The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) continues to show growth by appealing to students, consumers, and workers with interests in the higher education business. Our latest quarter shows approximately 132,000 views. The Higher Education Inquirer’s largest day for viewership was January 6, 2025, marking the fourth anniversary of Donald Trump’s failed attempted to overthrow the US government. While most of our views come from the US, HEI has an increasingly international reach.
In February 2025, five years after the UK formally left the EU, Sir Keir Starmer became the first UK Prime Minister since Brexit to head to Brussels to join a meeting of EU leaders. The trip was packaged as part of a “reset” in relations between the UK and the EU, albeit caveated with promises that the UK government is not seeking to re-join the EU’s single market or customs union, nor sign up to the principle of freedom of movement.
With President Donald Trump back in the White House and war ongoing in Ukraine, closer cooperation between the UK and EU in areas of security and defence will be vital to maintain pressure on Russia and bring about peace on the continent. Enhancing trade between the UK and EU will also be a key ambition shared by both parties, given the looming threat of American tariffs and the need to secure economic growth.
Youth mobility
The process of resetting the UK-EU relationship by the spring is one to watch for the UK’s higher education sector. This is because, while the EU has the power to ease restrictions on UK businesses to improve British trade prospects, the UK also has something that many in the EU want in return: namely the power to reinstate a youth mobility scheme between the UK and the EU.
At its most ambitious, such a scheme could allow young people from the UK and Europe the freedom to travel across countries to study and work as was the norm before Brexit. A curtailed version could at least see mobility enacted for shorter, time-limited placements. Either way, UK universities could find themselves becoming an important bargaining chip in any future renegotiations.
Bargaining power
Given the demand for a return of youth mobility is greater in the EU-27 than it is in Britain, UK ministers understandably remain cautious about giving the green light to this idea too soon. The recent gains of the populist Reform UK party in public popularity polls will likely also enhance this nervousness. Moreover, with the policy in clear breach of the UK Government’s own ‘red line’ on freedom of movement, British officials are playing down the prospect of any return to youth mobility between the two powers.
UK universities could find themselves becoming an important bargaining chip in any future renegotiations
Yet, as anybody who has ever been involved in some sort of negotiation knows, the key to a good outcome is not showing your own hand too early in the process. Doing so may significantly weaken your bargaining power and ability to leverage the situation in your own favour. The possibility of the UK offering a youth mobility concession to European leaders to secure more lucrative trading conditions and pump-prime economic growth may not, therefore, be completely off the table.
Risky business
In the past, the UK higher education sector would have been first to welcome the return to Britain of a youth mobility scheme such as Erasmus+. However, the current financial troubles facing the sector are likely to dampen university managers’ enthusiasm for any measures that would see EU students once again regarded as ‘home’ students, thereby capping the fees they pay.
The introduction of youth mobility measures would provide a welcome boost to the diversity of UK student populations by making it easier for those from less privileged backgrounds in Europe to study in Britain. However, with universities now focusing on their bottom line rather than the size and shape of their student intakes, any concessions that could reduce the revenue-generating potential of EU students could destabilise universities’ finances at a time when every penny counts.
Balancing act
The big question facing the higher education sector, then, is whether there is a proposal the UK government could make involving UK-EU student mobility that reconciles universities’ search for greater diversity on campus and enhanced prospects for their students with their need for extra income.
As it stands, the future of UK and EU students rests in the back pocket of the UK Prime Minister. Whether he pulls a student mobility scheme out as a trump card to get a beneficial deal for the British economy depends on the messages UK universities send to ministers and officials over the coming months.
Not enough noise about potential changes to the status of EU students could leave universities exposed without a financial compensation package from Treasury to cover any headline fee changes that a new youth mobility programme would incur. Yet, too much noise would also risk negative headlines around the world that international students are nothing more than lucrative cash flows for hard-up institutions.
The political reset ahead represents a balancing act for UK higher education. The key is whether we can find a solution that opens up UK universities and their students’ prospects further to the outside world while stabilising them financially so they can continue to transform lives for generations to come.
The post Beech-side views: Here’s looking at EU! appeared first on The PIE News.
I don’t remember where I heard this bit of wisdom, if I read it in a book or someone else told it to me, but it’s something I’ve carried around for a while now: There’s always going to be a next, until there isn’t.
My interpretation is a kind of combination of “this too shall pass” with “time marches on,” along with a reminder of the certainty that at some point all things and all people cease to exist.
(I find that last bit sort of comforting, but maybe I’m weird that way.)
It comes in handy when thinking about both exciting and difficult times. What is happening in a moment is not eternal, and something else will be coming along. In order to make that next thing as positive and beneficial as possible, we have to deal with both the present and those possible futures.
I think this mindset might be helpful to anyone who is considering the coming couple of years for higher education and bracing for the possible impact of a presidential administration that appears hostile to the work of colleges and universities and intends to bring this perceived hostile group to heel. I’m concerned that many institutions are not considering that there’s always going to be a next, and short-term accommodations are going to result in long-term problems.
What comes next will be far worse than it needs to be.
It’s strange to think that institutions that are so well established with such long histories should act with such fragility in the face of present uncertainty, but there are signs of what scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance” everywhere.
As reported by IHE’s Ryan Quinn, Texas A&M, along with other public higher ed institutions in the state, following threats ginned up by right-wing conservative billionaire-backed activist Christopher Rufo, has ended their participation in the PhD Project, a conference meant to help increase the number of doctoral students identifying as “Black, African American, Latino, Hispanic American, Native American or Canadian Indigenous.”
The institutions had previously participated for a number of years but have now rescinded their sponsorship because of Texas law SB 17, banning DEI programs at public universities. Texas governor Greg Abbott threatened to fire A&M president Mark Welsh. Welsh folded, issuing a statement that said, “While the proper process for reviewing and approving attendance at such events was followed, I don’t believe we fully considered the spirit of our state law in making the initial decision to participate. We need to be sure that attendance at those events is aligned with the very clear guidance we’ve been given by our governing bodies.”
The intention behind these attacks by Rufo and his backers is to, essentially, resegregate higher education under an entirely twisted definition of “fairness.” This point of view is ascendant, as multiple states have banned so-called DEI initiatives, and the rolling back of affirmative action in college admissions has already resulted in a decline in Black first-year students, something most pronounced at “elite” institutions.
So, this is now, but in acting this way now, what’s likely to be next? Will Texas A&M regress to a de facto policy of segregation? Is this healthy for the institution, for the state of Texas?
I grant that it is possible that a program of resegregation is consistent with the desires of a majority of the state’s citizens and the elected legislators are simply reflecting the desire of their constituency. If so, so be it … I guess. I wonder how long the institutions can last when it allows Chris Rufo or Elon Musk or Charlie Kirk or any other outside individual or group to dictate its policies. Is this a good precedent for whatever is next?
There’s going to be a next. What happens now will give shape to what that next might be. I worry that the folks making decisions believe there is only the now, not the next.
Thankfully, most of us do not have to make consequential decisions that impact many people working in large institutions, but we can use this framing in considering our individual fates as well.
In a couple of weeks my next book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, will be in the world. I’ve invested a lot in this book, not just time and effort, but some measure of my hopes for my career and the impact my ideas may have on the world of writing and teaching writing.
It is a fraught thing to invest too much into something like a single book. Books fail to launch all the time, as I’ve experienced personally … more than once. Finding the balance between investing sufficient effort to take advantage of the now, while also recognizing that I will have to do something next, has been a bit tricky, but necessary.
Maybe what’s next will be closely related to the now: more speaking, more workshops related to my vision for teaching writing, a truly tangible impact on how we collectively discuss these issues after being more of a gadfly and voice in the woods. But also, maybe this is closer to the end of a cycle that started with a previous book.
To calm my worries, I spend time thinking about what would be next if 50 percent or even 90 percent of what I now do for my vocation and income dried up. This is what I did when it became clear that teaching off the tenure track was not going to continue to be a viable way forward—a process that has put me in this moment.
Imagining a next, I think I would call my local School of Rock and see if they needed someone to teach kids the drums, and I also would get to work on a novel that’s been rolling around my head. I picture that possible next, and while there is a sadness that what I’m hoping to achieve now did not come to fruition, I can also envision real pleasure in that other path.
To preserve their essential mission, institutions must be prepared for turbulence and change by knowing there will be a next. To survive in this time, individuals must both be present in the now and consider what might have to happen next.
Not easy, but always necessary.
