment spurt during the pandemic. But it looks as if high living costs and meagre maintenance loans are putting youngsters off. And for far too many of them, the plan B is no further learning at all.
A year after it took office, the Labour government’s long-term vision for higher education remains frustratingly vague. It is having to deal with deep financial crises at some universities—caused in part by policy flip-flops by the previous government, which made grown-up budgeting very tough. The risk is that these troubles will become an excuse for Labour to put off difficult decisions like an overdue academic essay.
Much more focus is required. The government must speed ahead with long-trailed tweaks to student loans. At the moment it is easy to get money for long, languorous courses but hard to fund pithy short ones; more flexible rules could change that. Britons need much better ways of spotting, and dealing with, universities that are coasting: a truly brave government might seek to hand the sector at least some forms of (shock, horror) standardised test. And 30 years after Britain junked its polytechnics, the government should be asking whether Britain is well-served by a system that has become quite so lookalike. Few other countries harbour as many universities all jostling to offer much the same things.
For centuries Britain’s best universities have been a gold standard for elite education around the world. The country is right to be proud of that. But now it should also lead in a different manner: by building a post-secondary system that looks fit to give millions exactly the education they need.
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