Tag: happened

  • Whatever happened to the New Universities Challenge?

    Whatever happened to the New Universities Challenge?

    On a grey March morning in 2008, a ministerial stand-in cut the ribbon on a £25 million glass and steel building that was supposed to transform Southend-on-Sea.

    Then chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), David Eastwood had been hastily switched in as guest-of-honour to replace then-minister Bill Rammell.

    At the funding council, Eastwood had overseen the flow of millions in public money into this seaside town sixty miles east of London. Behind him was the University of Essex’s Gateway Building – six floors of lecture theatres, seminar rooms and local ambition.

    The name had been suggested by Julian Abel, a local resident, chosen because it captured both the building’s location in the Thames Gateway regeneration zone and its promise as “a gateway to learning, business and ultimate success.”

    Colin Riordan, the university’s vice chancellor, captured the spirit of the moment:

    While new buildings are essential to this project, what we are about is changing people’s lives.

    Local dignitaries toured the building’s three academic departments – the East 15 Acting School, the School of Entrepreneurship and Business, and the Department of Health and Human Sciences.

    They admired the Business Incubation Centre designed to nurture local start-ups. They inspected the GP surgery and the state-of-the-art dental clinic where supervised students from Barts and The London would provide free treatment to locals – already 1,000 patients in just eight weeks.

    This wasn’t just a university building. It was the physical manifestation of New Labour’s last great higher education experiment – the idea that you could transform left-behind places by planting universities in them – fixing “cold spots” and “left-behind places” with warm words and big buildings. It was as much economic infrastructure as it was education infrastructure.

    Once, Southend had been “a magnet for day trippers”, then a shabby seaside resort, then a town so deprived that it attracted EU funding. Into that landscape dropped a £26.2 million glass box with “amazing views of the Thames Estuary on one side and a derelict Prudential block on the other,” explicitly aiming to revive the town’s flagging economy.

    Riordan said the campus would “restore the physical fabric of the town centre” and act as a “magnet” for outsiders, while Eastwood supplied a line about a university being “global, national and local” at the same time – world-class research, national recruitment, local benefit.

    Initially, Southend grew beyond the Gateway. East 15 got Clifftown Studios in a converted church, giving the town a theatre and performance space. The Forum – a joint public/university/college library and cultural hub – opened in 2013 as a flagship partnership between Southend Council, Essex and South Essex College, widely lauded as an innovative three-way civic project. For a while, Southend genuinely felt like a university town – at least in the city-centre streets around Elmer Approach.

    But now seventeen years later, the University of Essex has announced it will close the Southend campus. The Gateway Building will be emptied, 400 jobs will go, and the town’s dream of becoming “a vibrant university town” may now end with recriminations about financial sustainability and falling international student numbers.

    The council leader, Daniel Cowan, says:

    …our city remains perfectly placed to play a major national role in higher education, business, and culture.”

    But does it?

    A gateway of excellence

    To understand how Southend’s university dream died, we need to understand how it was born – in the marshlands of Thames Gateway, in the policy papers of Whitehall, and in the peculiar optimism of Britain in the mid-2000s, when anything seemed possible if you just built it.

    In the dying days of the John Major years, to the east of London was a mess – dominated by derelict wharves, refineries and marshland – but it was also a potential route for the new Channel Tunnel Rail Link. In 1991, Michael Heseltine told MPs that the new line “could serve as an important catalyst for plans for the regeneration of that corridor” and announced a government-commissioned study into its potential.

    The thinking was formalised in 1995, when ministers published the Thames Gateway Planning Framework (RPG9a) – regional planning guidance for a “major regional growth area” extending from Newham and Greenwich in London to Thurrock in Essex and Swale in Kent. It was very much late-Conservative spatial policy – trying to capture South East housing and employment growth in a defined corridor while using new infrastructure and land-use policy to civilise what one background paper called the “largest regeneration opportunity in Western Europe.”

    New Labour scaled the whole thing up. In February 2003, John Prescott launched a Sustainable Communities Plan, which “set out a vision for housing and community development over the next 30 years”, with the Thames Gateway as its flagship growth area. Southend became the seaside town that would anchor the estuary’s eastern edge, absorb some of the new housing, and symbolise that this wasn’t just about London’s fringe – but about reviving places that had been left behind by deindustrialisation.

    2001’s Thames Gateway South Essex vision even identified Southend’s future role as the cultural and intellectual hub and a “higher education centre of excellence for South Essex.”

    In a 2006 Commons adjournment debate on “Southend (Regeneration)”, David Amess stitched the university and college expansions into promises of 13,000 new jobs and thousands of homes by 2021. Accommodating growth at the University of Essex Southend campus and South East Essex College, he argued, was key to turning the town centre into a “cultural hub”, alongside plans for a public and university library and performance and media centre.

    By the time John Denham published A New University Challenge: Unlocking Britain’s Talent in March 2008, Southend was the exemplar. In the South Essex case study the prospectus tells a neat story – Essex’s involvement began in 2001 via validated programmes at South East Essex College, evolved into a “distinctive” partnership pulling a research-intensive university into a major widening participation and regeneration project.

    With support from HEFCE, central and local government, it aimed to grow student numbers in the town from 700 to 2,000 by 2013 as “the beginning of a vision to make Southend a vibrant university town.”

    Regeneration tales

    There were plenty more. In “A New University Challenge,” Denham reminded readers that, since 2003, capital funding and additional student numbers had already gone into eleven areas – Barnsley, Cornwall, Cumbria, Darlington, Folkestone, Hastings, Medway, Oldham, Peterborough, Southend and Suffolk – with HEFCE agreeing support for six more – Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley, Everton, Grimsby, and North and South Devon.

    He estimated that around £100 million in capital had been committed so far, with capacity for some 9,000 students when all the projects were fully functioning.

    Cornwall was another showcase. The Penryn (then Tremough) campus – developed through the Combined Universities in Cornwall scheme – used EU Objective One money and UK government funding via the South West RDA to build a shared site for Falmouth and Exeter in a county with historically low higher education participation and a fragile, seasonal economy.

    Subsequent evidence to Parliament from Cornwall Council was explicit that CUC was designed to deliver economic regeneration as much as access, focusing European investment on “business-facing activity” and experimentation in outreach to firms that had never worked with universities before.

    Cumbria got its own mini-origin story. Denham described the new University of Cumbria – launched in 2007 – as “a new kind of institution” with distributed campuses in urban and rural settings – designed to meet diverse learner needs and provide, with partners, the “skills that are essential” to create the workforce that would go on to decommission the Sellafield nuclear power plant.

    Later DIUS reporting, REF environment statements and parliamentary evidence on the nuclear workforce all reprise the same themes – Cumbria as an anchor institution, a regional skills engine and a piece of the civil nuclear skills jigsaw.

    Suffolk was presented as the archetypal “cold spot.” In 2005 UEA and Essex, backed by Suffolk County Council, Ipswich Borough Council, EEDA and the Learning and Skills Council, secured £15 million from HEFCE to create University Campus Suffolk on Ipswich Waterfront – a county of over half a million people with no university, low participation and significant planned growth.

    Denham sold UCS as both a response to education under-supply and an enabler of economic regeneration. Later coverage in The Independent made the same point in more colourful language – Ipswich finally had its own glamorous waterfront campus “full of thousands of students.”

    Barnsley, Oldham, Darlington and the like were framed more modestly – university centres in FE colleges that extended HE access to people “who might not otherwise consider participating in higher education.” In Barnsley’s case that meant a town-centre site opened in 2005 by Huddersfield, with investment from HEFCE, Yorkshire Forward and Objective 1 funds, later taken over by Barnsley College but still offering Huddersfield-validated degrees and hosting around 1,600 HE students.

    Folkestone, Hastings and Medway were presented as coastal or post-industrial variations on the theme – attempts to use university presence in under-served towns as a driver of creative-quarter regeneration, skills upgrading and image change. University Centre Folkestone, a Canterbury Christ Church/Greenwich joint venture, showed up in coastal regeneration reports as a way to tackle deprivation through improved skills and productivity in South Kent.

    The Universities at Medway partnership between Kent, Greenwich, Canterbury Christ Church and Mid-Kent College was talked up in SEEDA case studies as a £50 million dockyard campus replacing thousands of lost shipbuilding jobs and housing over 10,000 students.

    All of that was then plugged into the macro-economy story. Denham leaned on work suggesting that a one percentage point increase in the graduate share of the workforce raised productivity by around 0.5 per cent, and argued that higher education contributes over £50 billion a year to the UK economy, supporting 600,000 jobs.

    The logic was pretty simple – if you want a more productive, knowledge-intensive economy, you need more graduates in more places – and not just in the big cities.

    20 new universities

    In March 2008 Denham called the scattered activity the “first wave” – and then announced a competition for the next one:

    We believe we need a new ‘university challenge’ to bring the benefits of local higher education provision to bear across the country.

    He got his headlines. He asked HEFCE to consult not just institutions but also RDAs, local authorities, business and community groups on how to identify locations and shape proposals. The goals were twofold – “unlocking the potential of towns and people” and “driving economic regeneration.”

    HEFCE’s Strategic Development Fund was given £150 million for the 2008–11 spending review. Denham suggested that over six years the fund could support up to twenty more centres or campuses, with commitments in place by 2014 and roughly 10,000 additional student places once mature.

    The criteria for bids were revealing about the politics of the moment. Proposals had to demonstrate that they would widen participation, particularly among adults with level 3 who had never considered HE. They had to slot into local economic strategies – supplying high-level skills, supporting business start-ups and innovation, anchoring graduates who might otherwise leave. And they had to show strong HE/FE collaboration, buy-in from councils and RDAs, credible demand modelling, and the ability to manage complex multi-funded capital projects.

    HEFCE dutifully ran a two-stage process – statements of intent followed by full business cases. By late 2009, after sifting twenty-three initial bids, the funding council concluded that six were strong enough to develop further, subject to the next spending review. Those six were Somerset (with Bournemouth University), Crawley (Brighton), Milton Keynes (Bedfordshire), Swindon (UWE), Thurrock (Essex) and the Wirral (Chester).

    But the initiative wasn’t to last. The 2010 election brought a coalition government that scrapped RDAs, squeezed capital budgets and shifted the English HE settlement onto nine-thousand-ish fees and income-contingent loans. HEFCE’s Strategic Development Fund withered. “Alternative providers” became the policy fashion – and the idea of a central pot funding twenty shiny new public campuses was in the past.

    The promised headline – twenty new campuses, twenty new “university towns” – never happened. Instead we got a patchwork of university centres, joint ventures and re-badged FE HE hubs, while national rhetoric shifted from “unlocking towns and people” to “competition and choice.”

    Four directions

    If we look back now at the original seventeen, we find four basic trajectories.

    Barnsley and Oldham have settled into the HE-in-FE pattern. University Campus Barnsley, opened in 2005 by Huddersfield with HEFCE, Yorkshire Forward and Objective 1 support, transferred to Barnsley College in 2013 and now runs as the college’s HE arm, with Huddersfield still validating degrees. University Campus Oldham followed a similar route – opened in 2005 under Huddersfield’s banner and managed by Oldham College since 2012, delivering Huddersfield-validated awards alongside its own.

    Cornwall and Medway look closer to what Denham imagined. The Penryn campus now hosts around 6,000 students on a shared Falmouth–Exeter site, with Objective One and SWRDA funding widely credited as crucial to its development.

    Universities at Medway, established in 2004 at Chatham Maritime, has struggled – Canterbury Christ Church has all but pulled out, Kent’s numbers are small. The glossy case studies boasting of its £300 million boost to the local economy and its role in remaking a dockyard area that lost 7,000 jobs overnight look less glossy in 2025 – and now, of course, Kent and Greenwich are merging.

    Cumbria and Suffolk were the two that ended up as fully fledged universities. The University of Cumbria, established in 2007 from a merger of colleges and satellite campuses, describes itself in REF and internal strategy documents as an “anchor institute” created to catalyse regional prosperity and pride, while continuing to play a role in the nuclear skills ecosystem around Sellafield. University Campus Suffolk secured university title and degree-awarding powers in 2016, with official narrative and sector commentary stressing its success in “transforming the provision of higher education in Suffolk and beyond” – although a significant proportion of its students are franchised.

    Grimsby, Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley, and the Devon centres fall into the “quietly important” category. The £20 million University Centre Grimsby opened in 2011 and now offers a large suite of higher-level programmes in partnership with Hull and through the TEC Partnership’s own degree-awarding powers. Grimsby Institute marketing describes it as a “dedicated home” for HE and one of England’s largest college-based providers. Similar stories play out in Blackburn, Blackpool and Petroc/South Devon – college-based university centres that rarely appear in the national HE debate but matter enormously for local progression and skills.

    Folkestone and Hastings show us the fragility of hanging regeneration hopes on small coastal campuses. University Centre Folkestone operated from 2007 to 2013 as a Canterbury Christ Church/Greenwich initiative, featuring in coastal regeneration studies as a way to address deprivation and skills deficits and energise the creative quarter. But by the early 2010s it had wound down its HE offer, with the buildings folded into Folkestone’s broader cultural infrastructure.

    Hastings saw an original centre replaced in 2009–10 by the University of Brighton in Hastings as the university’s fifth campus – itself the subject of fierce local protest when Brighton decided in 2016 to close the site and move provision into a partnership “university centre” model with Sussex Coast College.

    Peterborough was a late-blooming outlier. The original University Centre Peterborough, developed with Anglia Ruskin, is now joined by ARU Peterborough – a campus opened in 2022 with significant “levelling up” funding and endlessly described by ministers as addressing a higher education cold spot and boosting local productivity. It was, in many ways, Denham’s model revived under a different party label – but few like it are left.

    As for the “Universities Challenge” push, in Somerset, Bridgwater & Taunton College developed University Centre Somerset, offering degrees validated by HE partners. In Crawley, what had been imagined as a bid for a campus manifested as higher-level technical and university-level provision in Crawley College and the Sussex & Surrey Institute of Technology.

    Milton Keynes’ ambitions funnelled into University Centre/Campus Milton Keynes, now part of the University of Bedfordshire, with periodic political chatter about eventually having a fully fledged MK university. On the Wirral, Wirral Met’s University Centre at Hamilton Campus offers degrees accredited by Chester, Liverpool and UCLan as part of a broader skills and regeneration role. Thurrock saw South Essex College expand its University Centre presence – exactly the sort of FE-based HE model Denham said he wanted.

    Elsewhere, Chester has pulled out of Telford. Gloucestershire is winding down Cheltenham. The University College of Football Business (UCFB) no longer operates in Burnley. Man Met sold Crewe to Buckingham. USW is no longer in Newport, UWTSD is closing Lampeter, Durham is out of Stockton, and Cumbria has mothballed Ambleside.

    It turns out that on that grey March morning in 2008, David Eastwood was right. To sustain a full-fledged university campus – with all of the spill out benefits often envisaged – you need international students, national recruitment of home students and local students. Immigration policy change has made the first harder. A lack of deliberate student distribution has made the second harder. And closures like Southend’s leave local students like this.

    I personally chose Southend due to being a single parent, wanting to build my career in nursing whilst getting that extra time with my little girl.

    A new universities challenge

    In its “National Conversation on Immigration” in 2018, citizens’ panels for British Future saw real benefits of international students – it called for student migration and university expansion to be used “to boost regional and local growth in under-performing areas,” and for any major expansion of student numbers to be government-led with the explicit aim of spreading the benefits more widely, including via regional quotas on post-study work visas and new institutions in cold spots.

    It talked of “a new wave of university building” and said institutions should be located in places that have experienced economic decline, have fewer skilled local jobs, or are social mobility “cold spots” – with criteria including distance from existing universities and socio-economic need. They then give a worked list of ten suggested locations – Barnstaple, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Chesterfield, Derry-Londonderry, Doncaster, Grimsby, Shrewsbury, Southend and Wigan.

    But as we’ve covered before, immigration policy – both during expansion and contraction – is almost always place-blind.

    The Resolution Foundation’s Ending stagnation A New Economic Strategy for Britain makes a similar point – it rejects making existing campuses ever larger, and instead calls for new ones able to serve cold-spots “like Blackpool and Hartlepool.” It cites evidence that increasing the number of universities in a region – a 10 per cent rise – is associated with around a 0.4 per cent increase in GDP per capita.

    This Tony Blair Institute paper from 2012 – surely the inspiration for Starmer’s 66 per cent target speech – calls for new universities in “left-behind regions” as a way to reduce spatial disparities and break intergenerational disadvantage. Chris Whitty’s 2021 report that highlighted the “overlooked” issues in coastal towns suggested shifting medical training to campuses in deprived towns.

    And at a Policy Exchange event on the fringe of Conservative Party Conference that year, Michael “Minister for Levelling Up” Gove was asked about the potential for new universities to bring economic benefits to “places like Doncaster and Thanet.” Gove simply said: “I agree.”

    The current Labour government’s Post-16 education and skills white paper makes familiar noises about addressing “cold spots in under-served regions.” But there’s no money for new campuses, no Strategic Development Fund, no New University Challenge. Instead, there’s a working group. And around the edges, we’re watching the geographical distribution of higher education shrink.

    Without deliberate planning, sustained funding and political will, clustering will continue to cluster. Universities will consolidate in cities where mobile students want to study and where critical mass already exists. The cold spots will get colder.

    OfS talks of universities needing “bold and transformative action.” It doesn’t mean transforming places – it means surviving financially. Even mergers save little money unless they lead to campus closures. And campus closures mean communities losing not just current educational provision but future possibility – the chance that their children might stay local and still get a degree, that their town might attract the businesses and cultural institutions that follow universities, that they might be something more than a void on the educational map.

    The Robbins expansion of the 1960s worked because it created entire new institutions with sustained funding and genuine autonomy. The polytechnic expansion of the 1970s worked because it built on existing technical colleges with deep local roots. The conversion of polytechnics to universities in 1992 worked because it recognised existing success rather than trying to create it from nothing. But most attempts since to plant universities in cold spots through satellite campuses and partnership arrangements have struggled – because the system stubbornly refuses to pull levers based on place.

    Promises of change

    Once a university exits stage left, the impacts can be devastating. Despite promises that the merger and rebranding of the university into the University of South Wales in 2013 would not reduce campuses or student numbers, the 32-acre campus in Newport was closed in 2016 – when a largeish slice of arts and media courses moved to the Cardiff Atrium campus.

    Student numbers in the city collapsed from around 10,000 in 2010/11 to just 2,600 a decade later – a drop that left the city, in the words of one local councillor, as “a poor man’s Pontypridd” when it comes to higher education.

    The campus had been the city’s third highest employer – now the economic contribution of higher education to the local economy has all but evaporated. As one local put it:

    There’s a lot of hate for students until they’re gone.

    The Southend closure announcement came with promises too. The university would “support students through the transition.” The local council would “explore options for the site.” The MP would “fight for the community.”

    Some will point the finger at the university. But we would be very foolish indeed to blame universities for shutting down campuses that they can’t sustain in a market-led model.

    Doing so obscures the fundamental question – if universities are as crucial to regional development as everyone claims, why do we leave their geographical distribution to market forces? Why do we build campuses with regeneration money then expect them to survive on student fees? Why are we place-specific with our physical capital but place-blind with our human capital? Why do we keep repeating the same mistakes?

    The answer is uncomfortable – because we’ve never really believed in geographical equity in higher education. We’ve played at it, thrown money at it during boom times, made speeches about it. But when times get hard, when choices must be made, the cold spots are always first to lose out.

    The 1960s planners who chose Canterbury over Ashford and Colchester over Chelmsford understood that university location was too important to leave to chance. They made deliberate choices about where to invest for the long term. They understood that some places would need permanent subsidy to sustain provision, and they accepted that as the price of geographical equity.

    We’ve lost that understanding. We’ve replaced planning with market mechanisms, strategy with initiatives, and long-term thinking with political cycles. Places like Southend are the ones that will pay the price – and sadly, it won’t be the last.

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  • As the Labour Party Conference draws to a close, HEPI takes a look at what just happened

    As the Labour Party Conference draws to a close, HEPI takes a look at what just happened

    Nick Hillman, HEPI Director, bottles his thoughts about this year’s Labour Party Conference.

    As multiple fringe events showed, when it comes to higher education the Labour Conference was very busy, with notably more vice-chancellors in attendance than in days of yore.

    My Conference sojourn started on Saturday with a trip to Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club to watch the brilliant in-house Beatles tribute band. At the time, I mused about which fab-four song might best sum up the next few days. ‘Taxman’ perhaps?

    (If you drive a car) I’ll tax the street

    (If you try to sit) I’ll tax your seat

    (If you get too cold) I’ll tax the heat

    (If you take a walk) I’ll tax your feet

    In fact, when it came to higher education, the big news was a giveaway rather than a new tax. I’ll always remember where I was when Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister (in the Manchester University Students’ Union shop). Perhaps education policy wonks will similarly always remember where they were when they heard maintenance grants were on their way back (albeit for a second time – they were last reintroduced in the mid-2000s before being abolished a decade later).

    In my case, I was with dozens of others in a fascinating HEPI fringe event on students’ cost of living, chaired by my colleague Rose Stephenson and featuring Alex Stanley (NUS), Gavan Conlon (London Economics) and Nic Beech (University of Salford). This came hot on the heels of two other HEPI fringe events – one on public opinion and higher education featuring a bevy of vice-chancellors and another with Cambridge University Press and Assessment on ‘Quality Matters’.

    It was no surprise the news about maintenance grants won a spontaneous round of applause. It reminded me of the cheer I got during a speech to the University of Derby in 2016, when I read out the breaking news that UKIP’s Leader had just stood down (‘Nigel Farage resigns’, the Guardian reported, ‘after “achieving political ambition”’).

    In both instances, the initial reaction was premature. Brexit was not the end of Faragism and it quickly became clear in Liverpool that the return of maintenance grants is not quite what it first seemed either.

    Bridget Phillipson’s tweet announcing the change said:

    Access to our colleges and universities shouldn’t just be for a wealthy few.

    That’s why I’m bringing back maintenance grants for those who need them most.

    Labour is ambitious for all our young people, no matter their background. I’m putting our values into action.

    Most people who have calculated the cost of reintroducing grants have assumed it would cost something in the region of £2 billion a year. However, Ministers plan to fund the new grants via the proposed levy on international students’ fees, which is expected to raise around £600 million. So entitlement to the new means-tested grants will, it turns out, be limited by students’ course choice. You will be quids in only if you are studying what the politicians want you to study. 

    As I noted at the King’s College London Policy Institute fringe meeting on Wednesday afternoon, funding the new grants from the new levy may seem like clever politics, at least inside Number 10 and the Treasury and also perhaps by anyone seeking election as the Labour Party’s Deputy Leader.

    Students and vice-chancellors have been desperate for grants to return and rightly so – for the reasons why, see our recent report on a Minimum Income Standard for Students with TechnologyOne and Loughborough University. But the levy / tariff / tax on international students is hated by those same students and vice-chancellors, putting them in something of a bind when it comes to responding to the Government’s announcement.

    Not only do international students typically come from countries that are poorer than the UK, but they are already subsidising UK research and the teaching of domestic students. Now they are expected to contribute towards the day-to-day living costs of poorer home students too (just so long as those UK students are studying courses deemed to be of most economic value). Just how broad do Ministers think international students’ shoulders are?

    Many of them come from wealthy backgrounds but some do not have very deep pockets and none is obliged to study in the UK rather than elsewhere. So our higher education institutions are unlikely to be able to pass on the full 6% without seeing a drop in demand.

    It was great to witness so many backbench Labour MPs, like Alex Sobel, Daniel Zeichner, Abtisam Mohamed and Dr Lauren Sullivan, advocating for UK universities across the conference fringe programme. But more generally, there were parts of the Conference that felt flat as well as parts that were presumably in line with what the organisers wanted – including the Leader’s big set-piece speech. Starmer’s big reveal was the rejection of the ancient 50% target for young people’s participation in higher education in preference for a new target ‘That two-thirds of our children should go either to university… Or take a gold standard apprenticeship.’

    The Prime Minister would be unlikely to welcome the comparison but this reminded me of nothing so much as David Cameron’s pledges as Prime Minister. In 2013, for example, Cameron said: ‘I want us to have as a new norm the idea that in school, everybody, everyone who can, either takes that path on to university, or takes that path on to an apprenticeship. You should be doing one or the other.’

    The challenge is not coming up with such commitments; it is delivering them. Fewer adults are doing apprenticeships now than when David Cameron spoke, despite the introduction of an Apprenticeship Levy. Perhaps Starmer can succeed where Cameron and his successors failed…

    At the end of the Conference, I was left feeling the biggest omission compared to past Labour Conferences was a clear and broad narrative about His Majesty’s Official Opposition: the Conservative Party. If the choice facing the country really is between ‘division’ and ‘decency’, as Keir Starmer says, then might not the best way to defeat division be, as with Le Pen in France or the AfD in Germany, for centre-right and centre-left parties to act together?

    If Tony Blair and William Hague can work together, surely this is not impossible? But – and this is a personal opinion only – I left Liverpool wondering if the main problem for today’s Labour leadership is that they have spent the last 15 years making such strong criticisms of their bedfellows in the mainstream centre of British politics that they are unable to admit they may now need to work with the centre-right to stave off their worst fears.

    Then again, perhaps today’s Tory Party also cannot see that the opposite of division is not so much ‘decency’ (however much we might want that) as collaboration. We’ll find out for certain next week as the policy caravan moves across the north-west to Manchester for the Conservative Party Conference. Do come to HEPI’s event there if you can – it is outside the secure zone so no expensive pass is needed.

    Carole Cox, HEPI’s Events and Communications Administrator (and HEPI’s biggest Beatles’s fan) explains why Liverpool is the perfect place for day-trippers and long-stayers.

    The City of Liverpool has the biggest single collection of Grade One listed buildings than any other English city outside London and it was named the European Capital of Culture in 2008. A football mecca, it also boasts a plethora of museums, including the World Museum, the International Slavery Museum, the Museum of Liverpool, Tate Liverpool and the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

    It is also an interestingly quirky place, which harbours some amazing public toilets (you read that right). For example, if you ever happen to drop into the Philharmonic Dining Rooms in the Georgian Quarter, feel free to admire the famous Grade I-listed urinals in their pink marble splendour.

    And then, there is the deservedly famous Mersey Beat. Liverpool and The Beatles, these are words that go together well.* The Liverpudlian group are considered the best-selling band in music history, hailed as pioneers who revolutionised the music industry and popular culture.

    In summary, Liverpool is a ‘blast’ in more ways than one: a city which does not shy away from its heritage, a city with so much to offer culturally, but also a windy city open to the strong maritime winds gusting from the docks. Which may be why the French translation of the 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night is Les Quatre Garçons Dans Le Vent, a French colloquial idiom for their growing popularity – which, when translated word-for-word, awkwardly reads as ‘the four boys in the wind’.

    * ‘these are words that go together well’ are lyrics from the 1965 Beatles song Michelle (Lennon/McCartney).

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  • What’s happened since Texas killed in-state tuition for undocumented students

    What’s happened since Texas killed in-state tuition for undocumented students

    SAN ANTONIO — Ximena had a plan. 

    The 18-year-old from Houston was going to start college in the fall at the University of Texas at Tyler, where she had been awarded $10,000 a year in scholarships. That, she hoped, would set her up for her dream: a Ph.D. in chemistry, followed by a career as a professor or researcher.

    “And then the change to in-state tuition happened, and that’s when I knew for sure that I had to pivot,” said Ximena, who was born in Mexico but attended schools stateside since kindergarten. (The Hechinger Report is referring to her by only her first name because she fears retaliation for her immigration status.) 

    In June, the Texas attorney general’s office and the Trump administration worked together to end the provisions in a state law that had offered thousands of undocumented students like her lower in-state tuition rates at Texas public colleges. State and federal officials successfully argued in court that the long-standing policy discriminated against U.S. citizens from other states who paid a higher rate. That rationale has now been replicated in similar lawsuits against Kentucky, Oklahoma and Minnesota — part of a broader offensive against immigrants’ access to public education. 

    At UT Tyler, in-state tuition and fees for the upcoming academic year total $9,736, compared to more than $25,000 for out-of-state students. Ximena and her family couldn’t afford the higher tuition bill, so she withdrew. Instead, she enrolled at Houston Community College, where out-of-state costs are $227 per semester hour, nearly three times the in-district rate. The school offers only basic college-level chemistry classes, so to set herself up for a doctorate or original research, Ximena will still need to find a way to pay for a four-year university down the line. 

    Her predicament is exactly what state lawmakers from both political parties had hoped to avoid when they passed the Texas Dream Act, 2001 legislation that not only opened doors to higher education for undocumented students but was also meant to bolster Texas’s economy and its workforce long-term. With that law, Texas became the first of more than two dozen states to implement in-state tuition for undocumented students, and for nearly 24 years, the landmark policy remained intact. Conservative lawmakers repeatedly proposed to repeal it, but despite years of single-party control in the state legislature, not enough Republicans embraced repeal even as recently as this spring, days before the Texas attorney general’s office and the federal Department of Justice moved to end it. 

    Now, as the fall semester approaches, immigrant students are weighing whether to disenroll from their courses or await clarity on how the consent agreement entered into by the state and DOJ affects them.

    Immigration advocates are worried that Texas colleges and universities are boxing out potential attendees who are lawfully present and still qualify for in-state tuition despite the court ruling — including recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, asylum applicants and Temporary Protected Status holders — because university personnel lack immigration expertise and haven’t been given clear guidelines on exactly who needs to pay the higher tuition rate. 

    At Austin Community College, which serves an area as large as Connecticut, members of the board of trustees are unsure how to accurately implement the ruling. As they await answers, they’ve so far decided against sending letters asking their students for sensitive information in order to determine tuition rates. 

    “This confusion will inevitably harm students because what we find is that in the absence of information and in the presence of fear and anxiety, students will opt to not continue higher education,” said Manuel Gonzalez, vice chair of the ACC board of trustees.

    A billboard promoting Austin Community College in Spanish sits on a highway that leads to Lockhart, Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report

    Policy experts, meanwhile, warn that Texas’s workforce could suffer as talented young people, many of whom have spent their entire education in the state’s public school system, will no longer be able to afford the associate’s and bachelor’s degrees that would allow them to pursue careers that would help propel their local economies. Under the Texas Dream Act, beneficiaries were required to commit to applying for lawful permanent residence as soon as possible, giving them the opportunity to hold down jobs related to their degrees. Without resident status, it’s likely they’ll still work — just more in lower-paying, under-the-radar jobs.  

    “It’s so short-sighted in terms of the welfare of the state of Texas,” said Barbara Hines, a former law school professor who helped legislators craft the Texas Dream Act. 

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    By the turn of the century, almost two decades after undocumented children won the right to attend public school in the U.S., immigrant students and their champions remained frustrated that college remained out of reach. 

    For retired Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Rick Noriega, a Democrat who served in the Texas Legislature at the time, that reality hit close to home when he learned of a young yard worker in his district who wanted to enroll at the local community college for aviation mechanics but couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition. 

    Noriega called the school chancellor’s office, which was able to provide funding for the student to attend. But that experience led him to wonder: How many more kids in his district were running up against the same barriers to higher education? 

    So he worked with a sociologist to poll students at local high schools about the problem, which turned out to be widespread. And Noriega’s district wasn’t an outlier. In a state that has long had one of the nation’s largest unauthorized immigrant populations, politicians across the partisan divide knew affected constituents, friends or family members and wanted to help. Once Noriega decided to propose legislation, a Republican, Fred Hill, asked to serve as a joint author on the bill. 

    To proponents of the Texas Dream Act, the best argument in support of in-state tuition for undocumented students was an economic one. After the state had already invested in these students during K-12 public schooling, it made sense to continue developing them so they could eventually help meet Texas’ workforce needs. 

    “We’d spent all this money on these kids, and they’d done everything that we asked them to do — in many instances superstars and valedictorians and the like — and then they hit this wall, which was higher education that was cost prohibitive,” said Noriega. 

    The legislation easily passed the Texas House of Representatives, which was Democratic-controlled at the time, but the Republican-led Senate was less accommodating. 

    “I couldn’t even get a hearing,’” said Leticia Van de Putte, the then-state senator who sponsored the legislation in her chamber. 

    To persuade her Republican colleagues, she added several restrictions, including requiring undocumented students to live in Texas for three years before finishing high school or receiving a GED. (Three years was estimated as the average time it would take a family to pay enough in state taxes to make up the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition.) She also included the clause mandating that undocumented students who accessed in-state tuition sign an affidavit pledging to pursue green cards as soon as they were able.   

    Van de Putte also turned to Texas business groups to hammer home the economic case for the bill. And she convinced the business community to pay for buses to bring Latino evangelical conservative pastors from Dallas, San Antonio, Houston and other areas of the state to Austin, so they could knock on doors in support of the legislation and pray with Republican senators and their staff. 

    After that, the Texas Dream Act overwhelmingly passed the state Senate in May 2001, and then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed it into law the following month.

    Related: How Trump is changing higher education: The view from four campuses

    Yet by 2007, even as immigrant rights advocates, faith-based groups and business associations formed a coalition to defend immigrants against harmful state policies, the Texas legislature was starting to introduce a wave of generally anti-immigrant proposals. In 2010, polling suggested Texans overwhelmingly opposed allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates. 

    By 2012, a new slew of right-wing politicians was elected to office, many philosophically opposed to the law — and loud about it. Perry’s defense of the policy had come back to haunt him during the 2012 Republican presidential primary, when his campaign was dogged by criticism after he told opponents of tuition equity during a debate, “I don’t think you have a heart.” 

    Still, none of the many bills introduced over the years to repeal the Texas Dream Act were successful. And even Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican border hawk, at times equivocated on the policy, with his spokesperson saying in 2013 that Abbott believed “the objective” of in-state tuition regardless of immigration status was “noble.”

    Legislative observers say that some Republicans in the state continue to support the policy. “It’s a bipartisan issue. There are Republicans in support of in-state tuition,” said Luis Figueroa, senior director of legislative affairs at the public policy research and advocacy nonprofit Every Texan. “They cannot publicly state it.”

    Meanwhile, as the topic became more politically charged in Texas, the Texas Dream Act ended up amplifying a larger conversation that eventually led to the creation of DACA, the Obama-era program that has given some undocumented immigrants access to deportation protections and work permits. 

    Even before DACA, many immigrants worked, and those who remain undocumented often still do, either as independent contractors for employers that turn a blind eye to their immigration status or by starting their own businesses. A study from May 2020 found that unauthorized residents make up 8.2 percent of the state’s workforce, and for every dollar spent toward public services for them, the state of Texas recouped $1.21 in revenue. 

    But without the immediate legal permission to work, undocumented college graduates who had benefited from the Texas Dream Act found themselves limited despite their degrees. As the fight for tuition equity spread to other states, so did the fight for a legal solution to support the students it benefited. 

    When these young people — affectionately dubbed Dreamers — took center stage to more publicly advocate for themselves, their plight proved sympathetic. By 2017, the same year Trump began his first term, polling had flipped to show a plurality of Texans in support of in-state tuition for undocumented students. More recently, research has indicated time and time again that Americans support a pathway to legal status for undocumented residents brought to the U.S. as children. 

    But arguments against in-state tuition regardless of immigration status also grew in popularity: Critics contended that the policy is unfair to U.S. citizens from other states who have to pay higher rates, or that undocumented students are taking spots at competitive schools that could be filled by documented Americans. 

    The DOJ leaned on similar rhetoric in the lawsuit that killed tuition equity in Texas, saying the state law is superseded by 1996 federal legislation banning undocumented immigrants from getting in-state tuition based on residency. That argument has become a template as the Trump administration has sued to dismantle other states’ in-state tuition policies for undocumented residents.

    In Kentucky, state Attorney General Russell Coleman, a Republican, has followed in Texas’ footsteps, recommending that the state council overseeing higher education withdraw its regulation allowing for access to in-state tuition instead of fighting to defend it in court. 

    At the same time, the Trump administration has found other ways to cut back on higher education opportunities for undocumented students, rescinding a policy that had helped them participate in career, technical and adult education programs and investigating universities for offering them scholarships. 

    Related: Which schools and colleges are being investigated by the Trump administration? 

    Back in Texas, the sudden policy change regarding in-state tuition is causing chaos. Even the state’s two largest universities, Texas A&M and the University of Texas, are using different guidelines to decide which students must pay out-of-state rates. 

    Clouds fill the sky behind the tower at the University of Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Washington Post via Getty Images

    “Universities, I think, are the ones that are put in this really difficult position,” Figueroa said. “They are not immigration experts. They’ve received very little guidance about how to interpret the consent decree.” 

    Amid so much confusion, Figueroa predicted, future lawsuits will likely crop up. Already, affected students and organizations have filed motions in court seeking to belatedly defend the Texas Dream Act against the DOJ.

    In the meantime, young scholars are facing difficult choices. One student, who asked to remain anonymous because of her undocumented immigration status, was scrolling through the news on her phone before bed when she saw a headline about the outcome of the DOJ court case. 

    “I burst in tears because, you know, as someone who’s been fighting to get ahead in their education, right now that I’m in higher education, it’s been a complete blessing,” she said. “So the first thing that I just thought of is ‘What am I going to do now? Where is my future heading?’ The plans that I have had going for me, are they going to have to come to a complete halt?’” 

    The young woman, who has lived in San Antonio since she was 9 months old, had enrolled in six courses for the fall at Texas A&M-San Antonio and wasn’t sure whether to drop them. It would be her final semester before earning her psychology and sociology degrees, but she couldn’t fathom paying for out-of-state tuition. 

    “I’m in the unknown,” she said, like “many students in this moment.”

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

    This story about the Texas Dream Act was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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  • What Colleges and Universities Should Take Away from What Happened at UVA

    What Colleges and Universities Should Take Away from What Happened at UVA

    What happened to the President of UVA is devastating.  And we have let ourselves believe it is surprising.  But, while it should be shocking that the federal government – one that has been repeatedly talking about the return of education to the states – is interfering with the administration of a public university, it should have been expected if you were paying attention.

    Amanda Fuchs MillerWhy is that?  This Administration, as promised in Project 2025 and as evidenced by the appointees placed in Trump’s White House and the Department of Education, laid out a roadmap they would take to undermine higher education, as they are doing with other democratic institutions.  Using colleges’ responses to October 7th, and in the name of fighting antisemitism, the Trump Administration has taken steps since January 20th to undermine colleges and universities – not chipping away but taking a sledgehammer and finding everything to be a nail.

    The tools in this Administration’s toolbox include cancelling funding, slashing federal student aid, investigating and auditing schools, removing and threatening international students and immigrants, and increasing the costs of higher education institutions doing their work – from indirect cost increases on research funds to attempting to revoke tax-exempt status, and the list goes on. 

    These actions have, and will, hit institutions across the board hard – from Columbia and Harvard to public state schools to small independent colleges to community colleges.  All of these schools – and their students – rely on and benefit from public investments in higher education. 

    And the damage is not just to the schools and students.  The communities, cities, and states where these schools are located benefit economically when colleges and their students thrive. Our nation’s standing as a leader in innovation – in technology, medical advancements, and other fields – will be threatened without federal investments in higher education.  And, without academic freedom ensuring a diversity of viewpoints at our institutions, free from political interference, our democracy will be at risk.

    So, what lessons can we take from what happened at UVA and the forced resignation of President Ryan? 

    First, this has never been just about the Ivies.  There has been a belief that the elite schools are the target.  Just take a look at the list of the 60 colleges that the Trump Administration opened investigations into, under the pretext of antisemitism, in March – Ivy League schools but also publics (in blue states and red states), privates, and small independent colleges. The reconciliation bill, which was signed into law last week, eliminated Grad PLUS loans and capped Parent PLUS loans – programs that help students at all schools, including HBCUs.  And, the President’s FY26 budget would eliminate programs that fund wraparound services which will hurt community college students who rely most heavily on those federal investments.

    Second, it is not just about the words used. Following UVA President Ryan’s resignation, DOJ Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told CNN that although UVA decided in March 2025 to dissolve its DEI office, it “used a series of euphemisms to simply rebrand and repackage the exact same discriminatory programs that are illegal under federal law.”

    This raises a couple of lessons that can be learned as higher ed institutions look ahead.  Following the President’s executive orders on diversity, equity and inclusion, many organizations began scrubbing their websites, shuttering DEI offices, and disbanding committees with diversity and equity in their titles.  Schools instead need to first do a campus-wide review of their activities.  Then, they should undertake a risk assessment to both determine which activities can be viewed as being in contrast to Trump’s executive orders and the new certifications being tied to federal funding and to determine which activities are actually in violation of current state and federal antidiscrimination laws.  The first bucket of activities – those that do not follow the executive orders – may put schools’ funding at risk but are not necessarily illegal.  This Administration is using a chilling effect to stop allowable initiatives that are in contrast with their ideology and politics.  Understanding the risk is important for schools to protect themselves but schools must also continue to fulfill their missions of serving all students and providing diverse environments and inclusive communities and must be ready to push back when wrongly being accused of engaging in “illegal DEI,” which isn’t in and of itself a thing.

    Sometimes changing the words, or renaming or eliminating an office, may be necessary.  In fact, for federal grants, agencies are utilizing AI to do word searches so there may be a reason to use different words and reframe proposals for federal funds.  But, if schools are going to do so, they need to engage in genuine stakeholder outreach to explain what is and what isn’t changing.  In addition to the closing of UVA’s DEI office now being criticized as irrelevant in the eyes of the Trump Administration, the school leadership faced criticism from faculty, students and other university community members when they did so, which likely caused them to lose some of the support they needed to push back against the false charges by DOJ.   Explaining which changes are being made early – and which aren’t and why – can help college leaders on multiple fronts.

    Third, this Administration is continuing to not tell the truth about what the U.S. Supreme Court 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard  (SFFA) meant.  Assistant Attorney General Dhillon told CNN in her interview about UVA, “It’s not just admissions part, it’s also preferences in special programs while students are at the school … this is all illegal under Students for Fair Admissions.”  Well, no.  The Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA was about admissions.  Telling schools to stop activities because of SFFA in other areas is again a scare tactic that must be pushed back on both in courts and in the court of public opinion.

    This is the time for higher ed institutions and their stakeholders to come together and fight back.  Institutions must think outside the box and do the hard work so that they can continue to fulfill their missions of serving all students and being inclusive communities while not increasing the risks of harmful actions that will hurt their students, their communities, the economy, and our democracy. 

     _____________

    Amanda Fuchs Miller served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Higher Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education in the Biden-Harris Administration. She is the president of Seventh Street Strategies, which provides advocacy and policy supports to higher ed institutions, nonprofit organizations, and foundations.  

     

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  • Why I Stopped Starting Class with Content—and What Happened Instead – Faculty Focus

    Why I Stopped Starting Class with Content—and What Happened Instead – Faculty Focus

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  • ‘What the hell just happened?’ Australia’s flirtation with a levy on international students – By Professor Andrew Norton

    ‘What the hell just happened?’ Australia’s flirtation with a levy on international students – By Professor Andrew Norton

    • This blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Andrew Norton, Professor of Higher Education Policy at Monash Business School, Monash University.
    • The thoughts of Nick Hillman, HEPI’s Director, on the levy can be read on the Research Professional News website here.

    For an Australian reader the UK immigration white paper’s proposal for a levy on international student fee revenue sounds familiar. In mid-2023 just such a levy was suggested for Australia by the interim report of a major higher education policy review. Like its UK version, the idea was to reinvest levy revenue in education. While the interim report lacked white paper status, education minister Jason Clare liked the idea enough to mention it in his report launch speech. 

    But now the levy has vanished from the Australian policy agenda. When the Universities Accord final report was released in February 2024 the levy idea was there but postponed, shunted off until after other major funding reforms that will start in 2027 at the earliest. So far as I can find, the Minister – newly reappointed this week after Labor’s election victory on 3 May – has not mentioned the idea in public for 18 months.

    So what happened? Predictably, the universities that stood to lose the most from the levy opposed it. But the bigger reason was that between mid-2023 and late 2023 the politics of international education in Australia were turned upside down. In a few months international education went from a valuable export industry to a cause of Australia’s housing shortages. International student numbers had to be cut. 

    As originally proposed in Australia the international student levy was not linked to migration policy. Some reduction in student demand was predicted, as levy costs were passed on through higher fees. But this was a policy side-effect, not its goal. If too many international students were deterred the levy would not raise enough money to achieve its domestic objectives. The Government needed more effective ways of bringing international student numbers back down. 

    Between October 2023 and July 2024 the Australian Government introduced, on my count, nine measures to block or discourage would-be international students. 

    Among the Government’s nine measures was one that delivered it international student revenue much more quickly than the proposed levy. The Government more than doubled student visa application fees from A$710 (~£330) to A$1,600 (~£745), claiming that the money would be spent on policies benefiting domestic students. During the 2025 election campaign Labor said it would increase visa fees again, to A$2,000 (~£930). The UK’s £524 fee looks cheap by comparison. 

    Higher visa fees and other migration measures had two big advantages over the once-proposed levy from the perspective of the Australian Government – legal ease and speed in delivering on migration goals. In Australia, many migration changes can be made by ministerial determination without parliamentary review. The levy required legislation. Australia’s system of sending controversial legislation to often-bruising Senate inquiries increases political costs, even when the bill ultimately passes.

    What visa fees lack is the Robin Hood element of the Australian levy as proposed. In 2023 the University of Sydney alone earned 14% of all university international student fee revenue. The top six universities received more than half of the total. Levy advocates argue that these gains are built on past taxpayer subsidies and prime real estate. Profits built on these foundations can legitimately be taxed for the wider benefit of Australian higher education. 

    In Australia generally, and under Labor governments especially, an egalitarian political culture gives these levy arguments some resonance. But for the foreseeable future migration is a bigger issue than university funding, and visa policies a more straightforward way of bringing down international student numbers than levies. Perhaps the levy idea will return, but the government’s long silence on the subject suggests that this will not happen anytime soon.

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  • Euro visions: What the hell just happened?

    Euro visions: What the hell just happened?

    I swear if I was Danish or Lithuanian or Greek or something I wouldn’t have this problem.

    But (no) thanks to the byzantine bureaucrats at the Brexit Broadcasting Corporation, I have somehow been rejected for media accreditation to cover the higher education aspects of the Eurovision Song Contest for the third year in a row.

    It’s all the more baffling because not only did I send them some examples of the pieces I’d write (“Why Eurovision’s new voting algorithm provides inspiration for reform of income contingent student loans”, that sort of thing), I even removed my glasses for the pass photo to avoid a repeat of last year’s fracas in the Euroclub — when an ex-pat from Portugal TV demanded an interview with me in the Euroculub because he thought Ken Bruce had come to see Jedward.

    Anyway, undeterred I’ll be flying off later to stay in a converted monastery in this year’s host country Switzerland, where I’ll spend the week leading a double life by pretending to be an academic during the day (so I can eat discounted Zuger Kirschtorte in a mensa) and pretending to be a fan of music at night (so I can watch Croatian entry Marko Bošnjak screaming his way through Poison Cake in a badminton arena.)

    And so I thought I’d start the week by looking at where we’re at with Europe.

    I place a plank on a plank and call it a boat

    Back in 2020, then education secretary Gavin Williamson said that Turing, the post-Brexit successor to Erasmus+, would “expand opportunities to study abroad and see more students from all backgrounds benefit from the experience”.

    But since then the living allowance rates have already been cut to the bone (£14 per day for Switzerland, which would barely buy you a Schnitzel and chips), and schools and FE colleges have had their funding capped at about 50 placements each.

    The UK government can point and has pointed to increased participation in outward mobility — and a much broader range of countries being visited. But we’re missing out on the social and educational benefits of the collapse in EU inward, and under the headlines, in a huge number of cases, the outward are very short trips rather than proper study abroad.

    As I often argue on our SU study tours, the danger in that approach is that you barely get beyond noticing that they call a Twix a Raider before you’re on the flight back — when it’s the longer term immersion that can bring deeper rewards.

    And it may all well get worse. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a spending review on – and back in March The Times reported that as well as offering up for the chop universal free meals for infants, funding for free period products and a raft of dance, music and PE schemes, secretary of state Bridget Phillipson has suggested that the Turing scheme could go altogether.

    Guess which ones would win out of feeding kids, buying tampons, playing the Trombone and flying to Frankfurt for a fortnight.

    That’s life, and what a miracle

    The EU might yet push us in the other direction, though. There’s an EU summit on 19th May, and the slipstream of trade deals with the US and India, Keir Starmer has been rolling the pitch on a closer partnership with the EU, arguing that the British public has “moved on” from Brexit and suggesting that alignment over food standards, closer working on law enforcement and a “controlled youth mobility scheme” are all on the cards.

    That may not be enough. A large group of member states were already frustrated at what intransigence from the UK in the negotiations, mainly over their demand that students using their mobility rights would get to pay the same tuition fees as UK students if they enrol into a UK university for a year or so.

    Now they’re demanding a full re-join of Erasmus+, partly because back when we were still part of the scheme, the UK was the third most popular study destination behind only Spain and Germany.

    In the Telegraph, Lord Frost – our lead negotiator over the eventual Brexit deal – seems to think that that would continue:

    Erasmus will always be a net cost to the UK because more EU students want to come to Britain than Brits want to study in Europe. That is still the case because we have the best universities and the English language. We don’t need to pay the European Commission to get people to come here.

    I might be wrong about this – I often am – but right now given the state of the UK and the way in which cuts are raining down in universities, I’d wager that spending a semester in Badajoz, Białystok or Blagoevgrad or whatever looks infinitely more attractive in 2025 than it did in 2019. They’re all more likely to be teaching in English than they were a decade ago, and there’s a much better chance that your chosen modules will actually run when you get there.

    And anyway, what Frosty’s little England analysis also misses are the incalculable soft power and medium-term economic benefits that having a large number of EU students coming to the UK for a year offers. People routinely wax on about their Erasmus experience as life-changing – building friendships and connections that later end up as the sort of trading partnerships that Starmer is supposed to be rebuilding.

    How much time do we have left together

    It’s also worth bearing in mind how Erasmus+ has been changing. As well as the traditional study placements that most will understand, there’s a new European Student Card Initiative (ESCI) which will streamline access to libraries, transport, and cultural activities, a new app offering access to learning agreements, destination information and a digital version of the student card. The European Solidarity Corps offers young people the chance to volunteer or work in projects that benefit communities across Europe, and Blended Intensive Programmes (BIPs) that combine physical and virtual learning, and International Credit Mobility options that extend beyond Europe.

    There’s also the DiscoverEU initiative, which provides free rail passes to encourage cultural exploration and connection, new Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs) to drive collaboration between vocational education providers, businesses, and research centres, a Green Erasmus+ initiative, which prioritises projects with a positive environmental impact and offers support for green travel options, and Erasmus+ Teacher Academies — which are supporting the professional development of staff and promoting innovative teaching practice across Europe.

    Meanwhile the 64 separate European University Alliances are providing students with the chance to study across multiple countries, the European Degree programme will offer joint qualifications that carry a special European label — making it easier for students to have their qualifications recognised across border — and there’s ongoing work to improve and automate ECTS credit transfer, along with a whole bunch of digital innovation stuff.

    Given some of the problems with skills and teaching innovation in the system back home, and the weird reality of an impending credit-based student finance system with barely and progress on credit transfer, add all of that up and any sensible Department for Education would be as desperate to get us back into Erasmus+ and wider EU projects as DSIT was to get us back into Horizon.

    Interestingly, Eurovision host country Switzerland – which has of course never been a member of the EU – used to take part in Erasmus+, but was chucked out in 2014 following a referendum that voted to limit mass immigration.

    That meant that like us, Swiss universities could no longer participate fully in student exchanges and had to negotiate individual bilateral agreements with each partner university, creating no end of administrative burdens.

    SEMP – The Swiss Programme for Erasmus+ – does enable exchange activities, but universities taking part have to finance 40 per cent of costs, with the remaining 60 per cent covered by the federal government.

    But since 2023, Switzerland has pursued a new package with the EU, keen to re-establish relations in trade, transport, education, and research. The resultant December 2024 deal granted access to Horizon Europe, Euratom and the Digital Europe programmes earlier this year – and it’s set return to Erasmus+ in 2027 subject to parliamentary approval and a likely referendum in 2026.

    (They love their referendums in Switzerland. There was even one to approve the expenditure on Eurovision in the Basel-Stadt canton – the socially conservative EDU called it a “propaganda event” labelling 2024’s event as a “celebration of evil”, while the populist Swiss People’s Party said that the money would be better donated to those seriously affected by Summer 2024’s Swiss storms than “wasted on this embarrassing rainbow event”. United by Music and all that – Yes won by 66.5 per cent to No’s 33.5 per cent.)

    Sadly, with UK universities keen to see any pennies left spent on their excel sheets, and higher education stuck in an always-distracted schools department, it may not happen — and if it does, it’ll be down to EU negotiators clocking that Starmer needs a deal that can help neutralise growing youth support for populism back home.

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  • HEDx Podcast: What happened at the UA summit – Episode 156

    HEDx Podcast: What happened at the UA summit – Episode 156

    The Universities Australia Solutions Summit brought together university leaders, academics and government together in Canberra last week.

    The annual event is run by the vice-chancellor’s membership body UA, and this year’s Summit aimed to support national priorities with an exchange of ideas on everything from workforce productivity to Trump’s America.

    This episode of HEDx includes reflections of the event from James Cook University vice-chancellor Simon Biggs, University of Queensland deputy vice-chancellor Alphia Possamai-Inesedy and more.

    Read more:

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