LSE’s financial woes spotlight wider issues for sector

I am speechless how Tories along with greedy university leadership teams have run British universities into the ground. We used to be world-class, but somewhere along the way, marketing teams and sales pitches took over. They say "World changers welcome", but de facto the increase in international students led to a deterioration of the quality of education years ago because each body with a pulse counts, and you can't keep up good teaching if half of the students don't understand what you are telling them. The government needs to act now and fix their mistakes: bail out the sector by boosting science and research investment; abolish all tuition fees to provide zero incentives for taking on low-quality students; fund universities using a head-count formula instead from here on out. Let excellence thrive through actual science and achievements, not shallow reputation based on brand name. Stop treating science as an industry or "sector".

“It costs roughly the same to teach an overseas student, but you will have charged them twice or three times as much as a home student.” says it all really. Once your customers realise you are ripping them off they will shop elsewhere. Overseas universities are rapidly rising up the league tables as the UK institutions rest on their laurels. COVID just precipitated an inevitable outcome.

"Once your customers realise you are ripping them off they will shop elsewhere. Overseas universities are rapidly rising up the league tables as the UK institutions rest on their laurels. COVID just precipitated an inevitable outcome." Foreign students do actually have brains believe it or not and are fully aware that they are charged more, which is the norm across the world. However, the fees charged remain competitive and are cheaper than some other comparable universities, for example in the USA. The reason uk universities follow this strategy, is because the current govt strongly encouraged them to do so when the funding rules changed and tuition fees for UK students commenced. This was to make UK universities more financially viable and competitive, keeping UK student fees lower and releasing as much financial support from central govt as possible. If you actually pay attention to the sector you will see many UK universities in the Russell group especially, are consistently improving in world rankings. The rise of foreign universities is far more to do with them upping their game, often with their govt support in a bid to attract academic high achievers, the new money into the economy they bring, and outside investment from foreign businesses.

Time to start slashing the overpaid managers and overpaid bureaucrats that have infected UK Universities. There are so many "quality control types" and silly meetings and committees that it is quite incredible. We should start by getting rid of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and the Office for Students (OfS) - they are the root cause that makes Universities waste all this money and time on silly bureaucratic posts that achieve nothing or even negative results by wasting academics times to fill in useless reports and forms.

Some people, when they look back on the pre-covid era will be tempted to treat it as some sort of "Golden Age" for academics in the UK and, for some, this may be have been true, but all of the problems we now identify were latent within the system long before 2020. The reliance on students fees (home and overseas) the relentless pursuit of league tables (as a proxy for real quality) and the deperate desire for landmark buidlings have put the sector into massive debt and it is the debt, rather than current income crisis, which will ultimately decide the future of HE. Ambition is the real enemy of quality, not process, not government but unrealitic and unrestrained ambition. We simply do not need so many "excellent" universities, and, even if we did, they cannot all be in the top 20. The sector will diminish and the real question becomes how do we crteate and maintian genuine value in a shrinking economy.