Tag: maintenance

  • The maintenance loan now covers only half of students’ costs

    The maintenance loan now covers only half of students’ costs

    I’m in two minds over whether it was a curse or a blessing – and I may be retrospectively overstating its impact.

    But when I sat down to watch a bit of telly back on Tuesday 13th May 2003, I had no real sense of the extent to which it would end up causing me lost sleep over silos.

    The Day Britain Stopped was a BBC1 docudrama, set in the near future, that explored how a devastating chain of events could leave the country completely paralysed.

    First, a national rail strike pushes huge volumes of passengers and freight onto the roads, overwhelming the motorway network.

    Then the M25 becomes jammed after multiple accidents, including one on the Dartford Crossing. Poor coordination between highways management, police, and emergency services slows response times, and conflicting rerouting decisions worsen the congestion, leaving rescue crews unable to reach incidents.

    Then severe delays ripple through the air transport system, compounded by diverted flights and congested airports. And these all lead to a mid-air collision between two aircraft near Heathrow – killing hundreds – as communication and coordination systems fail under strain.

    Gridlock

    I was thinking about The Day Britain Stopped on a campus a few weeks ago. Student leaders were explaining a proposal from their university to take 30 ECTS credits or so of most degrees (ie a semester) and turn them into a compulsory placement.

    A “mini sandwich” is not, all things considered, a terrible idea. Students would gain valuable work experience – which we know helps with graduate outcomes – and in aggregate there would end up being a moderate reduction in teaching and assessment costs.

    But on the assumption that it would often be unpaid, given the maximum maintenance loan is now significantly below the National Minimum Wage (when chunked out at 30 weeks for 35 hours a week), working full-time for a semester would pretty much prohibit students from earning the extra that many need to now.

    Just like the two teams each re-routing traffic down the same country lanes around the M25, it’s a classic case of not seeing the full picture – and when combined with the HE sector’s preference for policy over scenario planning, potentially disastrous. But nothing like that could be coming in the year ahead, surely?

    Britain’s best days are ahead

    This does nothing for my doom-mongering street cred, but back in May 2024 – when HEPI and TechnologyOne published work from Loughborough University on a Minimum Income for Students (MIS) – I allowed myself a little optimism.

    In a sea of information that seemed to be designed to entice participation rather than be realistic about the costs of it, I imagined that the headline figure – that students need £18,632 per year outside of London to achieve a baseline student experience – would start to adorn .ac.uk cost of living webpages offering budgeting advice to students.

    Given the methodology for calculating the MIS was close to that used by the Living Wage Foundation, and given the Westminster government’s intent to ask the Low Pay Commission to (to all intents and purposes) replicate that methodology for the National Living Wage, I even allowed myself to imagine for a few moments that government might commit to closing the gap between available support and liveable income. It surely wouldn’t be committed to a liveable income for work but not one for study?

    Alas, it wasn’t to be. Vanishingly few of the universities that offer “typical” or “sample” student budgets quote anything like that figure – and that’s if they offer one at all. International students are still misled into thinking that the maximum maintenance loan will cover their costs, parents are still completely in the dark about what they’ll really need to contribute, and many of the survival stories that I’m told by new student leaders every summer have gone from amusing to heartbreaking.

    The MIS report even recommended that when students apply to higher education, UCAS could compare the support available from the student’s home UK nation with their expected living costs. But at the time of writing, the admissions service’s webpage on budgeting instead offers “average” spend figures from 2020, and somehow omits the £2,110 that the source study found students spending when preparing for higher education.

    Governments, meanwhile, did little. This coming September, Scotland is offering up a freeze (real terms cut) on maintenance support, Northern Ireland has an increase that still falls significantly short, and both Wales and England are increasing the maximum by 3.1 per cent. A frozen means test threshold means even fewer will get that max in England – and right now both RPI inflation and CPI inflation are in fact running at 4.1 per cent.

    Update: It’s all worse

    As such, if last year’s report was like a warming sign, the 2025 update to the MIS report ought to be like a fire alarm. The update expands on the 2024 research by examining first-year students and those living in halls for the first time – and through focus groups across five UK cities, researchers found that first-year students face the highest costs of any student group – £418 per week including rent to reach a minimum acceptable standard of living.

    This represents a “first-year premium” of around £14-20 more per week than continuing students, driven by both “setting-up” costs (laptops, kitchen equipment, bedding) and “settling-in” costs (freshers week activities, food wastage while learning to budget, and higher social spending to establish friendships).

    The financial pressure on students has intensified dramatically across all UK nations. In England, even students receiving maximum maintenance support can only cover half (50 per cent) of their actual living costs, forcing them to work over 20 hours per week at minimum wage to make ends meet.

    That, I add in passing, is 20 hours more a week than most politicians’ alma mater allows students to work to have a fulfilling student experience:

    Studying at Oxford is an exciting experience with plenty of opportunities and a high number of contact hours. For this reason, paid term-time employment is not permitted except under exceptional circumstances and in consultation with your Tutor and the Senior Tutor.

    Students from different UK nations face different circumstances – Welsh students have 63 per cent of their costs covered by maintenance support, while those from Northern Ireland receive support covering just 42 per cent of their needs. The gap between what students need and what they receive has created what the researchers term a “hidden parental contribution” – one that now exceeds £10,000 annually for English families.

    I still regularly encounter those who expect to see mass dropouts as a result of the growing gap – but anyone that works closely with students will tell you that it’s a slow participation implosion that we’re seeing rather than a non-continuation explosion.

    Two-thirds of students now work during term time, the highest on record – pressure that is squeezing out various aspects of university life, as students report less time for independent study, fewer opportunities to join activities, and increased commuting distances. Many are experiencing a fundamentally different university experience than they expected, with a third having less disposable income than planned, and 1 in 5 buying fewer books or course materials.

    Over a three-year degree, the total cost of reaching minimum living standards ranges from approximately £59,000 in Wales to £77,000 in London, excluding tuition fees. And these figures are what students need not for luxury, but simply to participate fully in university life with dignity. Even living in accommodation that is “purpose built” for students, while providing important social opportunities, is typically more expensive than shared private housing – with rent making up to 47 per cent of total living costs in London.

    Thanks to Terry Nutkins, Gordon Banks and Let Loose

    One particularly pleasing aspect of the report is the “surprising” costs that so many miss when casting round the marcomms office for a couple of student ambassadors to cobble up a budget.

    Practical necessities include storage costs between academic years when halls contracts end, insurance for phones and laptops used outside accommodation, and mattress protectors for the “really cheap and uncomfortable” beds typically provided.

    First-year students face particular financial pressures during their settling-in period, wasting money on food while learning to shop and cook independently, plus ongoing laundry costs in halls that can reach £5 weekly for basic washing needs.

    Academic periods bring additional expenses, from extra food costs during exam sessions when students spend long hours in libraries, to transport costs for third-year students attending job interviews and graduate recruitment events.

    Basic costs related to social participation and mental health are also included. They include individual crockery and cutlery in halls to avoid hygiene issues when sharing with strangers, a £20 (!) annual personalisation budget for room decoration that prevents students feeling like they’re “in prison,” and £50 annually for clothing required for university social events and society activities.

    They are seemingly minor expenses – but they all add up, and they highlight how the “minimum” standard isn’t about luxury, but about enabling students to participate fully in university life, maintain their mental health, and avoid social exclusion.

    There’s also dehumidifier packs to combat poor ventilation and condensation from drying clothes, tabletop ironing boards to fit cramped spaces, and overdoor hooks because standard furniture is insufficient for storing belongings across shared living arrangements.

    Technical necessities include extension leads for inadequate electrical outlets and Wi-Fi boosters for poor connectivity, while protective measures like upholstery and carpet cleaners become crucial for avoiding deposit losses. Even basic items like door mats for communal cleanliness and shower caddies for bathroom storage represent additional shared costs when five people live together.

    Beyond accommodation, students face numerous individual costs related to campus life and practical necessities that all accumulate quickly. They include water bottles and Tupperware containers for daily campus use and food storage, delivery and returns costs reflecting modern shopping patterns, and small airers for bedroom clothes drying when shared facilities are limited.

    Admin costs like provisional driving licences at £34 become the most practical form of student ID, cheaper and more portable than passports. And there’s eye tests every two years with potential glasses purchases, and a small budget for everyday medicines and a couple of prescriptions annually – along with significant variations in personal care costs, the report particularly noting “the higher cost of hairdressing for afro hair in particular,” while emphasising that regular haircuts are deemed essential for being “presentable” and maintaining “self-respect”. Luxuries these are not.

    Parental contribution

    The report repeats last year’s calls for urgent, system-wide reform based on five principles: simplicity, transparency, independence, sufficiency, and fiscal neutrality. Key recommendations include increasing maintenance support so students can reach minimum living standards through a combination of government support and reasonable part-time work, providing a “first-year boost” to help new students establish themselves, and raising parental contribution thresholds so families only contribute when they themselves have achieved minimum living standards.

    The researchers argue reforms could be implemented without additional government spending – although the proposal is to reintroduce much-maligned but fairly progressive real interest rates on student loans, ensuring those who benefit most from higher education contribute accordingly. Sadly, they’re usually the loudest too.

    Without reforms, they warn of three critical risks – increasingly unequal access to higher education, declining quality of student experience, and threats to sector sustainability as students struggle to afford university attendance.

    But forgive me for the doom. Any or all of that will have to wait until at least September 2026, and even then is looking increasingly unlikely, given that the Treasury is said to be staring at a £41bn hole in its budget, and is currently borrowing the money on the bond markets to lend to students at an interest rate of 4.5 per cent – a far cry from 0.5 per cent nine years ago.

    And it could all be about to get much much worse.

    Basket cases

    Whether you use RPI or CPI is almost immaterial – it’s the basket of goods that matters, and neither basket captures the basket of a student typified in the MIS. Students spend more on food than the average consumer, and in that basket they’re less able to “trade down” through the brands.

    The Bank of England expects food inflation to be around 5 per cent Q3, rising to 5.5 per cent by the end of the year – higher global commodity prices, higher labour costs and Extended Producer Responsibility regulations that come into effect from October of this year all driving the change.

    In June, Beef and Butter were up at 20 per cent, Coffee was at 12.5 per cent and Chocolate was running at 16 per cent. Decent rent data is hard to come by – but it always seems to increase by more than inflation. If not included in their rent, energy prices have shifted from being a drag on inflation to providing a boost – Ofgem’s price cap for households is £1,720 for July-September 2025, almost 10 per cent higher than the same period last year.

    And the BoE’s key mitigation measure – to cut the Bank Rate by 0.25 percentage points to 4 per cent at its August meeting – might be helping students’ landlords, but it won’t be impacting student budgets.

    Meanwhile, if students have been steadily increasing their term-time work (both in numbers of students and hours worked), that could be a coming problem too. Employment growth has stagnated, and job vacancies have fallen significantly. And while two-thirds of students say they’ve been in work during term time, 89 per cent of applicants are now expecting to find work – rising to 93 per cent of care leavers, 94 per cent of international students and 96 per cent of estranged students.

    Either there’s lots of spare jobs going, or the UK may be about to run out of part-time work for students. That’s a problem few will see coming, will be almost certainly be worse in some cities than in others, and would be exacerbated if the usual ratio of students spending in businesses v those working in those businesses shifts significantly – both having grown gently in tandem as student numbers have grown. The need to convert more jobs on campus to those that students can do has never been greater – even if they sound like the first to have gone as teams have contracted in recent years.

    Some will find work that’s further and further away from campus, some will find work that’s more and more punishing on them both mentally and physically, and some simply won’t find it at all. Many – like the international student leader I met last week – will find themselves working for less than minimum wage just to pay their fees, in a country that couldn’t seem less interested in those sorts of labour market abuses if it tried.

    God forbid a student has a setback, an accident or a costly health problem. Or happens to be a student in a year when if nothing else, there will be major and un-modelled impacts on student housing supply as a result of dramatic reforms to the way that an already scandalously poor rental market is regulated.

    Implosions v explosions

    Maybe a crisis is coming – the classic unplanned-for crisis of the sort in The Day Britain Stopped, when various factors conspire in a single period to multiply each other into something that few saw coming. But even if it isn’t an explosion and we see non-continuation rates fall off a cliff, we can see what’s coming – students choosing to stay at home just as their local university closes courses, students choosing against the extracurriculars that would make up for the skills their course supplies but are no longer needed.

    Students breathing in the spores of black mould as they literally choose between heating, and eating.

    In the 2024 MIS report, the authors warned against any increases to maintenance support that would come at the cost of lower participation in higher education, “for example if an increase could only be paid for by capping the number of students who can study in higher education”. The kneejerk makes sense – neither governments, universities nor students are ever keen on measures that might limit opportunity.

    But offering students a loan that only covers half of their basic living costs, and then asking them to work a minimum 20 hours a week during term-time isn’t “opportunity”, it’s a scam – one that sells “student life” but for those on low incomes offers the kind of experience associated with labour market outcomes they’re less likely to achieve anyway, and one that allows lots of people to pat themselves on the participation back while plunging unsuspecting students into poverty.

    If the country really can’t afford mass participation in higher education, and students can’t afford to be students, the only morally right thing to do is admit it. And if telling students they need £21,126 per year to live on might put some of them off, then maybe it should.

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  • Why College Deferred Maintenance Is a Growing Risk

    Why College Deferred Maintenance Is a Growing Risk

    Declining student numbers, funding reductions, rising personnel costs and policy changes at the state and federal level pose the biggest financial risks to institutions, according to Inside Higher Ed’s recent annual survey of chief business officers with Hanover Research. Those issues are consistent with an overall threat to higher education: that federal policy and economic uncertainty are stressing a sector already teetering on enrollment and demand cliffs.

    Yet underneath those challenges lies another, less headline-grabbing danger: delayed upkeep and repairs to infrastructure and assets.

    More on the Survey

    Inside Higher Ed’s 15th annual Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers was conducted by Hanover Research. The survey included 169 chief business officers, mostly from public and private nonprofit institutions, for a margin of error of 7 percent. The response rate was 7 percent. A copy of the free report can be downloaded here.

    On Wednesday, Aug. 20, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a free webcast to discuss the results of the survey, with experts who can answer your most pressing questions about higher education finance—including how to plan effectively amid the current financial and policy uncertainty. Register here.

    One in three surveyed CBOs (36 percent) identified infrastructure/deferred maintenance costs as a top financial risk to their institution, just behind state and/or federal policy changes—and ahead of options such as technology investment requirements, increased market competition (including from alternative credential providers), potential changes to international student enrollment and changes in student athletics revenue and name, image and likeness deals.

    Most CBOs also say they’re at least moderately concerned about their institution’s ability to fund deferred maintenance and facility needs, with 11 percent extremely concerned and another quarter (25 percent) very concerned.

    How bad is the problem? Just 1 percent of institutions represented were on track to fund no deferred maintenance in the then-current fiscal year (the survey was live in April and May). But another 63 percent were only poised to fund up to a quarter of identified needs. This is consistent across public and private nonprofit institutions.

    By institution type, public doctoral university CBOs were most likely to report funding a quarter or less, at 89 percent. Community college CBOs were least likely to report this, at 44 percent. Still, just about a third of community college CBOs expected their institution to fund more than half of identified needs.

    Across higher education, deferred maintenance needs span aging HVAC systems, roofs and dorms; buildings in need of rewiring; and more. Technical deferred maintenance, such as addressing choppy Wi-Fi, is another concern. These aren’t the flashy projects that attract donors or drive capital campaigns (exceptions notwithstanding). But they matter in terms of curb appeal and functionality. Prospective students notice the state of facilities. Dingy classrooms and buildings are current students’ learning and living conditions, and employees’ working conditions. Deferred maintenance may translate to safety or accessibility issues (think sidewalks and elevators). And problems only compound over time, meaning deferred maintenance can—and does—escalate to larger, costlier repairs.

    Richard G. Mills Jr., president and CEO of United Educators, a liability insurance and risk management services provider, said that underfunding depreciation has “long been in the bag of tools that institutions will turn to in times of financial stress.” It’s never been a “great practice,” he continued, “but I understand why it happens, and there is even an argument that in the past era of growth—in endowments, tuition, philanthropy and student population—it wasn’t an outlandish way to approach what were largely temporary downturns.”

    Now all that has changed, said Mills, a former college chief administrative, business and operating officer: “The forward environment is unlikely to be one of growth,” with philanthropy, tuition revenue and student populations “certain to remain flat or decline for some time.”

    In this light, using deferred maintenance as a tool is simply delaying an expense whose cost is likely to compound at a significant rate, he added.

    Ruth Johnston, vice president of consulting for the National Association of College and University Business Officers, agreed that deferred maintenance “is a very big and growing issue for universities and colleges and has been for many years.”

    Public colleges and universities are often hardest hit, Johnston said, as state legislators “prefer to fund new capital projects over providing funds for the less glamorous options of deferred maintenance.” And unless universities and colleges “intentionally create budgets, and consistently add funds to them, they don’t prioritize deferred maintenance and often only pay for emergency needs.”

    The shiny-object phenomenon isn’t exclusive to public institutions. Mills recalled, for example, how a dean at a private institution once said he wasn’t worried about underfunding because when major renewal was required, “he would simply run a capital campaign to build a new building.”

    In addition to the findings on deferred maintenance, the survey also suggests that some institutions are rethinking their physical campuses amid shifting enrollment and study trends. About two in five respondents (41 percent) report that their institution is retaining its current physical campus footprint but investing in renovations. Another 34 percent report targeted expansion, or moderate growth in specific areas. But relatively few CBOs report either strategic downsizing or significant expansion.

    Deferred maintenance expenses can sometimes be bundled into other project budgets. But uncertainty and other factors are slowing or halting even capital spending on many campuses—even if strategic downsizing isn’t yet a major trend.

    Seth Odell, founder of Kanahoma, an education marketing agency, underscored the gravity of the deferred maintenance backlog, saying it “feels like it’s a part of a broader death spiral many institutions have found themselves in.”

    “We often treat deferred maintenance as a facilities or finance issue, but it’s increasingly a strategic enrollment risk—and one that’s compounding year over year,” he said. “I’ve worked with institutions where students are literally walking past shuttered buildings on campus tours, or sweating through admitted-student events due to outdated HVAC systems. In a competitive enrollment environment, these realities are no longer just aesthetic. They’re affecting yield.”

    Compounding Problems, (Radical) Solutions

    Even before it downgraded its higher education outlook in March due to federal policy uncertainty, Moody’s Ratings had warned that a “large and growing backlog of capital needs posed a significant credit risk for the higher education sector.” In a report last summer, Moody’s said that $750 billion to $950 billion of spending would be needed over the next decade for just its approximately 500 rated colleges and universities to make “significant headway toward reducing deferred maintenance, upgrading facilities and building the new projects that are critical to strategic positioning.”

    “Colleges and universities that are unable to offer updated facilities, advanced technology and an attractive physical environment risk losing competitive standing,” Moody’s said at the time.

    Construction cost data firm Gordian documented in its most recent “State of Facilities in Higher Education” report “ongoing curtailment of campus expansions as institutions take stock of what they will really need to own and operate,” plus shortfalls in the funding of needed campus renewal investments of more than 32 percent. It valued the backlog of capital renewal needs at over $140 per gross square foot.

    The situation isn’t likely to improve anytime soon. Emily Raimes, associate managing director at Moody’s, told Inside Higher Ed that amid growing economic and policy uncertainty, “many institutions are adopting a more cautious approach to financial planning. This shift in strategy may lead to a deceleration or postponement of capital investment initiatives.”

    Shrinking the footprint of a college campus is a real opportunity for colleges and universities to move forward and save money.”

    —Consultant John Woell

    F. King Alexander, who served as president of Louisiana State University from 2013 to 2020, said that deferred maintenance needs increased $30 million per year at the Baton Rouge campus alone during his tenure. The university “cobbled” together only about $8 to $10 million annually to address emergency issues, he said, so the problem still grew by about $20 million annually “despite what we were able to do.”

    “We used a lot of duct tape,” he said.

    Louisiana last year passed legislation designed to fund deferred maintenance and capital improvements at state institutions. It will take years and consistent support to tackle the state’s $2 billion backlog.

    Alexander, now a professor of educational leadership at Florida Gulf Coast University, is currently involved in an ongoing national study that draws on the insights of chief community college financial officers. Based on that research, completed with colleagues at the University of Alabama’s Education Policy Center, only “marginal” progress has been made in facilities since 2007, as institutions “still have the same needs, the same backlogs, the same increases in maintenance and the same lack of planning,” he said. In 2024, the largest areas of deferred maintenance and facility problems for community colleges included science labs, classroom spaces and computer labs.

    “States have consistently shifted their deferred maintenance costs from state government to the public colleges and universities over the last three decades,” Alexander said. “In other words, to student tuition and fees.”  

    Odell described deferred maintenance as “both a symptom and an accelerant of the bigger financial reckoning” now facing higher education.

    For tuition-dependent institutions especially, he added, “it’s a vicious cycle. Declining enrollment leads to reduced revenue, which leads to deferred investments, which in turn erode the very experience that drives enrollment.”

    Odell did note some “success stories,” including Southern New Hampshire University, which has been able to work somewhat in reverse, “using surplus generated from online enrollment growth to completely revamp and reimagine their campus experience.”

    Among other strategies, the consultancy EAB recommends that campus leaders create maintenance endowments that will support a building’s “true needs” across its life cycle—not just construction.

    John Woell, principal at Manitou Passage Consultancy, offered his own suite of suggestions—some of them unconventional: replacing faculty and staff offices with more flexible workspace arrangements, known as “hoteling”; being clear about needs, including how each campus space supports the college’s mission; and ending gifts in perpetuity by pivoting to “sponsorships.” 

    “If a gift pays to build a space that has a likely useful life span of 50 years, allow renaming at the end of the 50 years.”

    Bigger picture, Woell said, “Shrinking the footprint of a college campus is a real opportunity for colleges and universities to move forward and save money.”

    Alexander agreed that campus-based solutions such as rethinking physical spaces and even downsizing make sense where enrollment is not growing. But he stressed the importance of public investment in higher education—including more reliable state funding for deferred maintenance expenses at public institutions.

    “This is a huge issue that presidents have to deal with that nobody’s talking about.”

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  • A proper review of student maintenance is now long overdue

    A proper review of student maintenance is now long overdue

    Elsewhere on the site, Esther Stimpson, Dave Phoenix and Tony Moss explain an obvious injustice.

    Universal Credit (UC) reduces by 55p for every £1 earned as income – unless you’re one of the few students entitled to UC, where instead it is reduced by £1 for every £1 you are loaned for maintenance.

    To be fair, when Universal Credit was introduced, the income disregards in the old systems that recognised that students spend out on books, equipment and travel were rolled into a single figure of £110 a month.

    Taper rates were introduced to prevent “benefit traps” where increasing earnings led to disproportionately high reductions in support – and have gone from 65p initially, then to 67p, and now to 55p.

    But for students, there’s never been a taper rate – and that £110 for the costs of books, equipment and travel hasn’t been uprated in over 13 years. Lifelong learning my eye.

    The olden days

    The student finance system in England is full of these problems – probably the most vexing of which is the parental earnings threshold over which the system expects parents to top up to the maximum.

    It’s been set at £25,000 since 2008 – despite significant growth in nominal earnings across the economy since then. IFS says that if the threshold had been uprated since 2008, it would now be around £36,500 (46 per cent higher) in 2023/24.

    That explains how John Denham came to estimate that a third of English domiciled students would get the maximum maintenance package back in 2007. We’re now down to about 1 in 5.

    Add in the fact that the maximums available have failed to increase by inflation – especially during the post-pandemic cost of living spikes – and there’s now a huge problem.

    It’s a particular issue for what politics used to call a “squeezed middle” – the parents of students whose families would have been earning £25,000 in 2007 now have £4,000 more a year to find in today’s money.

    And thanks to the increases in the minimum wage, the problem is set to grow again – when the Student Loans Company comes to assess the income of a single parent family in full time (40 hours) work, given that’s over the £25,000 threshold, it will soon calculate that even that family has to make a parental contribution to the loan too.

    It’s not even as if the means test actually works, either.

    Principles

    How much should students get? Over twenty years ago now, the higher education minister charged by Tony Blair with getting “top-up fees” through Parliament established two policy principles on maintenance.

    The first was Charles Clarke’s aspiration to move to a position where the maintenance loan was no-longer means tested, and made available in full to all full-time undergraduates – so that students would be treated as financially independent from the age of 18.

    That was never achieved – unless you count its revival and subsequent implementation in the Diamond review in Wales some twelve years later.

    Having just received results from the Student Income and Expenditure Survey (SIES) the previous December, Clarke’s second big announcement was that from September 2006, maintenance loans would be raised to the median level of students’ basic living costs –

    The principle of the decision will ensure that students have enough money to meet their basic living costs while studying.

    If we look at the last DfE-commissioned Student Income and Expenditure Survey – run in 2021 for the first time in eight years – median living and participation costs for full-time students were £15,561, so would be £18,888 today if we used CPI as a measure.

    The maximum maintenance loan today is £10,227.

    The third policy principle that tends to emerge from student finance reviews – in Scotland, Wales and even in the Augar review of Post-18 review of education and funding – is that the value of student financial support should be linked somehow to the minimum wage.

    Augar argued that students ought to expect to combine earning with learning – suggesting that full-time students should expect to be unable to work for 37.5 hours a week during term time, and should therefore be loaned the difference (albeit with a parental contribution on a means test and assuming that PT work is possible for all students on all courses, which it plainly isn’t).

    As of September, the National Living Wage at 37.5 hours a week x 30 weeks will be £13,376 – some £2,832 more than most students will be able to borrow, and more even than students in London will be able to borrow.

    And because the Treasury centrally manages the outlay and subsidies for student loans in the devolved nations for overall “equivalence” on costs, both Scotland and Wales have now had to abandon their minimum wage anchors too.

    Diversity

    Augar thought that someone ought to look at London weighting – having not managed to do so in the several years that his project ran for, the review called London a “subject worthy of further enquiry”.

    Given that the last government failed to even respond to his chapter on maintenance, it means that no such further work has been carried out – leaving the uprating of the basic for London (+25 per cent) and the downrating for those living at home (-20 per cent) at the same level as they were in the Education (Student Loans) Regulations 1997.

    Augar also thought student parents worthy of further work – presumably not the subject of actual work because it was DfE officials, not those from the DWP, who supported his review. Why on earth, wonder policymakers, are people putting off having kids, causing a coming crisis in the working age/pensionable age ratio? It’s a mystery.

    Commuters, too. The review supported the principle that the away/home differential should be based on the different cost of living for those living at home but it “suggested a detailed study of the characteristics and in-study experience of commuter students and how to support them better.” It’s never been done. Our series would be a good place to start.

    Things are worse for postgraduates, of course. Not only does a loan originally designed to cover both now go nowhere near the cost of tuition and maintenance, the annually updated memo from the DWP (buried somewhere in the secondary legislation) on how PG loans should be treated viz a vis the benefits system still pretends that thirty per cent of the loan should be treated as maintenance “income” for the purposes of calculating benefits, and the rest considered tuition spend.

    (Just to put that into context – thirty per cent of the current master’s loan of £12,471 is £3,741. 90 credits is supposed to represent 1800 notional hours that a student is spending on studying rather than participating in the labour market. The maintenance component is worth £2.08 an hour – ie the loan is £16,851 short on maintenance alone for a year which by definition involves less vacation time).

    Carer’s Allowance is available if you provide at least 35 hours of care a week – as long as you’re not a full-time student. Free childcare for children under fives? Only if you’re not a full-time student. Pretty much all of the support available from both central government and local authorities during Covid? Full-time students excluded.

    When ministers outside of DfE give answers on any of this, they tell MPs that “the principle” is that the benefits system does not normally support full-time students, and that instead, “they are supported by the educational maintenance system.” What DWP minister Stephen Timms really means, of course, is thank god our department doesn’t have to find money for them too – a problem that will only get worse throughout the spending review.

    Whose problem?

    Back in 2004, something else was introduced in the package of concessions designed to get top-up fees through.

    As was also the case later in 2012, the government naively thought that £3,000 fees would act as an upper limit rather than a target – so Clarke announced that he would maintain fee remission at around £1,200, raise the new “Higher Education grant” for those from poorer backgrounds to £1,500 a year, and would require universities to offer bursaries to students from the poorest backgrounds to make up the difference.

    It was the thin end of a wedge. By the end of the decade, the nudging and cajoling of universities to take some of their additional “tuition” fee income and give it back to students by way of fee waivers, bursaries or scholarships had resulted in almost £200m million being spent on financial support students from lower income and other underrepresented groups – with more than 70 per cent of that figure spent on those with a household income of less than £17,910. By 2020-21 – the last time OfS bothered publishing the spend – that had doubled to £406m.

    It may not last. The principle is pretty much gone and the funding is in freefall. When I looked at this last year (via an FOI request), cash help per student had almost halved in five years – and in emerging Access and Participation Plans, providers were cutting financial support in the name of “better targeting”.

    You can’t blame them. Budgets are tight, the idea of redistributing “additional” fee income a lost concept, and the “student premium” funding given to universities to underpin that sort of support has been tumbling in value for years – from, for example, £174 per disabled student in 2018/19 to just £129 now.

    All while the responsibility for the costs to enable disabled students to access their education glide more and more onto university budgets – first via a big cut in the last decade, and now via slices of salami that see pressure piled on to staff who get the blame, but don’t have the funding to claim any credit.

    Pound in the pocket

    What about comparisons? By European standards, our core system of maintenance looks fairly generous – in this comparison of monthly student incomes via Eurostudent, for example, we’re not far off top out of 20 countries:

    But those figures in Euros are deceptive. Our students – both UG and PG – spend fewer years as full time students than in almost every other country. Students’ costs are distorted by a high proportion studying away from home – something that subject and campus rationalisation will exacerbate rather than relieve.

    And anyway, look at what happens to the chart when we adjust for purchasing power:

    How are students doing financially three years on? The Student Income and Expenditure Survey (SIES) has not been recommissioned, so even if we wanted to, we’d have no data to supply to the above exercise. The Labour Force Survey fails to capture students in (any) halls, and collects some data through parents. Households Below Average Income – the key dataset on poverty – counts tuition fee loans as income, despite my annual email to officials pointing out the preposterousness of that. How are students doing financially? We don’t really know.

    And on costs, the problems persist too. There’s no reliable data on the cost of student accommodation – although what there is always suggests that it is rising faster than headline rates of inflation. The basket of goods in CPI and RPI can’t be the same as for a typical student – but aside from individual institutional studies, the work has never been done.

    Even on things like the evaluation of the bus fare cap, published recently by the Department for Transport, students weren’t set up as a flag by the department – so are unlikely to be a focus of what’s left from that pot after the spending review. See also health, housing, work – students are always DfE’s problem.

    Student discounts are all but dead – too many people see students as people to profit from, rather than subsidise. No government department is willing to look at housing – passed between MHCLG and DfE like a hot potato while those they’d love to devolve to “other” students as economic units or nuisances, but never citizens.

    The business department is barely aware that students work part-time, and the Home Office seems to think that international students will be able to live on the figure that nobody thinks home students can live on. DfE must have done work, you suppose they suppose.

    In health, we pretend that student nurses and midwives are “supernumerary” to get them to pay us (!) to prop up our creaking NHS. And that split between departments, where DfE loans money to students for four years max, still means that we expect medical students in their final two years – the most demanding in terms of academic content and travelling full time to placements – to live on £7,500 a year. Thank god, in a way, that so few poor kids get in.

    It’s not even like we warn them. UK higher education is a £43.9 billion sector educating almost 3m students a year, professes to be interested in access and participation, and says it offers a “world-class student” experience. And yet it can’t even get its act together to work out and tell applicants how much it costs to participate in it – even in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

    Because reasons

    Why are we like this? It’s partly about statecraft. There was an obvious split between education and other departments when students were all young, middle class and carefree, and devolution gave the split a sharper edge – education funding (devolved) and benefits (reserved).

    It’s partly about participation. It’s very tempting for all involved to only judge student financial support on whether it appears to be causing (or at least correlates with) overall enrolment, participation and completion – missing all of the impacts on the quality of that participation in the process.

    Do we know what the long-term impacts are on our human capital of “full-time” students being increasingly anxious, lonely, hungry, burdened and, well, part-time? We don’t.

    Efficiency in provider budgets is about getting more students to share cheaper things – management, space, operating costs and even academics. Efficiency for students doesn’t work like that – it just means spending less and less time on being a student.

    The participation issue is also about the principal – we’ve now spent decades paying for participation expansion ambitions by pushing more and more of the long-run run cost onto graduates – so much so that there’s now little subsidy in the system left.

    And now that the cost of borrowing the money to lend to students is through the roof, increases in the outlay look increasingly impossible.

    Lifelong moaning

    But something will have to give soon. Some five years after Boris Johnson gave a speech at Exeter College announcing his new Lifetime Skills Guarantee, there’s still no news on maintenance – only ever a vague “maintenance loan to cover living costs for courses with in-person attendance” to accompany the detailed tables of credits that get chunked down from the FT £9,535.

    The LLE was partly a product of Augar (more on that on Wonk Corner) – who said that maintenance support should be reserved for those studying at a minimum level of intensity – 25 per cent (15 ECTS a year), and then scaled by credit.

    But think about that for a moment, setting aside that increasingly arbitrary distance learning differential. Why would a student studying for 45 credits only get 3/4 of an already inadequate loan? Will students studying on one of those accelerated degrees get 1.5 x the loan?

    The centrality of credit to the LLE – and its potential use in determining the level of student financial support for their living and participation costs – is fascinating partly because of the way in which a row between the UK and other member states played out back in 2008.

    When ECTS was being developed, we (ie the UK) argued that the concept focused too heavily on workload as the primary factor for assigning credits. We said that credits should be awarded based on the actual achievement of learning outcomes, rather than simply the estimated workload.

    That was partly because the UK’s estimate at the time of 1,200 notional learning hours (derived from an estimate of 40 hours’ notional learner effort a week, multiplied by 30 weeks) was the lowest in Europe, and much lower than the 1,500-1,800 hours that everyone else in Europe was estimating.

    Annex D of 2006’s Proposals for national arrangements for the use of academic credit in higher education in England: The Final report of the Burgess Group put that down to the UK having shorter teaching terms and not clocking what students do in their breaks:

    It could be argued that considerably more learner effort takes place during the extended vacations and that this is not taken into account in the total NLH for an academic year.

    Those were the days.

    In the end an EU fudge was found allowing the UK to retain its 20 notional hours – with a stress that “how this is applied to a range of learning experiences at a modular or course level will differ according to types of delivery, subject content and student cohorts” and the inclusion of “time spent in class, directed learning, independent study and assessment.”

    A bit like with fees and efficiency, if in the mid noughties it was more likely that students were loaned enough to live on, were posh, had plenty of spare time and had carefree summers, that inherent flex meant that a student whose credit was more demanding than the notional hours could eat into their free time to achieve the learning outcomes.

    But once you’ve got a much more diverse cohort of students who are much more likely to need to be earning while learning, you can’t really afford to be as flexible – partly because if you end up with a student whose characteristics and workload demand, say, 50 hours a week, and a funding system that demands 35 hours’ work a week, once you sleep for 8 hours a night you’re left with less than 4 hours a day to do literally anything else at all.

    Think of it this way. If it turns out that in order to access the full maintenance loan, you have to enrol onto 60 ECTS a year (the current “full-time” position), we are saying to students that you must enrol onto credits theoretically totalling at the very very least 1,200 hours of work a year. We then loan them – as a maximum – £8.52 an hour (outside London, away from home). No wonder they’re using AI – they need to eat.

    If it then turns out that you end up needing to repeat a module or even a year, the LLE will be saying “we’ve based the whole thing on dodgy averages from two decades ago – and if you need to take longer or need more goes at it, you’ll end up in more debt, and lose some of your 4 years’ entitlement in the process”. Charming.

    A credit system whose design estimated notional learning hours around students two decades ago, assumed that students have the luxury of doing lots of stuff over the summer, and fessed up that it’s an unreliable way of measuring workload is not in any world a sensible way to work out how much maintenance and participation cost support to loan to a student.

    Pretty much every other European country – if they operate loans, grants or other entitlements for students – regards anyone studying more than 60 (or in some cases, 75) credits as studying “full-time”.

    That allows students to experience setbacks, to accumulate credit for longer, to take time out for a bereavement or a project or a volunteering opportunity – all without the hard cliff edges of “dropping out”, switching to “part-time” or “coming back in September”. Will our student finance system ever get there? Don’t bet on it.

    If the work (on workload) isn’t done, we’ll be left with definitions of “full-time” and “part-time” student that are decades old – such that a full-time student at the OU can’t get a maintenance loan, while an FT UG at a brick university that barely attends in-person can – that pretty much requires students to study for more credit than they can afford to succeed in.

    Oh – and if the loan is chunked down for a 30 credit module, how will the government prevent fraud?

    Via an FOI request, the SLC tells me that last year, almost 13,000 students FT students in England and Wales managed to pull down installment 1 of their loan without their provider pulling down installment 1 of the fee loan. Anyone that thinks that’s all employer funding will shortly be getting my brochure on bridges.

    Maintenance of a problem

    Our system for student living and participation costs may, by comparison with other systems, appear to be a generous one – especially if you ignore the low number of years that students are in it, and how much they eventually pay back. But make no mistake – our student finance system is completely broken – set up for a different sector with different students that has no contemporary basis in need, ambition or impact.

    Its complexity could not be less helpful for driving opportunity, its paucity is likely to be choking our stock of human (and social) capital (and resultant economic growth), and its immediate impacts have normalised food banks on campus – real poverty that universities neither can nor should be expected to alleviate with other students’ fees and debt.

    The signals and signs are of danger ahead – a minister keen to stress that the “fundamentals” of the system we have for funding higher education won’t change reminds us both of a lack of money and a bandwidth issue. It’s one whose solution requires real research, cross-departmental and nations working, and a proper sense of what we want students to be, experience and learn. Sadly, that also sounds like a solution that lends itself to long grass.

    Given everything else going on in the world right now, maybe that’s inevitable. But decade after decade, every time we put off a proper review, or over-prioritise university rather than student funding in the debates, we dodge the difficult questions – because they’re too complex, because the data isn’t there, because it’s another department’s problem, because reasons.

    If Bridget Phillipson is serious about “fixing the foundations” to “secure the future of higher education” so that “students can benefit from a world-class education for generations to come”, she needs to commission a dedicated student maintenance review. Now.

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  • We need to recognise the importance of maintenance too

    We need to recognise the importance of maintenance too

    The most obvious way that a university expresses what it values is what it chooses to pay for.

    At an institution level this might be about which kinds of jobs in which kinds of areas are funded. At a more personal level value is made clear by how people get in and get on in an institution.

    Promotion

    In reviewing promotion criteria of a number of universities, where it is not behind a login of some kind, one theme comes out time and time again. Promotion isn’t solely based on being consistently good at one thing. Promotion is about being able to be good at lots of things at once.

    Whether this is the hope that academics can be good researchers, teachers, and administrators all at once. The desire to find managers that can manage people as well as projects. And the forever quest for professional services that have innovative approaches of some kind.

    It isn’t fair to single out specific institutions as this is a sector wide phenomena but consider some of the language in the follow promotion criteria:

    • For a Grade 7 Assistant Professor “Evidence will be required of the ability to innovate and plan, and to execute plans competently”
    • For a Grade 9 lecturer role “Contributes to the planning, design and development of objectives and material, identifying areas for improvement and innovation.”
    • For a Grade 6 professional services role “You are involved in decisions that have an ongoing impact beyond your immediate team”
    • The job evaluation criteria for professional service staff “Will the role holder play an active part of any networks (connecting regularly with groups outside their team)? If so, please outline what these networks are, whether the role holder would be expected to establish the network, and the input they are expected to have”

    The thread between these criteria is the implication that doing a defined job to an agreed standard isn’t enough. Promotions, particularly to high grades, depend on creating new practices, integrating with other teams, and making an impact beyond the confines of a role. It is the things which aren’t in the job description, because the nature of innovation means they cannot be, that are as valuable as the actual job description.

    Innovation may be the goal but it comes at a cost.

    Consistency

    Every promotion criteria is a choice on what an institution values. The consistent message is that value is not purely about executing a single role consistently well. The choice that many universities have made is that there is value in working vertically, developing new practice within a role, and working horizontally, developing and sharing expertise across teams and departments.

    This choice means that there is less emphasis on maintenance and delivery. The slow grind of keeping the place running and doing a set of discreet things well over and over again.

    The result of this choice is that roles where there is less autonomy may be at a disadvantage. This is not to say there is not a role for innovation in all jobs but that innovation is structurally easier in some jobs than others. Take for example the jobs which are purely focussed on creating and interpreting new knowledge. In a previous role as a senior policy advisor I had great latitude to pursue institutional projects, look into problems and suggest new ways of working, and as a bonus my boss was the Vice Chancellor. It would have been an enormous failure of mine to have not been innovative.

    Conversely, the people our institutions rely on that work on the reception desks, maintain buildings, clean the offices, and do the things that actually make the entire place stay open clearly have less freedom to innovate in their work. They are managed on their ability to deliver a distinct service but promotion is often dependent on being able to move beyond maintaining performance. There therefore opens a gap in the possibility of getting promoted between those who work primarily in maintaining the institution and those who think about what the institution might do. This does not seem like an ideal incentive for institutions that rely on lots of people turning up, doing a defined role well, and being motivated to do so.

    Innovation for the sake of it

    The underpinning assumption is that innovation for its own sake is a good thing. There is even a league table for the most innovative universities in the world.

    This is because the university bureaucracy demands feeding with new ideas. It is a more machine. It needs more papers, more ideas, more meetings, more service innovation, more approaches, more evaluation, and ultimately more with less. The current more is innovating in service delivery with less resource to do it. It is rare to see a university with few ideas. It is much more common to see an institution with too few people to deliver them.

    The prizing of the new is tempting because it’s interesting but it’s a tool for a limited set of purposes. Innovation is the tool through which new ideas, services, processes, and products can emerge. Maintenance, the kind of reusing, fixing, and keeping things consistent, is the tool to ensure the good keeps going. They both have their place but one is not more inherently valuable than the other.

    In their influential essay on the topic Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel write that:

    Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there?

    To believe entirely in innovation as an unalloyed good is to fundamentally believe that newness is better. It is by extension a surrender of agency to say the promise of the future is better than the material of the present. Once the innovation happens more maintenance is needed. Once innovation overtakes maintenance, leaving no capacity to keep the new thing working,  the realm of innovation for innovation sake is entered.

    However, the alternative is not to go entirely the other way and focus on consolidation. As Russell and Vinsel point out in their own country

    What a shame it would be if American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators, and remote controls.

    It is a question of balance and in a multi-layered bureaucracy like a university it requires balance across numerous domains.

    At a human level, there should be clear progression pathways for people that want to be experts and keeping things going. The reward does not have to be management responsibility (why make people who are good at delivering do less delivery?) but recognition of their domain specialisms.

    Culturally, it is about language that reflects the shared contribution of skills toward a common goal. And institutionally, it is a question of how maintenance becomes a key strategy component, and is therefore recognised. For example, the extent to which sustainability strategies are built on innovative idea vs the extent to which they are about keeping the old going.

    Our institutions depend on the people that literally keep the lights on, the machines working, and the services delivered. Let’s let the maintainers maintain and reward them for doing so. Let’s also keep innovating, maybe just not on everything all of the time.

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