Category: Featured

As the comparison between spending (per student) in Scottish and English universities comes into my argument later, Robert Burns’ famous lines from To a Louse seems a good place to start.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us

We are very familiar with how we see ourselves. Higher education is facing an intolerable financial squeeze.

In England the maximum fee which institutions are allowed to charge has only been been upgraded once, and only marginally, since the switch from state grants to tuition fees as the main source of funding for teaching 13 or more years ago. Its real value is barely 70 per cent of what it was then, although the Labour government has agreed to another – marginal – increase from 2025-26.

In Scotland, where Scottish domiciled students pay no fees, public expenditure on higher education has similarly failed to keep pace with inflation.

The substantial increase in full-fee paying international students, which many institutions relied on to fill the gap has ground to a halt because of less generous visa rules imposed as part of the backlash against large-scale immigration. The never-had-it-so-good years when growing your income was easy are over.

Red ink

Meanwhile costs have piled up. Higher education faces not only the standard inflationary pressures – higher wage, pension, energy, estates and other costs. As employers institutions must also pay higher rates of higher national insurance, without the possibility of passing on these extra costs (because of frozen fees and frowned-upon international recruitment). They may also face a levy on international students, although the Government has weakly promised that, if imposed, its proceeds would be redistributed within the system.

As a result an escalating number of institutions are reporting deficits. The talk is all of transformation, a new code for everything from sharing back-office services to full-blown institutional mergers. The prospect of outright institutional failures cannot be excluded. Dundee has already come close, although not perhaps as close as initial alarmist scenarios suggested. Scotland, of course, still has a funding council able to intervene in such situations. In England the Office for Students has only recently begun to focus on financial sustainability, so it is far from clear what the fate of an English Dundee might be.

That is our story – and we sticking to it. Rightly so, because it is almost entirely true, although it might help to convince others if it was not sometimes expressed in a spirit of aggrieved entitlement.

The other side

However, going back to Burns, we also need to think a bit more about how others see us. It is not simply that we are living in a post-truth world, so the marshalling of incontrovertible evidence while still necessary is now far from sufficient. This applies in particular to the toxically tangled issues of international students and immigration. No amount of evidence of the benefits of “soft power”, or economic multiplier effects, or of the way non-UK PhD students and post-docs have allowed us to punch above our weight in science and scholarship (same in the US, of course) will persuade those who fear they will have to live in, in the queasy but presumably deliberate phrase of the Prime Minister, “an island of strangers”.

But there is no need to go down the post-truth rabbit hole. There are perfectly rational and plausible ways in which others can see us that are radically different from the way we see ourselves, ways that might appeal to politicians set upon from all sides by multiple clamouring claims for increased state support and to their officials focused on delivery and free-lance advisers thrilled by difficult choices.

For example, these others might highlight the fact that spending per student on higher education, from all sources, is high by international standards. Among OECD countries the UK comes third, really second after the US because Luxembourg in the number-one spot is clearly a special case. In OECD’s book expenditure per student is substantially higher than in every other European country.

Of course, international comparisons are notoriously unreliable because of the difficulty of making like-for-like comparisons and disentangling higher from wider tertiary education. Even the apparently simpler task of just comparing public expenditure and excluding private expenditure is fraught, as the difficulty of categorising expenditure on student loans in England has demonstrated. But, with all these caveats, it is still fair to conclude that UK expenditure per student is towards the generous end of the international spectrum.

A counter ability

The counter-argument is that this higher expenditure pays dividends because there are so many UK institutions among the top universities in global rankings. But there are clearly other factors that explain our stand-out performance, although Switzerland actually has more highly graded institutions in proportion to its population. Also our global eminence is essentially rooted in research not teaching performance, which is only relevant to expenditure-per-student in terms of cross subsidy. A better counter-argument is that, because of shorter course lengths – three-year undergraduate degrees and one-year Masters – and high completion rates, expenditure per graduate is pretty average by international standards.

The same ‘others’, faced with evidence that funding per student in England is higher than in Scotland (spelt out, for example, in the recent report by London Economics for a Royal Society of Edinburgh conference), might not automatically conclude, as we do, that therefore funding in Scotland should be raised to the English level. On the contrary they might conclude that, because Scottish universities offer the same quality (whether measured by league tables, shares of competitively won research funding or external examiners’ and other reports on teaching) and the incidence of financial distress is not greater north of the Border, perhaps English funding levels may actually be (too?) generous…

Of course, all Anglo-Scottish unit funding comparisons are compromised by the fact that undergraduate degrees are three-years south and four-years north of the Border. Historically the younger age of university entrants in Scotland, the lower intensity of Highers and persistence of “democratic intellect” general degrees may have justified the different course lengths. But there is now no difference in entry ages, Highers and Advanced Highers are clearly equivalent to A levels (as English universities acknowledge in their admissions criteria) and ordinary degrees have almost disappeared.

Nor is it immediately obvious why, if an English system were to be adopted (which is not going to happen), Scottish graduates should be burdened with substantially more debt. The pressure for shorter, and less costly, degrees would clearly increase. But that is an argument for another time and place – and an educationally informed outcome could well be that English undergraduate degrees should also be four-year, which after all is the international standard in the rest of Europe, the US and almost everywhere else.

Shiny new buildings

The same ‘others’, faced with this prima facie evidence of  “inefficiency”, might also express some concern about the less-than-prudent management of some – English – universities since the high-fees regime was introduced 13 years ago. Was it really reasonable to plan, as the cranes went up on campus, on the basis that the tuition fees windfall would last for ever? Or that in crabby post-Brexit Britain the very considerable expansion in the number of international students would not provoke a populist backlash?

They might even point back to historical precedents, and argue there is nothing fixed or sacred about any particular level of funding. Back in 1981 the former University Grants Committee bet on protecting the unit of resource – and lost. The student demand displaced by this vain attempt at protection flowed into the then polytechnics, creating the shape of higher education with which we are familiar today. When expansion really took off in the 1990s the unit of resource was further degraded, Better times only returned with the revival of public expenditure under Tony Blair and, crucially, Gordon Brown and, later, for a while, with high tuition fees.

Finally they might channel, in a much more moderate way of course, Donald Trump’s threat to use the money he is withdrawing from Harvard to fund “trade schools”. There are plenty of influential people who argue higher education, and specifically universities, has been expanded at the expense of further education. This may demonstrate how little they know and understand about what actually happens in universities today, in particular post-1992 universities. But they represent an important strand of political, if not public, opinion which is hardly sympathetic to increased funding for higher education.

To be clear, I am not endorsing this alternative viewpoint. My absolute preference is for a better funded higher education system, and also for increased public funding and a managed retreat from the narrowly transactional and crassly commodified regime imposed in England (do you really, Scotland, want to go there?). Nevertheless, surely it is important to remember Burns’ “giftie… to see oursels as ithers see us”. It can only only strengthen our arguments.