Ways of making UK higher education cheaper to run

This is an updated version of my response on the WonkHE blog to the WonkHE post of 25 March 2024 by Jim Dickinson on There may be ways to make UK higher education cheaper to run – in the light of my recent policy work on digital schools.

Jim’s post led to a flurry of useful comments but activity dwindled fast. (Costs is not a cheerful subject.) However, Bob Drake’s LinkedIn post of 28 May 2024 Whoever wins the UK General Election in July needs to have a serious conversation about Higher Education (HE) – and the drumbeat of increasing cuts to university staffing reported almost daily in Times Higher Education – have brought it back into sharp relief.

A bit of history

Looking at costs is long overdue in my view and I am amazed it has not had recent attention. But it does require more than LinkedIn-style attention – it will require significant work to understand the issues.

Agonising about costs in HE goes in cycles of about 5-10 years. My personal view of timescales is a bit influenced by the fact that any costs study I get involved in inevitably has aspects of digital learning. But it goes something as follows – bursts of activity followed by silence, somewhat correlated with global economic shocks and often ended by “distractions”:

• early 1990s: major studies – the CCAM studies – by European Commission on costs of (what was then called) distance learning
• later 1990s: series of CNL studies funded by JISC on costs of networked learning – then dot.com crash and UKeU saga
• 2007-10: Great Recession: HE budgets in many nations cut, a small Jisc study (CELSE) but no JISC action, then OER and MOOCs (and total “loss of the plot” re costs)
• 2016-17: some EU funding (D-TRANSFORM), topic of interest to several UK universities often considering major thrusts in digital learning e.g. with OPMs
• 2020-23 : Covid and related distractions – without addressing the issue that UK universities already had cost challenges – now in the last few months getting much worse, right across the sector.

For more context see https://bacsich.org/publications/costs/

Things we need to know

Following up on Jim’s points, things surely we would want to know more about the current UK HE situation include:

• What percentage of UK universities’ costs can be put down to the general inefficiency of doing business in the UK these days? I don’t completely buy the “onerous regulator” theory: things may be worse in England the last few years with OfS but look at some East European governments for over-regulation (see recent OECD HE quality report).
• What percentage to the tasking of universities to put right things that schools should have dealt with? Especially so in the Covid recovery period.
• Does the costs picture look equally bleak in Scotland to England, given that Scotland has a much more “globally mainstream” approach to HE than England? If yes, that removes many theories from contention. Treading nervously into a Scottish bog while simultaneously lighting the blue touchpaper, some might feel that a country with a 4-year degree programme (i.e. most countries) would seem to have some obvious cost savings.
• What about in Wales, a typical “small European country”? Many of the other small EU countries are pretty centralised in their approach to e.g. IT and its support (but even I can’t believe that savings on IT save that much percentage-wise).
• As a result of recent work I am not convinced that one can separate out (in pedagogic, IT and funding/support aspects) the “upper secondary” level of school education (A levels, or equivalent, ) from HE. (Look at the confusion round Sixth Form Colleges/Academies.) Since schools are much cheaper to run than universities (check DfE rates per pupil) the more stuff taught in schools the less needs to be done in universities – in theory. Is something going wrong there? We need to make sure we are comparing like by like between countries.
• What is the cost burden of small-population departments and courses? (One could look at how other countries and sectors handle this – Sweden, Canadian provinces, supplemental virtual schools in US, etc. A student in England can take fully online A levels from at least 10 providers. Do we need 2500 secondary schools all trying to teach specialist subjects? Likewise for universities.

It is not clear how expensive it would be to do a “proper study” – however I expect some ground-clearing work would not take long.

A sub-study needs to be done on what can be learned from what used to be called the “challenger providers” – smaller, newer UK HE providers some still operating well under the fee cap. (The phrase is not much used in public documents but see this 2022 HEPI report.) This was last done quietly for Jisc circa 2016, based on a constant thread of studies from myself and a few others on EU and other projects over many years since around 1996. We must get away from university “isomorphism”, a mathematical term popularised by Ryan Craig in a series of books and blogs, including his compelling article Out Of Fashion: How Bad Colleges Help The Ivies, And How Ivies Sustain Bad Colleges.

There are several low-cost US models worth looking at also.

As to good practice in other countries re costs, I don’t feel that a study needs to look across the full spectrum of OECD and EU countries: some are obvious outliers (for economic not HE reasons). However, US, Canada, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands and Ireland would be a useful start. Even if some question the relevance of some of these to England we do need some comparators to the other home nations.

In Part 2

In a second part of this article I will look at some short-term possible adjustments to university and school activity which require action “above” the sector but would generate savings within universities which would be beneficial, without changing the fundamentals of the university experience. At present there is a danger that universities making efficiency gains on their own are doing so only at great cost to their future activities and staff morale.

Misery loves company

In an election period it is even harder than usual for UK people to look beyond their own country. Just two days ago the new Dutch government slashes higher education funding – a process which “involves major cuts to research and university funding alongside harsh new measures for students”. And Denmark will reduce the number of student places at universities by 10.4 per cent. Universities in the US close at the rate of one every few weeks.

It could be worse.