Universities are considering offering fewer places to British students amid the threat of financial collapse, insiders have said.
Vice-chancellors are scrambling to make savings as frozen home tuition fees, higher costs and a drop in international students at some institutions is putting their financial security at risk.
John Rushforth, the executive secretary of the Committee of University Chairs, which represents heads of UK university governing bodies, told The Telegraph that reducing the number of domestic students was “one consideration” at universities worried about the risk of going bust.
He said: “You can reduce the numbers of domestic students you take because you can still make a surplus on foreign students, but you can’t make one on domestic students.”
Mr Rushforth added: “I think they’re all looking at alternative futures and alternative possibilities. And that’s one consideration.”
Universities in England made an average loss of £2,500 for every home student they educated last year, according to the Russell Group. Tuition fees for domestic students have effectively been frozen at £9,250 for the past decade. Overseas students pay up to four times as much as their domestic counterparts.
Mr Rushforth warned that a university in England could go bust as soon as this year because of cost pressures.
He said: “There are some active discussions that I know of where people are worried about going concern now. And of course, they are charities. If they can’t meet their liabilities then they have to cease trading.”
He added: “It’s not inevitable, but something will have to give. Going bust is a possibility. There is a risk of that.”
Universities are worried about a fall in international student demand from some countries after Rishi Sunak introduced a clampdown on foreign students bringing dependants. They also face higher costs for teaching, research and staff pensions.
Mr Rushforth said that most universities have gone through staff redundancy programmes and made efforts to reduce their costs in the last couple of years.
Some institutions are considering mergers or policies to generate more funds for commercialising research in the longer term, he added.
While universities consider cutting places for British students, some also say they have reached “the limit of foreign students that we want,” Mr Rushforth said.
He added: “I know a number of institutions that are up at the 50 per cent mark [for overseas students]. They say: ‘We welcome foreign students, they’re great for the education of domestic students. But we don’t want to be an international university. We want to be a UK university.’ So it’s a really difficult one.”
The University of York, which reported a deficit of £24 million in its latest financial accounts, warned the university and wider sector “has faced levels of inflation not seen in decades, uncertainty in global markets, and an unsustainable HE [Higher education] funding model, all of which have added pressure to our financial planning”.
Coventry University warned that it would need to make £95 million in cuts over the next two financial years. Its financial accounts stated: “The UK Government’s response to issues around migration and the economy in recent months has had an impact on the group’s recruitment of international students.”
Russell Group universities are believed to have longer to plan for the prospect of reduced real-term tuition fee income and higher costs because they typically have bigger reserves.
Universities with polytechnic roots are more at risk in the short term, especially as they are having to cover the increase in costs of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, Mr Rushforth said.
Nick Hillman, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said that university chairmen, who often have experience in business, “understand better than anyone that universities cannot endlessly expand their loss-making activities”.
He said: “These sorts of conversations, including about reducing home student numbers, are happening in universities up and down the country.
“It worries me as a citizen because we need more high-level skills as a country. It worries me as a policy wonk because we should be expanding higher education the way our competitor nations are doing. And it worries me most of all as a parent who wants their children to have the same opportunities that others have had.”
A spokesman for Universities UK said: “For quite some time, universities right across the country have been making tough decisions to try to control costs. There is much that they can do. But in the end, with income for teaching falling and costs rising for many years, we do need Government to step up and recognise that this cannot be left to drift.
“If we want our universities to continue to be amongst the best in the world, we need to do something to stop the deterioration in their finances.
“Students and parents should be reassured that the failure of a university is very rare, but course closures and occasionally campus closures are something many universities already have experience in managing.”
A Government spokesman said: “We continue to provide significant financial support of nearly £6 billion per year to the higher education sector, plus more than £10 billion per year in tuition fee loans. The Office for Students’ latest report also stated that the overall financial position of the sector was sound.
“While British universities are independent from government, we are clear that domestic students should be the priority. Our reforms to higher education will crack down on rip-off degrees and ensure student visas are used for education rather than immigration.”
One of the few things I agree with the Tories on is that our university system is way too bloated.
Covid exposed what a scam it is.
It needs to consolidate with a smaller number of universities offering genuinely high class tertiary education
So basically they’ve been taking it in hand over fist for ages and they made no attempt to plan for the future and now will punish British students in favour of full pocketed foreign students. I’m reading that right?
It’s well known that the admission policies of universities, and their need for more and more revenue, are a direct cause of the growth in the UK population.
Can someone explain how universities are short on money? I’m not being antagonistic but at a glance UCL have 43,000 enrolled paying £9,000 a year. The teaching staff are underpaid as well. When I was in university in London the unis also had huge property holdings in central London and acted as landlords offering low quality accommodation to students at high cost. I’m not sure how they don’t have any money?
Waaay too many people attend university at the moment, it’s ridiculously bloated and is trapping millions of young people in vast piles of high-interest debt for something that often isn’t really necessary for their career.
The reality is, the majority of graduates enter jobs which are completely unrelated to their degree and/or roles where you simply learn on the job from scratch- degree or no degree.
Take this case study: you get average A-levels, then study English, Politics, Psychology or History at an average university, you leave with £50k of debt and then get an entry-level job in: marketing, PR, communications, events management, or generalist civil servant… the degree is not useful for those positions, you could have excelled in those jobs without a degree (as indeed many people do, and who perform just as capably as graduates).
Even if you take a *highly skilled job* such as software engineering, lots of top software engineers taught themselves from scratch, or just did a 2-3 month ‘boot camp’ and then went into an internship.
In the 1940s around 2-3% of people attended university, it’s now 40-50% of young people, have we genetically engineered people to become a lot more intelligent, or have we massively lowered the standards of our universities?
Problem is, by transferring the cost of tuition to individuals they made it highly political. So instead of fees going up with inflation via government grant they are stuck at £9250 because it’s politically impossible to hike them.
US education is overpriced but they have managed to retain quality. UK education has become low quality cash-cows for international students, even in top unis like LSE/Imperial/UCL
*”Universities in England made an average loss of £2,500 for every home student they educated last year, according to the Russell Group. Tuition fees for domestic students have effectively been frozen at £9,250 for the past decade. Overseas students* [*pay up to four times as much*](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/27/leading-universities-offers-overseas-students-low-grades/) *as their domestic counterparts.”*
Wow, frozen at 9 thousand a year. Makes me wonder how universities survived before.
Jokes aside, this paragraph encapsulates everything that is wrong here. But glad our govt. has its priorities straight and public support behind it: Ukraine needs the money more than future graduates.
Don’t worry guys, you might not have access to higher education but I’ve been informed that these foreign students put more into the economy than you would. So don’t be concerned, I’m sure it will trickle down to you somehow!
Forced commercialisation of universities, and cutting funding, making teaching near unaffordable for lecturers aand making it unaffordable to many domestic and foreign to meet the rising tuition costs is just another way in which the Tories have been starving and crippling otherwise healthy institutions in the last 15 years.
As someone in academia the landscape has been getting bleaker and bleaker since I started in 2009, coincidentally the year before they raised the tuition fees to eye watering levels out of the blue
Something that people seem to be missing with the whole “universities need to be reduced” is that a significant amount of local economies rely on them,.and I’m not talking about bars, restaurants, etc. I’m talking about construction; student accommodation, university buildings, hotels (for foreign student family members when they visit, as well as functions, etc).
The amount of debt tied up in this expansion must surely pose a significant risk to the wider economy should it go bad, as well as knock on effect to the property market, and of course local governments who, as well as probably being invested in this stuff, would take a hit to their budgets as a result. I can see more councils going bankrupt.
Britain’s house of cards built of debt and never ending property bubbles looks pretty shaky right now.
No surprise to hear this, our university system was too big before the Tories came in and they’ve done nothing to fix it and now the money is drying up. How many student loans are out there that will never be fulfilled and how many unis are being propped up by foreign students paying super amounts.
I live in Leeds and every new building in the city centre is student accommodation . The city centre is now very reliant on a resident student population . I’ve been thinking for years it feels like a bubble but I have no idea about the economics of it or of higher education policy . If it blows up Leeds will have a lot of empty flats
When you can get into university with shit grades to do a “real” subject at a former polytechnic of course it’s going to end up worthless, you should have seen some of the mouth breathers on my course
One of my only regrets was doing the above and I went to university way before the tuition fees, god knows how the fuckers who were duped into “going uni” recently feel
At least we have less immigrants! This government will destroy the country to satisfy the racists.
How the hell are they getting £9k a year for some courses putting on 2 lectures a week and still going under?!
There is a worrying amount of cynicism and apathy to Universities in this thread I feel. I think people are looking at Universities purely as if all they do is teach undergraduate courses in areas where degrees aren’t a necessity for a given field.
And what people don’t realise is that Universities have been given an ever increasing portfolio of responsibilities, whilst the funding base has remained the same per domestic student for years. Unis are essentially operating with a third of the working capital per undergraduate student as they were a decade ago due to inflation.
UK Universities, things that should be one of the countries most prized assets, are being systematically destroyed by the current funding environment and a willingness of the government to pit students against providers.
One random thought I have is from my own university experience. Scientists tended to work 40 hours a week with labs etc – on the other end of the scale I had friends doing English and History which was say 4 hours contact time a week and another 10 working.
Why not truncate that….say two year courses vs three when you don’t really need 3 years to cover the current content.
Of course this was late 90s so things could be different.
lots of interesting thoughts and ideas
would a new model help? In contemporary language, is it ripe for *disruption*?
if…
* there’s too much specialisation
* *this could have been a YouTube video*
* group work is critical, and valued by educators and learners
* more young adults should have an education
* £50K of debt and three years of your CV gets a logo on your CV and it *not* rejected from the application list; otherwise, it’s of little value
* after 10 years, graduates earn an average £30K
* Universities are at high risk of going bankrupt
…then the model is of course *completely* broken.
How do other countries resolve these?
How about this as an outline model
* approximately 30 weeks / year for 3 years can be consolidated into two calendar years of 45 weeks each [simple round numbers]
* edX and the Open University show it’s possible to do it online, but the best combination is to *flip* the classroom; online recordings + online discussions + in person seminars
* imagine standardised set of subjects, much like A levels, but at higher level
* to be blunt – many HE staff are poor educators, and each University is ‘duplicating’ it’s education effort [they know their stuff; they’re just not *educators*]
* proverbial death by PowerPoint
* imagine if lectures were of the quality of TED talks, or of the calibre of the latest BBC Nature documentary delivered by someone as knowledgeble and enthusiastic as David Attenborough
* now get the module videos produced by something like BBC Education (“Open University”) – books and videos, interactive, etc
* a MOOC for discussion, Q and A, self assessment, progress tracking, nudging, etc
* use the flipped classroom model
* so students watch the recording independently, or together [in other words, it’s not a scheduled “mandatory” event]
* optional (recommended) discuss independently online
* attend seminars to discuss further
* whatever assessment method works best; favouring knowledge and understanding *demonstration* rather than recall [though this is already true]
* practically, it’s more like ‘college’
* students live at home [if possible; cheaper than Halls, less social isolation for students]
* physically smaller campuses, where students are not lost in an *enormous* crowd
* both of these should improve retention and reduce dropout rates
* the first calendar year is subject-centric
* the second calendar year adds more transferable skills
* project management (PRINCE2 | PMBOK | Agile Manifesto
* process and data analysis
* Accounts | People Skills | Marketing
* etc
* this is professional education – designed to make you a high value employee. You’re free to get a *pure* education – eg to study for study’s sake. But the public can’t afford to fund this.
* You finish your two years with a degree.
It’s less likely that what you learnt in calendar year one is now irrelevant
* it’s not been as long [as three years]
* the content was produced professionally, perhaps renewed every three years
* designed from the ground up to be
Each year, there will be tens of thousands of graduates who studied the exact same curriculum. Is that a bad thing?
Beyond this standard curriculum, perhaps students could develop specialisms once they begin working; probably relatively easier and more useful [eg if I work for Elbonia Pharmaceuticals in Marketing, it’s easier and more useful if I enrich my standard “Business” degree with *Pharmaceuticals Marketing* – if this is somewhat online-based, then your ‘niche’ is actually being studied by many]
This is *relatively* easy for education that can be delivered by book, videos and discussion; letss so for wet labs, etc
In this model, educators are primarily that – educators and not researchers. So, quite different from today’s model.
So, a relatively low cost, high quality education provided in two years, with less social isolation and more valuable at the end.
[I haven’t solved anything with my post. I am merely asking with some suggestions. I have no doubt it is *wildly* naive; but hopefully there’s something useful here, too]
Finally we can take our rightful place in the globalised capitalist hellscape. Our houses aren’t there to house people – they are another global asset investment vehicle come casino. Our universities aren’t for us, there are for some anonymous trans national capitalist class and their children because in those circles a uk education is the best don’t you know?
21 comments
[Full text available here](https://archive.is/9f259).
Universities are considering offering fewer places to British students amid the threat of financial collapse, insiders have said.
Vice-chancellors are scrambling to make savings as frozen home tuition fees, higher costs and a drop in international students at some institutions is putting their financial security at risk.
John Rushforth, the executive secretary of the Committee of University Chairs, which represents heads of UK university governing bodies, told The Telegraph that reducing the number of domestic students was “one consideration” at universities worried about the risk of going bust.
He said: “You can reduce the numbers of domestic students you take because you can still make a surplus on foreign students, but you can’t make one on domestic students.”
Mr Rushforth added: “I think they’re all looking at alternative futures and alternative possibilities. And that’s one consideration.”
Universities in England made an average loss of £2,500 for every home student they educated last year, according to the Russell Group. Tuition fees for domestic students have effectively been frozen at £9,250 for the past decade. Overseas students pay up to four times as much as their domestic counterparts.
Mr Rushforth warned that a university in England could go bust as soon as this year because of cost pressures.
He said: “There are some active discussions that I know of where people are worried about going concern now. And of course, they are charities. If they can’t meet their liabilities then they have to cease trading.”
He added: “It’s not inevitable, but something will have to give. Going bust is a possibility. There is a risk of that.”
Universities are worried about a fall in international student demand from some countries after Rishi Sunak introduced a clampdown on foreign students bringing dependants. They also face higher costs for teaching, research and staff pensions.
Mr Rushforth said that most universities have gone through staff redundancy programmes and made efforts to reduce their costs in the last couple of years.
Some institutions are considering mergers or policies to generate more funds for commercialising research in the longer term, he added.
While universities consider cutting places for British students, some also say they have reached “the limit of foreign students that we want,” Mr Rushforth said.
He added: “I know a number of institutions that are up at the 50 per cent mark [for overseas students]. They say: ‘We welcome foreign students, they’re great for the education of domestic students. But we don’t want to be an international university. We want to be a UK university.’ So it’s a really difficult one.”
The University of York, which reported a deficit of £24 million in its latest financial accounts, warned the university and wider sector “has faced levels of inflation not seen in decades, uncertainty in global markets, and an unsustainable HE [Higher education] funding model, all of which have added pressure to our financial planning”.
Coventry University warned that it would need to make £95 million in cuts over the next two financial years. Its financial accounts stated: “The UK Government’s response to issues around migration and the economy in recent months has had an impact on the group’s recruitment of international students.”
Russell Group universities are believed to have longer to plan for the prospect of reduced real-term tuition fee income and higher costs because they typically have bigger reserves.
Universities with polytechnic roots are more at risk in the short term, especially as they are having to cover the increase in costs of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, Mr Rushforth said.
Nick Hillman, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said that university chairmen, who often have experience in business, “understand better than anyone that universities cannot endlessly expand their loss-making activities”.
He said: “These sorts of conversations, including about reducing home student numbers, are happening in universities up and down the country.
“It worries me as a citizen because we need more high-level skills as a country. It worries me as a policy wonk because we should be expanding higher education the way our competitor nations are doing. And it worries me most of all as a parent who wants their children to have the same opportunities that others have had.”
A spokesman for Universities UK said: “For quite some time, universities right across the country have been making tough decisions to try to control costs. There is much that they can do. But in the end, with income for teaching falling and costs rising for many years, we do need Government to step up and recognise that this cannot be left to drift.
“If we want our universities to continue to be amongst the best in the world, we need to do something to stop the deterioration in their finances.
“Students and parents should be reassured that the failure of a university is very rare, but course closures and occasionally campus closures are something many universities already have experience in managing.”
A Government spokesman said: “We continue to provide significant financial support of nearly £6 billion per year to the higher education sector, plus more than £10 billion per year in tuition fee loans. The Office for Students’ latest report also stated that the overall financial position of the sector was sound.
“While British universities are independent from government, we are clear that domestic students should be the priority. Our reforms to higher education will crack down on rip-off degrees and ensure student visas are used for education rather than immigration.”
One of the few things I agree with the Tories on is that our university system is way too bloated.
Covid exposed what a scam it is.
It needs to consolidate with a smaller number of universities offering genuinely high class tertiary education
So basically they’ve been taking it in hand over fist for ages and they made no attempt to plan for the future and now will punish British students in favour of full pocketed foreign students. I’m reading that right?
It’s well known that the admission policies of universities, and their need for more and more revenue, are a direct cause of the growth in the UK population.
Can someone explain how universities are short on money? I’m not being antagonistic but at a glance UCL have 43,000 enrolled paying £9,000 a year. The teaching staff are underpaid as well. When I was in university in London the unis also had huge property holdings in central London and acted as landlords offering low quality accommodation to students at high cost. I’m not sure how they don’t have any money?
Waaay too many people attend university at the moment, it’s ridiculously bloated and is trapping millions of young people in vast piles of high-interest debt for something that often isn’t really necessary for their career.
The reality is, the majority of graduates enter jobs which are completely unrelated to their degree and/or roles where you simply learn on the job from scratch- degree or no degree.
Take this case study: you get average A-levels, then study English, Politics, Psychology or History at an average university, you leave with £50k of debt and then get an entry-level job in: marketing, PR, communications, events management, or generalist civil servant… the degree is not useful for those positions, you could have excelled in those jobs without a degree (as indeed many people do, and who perform just as capably as graduates).
Even if you take a *highly skilled job* such as software engineering, lots of top software engineers taught themselves from scratch, or just did a 2-3 month ‘boot camp’ and then went into an internship.
In the 1940s around 2-3% of people attended university, it’s now 40-50% of young people, have we genetically engineered people to become a lot more intelligent, or have we massively lowered the standards of our universities?
Problem is, by transferring the cost of tuition to individuals they made it highly political. So instead of fees going up with inflation via government grant they are stuck at £9250 because it’s politically impossible to hike them.
US education is overpriced but they have managed to retain quality. UK education has become low quality cash-cows for international students, even in top unis like LSE/Imperial/UCL
*”Universities in England made an average loss of £2,500 for every home student they educated last year, according to the Russell Group. Tuition fees for domestic students have effectively been frozen at £9,250 for the past decade. Overseas students* [*pay up to four times as much*](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/27/leading-universities-offers-overseas-students-low-grades/) *as their domestic counterparts.”*
Wow, frozen at 9 thousand a year. Makes me wonder how universities survived before.
Jokes aside, this paragraph encapsulates everything that is wrong here. But glad our govt. has its priorities straight and public support behind it: Ukraine needs the money more than future graduates.
Don’t worry guys, you might not have access to higher education but I’ve been informed that these foreign students put more into the economy than you would. So don’t be concerned, I’m sure it will trickle down to you somehow!
Forced commercialisation of universities, and cutting funding, making teaching near unaffordable for lecturers aand making it unaffordable to many domestic and foreign to meet the rising tuition costs is just another way in which the Tories have been starving and crippling otherwise healthy institutions in the last 15 years.
As someone in academia the landscape has been getting bleaker and bleaker since I started in 2009, coincidentally the year before they raised the tuition fees to eye watering levels out of the blue
Something that people seem to be missing with the whole “universities need to be reduced” is that a significant amount of local economies rely on them,.and I’m not talking about bars, restaurants, etc. I’m talking about construction; student accommodation, university buildings, hotels (for foreign student family members when they visit, as well as functions, etc).
The amount of debt tied up in this expansion must surely pose a significant risk to the wider economy should it go bad, as well as knock on effect to the property market, and of course local governments who, as well as probably being invested in this stuff, would take a hit to their budgets as a result. I can see more councils going bankrupt.
Britain’s house of cards built of debt and never ending property bubbles looks pretty shaky right now.
No surprise to hear this, our university system was too big before the Tories came in and they’ve done nothing to fix it and now the money is drying up. How many student loans are out there that will never be fulfilled and how many unis are being propped up by foreign students paying super amounts.
I live in Leeds and every new building in the city centre is student accommodation . The city centre is now very reliant on a resident student population . I’ve been thinking for years it feels like a bubble but I have no idea about the economics of it or of higher education policy . If it blows up Leeds will have a lot of empty flats
When you can get into university with shit grades to do a “real” subject at a former polytechnic of course it’s going to end up worthless, you should have seen some of the mouth breathers on my course
One of my only regrets was doing the above and I went to university way before the tuition fees, god knows how the fuckers who were duped into “going uni” recently feel
At least we have less immigrants! This government will destroy the country to satisfy the racists.
How the hell are they getting £9k a year for some courses putting on 2 lectures a week and still going under?!
There is a worrying amount of cynicism and apathy to Universities in this thread I feel. I think people are looking at Universities purely as if all they do is teach undergraduate courses in areas where degrees aren’t a necessity for a given field.
I’d like to point out the following:
* [Universities contribute around £130 Billion to the economy.](https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-research/publications/impact-higher-education-sector-uk)
* [Outside of our cultural exports they are one of the few things the rest of the world considers the UK a leader in.](https://www.timeout.com/uk/news/its-official-the-uk-is-one-of-the-best-countries-in-the-world-091123)
* [They are perhaps the most important enabler of social mobility in our country and this is driven by Non-Russell group Universities.](https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/10/19/2023-english-social-mobility-index/)
* [A quarter of all new medicines developed in the last twenty years came out of academic research.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8552459/)
* [UK Universities are a major source of Foreign Direct Investment. Getting cash out of other countries into ours.](https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/The-role-of-universities-in-driving-overseas-investment-into-UK-Research-and-Development.pdf)
* [Working age migration is critical for the sustainability of our country and Universities enable highly educated migration to take place](https://www.oecd.org/migration/OECD%20Migration%20Policy%20Debates%20Numero%202.pdf)
* [Every £1 of public sector R&D Spend leads to £7 of net benefit for the UK](https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmsctech/1453/145305.htm)
And what people don’t realise is that Universities have been given an ever increasing portfolio of responsibilities, whilst the funding base has remained the same per domestic student for years. Unis are essentially operating with a third of the working capital per undergraduate student as they were a decade ago due to inflation.
UK Universities, things that should be one of the countries most prized assets, are being systematically destroyed by the current funding environment and a willingness of the government to pit students against providers.
One random thought I have is from my own university experience. Scientists tended to work 40 hours a week with labs etc – on the other end of the scale I had friends doing English and History which was say 4 hours contact time a week and another 10 working.
Why not truncate that….say two year courses vs three when you don’t really need 3 years to cover the current content.
Of course this was late 90s so things could be different.
lots of interesting thoughts and ideas
would a new model help? In contemporary language, is it ripe for *disruption*?
if…
* there’s too much specialisation
* *this could have been a YouTube video*
* group work is critical, and valued by educators and learners
* more young adults should have an education
* £50K of debt and three years of your CV gets a logo on your CV and it *not* rejected from the application list; otherwise, it’s of little value
* after 10 years, graduates earn an average £30K
* Universities are at high risk of going bankrupt
…then the model is of course *completely* broken.
How do other countries resolve these?
How about this as an outline model
* approximately 30 weeks / year for 3 years can be consolidated into two calendar years of 45 weeks each [simple round numbers]
* edX and the Open University show it’s possible to do it online, but the best combination is to *flip* the classroom; online recordings + online discussions + in person seminars
* imagine standardised set of subjects, much like A levels, but at higher level
* to be blunt – many HE staff are poor educators, and each University is ‘duplicating’ it’s education effort [they know their stuff; they’re just not *educators*]
* proverbial death by PowerPoint
* imagine if lectures were of the quality of TED talks, or of the calibre of the latest BBC Nature documentary delivered by someone as knowledgeble and enthusiastic as David Attenborough
* now get the module videos produced by something like BBC Education (“Open University”) – books and videos, interactive, etc
* a MOOC for discussion, Q and A, self assessment, progress tracking, nudging, etc
* use the flipped classroom model
* so students watch the recording independently, or together [in other words, it’s not a scheduled “mandatory” event]
* optional (recommended) discuss independently online
* attend seminars to discuss further
* whatever assessment method works best; favouring knowledge and understanding *demonstration* rather than recall [though this is already true]
* practically, it’s more like ‘college’
* students live at home [if possible; cheaper than Halls, less social isolation for students]
* physically smaller campuses, where students are not lost in an *enormous* crowd
* both of these should improve retention and reduce dropout rates
* the first calendar year is subject-centric
* the second calendar year adds more transferable skills
* project management (PRINCE2 | PMBOK | Agile Manifesto
* process and data analysis
* Accounts | People Skills | Marketing
* etc
* this is professional education – designed to make you a high value employee. You’re free to get a *pure* education – eg to study for study’s sake. But the public can’t afford to fund this.
* You finish your two years with a degree.
It’s less likely that what you learnt in calendar year one is now irrelevant
* it’s not been as long [as three years]
* the content was produced professionally, perhaps renewed every three years
* designed from the ground up to be
1. recording | interactive
2. discussions | self assessment
3. seminars
Each year, there will be tens of thousands of graduates who studied the exact same curriculum. Is that a bad thing?
Beyond this standard curriculum, perhaps students could develop specialisms once they begin working; probably relatively easier and more useful [eg if I work for Elbonia Pharmaceuticals in Marketing, it’s easier and more useful if I enrich my standard “Business” degree with *Pharmaceuticals Marketing* – if this is somewhat online-based, then your ‘niche’ is actually being studied by many]
This is *relatively* easy for education that can be delivered by book, videos and discussion; letss so for wet labs, etc
I saw something about a billionaire setting up a new model in Paris; it might have been [Xavier Niel](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2016/05/23/french-billionaire-opens-free-coding-university-42-in-silicon-valley/) [was just a short news clip]. If it is as successful as the articles, perhaps join the best of both?
In this model, educators are primarily that – educators and not researchers. So, quite different from today’s model.
So, a relatively low cost, high quality education provided in two years, with less social isolation and more valuable at the end.
[I haven’t solved anything with my post. I am merely asking with some suggestions. I have no doubt it is *wildly* naive; but hopefully there’s something useful here, too]
Finally we can take our rightful place in the globalised capitalist hellscape. Our houses aren’t there to house people – they are another global asset investment vehicle come casino. Our universities aren’t for us, there are for some anonymous trans national capitalist class and their children because in those circles a uk education is the best don’t you know?