left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

It was a long time ago.  Not in a galaxy far, far away – but to be honest higher education felt so different, in so many ways, that it may as well have been.  Though not in one respect.

not a fairy tale, but still grim

I was working with an academic head of faculty, whose responsibilities included a department where performance wasn’t matching up to institutional reputation or aspiration.  This was particularly the case in respect of research, and therefore action had to be taken.

It was decided that this included a new workload model that rebalanced academic staff time between the two key academic activities: education and research. And the proposed new model was that academic staff should spend 53% of their time on teaching and related activity; and 47% on research and related activity.

This was quite a shift for the department.  As might be imagined, it led to a lot of discussion at the meeting where it was considered. And then it was approved.

I still can’t decide if I was the only person who noticed it; or if everyone noticed it and no-one was going to mention it.

The next item on the agenda was a report on the department’s finances, including the budget for the coming year.  And this showed that in this academic year teaching income for the department was c.£1M; research income was c.£100K.

follow the money

Of course it’s not a simple comparison. The stark contrast (to say the least) between where the money was coming from and how we were choosing to use that funding was, nevertheless, an important part of my developing the different perspective on life in universities that you gain as a member of staff rather than a student.

Specifically, it helped me realise that higher education as a sector had gone one better than Newton, and had established a Fourth Law of Motion:

Other things being equal within a university, student fee income will gravitate towards funding research activity.

(yet) another type of inflation

Thankfully I’ve never come across as stark a contrast again, but the Fourth Law of Motion still holds in the sector.

Using TRAC data, in 2017 a HEPI pamphlet concluded that ‘research remains underfunded in the UK despite more than a decade of ‘full economic cost’ funding and students are picking up the bill’ [p.7]. In 2017 the cross-subsidy was estimated at £3.3Bn a year.  A follow-up report from HEPI three years later calculated that the annual cross-subsidy had risen to £4.3Bn.

Both reports were also clear where this cross-subsidy was coming from: international students.  Even in 2020 (i.e. before the huge spike in costs resulting from the post-pandemic surge in inflation) the funding available for the education of home undergraduates was only covering 98% of the Full Economic Cost, and on average fees for international students were £5.1K p.a. greater than the cost of providing their education.

mutual benefits

So UK higher education income generated from education, cross-subsidises research; and the extent of it has been and is increasing.  While this is true, other things are also true.

The sector rightly emphasises the benefits to students of the links between teaching and research.  This became a favoured message, and a research/scholarship focus, of the sector from the mid noughties, with the work of Jenkins and Healy on the teaching-research nexus being at the centre of a huge amount of interesting research and writing in this area.

And while talk of, and work on, this nexus perhaps hasn’t been quite as fashionable in recent years (and as Nicola Dandridge recently warned the two areas may be drifting apart), the teaching-research relationship remains a crucial aspect and quality of higher education.

choice

The current crisis of UK higher education, however, means that we need to move past the Age of the (softly spoken) Fourth Law of Motion.  Because to stop being flippant, the cross-subsidisation of research by education isn’t a natural law.

It’s a choice.

In some ways a difficult one given the unwillingness to fully fund research.  But one about which we need to think more, and harder; be more open and frank with ourselves, and with our students.

The sector will ask itself: do I have to do this?

The answer’s yes. And it’s only one of a number of such hard questions that we’ll need to tackle in the coming months and years.

and more choices

It’s clear now that there are instances of significant resources being extracted from the sector and its students by certain providers (condoned, implicitly if not explicitly, by their validating university) who are charging the maximum fee while offering a distinctly ‘no frills’ educational experience.  The sector will have wonder if it needs to tackle this issue.  It does, and recent sector efforts have not gone far enough.

In an article on WonkHE Jim Dickinson argued persuasively that given the current pressures another form of cross-subsidisation, between subjects/types of student, is unlikely to be sustainable.  Another issue that has been bubbling under the surface of UK higher education for a while, and which it’s unlikely we can avoid now.

And in both his Triangle of Sadness provocation and more recent articles (£), Shiltij Kapur has drawn attention to what has been a distinctive feature of UK higher education – its low Staff:Student Ratios (SSRs) compared to higher education internationally, and their unsustainability in the current funding model.  That’s not just a future prospect, it’s a current reality that is only going to come into sharper focus in 2025-26 as the full impact of the current rounds of job losses take effect.

Do we have to think about and consciously address this SSR issue? 

Well, we can choose not to, and sleep walk into the new reality.  Or we can recognise that this is where we are heading (if we aren’t already there); think about how we manage this most effectively for the sake of both students and staff; and make choices and take action based on this.

These are some of the wicked issues that have been around for years, but which the current financial situation the sector faces make more critical and urgent.

and the answer is

Crucially these current challenges are not just about how we manage and run ourselves in terms of the non-academic activities (e.g. sharing/merging back office functions across universities; joining the AI gold rush).  They are about the activities, education and research, at the core of what it means to be university.

And though it is hard (almost unspeakably so at times in terms of the human impact of some of this), the only honest answer the sector can give to the question ‘do I have to address these issues’ is yes.