Ending student quotas has been disastrous for higher education

Catherine Fletcher

The decision by Sunderland University to close history, modern languages and politics degrees in favour of more “career-focused” courses has been widely criticised. One objection is simply that all these humanities subjects offer students skills that play well in the job market. But it’s a problem to reduce university education to simply what sells to employers. These are subjects that matter to society as a whole, whether in working out the political implications of the climate crisis or understanding the fate of post-industrial towns. They shouldn’t become the preserve of an elite. Post-92 humanities departments – the UK’s polytechnics became universities in 1992 – rarely get the media attention that their counterparts in the Russell Group enjoy, but they do plenty of innovative teaching and research, with especially strong track records in local and regional history and engagement with the heritage industry.

I don’t know the inside story at Sunderland, but course closures such as these are a predictable consequence of the government’s decision to remove the quotas on student recruitment from 2015. Prior to that point, there were centrally imposed limits on how many students any given university could recruit. Since then, it’s been a free-for-all: the decision created a market in university places that is doing the higher education sector no favours.

Subjects such as history and politics, which don’t require expensive infrastructure to teach, were popular targets for expanding student intake in the more selective universities. That was good news for students who’d previously had to settle for their second-choice institution, but it’s making it hard to sustain a full range of courses at the middle- and lower-tariff universities, as a proportion of their applicants head for more “prestigious” institutions and their student numbers decline. Goldsmiths, University of London has just announced that it needs to save £10m in less than two years in the light of student recruitment problems. It plans to “streamline” provision.

While more applicants now get into their first choice of university, not every applicant is equally mobile. The students who lose most as courses close are those who need to fit study around the school run, or other caring responsibilities, and therefore rely on local provision. Then there are the applicants who prefer a university with experience of dealing with people who are the first in their family to go into higher education, or who arrive with BTecs rather than A-levels. I have taught in a university with no entrance requirements, in one that asked for three As at A-level (preferably in “traditional” subjects), and in others in between. Understandably, they used different teaching strategies, particularly in the first year, taking those different starting points into account. Media discussion of widening participation in higher education often focuses on Oxbridge, but the Guardian’s league tables show that on the measure of which institutions add most value between a student’s entry qualifications and final degree, the post-92s match – and sometimes beat – the achievements of their more prestigious counterparts.

The market makes for losers in the “prestigious” universities, too. I am told by academic staff at one popular institution that they’re expected to support 50 personal tutees each, making it nigh on impossible to get to know students individually. Colleagues at another university that appears to be doing well report that students wait weeks for an appointment at the counselling service. Lectures scheduled from 8am, or until 6pm, stretching out the working day, are another growing phenomenon.

University staff are bearing the brunt of the volatility, whether navigating those enormous tutorial groups at one end of the scale, facing redundancy at the other, or stuck in the middle on a fixed-term contract that may or may not be renewed depending on student numbers. It is hardly surprising that the University and College Union is currently in dispute over casualisation and workload – as well as pay and (in the pre-92 universities) pensions. But the implications of this shake-up to the sector go wider. At Lampeter University, for example, the number of students has fallen from around 1,500 in the 1990s to fewer than 400 now, with inevitable knock-on effects for the local economy.

This is not a political climate that favours easy decisions in higher education. In November 2019, the credit rating agency Moody’s accorded more universities a negative financial outlook. Concerns about the impact of Brexit and reliance on overseas fee income have been widespread. But I’m reluctant to accept that these must be the terms of the debate. A society – and indeed a world – confronting the climate crisis urgently needs people who have the

education to think about big issues. Those aren’t only scientific or technological: they’re also about the ways that people have made, and continue to make, decisions. The humanities matter. And it matters that students from all backgrounds – and across the country – have the opportunity to join in these world-changing discussions.