Tag: Universities

  • Oil, Crypto, and the Struggle for Latin America’s Universities

    Oil, Crypto, and the Struggle for Latin America’s Universities

    Latin America—a region of thirty-three countries stretching from Mexico through Central and South America and across the Caribbean—has spent more than a century fighting against foreign exploitation. Its universities, which should anchor local prosperity, cultural autonomy, and democratic life, have instead been repeatedly reshaped by foreign corporations, U.S. government interests, global lenders, and now crypto speculators. Yet the region’s history is also defined by persistent, courageous resistance, led overwhelmingly by students, faculty, and Indigenous communities.

    Understanding today’s educational crisis in Latin America requires tracing this long arc of exploitation—and the struggle to build systems rooted in equity rather than extraction.

    1900s–1930s: Bananas, Oil, and the Rise of the “Banana Republics”

    Early in the 20th century, American corporations established vast profit-making empires in Latin America. United Fruit Company—today’s Chiquita Banana—dominated land, labor, and politics across Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Standard Oil and Texaco secured petroleum concessions in Venezuela and Ecuador, laying foundations for decades of foreign control that extracted immense wealth while leaving behind environmental devastation, as seen in Texaco’s toxic legacy in the Ecuadorian Amazon between 1964 and 1992.

    Universities were bent toward these foreign interests. Agricultural programs were geared toward serving plantation economies, not local farmers. Engineering and geological research aligned with extractive industries, not community development.

    Resistance did emerge. Student groups in Guatemala and Costa Rica formed part of early anti-oligarchic movements, linking national sovereignty to university reform. Their demands echoed global currents of democratization. Evidence of these early student-led struggles appears in archival materials and Latin American scholarship on university reform, and culminates in the influential 1918 Córdoba Manifesto in Argentina—a radical declaration that attacked oligarchic, colonial universities and demanded autonomy, co-governance, and public responsibility.

    1940s–1980s: Coups, Cold War Interventions, and the Deepening of U.S. Oil Interests

    During the Cold War, exploitation intensified. In Guatemala, the CIA-backed overthrow of democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 protected United Fruit’s land holdings. Universities were purged or militarized, and critical scholars were exiled or killed.

    In Chile, the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende—supported by American corporate giants such as ITT and Anaconda Copper—ushered in a brutal dictatorship. Under Augusto Pinochet, thousands were murdered, tortured, or disappeared, while the Chicago Boys imported radical neoliberal reforms that privatized everything, including the higher education system.

    Throughout the region, oil deals disproportionately favored American companies. Mexico and Venezuela saw petroleum wealth siphoned off through arrangements that benefited foreign investors while leaving universities underfunded and politically surveilled. Scholarship critical of foreign intervention was marginalized, while programs feeding engineers and economists to multinational firms were expanded.

    Student resistance reached historic proportions. Chilean students and faculty formed the core of the anti-dictatorship movement. Mexico’s students rose in 1968, demanding democracy and university autonomy before being massacred in Tlatelolco. CIA declassified documents reveal that student uprisings across Latin America in the early 1970s were so widespread that U.S. intelligence considered them a regional threat.

    1990s–2000s: Neoliberalism, Privatization, and the Americanization of Higher Education

    In the 1990s, neoliberalism swept the region under pressure from Washington, the IMF, and the World Bank. After NAFTA, Mexico’s universities became increasingly aligned with corporate labor pipelines. In Brazil, Petrobras’ partnerships with American firms helped reshape engineering curricula. Private universities and for-profit models proliferated across the region, echoing U.S. higher ed corporatization.

    Hugo Chávez captured the broader sentiment of resistance when he declared that public services—including education—cannot be privatized without violating fundamental rights.

    Students fought back across Latin America. In Argentina and Brazil they contested tuition hikes and privatization. In Venezuela, the debate shifted toward whether oil revenue should fund tuition-free universities.

    Indigenous Exclusion, Racism, and the Colonial Foundations of Inequality

    One of the greatest challenges in understanding Latin American education is acknowledging the deep racial and ethnic stratification that predates U.S. exploitation but has been exacerbated by it. Countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Guatemala have large Indigenous populations that, to this day, receive the worst education—much like Native American communities relegated to underfunded reservation schools in the United States.

    Racism remains powerful. Whiter populations enjoy greater economic and educational access. University admission is shaped by class and color. These divisions are not accidental; they are a machinery of control.

    There have been important exceptions. Under President Rafael Correa, Ecuador built hundreds of new schools, including Siglo XXI and Millennium Schools, and expanded public education access. In Mexico, the 2019 constitutional reform strengthened Indigenous rights, including commitments to culturally relevant education. Bolivia—whose population is majority Indigenous—has promoted Indigenous languages, judicial systems, and education structures.

    But progress is fragile. Austerity, IMF conditionalities, and elite resistance have led to cutbacks, school closures, and renewed privatization across the region. The study you provided on Ecuador documents Indigenous ambivalence, even hostility, toward Correa’s universal education plan—revealing how colonial wounds, cultural erasure, and distrust of state power complicate reform and provide openings for divide-and-conquer strategies long exploited by ruling classes.

    These contradictions deepen when Indigenous movements—rightfully demanding no mining, no oil extraction, and protection of ancestral lands—collide with leftist governments reliant on resource extraction to fund public services. This tension is especially acute in Ecuador and Bolivia.

    2010s–Present: Crypto Colonialism and a New Frontier of Exploitation

    Cryptocurrency has opened a new chapter in Latin America’s long history of foreign-driven experimentation. El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin in 2021, promoted by President Nayib Bukele, transformed the country into a speculative test lab. Bukele has now spent more than $660 million in U.S. dollars on crypto, according to investigative reporting from InSight Crime. Universities rushed to create blockchain programs that primarily serve international investors rather than Salvadoran students.

    In Venezuela, crypto became a survival tool amid hyperinflation and economic collapse. Yet foreign speculators profited while universities starved. Student groups warned that crypto research was being weaponized to normalize economic chaos and distract from public-sector deterioration.

    Resistance has grown. Salvadoran students have protested the Bitcoin law, demanding that public resources focus on infrastructure, health, and education. Venezuelan students call for rebuilding social programs rather than chasing speculative financial technologies.

    Contemporary Student Resistance: 2010s–2020s

    Across the region, student movements remain powerful. The Chilean Winter of 2011–2013 demanded free, quality public education and challenged Pinochet’s neoliberal legacy. The movement culminated in the 2019 uprising, where education reform was central.

    Mexico’s UNAM students continue to resist corruption, tuition hikes, gender violence, and the encroachment of corporate and foreign interests. The 1999–2000 UNAM strike remains one of the longest in modern higher education.

    Colombian students have forced governments to negotiate and invest billions in public universities, framing their struggle as resistance to neoliberal austerity shaped by U.S. policy.

    Argentina continues to face massive austerity-driven cuts, sparking protests in 2024–2025 reminiscent of earlier waves of resistance. Uruguay’s Tupamaros movement—largely student-led—remains a historical touchstone.

    Every country in Latin America has experienced student uprisings. They reflect a truth that Paulo Freire, exiled from Brazil for teaching critical pedagogy, understood deeply: education can either liberate or oppress. Authoritarians, privatizers, and foreign capital prefer the latter, and they act accordingly.

    Today’s Regional Education Crisis

    The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the system into further crisis. Children in Latin America and the Caribbean lost one out of every two in-person school days between 2020 and 2022. Learning poverty now exceeds 50 percent. Entire generations risk permanent economic loss and civic disenfranchisement.

    Infrastructure is collapsing. Rural and Indigenous communities suffer the worst conditions. Public investment is chronically insufficient because governments are trapped in cycles of debt repayment to international lenders. Ecuador has not seen a major public-investment program in a decade, as austerity and IMF repayments dominate national budgets.

    The result is a system starved of resources and increasingly vulnerable to privatization schemes—including U.S.-style online coursework, ideological “instruction kits,” and for-profit degree mills.

    Latin American Universities as Battlegrounds for Sovereignty

    Latin America’s universities are shaped by the same forces that have dominated the region’s history: oil extraction, agribusiness, foreign capital, neoliberalism, structural racism, debt, and now crypto speculation. Yet universities have also been homes to transformation, rebellion, cultural resurgence, and hope.

    Across more than a century, students—Indigenous, Afro-descendant, mestizo, working-class—have been the region’s fiercest defenders of public education and national sovereignty. Their resistance continues today, from Quito to Buenos Aires, from Mexico City to Santiago.

    For readers of the Higher Education Inquirer, the lesson is clear: the struggle for higher education in Latin America is inseparable from the struggle for democracy, racial justice, Indigenous autonomy, and freedom from foreign domination. The region’s ruling elites and international lenders understand that an educated public is dangerous, which is why they starve, privatize, and discipline public schools. Students understand the opposite: that education is power, and that power must be reclaimed.

    The next chapter—especially in countries like Ecuador—will depend on whether students, teachers, and communities can defend public education against the dual forces that have undermined it for more than a century: privatizers and fascists.

    Sources (Selection)

    National Security Archive, CIA Declassified Documents (1971)
    InSight Crime reporting on El Salvador Bitcoin expenditures
    Luciani, Laura. “Latin American Student Movements in the 1960s.” Historia y Memoria (2019)
    The Córdoba Manifesto (1918)
    UNESCO, World Bank data on learning poverty (2024)
    Latin American studies on United Fruit, Standard Oil, Texaco/Chevron in Ecuador
    LASA Forum: Analysis of Indigenous responses to Correa’s education reforms
    Periodico UNAL: “The Student Rebellion: Córdoba and Latin America”
    Multiple regional news sources on Argentina’s 2024–2025 education protests

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  • The end of pretend – AI and the case for universities of formation

    The end of pretend – AI and the case for universities of formation

    I loved magic as a kid. Card tricks, disappearing coins, little felt rabbits in pretend top hats. “Now anyone can be a magician,” proclaimed the advert in the Argos catalogue. Ta da. Now that’s magic.

    I’d make pretend tickets, rearrange the seating in the front room, and perform shows for the family – slowly learning the dark arts of misdirection and manipulation along the way. When I performed, I generated pride.

    Over time I found that some of those skills could be used to influence people more generally – to make them feel better about themselves, to change their decisions, to trigger some kind of behaviour.

    Sometimes, I’d rationalise, as long as I was doing it for the right reasons, it was better if they didn’t know it was a trick. The end justified the means. Or did it?

    People love it when they know that magic is being performed as magic – the willing suspension of disbelief, the pleasure of being fooled by someone who’s earned the right to fool us. When they give permission to be illegitimately impressed, all is fine.

    But what they can’t stand is being lied to. We don’t like being deceived. Most political news in this country centres on who lied and about what. We’re obsessed with it.

    The cover-up is always worse than the crime, yet everyone still does it – they have to, they rationalise, to keep up, or to get permission. The gap between how things are and how we present them is the game.

    Once they’re in, it won’t matter that the sector painted an unobtainable picture of student life for applicants. Once the funding is secured, universities can fess up that it isn’t as good as government thought it would be later. Once the rules are published, better to ask for forgiveness over the impact on net migration – not permission.

    I think about that little magic set I got a lot, because so much of what AI does still sits for me in that “magic trick” space.

    Ta da. Look what it can do. Generate an essay, write a play, create some code, produce an image of the Pope in a puffer jacket. But the line between magic and lies is a slippery slope, because its number one use case is pretence.

    AI is used to lie – fake essays, fake expertise, fake competence. But mostly to make us look better, appear faster and seem wiser. The anxiety about being “found out” is the anxiety of the liar, not the audience at a magic show. Students worry they’ll be caught. Universities worry their degrees will be worthless.

    Everyone worries that the whole edifice of qualifications and signals and “I know something you don’t” will collapse under the weight of its own pretending. But the pretending was already there – AI just makes the tricks cheaper, and much harder to sustain.

    When I look back upon my life

    I’ve been in a particularly reflective mood recently – I turned 50 at the weekend (I can’t believe it either, it’s the moisturiser) and there’s something I can’t shake. When I look back upon my life, it’s always with a sense of shame.

    When I got accepted to the University of the West of England in the mid-nineties, grandparents on both sides were thrilled that I had “got into Bristol”. A few extra Bonusprint copies of the sunken lawn at the St Matthias campus helped.

    It hadn’t started as a deliberate lie – more a misunderstanding about where we had driven to on open days – but instead of correcting it, I doubled down.

    Nobody in my family had been to university, and I doubt they would have discerned the difference. But on some level I thought I had to prove that their financial support was for something rare. Something… special.

    Decades later I realised that the entire edifice of higher education runs on the same kind of slippage – the gap between what universities actually do, and the status they are assumed to have and confer.

    Applicants and their families celebrate “getting in” as if admission itself were the achievement. Parents frame graduation photos, the ceremony mattering more than the three years that preceded it. Employers use degree classifications as sorting mechanisms while moaning that the sort has not delivered the graduates they wanted. There’s a graduate premium. And so on.

    Those of us who write about higher education are no better. Our business model rests on “I know something you do not” – the insider knowledge, the things you haven’t noticed, the analysis you can’t get elsewhere. Scarcity of information, monetised. I’ve built a career on being the person in the room who has read the regulatory guidance.

    But now, suddenly, a machine can summarise the guidance in seconds. Not as well as I can – not yet, not always – but well enough to make me wonder what I am actually for. What value I bring. How good I am at… pretending.

    AI doesn’t create that anxiety. It exposes something that was always there – the fear that our value was never in what we knew, but in other people not knowing it. And that eventually, someone might find that out.

    It’s always with a sense of shame

    Back in 1995 my first (handwritten) university essay was about the way the internet lets you become someone you are not. Chatrooms were new and identity was suddenly fluid. You could lie about everything – your age, your appearance, your expertise – and checking was hard.

    The internet has been flooded with exaggeration ever since. Wish.com tat that looks nothing like the picture. LinkedIn profiles that bear no relationship to actual jobs. Influencers selling lives they don’t live in places that barely exist.

    But it has also liberated us. At UWE, I lived through the transition from index cards in libraries to DogPile, asking Jeeves and Google. The skill of navigating a card catalogue, of knowing which reference books to check – it felt essential, and then it was worthless. For one semester, we were told we weren’t allowed to use search engines. The faculty held on for a while, then let go.

    In my first year, I chose a module involving audio editing on reel-to-reel tape. Splicing, cutting, winding, knives. At the end of the year, I got a job helping to put the equipment in a skip. The skills I’d learned were obsolete before I graduated.

    Each time, there was a period of pretending that the old skills still mattered. Each time, the system eventually admitted they didn’t. Each time, something was revealed about what had actually been valuable all along. The card catalogue wasn’t the point – finding and evaluating information was. The handwriting wasn’t the point – thinking under pressure was. The reel-to-reel wasn’t the point – understanding how to shape a story with sound was.

    Now the sector clings on to exams, essays, and the whole apparatus of assessment that assumes that producing a thing proves you learned something. The system holds on – but for what?

    I’ve always been the one to blame

    If I rummage through the AI pitches that land at [email protected], I can see a familiar pattern.

    There are catastrophists. Students are cheating on an industrial scale. The essay is dead. Standards are collapsing and students are cognitively offloading while the great plagiarism machine works its magic.

    There are tech evangelists. Productivity gains, personalised learning, democratised access and emancipation – just so long as you don’t ask who is selling the tools, who is buying the data, or what happens to students who can’t afford the premium tier.

    Then there is the centrist-Dad middle. “It is neither all good nor all bad” – balance, nuance, thoughtful engagement, and very little about what any of this is actually for.

    The catastrophists are wrong because they assume what’s being bypassed was valuable – that the essay-writing, the exam-sitting, the problem-set-completing were the point rather than proxies for something else. If the activities can be replaced by a machine, what were they measuring?

    The evangelists are wrong because they assume more efficiency is always better – that if AI frees us from X, we’ll have more time to do Y. But they never say what Y is. Or whose time it becomes. In practice, we know – the efficiency dividend flows upward, and never shows up as an afternoon off.

    The balanced view is just as bad, because it pretends there’s no choice to be made. It lets us sound reasonable while avoiding the harder question – what is higher education for?

    At the high risk of becoming one of those bores at a conference whose “question” is a speech about that very issue, I do think there is a choice to be made. We ought at least to ask if universities exist to sort and qualify, or to form and transform. AI forces the question.

    For everything I long to do

    Let’s first admit a secret that would get me thrown out of the Magic Circle. The industrial model of education was built on scarcity, and scarcity made a certain kind of pretending possible.

    Information was scarce – held in libraries, transmitted by experts, accessible only to those who got through the door. A degree meant three years in proximity to information others could not reach.

    Attention was scarce – one lecturer, two hundred students, maybe a weekly seminar. The economics of mass higher education turned teaching into broadcast, not dialogue, but the scarcity, coupled with outcomes stats from the past, still conferred value.

    Feedback was scarce – assignments returned weeks later with a grade and a short paragraph. The delay and brevity made the judgement feel weighty, even oracular.

    In a scarcity system, hoarding makes sense. Knowledge is power precisely because others don’t have it. “I know something you do not” isn’t a bug – it’s the business model. But once something isn’t scarce any more, we have to search again for value.

    We’ve been here before. Calculators didn’t destroy maths – they revealed that arithmetic wasn’t the point. Google didn’t destroy research – it revealed that finding information wasn’t really the hard bit. Each time the anxiety was the same – students will cheat, standards will collapse, the thing we valued will be lost. Each time the pretending got harder to sustain.

    For me AI fits the pattern. Not because it knows everything – it obviously doesn’t. Its confident wrongness is one of its most dangerous features. But it makes a certain kind of information effectively free. Facts, frameworks, standard analyses are now available to anyone with an internet connection and the wit to ask.

    And it hurts to carefully build and defend systems that confer status on things humans can do – only to have something come along and relieve humans from having to do them. It causes a confrontation – with value.

    No matter when or where or who

    During the early days of Covid, I came across a Harvard Business School theory called Jobs To Be Done. People pay to get a job done, but organisations often misunderstand the real job they’re being paid to perform.

    As a kid, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in our house was marketed as an educational tool – an invitation to become a programmer. Some did. Most, like me, worked out how to make the screen say rude words and then played games.

    Students have at least two jobs they want done. One is access to well-paid and meaningful work, made possible through obtaining a degree and supplied by academic programmes. The second is coming of age – the intoxicating combination of growing up and lifestyle. Becoming someone. Finding your people. Working out who you are when you’re not defined by your parents or your school.

    Universities have always provided both, but only dare attribute value to the first. The second is treated as incidental – “the student experience”, something that happens around the edges. But for many students, perhaps most, the second job is why they came. The qualification is the price of admission to three years of transformation.

    AI increasingly handles the first job – the information, the credentials, the sorting – more efficiently than universities ever could. If that were all universities offered, they’d already be obsolete. What AI can’t provide is the second job. It can’t help us become someone. It can’t introduce us to people who will change our lives. It can’t hold us accountable, or surprise us, or make us brave.

    During Covid, I argued that universities should cancel as much face-to-face teaching as possible – because it wasn’t working anyway – but keep campuses open. Not for teaching – for being. For studying together, bonding, bridging, belonging.

    I’ve not changed my view. AI just makes it more urgent. If the content delivery can be automated, the campus has to be for something else. That something else is formation.

    Has one thing in common, too

    A couple of years ago I came across Thomas Basbøll, resident writing consultant at Copenhagen Business School Library. He argues that when a human performs a cognitively sophisticated task – writes a compelling essay, analyses a complex case, synthesises disparate sources – we infer underlying competence. The performance becomes evidence of something deeper.

    When a machine performs the same task, we can’t make the inference. The machine has processes that produce outputs. It doesn’t “know” anything – it predicts tokens. The output might resemble what a knowledgeable human would produce, but it proves nothing about understanding.

    Education has always used performance as a proxy for competence. Higher education sets essays because it assumed that producing a good one required learning something. There was trust in the inference from output to understanding, and AI breaks it. The performance proves nothing.

    For many students, the performance was already disconnected from competence. Dave Cormier, from the University of Prince Edward Island, described the experience of essay writing in the search era as:

    have an argument, do a search for a quote that supports that position, pop the paper into Zotero to get the citation right, pop it in the paper. No reading for context. No real idea what the paper was even about.”

    There was always pretending. AI just automated it.

    Basbøll’s question still haunts me. What is it that we want students to be able to do on their own? Not “should we allow ChatGPT” – that battle is lost. What capacities, developed through practice and evidenced in assessment, do we actually care about?

    If the answer is that appearing literate is enough, then we might as well hand the whole thing to the machines. If the answer is that we want students to actually develop capacities, then universities will need to watch students doing things – synchronous engagement, supervised practice, assessment that can’t be outsourced. A shift that feels too resource-intensive for the funding model.

    What’s missing from both options is that neither is really about learning. One is about performing competence, the other is about proving competence under surveillance, but both still treat the output as the point. The system can’t ask what students actually learned, because it was never designed to find out. It was designed to sort.

    Everything I’ve ever done

    How hard should education be? The “meritocracy of difficulty” ties academic value to how hard a course is to survive – dense content, heavy workloads, high-stakes assessment used to filter and sort rather than support students. Go too far in the other direction, and it’s a pointless prizes-for-all game in which nobody learns a thing.

    Maybe the sorting and the signalling is the problem. The degree classification system was designed for an elite era where classification signalled that the graduate was better than other people. First class – exceptional. Third – joker. The whole apparatus assumes that the point of education is to prove that your Dad’s better than my Dad. See also the TEF.

    Everyone pretends about the workload. The credit system assumes thirty-five to forty hours per week for a full-time student. Students aren’t studying for anything like that. The gap is vast, everyone knows it, and nobody says it out loud because saying it would expose the fiction.

    AI intensifies it all. If students can automate the drudgery, they will – not because they’re lazy, but because they’re rational actors in a system that rewards outputs over process. If the system says “produce this essay” and the essay can be produced in ten minutes, why would anyone spend ten hours?

    Mark Twain might have said that he would never let his schooling interfere with his education. Today’s undergraduates would more often lament that they don’t can’t their lectures and seminars interfere with their part-time job that pays the rent.

    Every place I’ve ever been

    There’s a YouTube video about Czech railways that’s been stuck in my head for weeks now. They built a 200 km/h line between Prague and Budweis and held celebrations – the first domestic intercity service to break the 160 km/h barrier.

    But only one train per day actually runs at that speed. It arrives late every time. Passengers spend the whole journey anxious about missing their ten-minute connection at the other end.

    The Swiss do it differently. The Gotthard Base Tunnel was built for 230 km/h. Trains run at 200. The spare capacity isn’t wasted – it’s held in reserve. If a train enters the tunnel with a five-minute delay, it accelerates and emerges with only two. The tunnel eats delays. The result is connection punctuality of the kind where you almost always make your connection.

    The Czech approach is speed fetishism – make the easily marketable number bigger, and assume that’s improvement. The Swiss approach is reliability – build in slack, prioritise the journey over the metric, make sure people get where they’re going.

    It sometimes feels to me like UK universities have gone the Czech route. We’re the envy of the world on throughput – faster degrees, more students, tighter timetables, twelve-week modules with no room to fall behind.

    But when anything goes wrong – and things always go wrong – students miss their connections. A bad week becomes a failed module. A failed module becomes a resit year. A mental health crisis becomes a dropout. Then we blame them for lacking resilience, as if the problem were their character rather than a system designed with no slack.

    The formation model is the Swiss model. Slow down. Build in reserves. Let students recover from setbacks. Prioritise the journey over the metric. Accept that some things cannot be rushed.

    At school they taught me how to be

    Universities tell themselves similar lies about academics. It’s been obvious for a long time that the UK can’t sustain a system where researchers are also the teachers, the pastoral supporters, the markers and the administrators.

    The all-rounder academic – brilliant at research, compelling in lectures, attentive in tutorials, wise in pastoral care, efficient at marking, engaged in knowledge exchange – was always a fantasy, tolerable only when student numbers were small enough to hide the gaps.

    Massification stretched it. Every component became more complicated, with more onerous demands, while the mental model of what good looks like didn’t change. AI breaks it.

    If students automate essay production, academics can automate feedback. We’re already seeing AI marking tools that claim to do in seconds what takes hours. If both sides are pretending – students pretending to write, academics pretending to read – what’s left?

    The answer is – only the encounter. The tutorial where someone’s question makes you think again. The supervision where a half-formed idea gets taken seriously. The seminar where genuine disagreement produces genuine movement. The moments when people are present to each other, accountable to each other, and changed by each other.

    They can’t be automated. They also can’t be scaled in the way the current model demands. You can’t have genuine encounters at a ratio of one to two hundred. Nor can you develop judgement in a twelve-week module delivered to students whose names you don’t know.

    The alternative is differentiation – people who teach, people who research, people who coach, working in teams on longer-form problems rather than alone in offices marking scripts. But that requires admitting the all-rounder was always a lie, and restructuring everything around that admission.

    So pure in thought and word and deed

    If information is now abundant and feedback can be instant and personalised, then the scarcity model is dead. Good riddance. But abundance creates its own problems.

    Without judgement, abundance is useless. Knowing that something is the case is increasingly cheap. Any idiot with ChatGPT can generate an account of the causes of the First World War or the principles of contract law. But knowing what to do about it, whether to trust it, how it connects to everything else, which bits matter and which are noise – these remain expensive, slow, human.

    Judgement is not a skill you can look up. It’s a disposition you develop through practice – through getting things wrong and understanding why, through watching people who are better at it than you, through being held accountable by others who will tell you when you’re fooling yourself. AI can give us information. It can’t give us judgement.

    Abundance makes it harder to know what we don’t know. When information was scarce, ignorance was obvious. Now, ignorance is invisible. We can generate confident-seeming text on any topic without understanding anything about it. The gap between performance and competence widens.

    UCL’s Rose Luckin calls what’s needed “meta-intelligence” – not knowing things, but knowing how we know, knowing what we don’t know, and knowing how to find out. AI makes meta-intelligence more important, not less. If we can’t evaluate what the machine is giving us, we’re not using a tool. We’re being used by one.

    That’s the equity issue that most AI boosterism ignores. If you went to a school that taught you to think, AI is a powerful amplifier. If you went to a school that taught you to comply, AI is a way of complying faster without ever developing the capacities that would let you do otherwise.

    They didn’t quite succeed

    Cultivating judgement means designing curricula around problems that don’t have predetermined answers – not case studies where students are expected to reach the “right” conclusion, but genuine dilemmas where reasonable people disagree. It means assessment that rewards the quality of reasoning, not just the correctness of conclusions – teachers who model uncertainty, who think out loud, who change their minds in public.

    Creating communities of inquiry means spaces where people think together, are accountable to each other, and learn to be wrong in public. They can’t be scaled, and can’t be automated. They require presence, continuity, and trust built over time. AI can prepare us for these spaces. It can’t be one of them.

    Last week I was playing with a custom GPT with a group of student reps. We’d loaded it with Codes of Practice and housing law guidance, and for the first time they understood their rights as tenants – not deeply, not expertly, but enough to know what questions to ask and where to push back. They’d never have encountered this stuff otherwise.

    The custom GPT wasn’t the point – the curiosity it sparked was. They left wanting to know more, not less. That’s what democratised information synthesis can do when it’s not about producing outputs faster, but about opening doors others didn’t know existed.

    Father, forgive me

    There’s always been an irony in the complaint that graduates lack “soft skills”. For decades, employers demanded production – write the report, analyse the data, build the model. Universities obliged, orienting curricula around outputs and assessing students on their capacity to produce. Now that machines produce faster and cheaper, employers discover they wanted something else all along.

    They call it “soft skills” or “emotional intelligence” or “communication”. What they mean is the capacity to be present with other humans. To listen, to learn, to adapt – to work with people who are different from you, and to contribute to collective endeavours rather than produce outputs in isolation.

    It’s always irked me that they’re described as soft. They are the hardest skills to develop and the hardest to fake. They are also exactly what universities could have been cultivating all along – if anyone had been willing to name them and pay for them.

    Universities that grasp this can offer students, employers and society something they genuinely need – people who can think, who can learn, who can work with others, who can handle complexity and uncertainty. Employers will need to train them in their specific context, but they’ll be worth training. That’s a different value proposition than “job-ready graduates” – and a more honest one.

    I remember visiting the Saltire Centre at Glasgow Caledonian and being amazed that a university was brave enough to notice that students like studying together. Not just being taught together – studying together. The spaces that fill up fastest are the ones where people can work alongside others, help each other, and belong to something.

    It’s not a distraction from learning. It is learning. The same is true of SUs, societies, volunteering, representation – the “extracurricular” activities that universities tolerate but rarely celebrate. These are where students practise collective action, navigate difference, take responsibility for something beyond themselves. Formation happens in community, not just in classrooms.

    I tried not to do it

    Being brave enough to confront all this will be hard. The funding model rewards efficiency, the regulatory model rewards measurability, and the labour market wants qualifications. The incentive is to produce – people who can perform, not people who have developed.

    Students – many, not all – have internalised this logic. They want the degree, the credential, the signal. They are strategic, instrumental, and focused on outcomes. It’s not a character flaw – it’s a rational response to the system they’re in. If the degree is the point, then anything that gets you the degree efficiently is sensible. AI is just the latest efficiency tool.

    But while shame is a powerful disincentive to the fess up, the thing about pretending is that it’s exhausting. And it’s lonely.

    For years at Christmas, I pretended UWE was Bristol because I was ashamed – ashamed of wanting to study the media, ashamed of coming from a family where going to any university was exceptional, ashamed of the gap between where I was and where people felt I should be. The pretending was a way of managing the shame.

    I suspect a lot of students feel something similar. The performance of knowledge, the strategic deployment of qualifications, the constant positioning and comparison – these are ways of managing the fear that you’re not good enough, that you’ll be found out, that the gap between who you are and who you’re supposed to be is too wide to bridge.

    AI intensifies the fear for some – the terror that they’ll be caught, that the machine will be detected, that the pretending will be exposed. But it might offer a different possibility. If the pretending no longer works – if the performance can be automated and therefore has no value – then maybe the only thing left is to become someone who doesn’t need to pretend.

    And I still don’t understand

    That is the democratic promise of abundant information. Not that everyone will know everything – that’s neither possible nor desirable. But that knowledge can stop being a marker of status, a way of putting others down, or a resource to be hoarded. “I know something you don’t” can give way to “we can figure this out together.”

    The shift from knowledge as possession to knowledge as practice is a shift from “I have information you lack” to “I can work with you on problems that matter.” From education as credentialing to education as formation. From “I’m better than you” to “I can contribute.” From pretending to becoming.

    We’d need assessment that rewards contribution over reproduction. If the essay can be generated by AI, then the essay is testing the wrong thing. Assessment that requires students to think in real time, in dialogue, in response to genuine challenge – this is harder to automate and more valuable to develop. The individual student writing the individual essay marked by the individual academic is game over if AI can play both roles.

    We’ll need pedagogy that prioritises encounter over transmission. Small group teaching. Sustained relationships between students and teachers. Curricula designed around problems rather than content coverage. Something between a module and a course, run by teams, with long-form purpose over a year rather than twelve-week fragments. Time and space for the slow work of formation.

    We’ll need recognition that learning is social. Common spaces where students can study together. Student organisations supported rather than tolerated. Credit for service learning, for contribution to community, for the “extracurricular” activities where formation actually happens.

    We’ll need slack in the system. The Swiss model, not the Czech one. Space to fall behind and catch up. Multiple attempts at assessment. Pass/fail options that encourage risk-taking. Time built in for things to go wrong, because things always go wrong. A system that absorbs delays rather than compounding them.

    None of this will happen quickly. The funding model, the regulatory model, the labour market, the expectations students bring with them – they are not going to transform overnight. We’ll all have to play along for a while yet, doing the best we can within systems that reward the wrong things.

    But playing along is not the same as believing. And knowing what we’re playing along with – knowing what we’re compromising and why – is the beginning of something different.

    The end of pretending

    The reason I came to work here at Wonkhe – and the whole point of my work with students’ unions over the years – has been about giving power away. Not hoarding insight, but spreading it. Not being the person who knows things – but helping other people act on what they now know.

    The best email I got last week wasn’t someone telling me that I was impressive, or clever. I’ve learned how to get those emails. It was someone saying “really great notes and really great meeting – has got our brains whirring a lot.” Using what I offered to do something I couldn’t have done myself.

    Maybe I’ve become one of those insufferable men who grab the mic to assert that what education is for is what it did for them. But the purpose of teaching is surely rousing curiosity and creating the conditions for people to become.

    When I look back at the version of myself who told his family he was going to Bristol, I feel compassion more than embarrassment. He was doing the best he could in a system that made pretending rational.

    Thirty years on, I’ve watched skills become obsolete, formats get put in the skip, pretences exposed. Each time we held on for a while. Each time we eventually let go. Each time something was revealed about what had actually mattered all along.

    AI doesn’t end the system of pretending. But it does expose its contradictions in ways that might, eventually, make something better possible. If the performance of knowledge becomes worthless, then maybe actual formation – and the human encounters that produce it – can finally be valued.

    The hopeful answer is that universities can be places where people become more fully human. Not because they acquire more information, or even because they become subject specialists – though many will – but because they develop the capacities for thought, action, connection and care that make a human life worth living.

    They are capacities that can’t be downloaded, nor automated, nor faked. They can be developed only slowly, in relationship, through practice, with friction.

    You came to university for skills and they turned out to be useless? That’s a trick. You came for skills and left ready to change the world? Now that’s magic.

    Continue the conversation at The Secret Life of Students: Learning to be human in the age of AI – 17 March, London. Find out more and book.

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  • WEEKEND READING The art of reimagining universities: a vision for higher education

    WEEKEND READING The art of reimagining universities: a vision for higher education

    Join HEPI for a webinar on Thursday 11 December 2025 from 10am to 11am to discuss how universities can strengthen the student voice in governance to mark the launch of our upcoming report, Rethinking the Student Voice. Sign up now to hear our speakers explore the key questions.

    This blog was kindly authored by Professor Rathna Ramanathan, Provost, Central Saint Martins; Executive Dean for Global Affairs and Professor of Design and Intercultural Communication, University of the Arts London.

    The structure of our universities is stuck in the past. The recent post-16 education and skills white paper praises our universities as globally excellent institutions but calls for a reorientation towards national priorities and greater efficiency. As academics and creatives functioning as outsiders, we can use this position productively to define future pathways.

    We’re living through multiple crises at once – climate emergency, polarization, AI disruption – yet most universities still organize themselves around departments created decades ago. Institutions talk endlessly about ‘interdisciplinary collaboration’ and ‘preparing students for the future’, yet their actual structures often make both nearly impossible.

    At Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, we have tried something different. We have redesigned the College by rethinking what an art and design college should focus on and how it can work, guided by shared principles that emerged from asking: ‘What does it look like when we work together at our best?’

    The real question

    We ask students to be creative, adaptive, bold. To embrace complexity and imagine different futures. What could our universities achieve if we reorganised ourselves with the same creativity we demand from students?

    The institutions that thrive in the coming decades won’t be those defending traditions most fiercely. They will be those with the courage to redesign themselves for the world emerging, not the one they were built for. That’s uncomfortable. Structural change is difficult and uncertain. Letting go of familiar categories and hierarchies requires trust. Building new collaborative cultures alongside new organisational structures demands sustained effort. This discomfort might be precisely the point. If universities can’t model the adaptive, experimental, principles-led thinking we claim to teach, why should anyone trust us to prepare the next generation for an uncertain future? More bluntly, if we don’t practice what we teach, do we deserve to thrive?

    The problem: structure shapes everything

    For over a century, universities have organised themselves into disciplinary silos. This made sense when knowledge was more stable, and career paths were more predictable. But today’s urgent challenges  don’t heed disciplinary boundaries and require insights from science, policy, economics, ethics, design, and creative practice simultaneously.

    Most universities recognise this. They create joint programmes and support cross-department initiatives. Yet the fundamental architecture remains unchanged: separate budgets, isolated governance structures, academic staff working within disciplinary lanes. It’s like trying to renovate a house by rearranging the furniture while leaving the walls intact.

    For students, this disconnect is glaring. They see interconnected problems everywhere, yet are asked to choose a single discipline and stay within it. They want to learn how to think, not just master a predetermined skill set. Traditional university structures also inadvertently reinforce whose knowledge counts and whose doesn’t, often privileging Western over non-Western perspectives, theory over practice, and individual achievement over collective wisdom. In an era demanding intercultural, community-centred, and future-focused approaches, these inherited biases have become institutional liabilities.

    The experiment: principles before structure

    Central Saint Martins’ transformation began with a fundamental question: ‘What does it look like when we work together at our best?’ From this inquiry emerged five core principles that now guide decision-making at College level: address shared conditions that transcend disciplines; seek common ground through equitable collaboration; treat the whole life of the College as creative material; bring practice to every space; and deepen connections with communities beyond our walls. These aren’t aspirational statements. They’re operational principles that inform the creation of a new structure: ‘Schools of Thought’.

    Three schools of thought: foundations, not hierarchies

    Most university ‘schools’ function as management layers above departments with administrative structures for top-down control. At Central Saint Martins, we are inverting this model. Our Schools of Thought establish shared foundations beneath courses and programmes, creating common ground where disciplines naturally converge.

    Each school aims to be transdisciplinary (integrating ways of thinking), not merely multidisciplinary (putting disciplines side-by-side). They’re collective, not just collaborative. The naming strategy – C + S + M = CSM – emphasises the whole over parts. Rather than reinforcing disciplinary boundaries, they create space for working across schools while adapting to changing conditions.


    C School [Culture]     explores culture as a vital form of enquiry and expression, developing thinking and practice across art, performance and curation. It recognises culture in the immediate world around us, understanding it as a sense-making activity.


    S School [Systems]     explores how different forms of designing allow us to understand and intervene in the complex human systems shaping our world through graphic communication, product and industrial design, architecture, business innovation, and creative enterprise.


    M School [Materials]     investigates radical approaches to materials, making, and meaning-making through fashion, textiles, and jewellery to digital interaction, scientific innovation, and multi-species regeneration.

    Why principles matter more than plans

    What makes this transformation different from typical restructuring is its foundation in shared principles rather than predetermined outcomes. The principles emerged from collective reflection on the College’s actual lived experience, examining when authentic collaboration and meaningful impact happen. They aim to capture the heart of the College’s culture rather than imposing an abstract ideal. They create coherence without rigidity, alignment without conformity.

    Schools of Thought are not viewed as resolved but as vehicles for ongoing transformation. They provide low-walled frameworks for continuous evolution, adapting to changing conditions while staying true to core values. As communities and conversations develop, the schools themselves will transform, shaped by the very practices they enable.

    The deeper shift: embedding justice and sustainability

    Traditionally, art and design education has reinforced colonial perspectives, unsustainable production and cultural hierarchies; biases that reproduce invisibly through inherited disciplinary structures. The principle of ‘addressing shared conditions’ makes complicity in global crises unavoidable rather than optional, preventing justice and sustainability from being relegated to elective courses or diversity initiatives.

    ‘Seeking common ground’” creates space for marginalised knowledge systems, while ‘taking the whole life of the College as material’ reveals institutional truths through the lived experiences of our staff and our students rather than stated values alone.

    We can’t truly prepare students for the climate crisis, technological disruption, or polarisation by adding modules to unchanged systems. The structure needs to embody the values and capacities these challenges demand.

    What creativity teaches

    Creative education isn’t primarily about self-expression or beautiful objects. But approached as Central Saint Martins has, creativity becomes a methodology for engaging with uncertainty as traditional certainties collapse.

    ‘Bring practice to every space’ makes thinking-in-formation visible, cultivating comfort with ambiguity and the capacity to learn from failure—all critical for navigating unpredictable futures. “Deepen external connections” recognises that knowledge develops through genuine dialogue with communities beyond institutional walls, not expert pronouncements.

    These approaches value prototyping and iteration over perfect solutions, holding contradictory ideas simultaneously, collaborating across difference, and making abstract possibilities tangible. We want to apply creative principles to institutional transformation, treating the restructuring as an experimental, collaborative, and iterative process rather than a top-down plan.

    Lessons for all higher education

    Although rooted in creative arts, the principles-led approach transfers across sectors. Imperial College London’s recently launched Schools of Convergence Science reflects similar recognition that traditional structures no longer serve contemporary challenges. Structural change requires more than new organisational charts. It requires:

    • Culture shifts embedded in governance: Principles that guide decision-making at every level, ensuring new structures don’t simply replicate old patterns.
    • Foundation-level transformation: Creating common ground where collaboration becomes natural rather than requiring special initiatives.
    • Recognition of complicity: Acknowledging how inherited structures perpetuate problems, then actively working to transform those conditions.
    • Treating institutional structure as material: Applying the same creative, experimental, iterative approaches we teach students.
    • Making the whole life of the institution visible: Valuing informal experience alongside formal roles, practice alongside theory, collective wisdom alongside individual expertise.

    Any university can ask itself: What principles characterise when we work at our best? How could we design structures that enable rather than constrain that work? What would it mean to organise around shared conditions rather than inherited categories?

    As higher education gets increasingly othered in new policies, outsiders can provide the breakthroughs needed by taking a fresh perspective. As ‘The genius of the amateur’ points out, outsiders often succeed because progress is about generating models which we then test, apply and refine. We can’t do this alone at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, we need to do this collectively: to genuinely practice for ourselves what we teach and to create a space which isn’t about silos or othering but where all of us are welcome.

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  • From detection to development: how universities are ethically embedding AI-for-learning

    From detection to development: how universities are ethically embedding AI-for-learning

    Author:
    Mike Larsen

    Published:

    • HEPI Director Nick Hillman’s verdict on the Budget can be found on the Times Higher website here.
    • Today’s blog was kindly authored by Mike Larsen, Chief Executive Officer at Studiosity, a HEPI Partner.

    The future of UK higher education rests upon the assurance of student learning outcomes. While GenAI presents the sector with immense opportunities for advancement and efficiency, the sector is constrained by an anachronistic model of plagiarism detection rooted in adversarialism. I believe the ‘Police and Punish’ model must now be replaced by ‘Support and Validate’.

    A reliance upon detection was perhaps once a necessary evil but it has never aligned with the fundamental values of higher education. The assumption that policing student behaviour is the only way to safeguard standards no longer applies.

    Such a punitive policy model has become increasingly untenable, consuming valuable university resources in unviable investigations and distracting from universities’ core mission. I believe there is a compelling alternative.

    As assessment methods undergo necessary change, higher education institutions must consciously evaluate the risks inherent in abandoning proven means of developing durable critical thinking and communication skills, such as academic writing. New learning and assessment methodologies are required but must be embraced via evidence and concurrently protect the core promise of higher education.

    An emerging policy framework for consideration and research is ‘support and validate’ which pairs timely, evidence-based academic support with student self-validation of authorship and learning.

    Building capability, confidence and competence provides the ideal preparation for graduates to embrace current and future technology in both the workplace and society.

    The combination of established and immediate academic writing feedback systems with advanced authorship and learning validation capabilities creates a robust and multi-layered solution capable of ensuring quality at scale.

    This is an approach built upon detecting learning, not cheating. Higher education leaders may recognise this integrated approach empowers learners and unburdens educators, without compromising quality. It ensures the capabilities uniquely developed by higher education, now needed more than ever, are extended and amplified rather than replaced by techno-solutionism.

    We must build a future where assessment security explicitly prioritises learning, not policing. For UK higher education, a pivot from punishment to capability-building and validation may be the only sustainable way to safeguard the value of the degree qualification.

    Studiosity’s AI-for-Learning platform scales student success at hundreds of universities across five continents, with research-backed evidence of impact. Studiosity has recently acquired Norvalid, a world leader in tech-enabled student self-validation of authorship and authentic learning, shifting how higher education approaches assessment security and learning.

     

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  • Universities now need to be much clearer about the total cost of a course

    Universities now need to be much clearer about the total cost of a course

    Now that we know the undergraduate fee caps that will apply in England in 2026-27 and 2027-28, now seems like a good time to get something off my to-do list.

    For the sector, the headline is financial stability – after years of the fee cap being frozen while costs rose, two years of confirmed inflationary increases provide some relief.

    But the announcement also crystallises a compliance problem that has been building since April, when new price transparency provisions came into force under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.

    Last week the Competition and Markets Authority published finalised guidance on Complying with the law on unfair commercial practices relating to price transparency.

    For a student starting a three-year degree next September, the total tuition cost is now entirely calculable. Year 1: £9,535. Year 2: £9,790. Year 3: £10,050. Total: £29,375.

    And yet university prospectuses and websites overwhelmingly advertise just the Year 1 figure – understating the actual three-year cost by nearly £2,000.

    Under the new CMA guidance that practice looks legally vulnerable. And, at least for England, OfS about to consult on applying a new “treating students fairly” condition to all registered providers, the regulatory architecture to enforce compliance is assembling itself.

    A note before I get going – the DMCC Act is UK-wide legislation, and the CMA’s price transparency requirements apply to universities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland just as they do in England.

    The OfS regulatory overlay – particularly Condition C5, whatever version of it gets applied to existing providers, and a presumption of non-compliance where consumer law has been breached – is England-specific.

    Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish universities don’t face the same automatic read-across from CMA findings to registration consequences. But they remain fully exposed to CMA enforcement, including direct fines and redress orders. It just means the enforcement route is different.

    £29,375. And the rest

    CMA209 is formal CMA guidance issued under the DMCC Act on the price transparency provisions – not HE-specific, but nothing in it carves higher education out.

    At its heart, it says that whenever a trader gives information about a product and its price, that is usually an “invitation to purchase” – and at that point the consumer must be given a realistic, meaningful and attainable total price, including any fees, taxes or other payments they will necessarily incur if they go ahead.

    The guidance defines “invitations to purchase” broadly – a website listing, an advert, a prospectus entry, an email, an instant message from an ambassador, so long as it indicates the characteristics of a product and its price and enables the consumer to decide whether to purchase or take some other “transactional decision.”

    Universities can’t rely on the detailed fee terms being buried on a separate page, or in the conditions of offer, to cure a misleading headline later in the journey.

    Three specific practices are now explicitly prohibited or heavily restricted:

    Drip pricing – showing one price up front and then introducing mandatory charges only later in the process – is now a prohibited practice under section 230 of the DMCC Act. The guidance is unambiguous:

    The practice of showing consumers an initial headline price for a product and subsequently introducing additional mandatory charges as consumers proceed with a purchase or transaction – sometimes called ‘drip pricing’ – is prohibited under the UCP provisions.

    Partitioned pricing – giving a list of components without also giving the overall total – is:

    …generally prohibited since it is not consistent with providing the ‘total price’ of the product.

    You can’t say “Tuition fee £X, additional compulsory course costs apply, see small print” without also giving either a single total price or, where that total genuinely cannot be calculated, a clear and prominent explanation of how it will be calculated.

    Non-prominent variable pricing information – where some part of the total price cannot reasonably be calculated in advance, traders must tell consumers how that part will be calculated, “with as much prominence as” any calculable components. A footnote in the terms and conditions will not do.

    Mandatory charges and hidden course costs

    The guidance is explicit that the “total price” must include any fees, taxes, charges or other payments that the consumer will necessarily incur. Mandatory charges include – per the guidance –

    administration fees, however described, such as booking or processing fees, quality assurance charges, platform charges… [and]… fees relating to additional services that cannot be avoided.

    Crucially, the guidance also says that charges arising from the trader’s own input costs – including the costs of third parties they choose to contract with – are mandatory and must be baked into the advertised price, not bolted on separately.

    Consumers have no control over such expenses. They cannot compare and select the third-party provider or products they use and have no way of opting out of them.

    I’m thinking maybe mandatory DBS and occupational health checks for health courses where the university organises the process, or compulsory field trip costs where the programme design offers no realistic non-paying route. Under CMA209, those all look like mandatory charges that should be rolled into the total price shown wherever the course and its fee are advertised – not left for discovery on a faculty web page in week three of term.

    The guidance is also explicit that merely calling something an “extra” or listing it separately does not make it optional:

    A charge is mandatory if the consumer will have to pay the additional charge in order to purchase or receive the advertised product. It is still a mandatory charge even if the consumer could theoretically avoid it by purchasing or signing up for an additional product.

    The guidance notes that refundable security deposits – money held against potential damage that’s “automatically refunded if not called upon” – don’t need to be included in the total price.

    But non-refundable deposits that form part of the purchase price are different. International students routinely pay substantial non-refundable deposits to secure places – often £1,000–3,000 or more, and sometimes 50 per cent of the first year’s fees.

    These are mandatory charges, payable before the student can even accept an offer. Under CMA209’s logic, the existence of the deposit, its amount, and the circumstances in which it might be forfeited are all material information that should be disclosed upfront – not discovered partway through the application process.

    The guidance’s emphasis on not introducing charges “later in the process” is directly relevant – if a student applies based on a headline fee figure and only later discovers they need to pay a substantial non-refundable deposit before they can confirm their place, that looks a lot like drip pricing.

    The “additional course costs” problem

    Plenty of universities maintain a separate page – often linked from the main fees section – listing “additional course costs” that students should “budget for.” Under CMA209, this structure is problematic on multiple fronts.

    First, where those costs are genuinely mandatory – DBS checks, professional registrations, required equipment – listing them separately is textbook partitioned pricing. The guidance is explicit:

    It is not enough to present the individual price components and expect the consumer to calculate the total price.

    A course page that shows tuition at £9,535 and then separately lists a £50 DBS check, £150 uniform and £120 professional body registration is doing exactly what CMA209 prohibits – presenting components without the total.

    Even where costs relate to optional modules, the guidance requires that variable pricing information be given “with as much prominence as” the calculable headline price. A link to a separate page does not constitute equal prominence.

    The “optional” categorisation itself deserves scrutiny. The guidance notes that a charge remains mandatory “even if the consumer could theoretically avoid it” through alternative choices.

    If a geology degree features fieldwork in its marketing, and the fieldwork module has a £500 field trip cost, the theoretical existence of non-fieldwork routes doesn’t make that cost optional for students buying the product as advertised.

    The test is whether the base price is “realistic, meaningful and attainable” for the degree as typically experienced – not whether a determined student could engineer a cheaper path through.

    Universities may need to audit every course’s additional costs and ask hard questions about what’s genuinely optional versus what’s mandatory in practice. The answer will often be uncomfortable. Oh, and the cost of resitting something also clearly needs more… clarity.

    Multi-year degrees and in-contract price increases

    The guidance has a specific section on “periodic pricing” – contracts where the consumer makes regular payments in return for ongoing services, such as subscriptions, gym memberships or broadband. It distinguishes between “rolling contracts” (can be cancelled any time, so the total price is just the price per period) and “minimum term contracts” (consumer commits for a defined period).

    For minimum term contracts, traders can either provide:

    ….the cumulative price that the consumer will have to pay over the entire minimum length of the contract, inclusive of all mandatory charges in that period

    …or provide:

    the total price that the consumer pays for each period of the contract… alongside a prominent statement of the number of months the consumer is committed to pay that price for.

    Most undergraduate degrees look very like a minimum-term periodic arrangement in substance. The student expects to be there for three or four years, paying annual tuition fees for ongoing access to teaching and services, and will normally make their transactional decision on the basis of the whole degree rather than a single year.

    The CMA’s own 2023 HE guidance reinforces this as follows:

    …the contract for educational services is for the full duration of the course, with milestones to be achieved in order to progress to the next year or other period of study.

    Applied to tuition fees, that raises some uncomfortable questions. If a university advertises fees at £9,535 for a three-year degree, is it in effect inviting the student into a three-year minimum term contract for services, with periodic payments due each year?

    If so, under CMA209 it should either present the total cumulative cost for the minimum term – or present a per-year total price plus a prominent statement of the minimum term, with any one-off fees (or, by analogy, any known annual increases) properly disclosed.

    Guidance was already clear that fee variation clauses are more likely to be fair if they include a “worked example” of how the clause might operate. Abstract percentages – “fees may increase by up to 5% annually” – don’t give consumers equivalent information to concrete pound figures.

    An international applicant who sees “£28,000” as the headline may not instinctively calculate that (“up to”) 5 per cent annual increases would mean approximately £88,200 over three years rather than £84,000 – a difference of over £4,000.

    For that percentage to have “as much prominence as” the headline price, it would need to be translated into the actual cost impact. This is particularly important for vulnerable consumers who may not run compound calculations when making application decisions.

    Universities might have argued that the total cost of a degree “cannot reasonably be calculated in advance” because future fee caps depend on inflation forecasts not yet made. For home UGs in England, that defence has now evaporated.

    Continuing to advertise “£9,535” when £29,375 is knowable would, under CMA209’s logic, be hard to reconcile with the requirement to provide the total price in an invitation to purchase.

    The guidance is explicit that traders should use any information already available to calculate the total price. The worked example for hotel bookings states that:

    …if a consumer searches for a ‘three-night stay for two people’ on a hotel booking website, the trader should use this information to calculate the total price based on those requirements including any per-transaction charges (and any other mandatory charges).

    By analogy – if a student is applying for a three-year degree starting in 2025, the university has all the information it needs to calculate and display the total cost.

    As we noted when the DMCC provisions came into force in April, vague claims that fees “may rise with inflation” may breach the rules if they fail to explain how, when, or by how much – or if that information isn’t given equal weight to the headline figure.

    Universities might argue that the “product” is access to one year of teaching and assessment, with progression to subsequent years being a separate (conditional) transaction. Under that framing, each year would be a genuinely rolling contract and the periodic pricing provisions wouldn’t require cumulative totals.

    The problem with that defence is threefold – it contradicts how universities market degrees (as three or four-year qualifications leading to awards), it contradicts the CMA’s own 2023 HE guidance on the duration of the educational services contract, and it would require universities to fundamentally redesign their offer letters, student contracts, and progression frameworks. It is not, I tentatively suggest, an easy pivot.

    The deferral problem

    The interaction between in-contract price increases and deferrals creates another drip pricing risk that universities may need to address.

    A student who applied for 2025 entry and accepts an offer does so on the basis of £9,535 fees. If they then defer to 2026, they face £9,790 – a £255 increase. The CMA’s 2023 HE guidance already flagged that deferrals require:

    …transparent information on the level of fees for that year if they could increase, and any other significant potential aspects of the course that you know will or may be different.

    Under CMA209, this looks like exactly the kind of later-revealed mandatory charge that the drip pricing prohibition targets. The student was shown one price when they made their transactional decision (accepting the offer), then charged a different, higher price when they actually enrol. Universities offering deferrals with “fees will be the rate applicable in your year of entry” are building this mechanism into their standard practice.

    The compliant approach would be to disclose at the point of offer – or certainly at the point of accepting a deferral – what the Year 1 fee for 2026 entry will be, what the total degree cost will be (using the now-known 2026-27, 2027-28, and projected 2028-29 figures), and how this differs from the cost had the student started in 2025. Anything less risks a student committing to defer without understanding the price implications.

    Non-standard degree structures

    The DfE announcement also creates specific presentation challenges for degrees that don’t follow the standard three-year full-time model.

    Foundation years: The announcement confirms that classroom-based foundation years remain frozen at 2025-26 levels while subsequent years increase. A four-year programme with a foundation year therefore has a complex cost profile: Year 0 at one price, Years 1–3 escalating. You cannot simply multiply the Year 1 fee by four – and the total will be different from a standard three-year degree starting in the same year. How should universities present this? The CMA209 logic suggests they need to show the actual cumulative total for the specific programme structure, not an indicative per-year figure that doesn’t reflect reality.

    Placement years and years abroad: Different percentage caps apply – 20 per cent of the full fee for sandwich placements, 15 per cent for years abroad and Turing years. A four-year degree with a placement year has three years at full fee and one at 20 per cent, while a degree with a year abroad has three at full fee and one at 15 per cent. For a 2025 entrant on a four-year sandwich course, the calculation would be £9,535 (Year 1) + £9,790 (Year 2, placement) × 20% + £10,050 (Year 3) + [2028–29 fee] (Year 4) – giving a total of around £21,543 plus the unknown final year. Universities need to work through these calculations for every programme variant and present the results clearly.

    Accelerated degrees: Two-year accelerated degrees have higher annual caps (£11,750 for 2026-27, £12,060 for 2027-28). A student choosing between a standard three-year degree and an accelerated two-year version is making a comparison that matters – £29,375 over three years versus approximately £23,810 over two years (for a 2026 entrant). CMA209’s requirement that prices be “realistic, meaningful and attainable” for the product as advertised suggests universities should be helping students make this comparison, not obscuring it with per-year figures that don’t facilitate like-for-like assessment.

    Part-time study: Part-time degrees stretch over 4–6+ years, accumulating more annual increases. The maths becomes more complex and the cumulative cost may substantially exceed the nominal fee multiplied by FTE years. Again, the guidance suggests universities should be doing this calculation for students, not leaving them to work it out themselves.

    Home students versus international students

    For home students in England, the government has now confirmed two years of fee increases, with a stated intention to legislate for automatic annual uprating thereafter. Ironically, the specific inflation measure remains technically unconfirmed – the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper indicated fees would rise “in line with inflation” but didn’t specify which index.

    You and I know that the figures are the OBR’s projections of inflation as of today, but that’s hardly an “objective verifiable inflation index.” Universities can at least show the trajectory for students whose entire degree is now priced.

    For international students, the position is much more exposed. Here, fee-setting is entirely at the university’s discretion, and annual uplifts of several hundred pounds – or several per cent – are routine.

    If a university can state “fees will increase by up to X per cent annually,” then it can calculate a maximum total cost for the degree. The guidance’s logic would suggest it should be displaying that maximum – or at minimum, the inflation cap and worked examples – with equal prominence to the Year 1 headline figure. Asking a student to commit to a multi-year programme on the basis of “£28,000 in year 1 – fees may rise in future years” without any structure looks exactly like the sort of thing this guidance is trying to stamp out.

    The universities that have moved to fixed-fee guarantees are in the cleanest compliance position. If the fee genuinely won’t increase, you can advertise Year 1 and the cumulative total is just three or four times that figure. Everyone else – particularly those with vague “may increase with inflation” language buried in terms – is more exposed.

    The deposits problem

    The deposit practices that have become widespread in international recruitment also deserve particular scrutiny under the new framework.

    According to UUKi survey data from last year, two thirds of providers charge deposits for international students at a specific monetary amount, with a further 17 per cent setting deposits as a percentage of the tuition fee – often 50 per cent.

    Universities have been encouraged to set earlier deadlines for applications and deposits as a way of “managing risk” – but the effect is to shift that risk onto students, who must commit substantial sums before they have complete information about accommodation, living costs, or visa outcomes.

    Of course universities have been explicitly encouraged to use deposits to reduce the likelihood of students transferring out of the degree programme. The logic is straightforward – if a student has already paid £5,000–15,000 that they’ll lose if they change their mind, they’re locked in.

    But that sits uncomfortably with OfS Condition F2, which requires registered providers to publish clear information about transfer arrangements – and with OfS’ legal duty to monitor the availability and utilisation of student transfer schemes.

    More broadly, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 already constrains what universities can do. Cancellation or early termination charges must be limited to what is “fair and proportionate” – meaning the university can recover its genuine costs or lost profit, but cannot levy charges designed to punish students for changing their mind or to scare them into staying in the contract.

    When challenged, universities might argue that the CAS allocated to the student could have gone to someone else, so they’ve lost the profit they would have made. But if the university hasn’t actually recruited to its CAS allocation – if numbers are down and places remain unfilled – that argument collapses.

    CMA’s existing guidance is clear that traders can only retain money to cover actual costs and losses, not to enforce compliance targets or prevent student choice. Universities aren’t really allowed to shift the burden of their regulatory obligations or commercial risks onto students.

    DMCC adds further layers. Under the duty of professional diligence, universities must act with the skill, care, and honesty that a reasonable trader should exercise in line with good market practice.

    Breaching that duty becomes unlawful when it distorts, or risks distorting, a consumer’s decision-making – a bar that drops further when the consumers in question are vulnerable. Practices that exploit a student’s weakness, confusion, or lack of experience can breach the Act even if no actual loss can yet be proven.

    OfS’ own prohibited behaviours list – currently applicable only to new registrants but expected to be extended – includes:

    …requiring a student to pay a disproportionately high sum of money as penalty to the provider or for services which have not yet been supplied, where the student decides not to sign the contract or withdraws from the contract after signing it.

    In its consultation response, OfS argued that the prohibited behaviours it was proposing closely reflect existing legal requirements “with which traders in any sector are required to comply.”

    If that’s right, then the current deposit practices of many universities may in many cases already be legally questionable – the prohibited behaviours list just makes explicit the kinds of practices consumer protection law is already concerned about.

    The interaction with immigration policy is awkward. The Legal Migration white paper signalled that UKVI will soon be demanding visa refusal rates of less than 10 per cent and course enrolment rates of at least 90 per cent of CASs issued.

    In the C5 consultation, one respondent suggested that OfS should work closely with UKVI to “agree a position on non-repayment of deposits for visa-sponsored students” – presumably because universities are using deposit forfeiture to manage these compliance targets.

    But again – universities can’t shift the burden of their regulatory obligations onto students. If a student’s visa is refused through no fault of their own, or if they withdraw before enrolment for legitimate reasons, treating a 50 per cent deposit as simply forfeited looks difficult to defend as “fair and proportionate” under consumer protection law.

    Postgraduate provision

    I’ve focused on undergraduate study here, but the transparency issues are at least as acute – arguably more so – for postgraduate provision.

    Taught masters programmes of one year limit the in-contract increase problem. But doctoral programmes run for 3–4+ years, with annual fee increases that are often entirely uncapped for international students. A PhD student starting at £25,000 per year with 5 per cent annual increases faces a four-year total of over £107,000 – significantly more than £100,000 if they’d assumed stable fees.

    The sums involved make transparency even more important, and current practice is often worse than undergraduate – many doctoral programme pages show only the current-year fee with no indication of how it will change.

    Postgraduate loans for home students are capped and don’t cover the full cost of many programmes, creating an additional transparency issue – the gap between the loan available and the fee charged is itself a mandatory cost that students need to understand upfront.

    The deposit problem is particularly tricky for international PGT students. A student who paid a 50 per cent deposit on a £20,000 masters programme – £10,000 – and then changed their mind about the course, or had accommodation fall through, or discovered that the cost of living information the university supplied was three years out of date, faces losing that entire sum unless they fit restrictive refund criteria.

    They’re locked in, or they’re out of pocket – and the consumer protection framework suggests many of those lock-ins may be unfair.

    Agents and intermediaries

    The guidance is explicit that both the party making an invitation to purchase and the trader on whose behalf it is made can be liable:

    If the product is being marketed on the seller’s behalf or in their name, the seller may also be responsible if the invitation to purchase fails to comply with the requirements of the UCP provisions.

    This has big implications for a sector that has become heavily dependent on international recruitment agents. Agents are involved in over 50 per cent of international student admissions – in some markets, the figure reaches 70 per cent.

    Under CMA209, if an agent in Lagos or Mumbai is advertising “Study at [University] for £22,000” without disclosing annual increases or the mechanism by which fees will rise, both the agent and the university are potentially in breach of the price transparency provisions.

    The guidance says that traders using other businesses to market their products must ensure they have provided those businesses with all the information required by the DMCC Act, and must also ensure that those businesses are complying with their obligations under the DMCC Act.

    If we’re honest, that’s compliance burden most universities are not currently equipped to manage. Many do not systematically audit agent materials. Commission arrangements are commercially sensitive and rarely transparent. Sub-agents – informal intermediaries whose details may not even be known to the contracting university – add further layers of opacity.

    The guidance creates, at minimum, an expectation that universities will need much tighter control over what partners and agents say about fees and increases.

    The guidance also notes that:

    …if an invitation to purchase is directed at UK consumers, it must comply with the relevant UCP provisions, even if the trader making the invitation to purchase is located outside the UK.”

    That jurisdictional reach catches overseas agents advertising to prospective international students who will study in the UK.

    Bang average

    Consumer protection law uses an “average consumer” test – would the practice mislead or affect the transactional decision of a typical consumer? But that test isn’t applied uniformly.

    Where a practice is directed at a particular group, the average consumer is judged by reference to that group. And where a practice is likely to materially distort the behaviour of consumers who are “particularly vulnerable” due to mental or physical infirmity, age, or credulity, it’s assessed from the perspective of the average member of that vulnerable group.

    DMCC recognises that vulnerability can arise from permanent characteristics – age, disability, low literacy – or from temporary circumstances like bereavement, financial stress, or life crisis.

    Applying from abroad to study in an unfamiliar country, navigating a complex visa system, relying on agents whose incentives may not align with your own, committing substantial deposits before you have complete information – all of this creates vulnerability in the consumer protection sense.

    In higher education, several groups of students could reasonably be considered vulnerable consumers in this context:

    International students face acute information asymmetry. They may be unfamiliar with UK consumer protection norms, language barriers may affect comprehension of complex fee terms, they’re making decisions from a distance often based on agent advice, and the financial stakes – total cost of attendance including living costs, visas, flights – are enormous. The combination of agent recruitment practices and student vulnerability is a killer – agents have financial incentives that may not align with student interests, students may not know agents are paid by universities, and the power imbalance is huge.

    Young people – most undergraduate applicants are 17ish when they make application decisions – are making one of the largest financial commitments of their lives with limited experience of contracts, consumer rights, or long-term financial planning. The guidance’s examples of misleading practices often involve consumers failing to notice or understand pricing complexity – that risk is heightened for young people navigating an unfamiliar system.

    First-generation HE students lack family knowledge to draw on. They may not know what questions to ask, may be more susceptible to impressive-sounding marketing claims, and may not have access to informal networks that help more advantaged students navigate the system.

    Students from disadvantaged backgrounds have a different vulnerability – the financial implications of hidden costs or unexpected fee increases fall harder on those with less family buffer. The same opaque pricing that a wealthy student might absorb as an inconvenience could derail the plans of a student with no margin for error.

    DMCC requires traders to design their sales practices, contracts, and communications with these vulnerabilities in mind. It is no defence to say that the “average” consumer would cope – if a foreseeable group of people is likely to be misled, disadvantaged, or harmed, the practice breaches the Act.

    The duty of professional diligence demands that universities act with the skill, care, and honesty that a reasonable trader should exercise in line with good market practice. Practices that (even inadvertently) exploit weakness, confusion, or lack of experience can be unlawful even if no actual loss can yet be proven.

    If university marketing practices disproportionately affect vulnerable groups – and there’s good reason to think they do – the compliance standard should be assessed accordingly.

    A fee presentation that might not mislead an experienced, sophisticated consumer could still breach the rules if it’s likely to mislead the students actually being recruited. The “average consumer” for an international recruitment agent’s materials isn’t a UK-based parent with professional advice – it’s someone in China, Nigeria or India trying to understand what three years of study will actually cost.

    OfS is coming

    If all of this feels a bit theoretical – the CMA has guidance, but will anyone actually enforce it? – OfS’ parallel moves should concentrate minds.

    OfS has already been pointing providers in this direction:

    …if providers are making changes that increase fees for new entrants in line with prescribed limits, they should make sure that prospective students have access to information about the full cost of their course, for the duration of the course, before they commit themselves to undertaking a higher education course.

    That language – “full cost of their course, for the duration of the course, before they commit” – is close to what CMA209 now makes a legal requirement. The sector can’t reasonably claim it had no warning.

    OfS has also established an important ceiling for continuing students – they can’t be charged more than the lower of either the relevant prescribed fee limit, or the level to which fees can be increased in line with the inflationary statement recorded in the Access and Participation Plan (or annual fee information return) that was in effect in their year of entry.

    That inflationary statement mechanism – which effectively caps what returning students can be charged – creates a documented ceiling that universities could, in principle, use to calculate and disclose maximum cumulative costs at the point of admission.

    It also means that the universities on my spreadsheet that have already increased their fees for continuing students beyond that which was committed to in the APP are very much risking it for a biscuit.

    Sinclair C5

    Of course OfS has published a new initial condition of registration, C5 (“Treating students fairly”), a version of which it says it will consult on applying to existing registered providers imminently. The condition is currently in force for new registrants – extending it to the existing register would make fee transparency a live regulatory issue for every provider in England.

    C5’s version of “consumer protection law” explicitly includes the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 – so non-compliance with CMA209’s price transparency provisions would directly implicate the condition. And the scope is, if anything, broader than CMA209 itself.

    The condition covers:

    …any arrangements the provider has made or plans to make to attract individuals to study at the provider, encourage individuals to submit applications to study at the provider, or to otherwise communicate with students or anyone with an interest in studying at the provider.

    The accompanying guidance defines “information about the provider” as anything individuals may rely on in their decision-making – including:

    …emails or other forms of communication; presentations delivered at open days; any written material used to inform communications (such as scripts for recruitment phone calls).

    On agents, C5 is if anything more explicit than CMA209. The guidance states that:

    …where a provider works with recruitment agents or other entities similarly working on its behalf, it will be held accountable for their behaviour.”

    And the provider must:

    …undertake appropriate due diligence on all third parties and on all third parties’ arrangements.

    On partnerships, the condition “applies to all higher education provided through all forms of partnership arrangements” and may result in “more than one provider being responsible for compliance with this condition in relation to the same student.”

    Delivery providers in franchise arrangements will have to must submit lead provider documents – including “template student contracts (including terms related to tuition fees and additional costs)” – and if they think those documents contain problematic provisions, they’re expected to work with the lead provider to address this before applying for registration.

    What are universities actually selling?

    More broadly, the price transparency requirements raise an uncomfortable question – what, exactly, is the “product” that universities advertise?

    Prospectuses don’t just show lecture theatres and libraries. They feature students playing sports, performing in shows, running societies, going on trips. Open days tour the SU facilities. Marketing copy talks about “joining a vibrant community” and “making friends for life.”

    If that’s part of how the product is marketed, CMA209 suggests it’s part of the product – and if accessing it costs extra, those costs are material information. A university advertising a “great and vibrant SU” without mentioning that club membership fees typically run to £5–50 per society, that sports clubs charge for kit and fixtures, and that participation in activities often costs money beyond tuition, is arguably presenting a version of the product whose price doesn’t reflect what students would actually pay to access it.

    Where a free inter-campus bus or shuttle is part of that promotional bundle – the thing that makes a multi-site timetable viable without extra cost – withdrawing it mid-course effectively increases the mandatory costs faced by students. At minimum, that raises the same kinds of questions about hidden charges and changes to the product that the price transparency regime is designed to address.

    For students from lower-income backgrounds who chose the university partly based on its marketed student life, discovering the hidden costs of participation is a form of bait-and-switch – even if legally defensible.

    The logic extends to living costs. Section 227 of the DMCC Act prohibits misleading omissions – failing to provide material information that consumers need for informed decisions. For students choosing between universities, living costs are often the second-largest expense after tuition, and they vary enormously by location. A student choosing between London and a smaller city could face a £15,000+ difference over three years – that’s material.

    Where universities make claims about accommodation, those claims must be accurate. “Affordable accommodation from £X per week” is misleading if that figure refers only to heavily oversubscribed halls available only to first-years, while most students pay significantly more in the private rented sector. Marketing materials featuring halls and campus living are potentially misleading if most students spend most of their degree in private accommodation of significantly lower quality at higher cost.

    Even a university in a notably expensive area that makes living costs look lower than they really are in its marketing may be committing a misleading omission – and OfS’ Condition C5 reinforces this by covering:

    …anything individuals may rely on in their decision making about whether (or what) to study at the provider.

    What happens now

    The unfair commercial practices provisions of the DMCC Act came into force on 6 April 2025. This is not prospective regulation – it applies now. The CMA has indicated it will update its sector-specific guidance in light of the new Act, but no timetable has been given for HE – and the absence of sector-specific guidance does not provide a grace period.

    The CMA now has direct enforcement powers under the DMCC Act. It doesn’t need to go to court to determine that an infringement has occurred – it can make that determination itself and impose financial penalties directly on businesses and individuals. The reputational and financial exposure for non-compliance has increased substantially.

    There will be some in the sector suggesting this is all rather tiresome – more compliance burden when universities should be focused on teaching and research or restructuring for survival. Sure, sure – but for me, that response misses the point.

    Consider what the current system asks of applicants. A 17-year-old browsing a website is expected to notice that £9,535 is a Year 1 figure, intuit that fees will rise annually, locate the relevant inflation mechanism buried in terms and conditions, run compound calculations across three or four years, and identify which “additional course costs” are genuinely optional versus effectively mandatory – all while simultaneously choosing A-levels and writing personal statements.

    It’s not a reasonable expectation. It’s a system designed by people who understand it for people who don’t, and the information asymmetry falls hardest on exactly the students who can least afford to get it wrong – first-generation applicants without family knowledge to draw on, international students navigating an unfamiliar system from thousands of miles away, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds with no financial buffer for unexpected costs.

    I’m no lawyer, and some of the above might not turn out to be technically required, but it seems to me that the point here isn’t to do the bare minimum to stay on the right side of the CMA, or in England, OfS.

    It’s to recognise that when you transfer the cost of higher education onto students and graduates – when you ask them to take on £30,000, £50,000, £80,000 of debt for a degree – you take on a corresponding obligation to help them understand what they’re buying and what they’ll pay. That means straining every sinew to make pricing clear, not hunting for loopholes that let you technically comply while keeping the complexity intact.

    In other words, however much of a pain in the arse it is, transparency isn’t bureaucratic overreach. It’s just what fairness looks like when you write it down.

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  • Budget 2025 for universities and students

    Budget 2025 for universities and students

    There’s not generally a lot for higher education in the chancellor of the exchequer’s annual budget statement – but this year marks an exception.

    We were expecting further details of two policies first announced earlier this year – a levy on international student fee income, and the promised return of maintenance grants for students from deprived backgrounds studying priority subjects.

    Though the return of grants (even in a very limited form) was welcomed by students and the sector, the levy has been the focus of sustained lobbying from providers struggling to balance their books with the one area of income that has sustainably grown over recent years.

    The budget also provides a few other unwelcome surprises – thresholds and interest rates have been frozen for plan 2 loan repayments (those made by the majority of recent graduates) until 2029-30, meaning that graduates will pay more. A tweak to pension salary sacrifices may make it even more expensive for some providers to employ staff. And the looming threat of a mammoth schools SEND debt being covered by departmental expenditure means that every area of education spending is likely to face pressure from 2027-28.

    But it is the fee uplift for the next two years that is likely to get most attention.

    Fee uplift

    The higher rate for tuition fee loan caps will rise, as announced, in both of the next two academic years – to £9,790 a year in 2026-27 and up to £10,050 for 2027-28, with other statutory caps (including for classroom-based foundation years) rising in lockstep. These are expected to be the final two rises that apply to all providers – primary legislation will be laid that means future fee cap rises will be linked to the Office for Students’ revised teaching excellence framework.

    It should also be noted that these are per year amounts, not the per credit amounts that the (as-yet unenacted) Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Act allows the government to set – this is interesting as the entire funding system is due to move to a per credit basis (to allow for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement’s modular approach to study) from 2026.

    While this decision has been widely trailed by the minister as evidence of her department addressing the financial problems faced by universities, it should be noted that both increases are (as usual) by OBR projections of interest rates which may differ from the actual interest rates. The rise of what is widely seen as the default tuition fee to north of £10,000 in 2027-28 is likely to trigger widespread commentary – if you believe the stories from the coalition years the original £9,000 figure was chosen precisely to avoid being above what was seen as a psychologically important £10,000 sticker price.

    Here’s how that breaks down for all of the common fee caps:

    Fee caps 2025-26 2026-27 2027-28
    With TEF and APP (FT) £9,535 £9,790 £10,050
    With TEF and APP (PT) £7,145 £7,335 £7,530
    With TEF and APP (Accel) £11,440 £11,750 £12,060
    With APP only (FT) £9,275 £9,525 £9,780
    With TEF only (FT £6,355 £6,525 £6,695
    With neither TEF nor APP (FT) £6,185 £6,350 £6,520

    International student levy

    We were expecting details of the international fee levy first announced in the immigration white paper – and these arrived via a consultation with a closing date of 18 February 2026.

    The proposal is that from August 2028, the levy on international student fee income has been set at a flat rate of £925 per student (rising by inflation in following years), with the first 220 students entirely exempt. It is estimated that this will generate around £445m in 2028-29, equivalent to around 4.5 per cent of total international fee income across the sector. However DfE estimates that the sector would lose £270m for that year (equivalent to around 3 per cent of international fee income), suggesting that more than half of the cost of the levy would be passed on to students, given that the same estimates suggest 14,000 less students would come to the UK to study in that year.

    Importantly, “international students” are defined as those who are registered for study during the year in question (excepting those who leave during the contractually protected first two weeks of study). Transnational provision, and provision at further education colleges below level 3, will not be in scope. And the system will be run by the Office for Students – there’s even an option to pay the levy quarterly by direct debit.

    The impact analysis notes that the levy will – unsurprisingly – reduce the ability of the sector to cross subsidise domestic teaching or research from international fee, but we are reminded that this is before accounting for any reinvestment of the levy in the sector, and before accounting for the rise in domestic tuition fees (though as fee rises are linked, nominally at least, to inflation that last one is a little disingenuous.

    The effect of a flat fee, as opposed to the blanket 6 per cent of international fee income levy first proposed in the annex to the immigration white paper, is to decrease the impact on providers who are able to charge higher fees per student. The “free” 220 students will keep many smaller specialist providers out of the levy entirely, meaning that proportionally more costs will fall on providers who attract large numbers of international students with lower fees.

     

    [Full screen]

    While the University of Suffolk will lose nearly 14 per cent of international fee income to the levy(on 750 students) and the University of Huddersfield will lose 9.3 per cent, the University of Cambridge will lose just 2.69 per cent (on 7,315 students). The practical impact of the proposal will be that providers that are more likely to be drawing substantial parts of their operating income from international fees (and those more likely to be enrolling students with disadvantaged backgrounds) will be hit hardest. The charts in this article will help you compare this outcome with proportional models like the initial 6 per cent proposal.

    We are not given a rationale for this change of approach, but it is fair to assume an active policy decision – to minimise the impact on those that make the most from international fees – based on soft power and international standing. It is a form of specialisation, perhaps.

    Maintenance grants

    Pretty much confirming that the policy on maintenance loans was back-of-a-fag-packet for Conference stuff, the documents collectively hide how much of the levy will be spent on the new maintenance grants. What we do know is that they’re coming in 2028-29, will be available to both new students and those already studying, and will be paid on top of maintenance loans.

    The amounts will be means-tested – students from households earning at or below £25,000 will get the maximum (£1,000 in years one and two, £750 from year three onwards), tapering to £500/£375 for those with household incomes up to £30,000. The higher amounts in early years are designed to help with “access and initial progression”, but in reality it’s a cliff edge that hits students from care-experienced backgrounds particularly hard.

    That doesn’t give us a total – grants will only be available for certain subjects aligned with the government’s economic priorities and Industrial Strategy. How many students there are left on a residual household income of 25k or less by 2018 is also not outlined. The eligible subject list hasn’t been confirmed – it’ll be informed by Skills England’s work on skills needs and may align with LLE priority funding categories. And students will need to be studying at least 120 credits per year (or full-time under current arrangements) to be eligible.

    Maintenance loans

    As (maximum) UG fees rise by projected inflation, so does maximum maintenance (and the PG loan schemes) by the OBR projection for Q1 2027 of 2.7 per cent. Of course the OBR has been wrong before, and may be wrong again – this year’s 3.1 per cent increase (based on Q1 2026) now shows up as 4.1 per cent in revised OBR forecasts, an error that nobody goes on to fix and so compounds in its impact over time.

    In addition, there’s no sign of that parental (residual household) income threshold for parents chipping in changing either – and now that the minimum wage is firmly over £25,000, will almost certainly mean a collapse off a cliff in the number of students able to access the maximum. This year DfE’s own estimates reckon that a maximum loan increase of 3.1 per cent will only result in an average loan increase of 2.6 per cent – expect (much) more of that by the end of the Parliament.

    While we’re on parental contributions, buried in the documents is another nasty sting. Right now, if you have two kids at university at the same time, the system recognises that your money has to stretch, and works out a “parental contribution” based on your household income, then splits that between the two students. So if the calculation says “this family can afford to put in £2,000”, and you have two undergrads, the system assumes roughly £1,000 per child – and each student’s maintenance loan is a bit higher to reflect that you are not magically doubling your contribution.

    It turns out that the LLE change will mean the SLC stops doing that split for people on the new LLE-style maintenance – each young person’s maintenance will be worked out on the household income as if they were the only one studying. So using the same example, the system would effectively assume you can contribute £2,000 to Child A and £2,000 to Child B. It’s “simpler” because in a modular, on-off, part-time LLE world the SLC will no longer have to track who else in the family is studying and constantly recalculate the split.

    But for a “traditional” family with two young full-time undergrads at the same time, it quietly removes a small protection you currently get when more than one child is in higher education.

    Plan 2 threshold freeze

    You might remember, back in the Summer of 2023, when Bridget Phillipson was touring the studios to declare that graduates will pay less under a Labour government:

    Reworking the present system gives scope for a month-on-month tax cut for graduates, putting money back in people’s pockets when they most need it. For young graduates this will give them breathing space at the start of their working lives and as they bring up families. This is a choice that the Tories could be making now to deliver a better, fairer system for our graduates and for our universities…. Labour will not be increasing government spending on this.

    There was never a detailed explanation of how that magic trick would be pulled off – although it was likely to have been based on London Economics’ stepped repayment modelling, which depended in part on the reintroduction of real interest rates post-graduation (between 0 per cent and 2 per cent) for graduates with earnings between £27,571 and £57,570.

    Either way – at least for Plan 2 borrowers – the budget very much breaks that pledge. For anyone who started a degree between 2012 and 2022, the repayment threshold will be frozen at £29,385 in cash terms for three years from April 2027. Instead of that threshold rising with prices or earnings, it just sits there while wages (hopefully) go up – which means more graduates crossing the line into repayment sooner, and those already repaying handing over a bigger slice of their real income than they would have done otherwise.

    It’s very much a stealth extra tax on graduates layered on top of already frozen income tax and National Insurance thresholds, and it shifts (even) more of the cost of the system away from the state and onto a cohort who have already endured one round of threshold suppression under Michelle Donelan’s “fairer sharing of the burden” reforms, have watched the “deal” they signed up to being repeatedly tweaked after the fact, and had been led to expect a “month-on-month tax cut” rather than another quiet squeeze.

    The Treasury’s justification consciously echoes Donelan’s line about graduate earnings premiums and fairness to non-graduates, but in practice this looks less like a principled reset of student finance and more like a return to the same playbook – using Plan 2 borrowers as a handy, captive tax base until the reality shows up on their payslips. For Reeves, it generates £285m in 2025-26, a big £5,915m “gain” in 2026-27 (that’s mainly the accounting revaluation of the loan book, not cash), then £255m in 2027-28, £290m in 2028-29, £355m in 2029-30 and £380m in 2030-31.

    Wider measures for students

    Rising National Living Wage and youth rates mean a substantial chunk of full-time students working in hospitality, retail and care will see higher hourly pay, although given the volume of jobs lost in these sectors in recent years (with similar warnings from those industries overnight), they’ll need to find a job first.

    The creation of a “Fair Work Agency” with explicit focus on enforcement in “high-risk” sectors is also, if successful, is likely to impact on international student incomes in a way that few like to talk about, but pretty much everybody knows (working more than 20 hours a week, cash in hand, with no rights).

    Extending the £3 bus fare cap will help, holding prescription charges steady all keep day-to-day pressure in shared student houses and commuter budgets a little lower than it would otherwise be, and taking around £150 off the average energy bill by shifting decarbonisation costs off bills and onto general spending won’t matter much given “all-inclusive” bills in halls and HMOs.

    Free emergency contraception in pharmacies closes an obvious gap in sexual health provision for a very student-heavy age group, while the cap on ticket resale prices cuts straight across the live events market some students use.

    Add all the measures up, and you might expect student poverty to show up in the annual release of the distributional impact on households analysis that gets produced to accompany budget day – but alas it remains the case that tuition fee loans show up as household income in the DWP’s Households below average income (HBAI) statistics, which means that the increase in maximum fees will see an HMO with 5 students in it looking 50k better off than they really are.

    Other bits

    The chancellor capped national insurance contribution exemptions for salary sacrifice into pensions at £2,000 – employees who pay more than this amount each year into pensions will need to account for employer national insurance contributions on additional amounts. A note from sector employers association UCEA before the budget reminded the Treasury that this approach is widely used by universities, and calculated that a cap could cost individual USS institutions an additional £1-3m each year with a total cost to the sector north of £50m – and there are going to be impacts relating to other pension schemes too.

    One of the biggest current issues with the wider education budget, and one that has pushed many local councils towards bankruptcy, is the rapidly rising cost of school provision and other support for pupils with special educational needs (SEND). Currently the costs of this provision are nominally covered by local councils, but are subject to a statutory override which means that the sums involved are not included within council deficit calculations. The budget confirms the June announcement that this arrangement will end from 2027-28, with costs (due to hit around £5bn) covered from that point within departmental expenditure limits.

    This has a clear impact on other areas of government spending, and if the Department for Education is to be made responsible it is likely that at least some of this funding will have to be found via cuts to other budgets, including for tertiary education.

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  • Florida public universities plan to cut at least 18 academic programs

    Florida public universities plan to cut at least 18 academic programs

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    Dive Brief:

    • State University System of Florida institutions collectively plan to terminate 18 academic programs and suspend another eight after reviewing how many degrees they award, Emily Sikes, the public system’s vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, said at a meeting last week with lawmakers. 
    • In the review, SUSF officials identified 214 programs systemwide that they say are underperforming based on how many graduates they’ve produced in the past three years. System universities plan to continue at least 150 of those programs while consolidating another 30.
    • The large majority of underperforming programs, 68%, are in the liberal arts, education and science fields, including ethnic and cultural studies, foreign languages, philosophy and religious studies, and physical and social sciences programs. 

    Dive Insight:

    As required by SUSF regulations, the 12-university system has conducted productivity reviews of degree programs every three to four years for roughly the past decade and a half, Sikes said.

    Over that time, the system’s institutions have axed over 100 programs based on those reviews, she said. Most of those programs were cut in 2011, when the first such review yielded 492 programs deemed to be underperforming, leading university officials to terminate 73 of them.

    In this year’s review, SUSF officials looked for bachelor’s programs graduating fewer than 30 students over the last three years, master’s programs awarding fewer than 20 degrees and doctorate programs with fewer than 10 graduates during that period. 

    Master’s programs made up 55% of the 214 that fell below graduate thresholds. But, Sikes added, there is a reason for that: SUSF universities often award master’s degrees to students who don’t complete doctoral programs so they have something to show for their time and effort.

    Another 31% of the underperforming programs were bachelor’s, and 14% were doctorate.

    For the eight programs set for suspension, the universities will stop enrolling students and “take a hard look” at either updating the curriculum to improve the program or deciding to wind it down, Sikes said.

    While Florida’s university system has reviewed its program productivity for years, other states have begun mandating their public colleges trim their offerings along similar lines. 

    This summer, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education announced that six of the state’s public colleges planned to eliminate 75 programs, suspend another 101 and consolidate 232 others in response to a new state law. 

    In April, Indiana lawmakers introduced graduation quotas for public college programs, requiring a three-year average of at least 15 graduates for bachelor’s programs, 10 for associate degrees, seven for master’s programs and three for doctoral degrees. The quotas were part of a controversial last-minute bonanza of new higher ed policies that lawmakers baked into a budget bill this year. 

    The speed of the program cuts led to confusion and chaos for some Indiana faculty this summer. “Even tenured faculty are wondering, am I going to have a job in two months?” one faculty governance leader in Indiana told local media in June.

    Ohio enacted a similar law this spring, called SB 1, which has led to dozens of proposed program cuts at the state’s public universities.

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  • What the Universities Accord missed: O’Kane – Campus Review

    What the Universities Accord missed: O’Kane – Campus Review

    The lead reviewer of Australia’s universities Mary O’Kane has outlined what the Universities Accord missed during her address at the University of Sydney 2025 Bradley Oration .

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  • Public Universities Don’t Want to Discuss the Compact

    Public Universities Don’t Want to Discuss the Compact

    As the stated deadline to sign the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” arrived Friday, multiple universities have already rejected the deal while only a few institutions have expressed interest.

    But among the public universities that were either formally invited to sign the compact or that participated in a call with the White House to provide feedback on higher education issues, none are willing to discuss their deliberations about the proposal or interactions with federal officials.

    Last month, Inside Higher Ed sent public records requests to Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Kansas, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia, seeking emails, text messages, internal presentations and other documents related to how presidents, trustees and other officials discussed the compact.

    As of Friday, none had provided those records. Only the University of Kansas indicated a willingness to do so, but it requested an up-front $100 fee for staff time to conduct the search. However, officials said they could not guarantee the requested records would be provided.

    Texas, meanwhile, has appealed to the state attorney general to avoid releasing the requested records. Now uncertainty abounds about what UT Austin will do on the day of the initial deadline, though conservative media has reported the Trump administration could push that date back (which officials did not confirm Thursday) as it struggles to find signatories.

    Texas

    Some public universities, such as Arizona and Virginia, have rejected the compact outright, but others, like Arizona State, have noted they never received a formal invitation to join and therefore they have nothing to decline. But UT Austin has remained silent about whether it will sign the compact.

    Although University of Texas system Board of Regents chairman Kevin P. Eltife issued an early statement saying that he welcomed the “the new opportunity presented to us and we look forward to working with the Trump Administration on it,” officials have said little since then.

    In response to an Oct. 22 public records request from Inside Higher Ed, UT Austin shared only the initial emails exchanged by federal and university officials inviting the university to consider the compact, a copy of the proposal itself, and Eltife’s statement. The rest it wants to keep private.

    UT system officials argued in a letter sent Tuesday to the attorney general’s office that the requested records are protected by attorney-client privilege and should not be disclosed.

    “In the information at issue, University and UT System attorneys are providing legal counsel, gathering information in order to provide legal counsel, or their clients are seeking legal advice from the attorneys and include the necessary background information so that counsel will be able to render an opinion on a given situation,” UT system attorney Jennifer Burnett wrote in the letter. “From the text of the communications, it is evident that the University and UT System attorneys for were [sic] involved in providing legal counsel to employees of the University.”

    Now the attorney general’s office has 10 business days to make a determination on the request.

    Gunita Singh, a staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told Inside Higher Ed by email that the university “is within its rights to argue that the records are privileged but they need to make a particularized showing that that is the case,” proving the requested documents “pertain to the provision of legal advice” and have been confidential at all times.

    Virginia

    The University of Virginia has yet to provide documents requested Oct. 22 in what appears to be a pattern of delayed responses, according to others who sought records from the public university in recent months.

    UVA’s student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, reported that it has submitted 25 public records requests to the university, but UVA officials have reportedly not provided records since July 1. Other journalists across the commonwealth have taken to social media to note that they have struggled to get information on athletic staffing and internal communications.

    State Senator Creigh Deeds, a Democrat who has represented the Charlottesville area for more than two decades, also struggled to get public records out of the university related to the resignation of former UVA president Jim Ryan, who stepped down in June under federal pressure. Deeds initially reached out to the university Aug. 1 seeking information, which he only obtained after submitting a public records request and paying $4,500 for the documents.

    Chris Seaman, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, requested public records related to costs for outside legal counsel on July 2. But Seaman still has not “received a substantive response from UVA regarding my FOIA request,” he told Inside Higher Ed by email. In an August email exchange shared by Seaman, a UVA official noted a delay in processing his request and wrote that “in the last few weeks, our office has received an unusually large volume of requests with limited staff to process them.” They also promised to “expedite handling” of his request, but more than three months later, Seaman said, he is still awaiting those documents.

    UVA spokesperson Brian Coy did not address the pattern of delays in a response to Inside Higher Ed, writing that the university “has received this request and is processing it in accordance with Virginia law” and is “preparing an estimate of anticipated costs” for review.

    Arizona and Arizona State

    Public records requests at Arizona State and the University of Arizona also remain unfulfilled after 30 days.

    Arizona State spokesperson Jerry Gonzalez said that he would check on the state of the request but noted that ASU was not invited to sign the compact, and so “there is nothing for the university to accept, reject, or negotiate.” (However, President Michael Crow has said he’s had discussions with Education Secretary Linda McMahon and other officials about higher education issues.)

    University of Arizona spokesperson Mitch Zak said that Inside Higher Ed’s public records request “remains in process” and “response time varies.” He noted that factors such as “the specificity of the request, the volume of requests received, and the time required to locate, review, and redact materials subject to disclosure” all shape public records response times.

    Arizona law does not specify how long public entities have to hand over documents but instructs that they do so “promptly.” Singh, the RCFP attorney, pointed to past legal cases in which Arizona courts found that 24 business days “satisfied the promptness standard” but that “a delay of 49 days, or 34 working days, did not meet the promptness standard” outlined in state law.

    Currently, she said, Arizona and Arizona State are “inching toward noncompliance territory.”

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  • Universities and economic growth in the Commonwealth

    Universities and economic growth in the Commonwealth

    Join HEPI for a webinar on Thursday 11 December 2025 from 10am to 11am to discuss how universities can strengthen the student voice in governance to mark the launch of our upcoming report, Rethinking the Student Voice. Sign up now to hear our speakers explore the key questions.

    This blog was kindly authored by Professor Colin Riordan, Secretary General, The Association of Commonwealth Universities.

    Governments throughout the Commonwealth are faced with a familiar dilemma. Once seen as central to nation-building, poverty reduction and technological self-sufficiency, universities in many countries face scepticism and waning public support. At a time when cost of living pressures are relentless, institutions are increasingly seen as ‘a kind of elite luxury that the taxpayer pays for’, as Michael Ignatieff recently put it. But that narrative misses the point. New evidence shows that investment in higher education delivers measurable, long-term economic growth – the kind that no government can afford to ignore.

    Education as economic infrastructure

    The evidence is revealed in a new study, undertaken by London Economics at the request of The Association of Commonwealth Universities, to investigate the link between investment in higher education and economic growth.

    The study found that a hypothetical 1% increase in the proportion of the population obtaining tertiary education qualifications (tertiary attainment) in 2025 would boost Commonwealth GDP by US$28 billion in 2029. That’s in addition to further increasing annual gains along the way, a clear sign that higher education returns compound over time.

    Why does this matter? Well, it is clear that many, if not all, of the pressures on universities stem from a paucity of resources following on from the 2008 financial crisis (from which many large economies have still not recovered); from the Covid pandemic; and from an upturn in conflicts across the world that are costly drains on the public purse. The difficulties are exacerbated by locally specific problems, including natural disasters such as drought, flooding, and extreme weather events, as well as political events such as Brexit, trade wars, and political instability.

    Governments have to find ways to restore their position in the face of these headwinds, and higher education can easily be depicted as part of the fiscal problem rather than of the solution. Demonstrating the return on investment in higher education will allow education ministers to go well-armed into the conference chamber with their finance ministers and national leaders.

    Beyond the balance sheet

    There are other economic arguments for universities, of course. Their knock-on effects through research and innovation, as employers, and as attractors of foreign direct investment, all come in addition to their core educational function. Universities improve public health outcomes, generate productivity gains, and strengthen civic life. But making the case for higher education as central to national prosperity is essential at a time when governments are facing seemingly intractable difficulties.

    The message, then, is clear: far from being a luxury perk for the elite, expenditure on higher education is an investment in critical national infrastructure. Building opportunities in higher education equates to building a road to future prosperity. Unlike eye-catching projects involving new roads, railways, bridges or airports, however, increasing the proportion of the population with higher education qualifications requires a leap of the imagination, and an array of arguments to be marshalled.

    Certainly, a clear vision of how the world will be different as a result of such an investment is critically important. Voters and populations want to know what difference more university places will make to their lives. It is up to politicians to set out that vision, but they themselves must first be persuaded, and so we must marshal further helpful arguments to support them.

    A shared responsibility

    Firstly, the investment does not have to come solely from the public purse. Tertiary attainment is the proxy that implies prior increases in expenditure on higher education, which could include private investment, partnering with overseas institutions, changing the proportion of the cost for which the individual is responsible, or imaginative loan schemes. Reformulating incentives and requiring efficiencies could certainly be in the mix. So, no education minister should need to envisage themselves going cap-in-hand to the finance department.

    On the contrary, they can offer the prospect of contributing to the public coffers in due course. Depending on the size of the country and the proportion of tax take, this could range from the US$ billions in a country like India to hundreds of millions in Bangladesh and many tens of millions in Kenya.

    A call to reimagine policy

    In a country like the UK, the GDP boost of a hypothetical 1% increase in tertiary attainment in 2025 would amount to £4.9 billion in 2029. This means that increasing capacity in higher education is fiscally prudent as well as being the most important tool we have to future-proof the economy and improve productivity in an age of AI-driven technological transformation. But in low-income countries, the multiplier effect is even higher, and so the argument for investment is stronger still.

    Commonwealth countries with rapidly growing youth populations face an urgent need to expand tertiary access if they are to harness their demographic dividend. Targeted investment in higher education is one of the most effective levers to drive inclusive, sustainable economic growth. The evidence supports stronger collaboration between governments, universities, and international funders to build tertiary systems that deliver for national economies.

    With all necessary caveats in relation to correlation versus causation, the results of the London Economic analysis are compelling. Governments that embed higher education policy into national economic planning and industrial strategies, and invest in universities as economic assets and hubs for talent development, innovation and productivity, will do more than balance their budgets: they will secure their future.

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