French universities fear ‘collapse’ as unfunded extra costs mount

The only crumb of comfort in our current financial woes is that things are much worse in France and when people witness its forthcoming financial crash they may actually wake up as to our true situation and take some action.

Mass HE is costly. Either it becomes over-crowded and under-funded as the State prioritises spend on health/pensions/schools and now defence… or tuition fees are introduced to partly shift the cost-burden from the taxpayer to students/families. But even the latter does not solve the problem for long as we now see from the English high-fees experiment.

We are witnessing the collapse of the West, step by step. Shifting funding from state to individual to pay for HE has not worked in the UK. Very difficult to go back now there's no money. We need governments in Europe to have some vision about what is needed for the future: take the best bits of the university social experience, combine with skills training that the economy actually needs, and put students into real jobs. A complete redesign of what HE and FE do. No more wasteful faculty and management structures, just delivery of well-rounded individuals who have skills, breadth of knowledge, and the ability to do critical thinking.