A grown up debate on higher education
This blog was kindly authored by Ian Sollom, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Universities and Skills.
Higher education in the UK is in a moment of crisis. The settlement that was supposed to put universities on a sustainable footing 15 years ago – and that my party paid a heavy price for – remained fixed, even while post-coalition, student finance terms were consistently tilted towards the individual. This has ultimately let everyone down: institutions cutting staff and courses, students struggling to cover basic living costs, and graduates watching the government taking more from their payslip than was promised.
None of this will be news to those reading this blog.
What is less often discussed is that this immediate crisis sits alongside a longer-term structural challenge that will arrive regardless of how the current problems are resolved.
HEPI research projects that the number of 18-year-olds in Britain will fall by 17 percent between 2030 and 2040. For a system built overwhelmingly around that cohort, that is a fundamental problem. If we are to address the current crisis effectively, we need a solution for the long term.
There are, the Liberal Democrats believe, broadly three options.
The first is consolidation. If the pool of domestic students shrinks, some contraction in the sector is probably inevitable. We have already seen it: the merger of Kent and Greenwich is an early signal of what structural adjustment can look like. Done carefully, this need not be a disaster. But done badly – or simply allowed to happen by default – it risks the loss of provision in parts of the country where there is no alternative, or even where the university is the primary engine of the local economy. The goal must be that access is not determined by where you happen to live. Consolidation can be managed; regional closure cannot simply be waved away.
The second option is doubling down on international students. They already cross-subsidise domestic teaching and research to a substantial degree, and the quality and diversity they bring is genuinely valued. But this route has limits that are becoming increasingly visible. Recruitment from some major source countries already appears to have peaked. And building deeper financial dependency on international fee income while simultaneously operating a hostile environment for international students – as successive governments have done – is not a sustainable strategy. Such an approach will leave institutions exposed in our political climate.
The third option is the one that Liberal Democrats believe has the most to offer for the long-term, but also has the least infrastructure behind it: lifelong learning.
The nature of work is changing – not just the familiar observation that there is no longer a job for life, but something more significant: there is increasingly no career, or even sector, for life. Automation and artificial intelligence are compressing the half-life of professional skills in ways that make the model of front-loading education into three years at 18 look increasingly ill-suited to what people actually need. Lifelong learning – genuine, flexible, accessible retraining and upskilling throughout a working life – and employer-driven learning, including the expansion of degree apprenticeships, point toward a different kind of university: one that serves people at 35 and 50 as well as at 18.
In truth, the future will almost certainly involve elements of all three options. Some consolidation will happen. International students will remain important.
But the critical question is whether we build the infrastructure that makes lifelong learning viable at scale – because without deliberate policy choices, it will not happen on its own. The funding model does not currently support it, nor do university delivery structures. Grant support, stackable funding that combines personal, employer and public contributions, and regulatory frameworks that make modular courses and credit transfer genuinely work – these are just some of the building blocks that need to be developed.
The sustainability of higher education isn’t the only challenge facing British universities. There is a parallel question about what universities deliver from an undoubtedly world-class research base. The translation of research into commercial success, and into economic benefit that is distributed across the whole country (and not just concentrated in the South East), is less impressive. That too requires deliberate investment and infrastructure. It too will not fix itself.
These questions informed the recent Liberal Democrat universities policy paper published in February, which sets out how we believe the infrastructure for lifelong learning, research commercialisation, and how a sustainable financial settlement can actually be built.
There is no doubt that the financial crisis in higher education needs urgent attention – on maintenance support, on graduate repayment terms and on institutional sustainability. But stabilising the current model is not enough if the model itself needs to change. Decisions taken now about what universities are for, and who they serve, will determine whether or not Britain enters the 2040s with a higher education system fit for the times. We must get them right.
HEPI is a registered charity and works with all mainstream political parties. We requested this piece because of the Liberal Democrats’ recent policy paper on higher education and we are equally happy to provide a space for other political parties to outline their higher education programmes.
Comments
Paul Wiltshire says:
When the current system is producing hundreds of thousands of graduates a year who end up in low paid trainee jobs that are more often than not nothing to do with their degree, that they could easily have done aged 18, then you are absolutely correct that we need a grown up debate. Mass HE is simply Mass exploitation in the hands of the commercially motivated HE sector , and we are condemning our young adults to a lifetime of an extra 9% of tax , and a huge write off for the taxpayer for a completely pointless 3 extra years of study. We need employers to stop discriminating against non-graduates and start to employ 18 year olds again.
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Jonathan Alltimes says:
Higher education has been in crisis since the lifting of the student number cap, the fixed tuition fee, and then the restriction on the number of international student visas.
The settlement failed to account for the more rapid expansion in student numbers than originally expected and it did not expect every provider to charge the maximum tuition fee for every degree.
The structural change does not sit alongside the current crisis it is ahead of it now. The current crisis needs to dealt with by the OfS and the demographic change also needs to be planned for by the DfE.
Consolidation is going to occur long before the demosgraphic change. There will be some loss of tertiary education provision, but not a complete absence.The mostly likely consolidation is away from areas of lower population and lower population density towards areas of higher population and higher population density. The long-term effects of deindustrialization needs to be understood and reversed where businesses co-locate.
Think about the ratios of UK-domiciled students to international students on each course and degree programme. The situation did not occur in the last couple of years, it began 20 years ago. As the tutition fee did not rise, the universities changed the quality of the student experience for their own financial gain by recruiting more international students, instead of altering their provision they lobbied for more growth in the form of lifting the student number cap, which suited the larger stronger providers.
Promoting lifelong learning as a state policy has been talked about for nearly 50 years, but why has there been so little response from OECD nations? It is because people can not simply return to education and training having accumulated living expenses since their last period of education and it does not enable the degree of specialization required to deal with the risks of unemployment caused by deindustrlization, new technologies, R&D intensification, and international competition. Popping in for a series of quick short courses over a number of years is not enough to consolidate learning in a new specialism.
The critical question is will a government legislate to make larger companies provide apprenticeships and accredited education and training, instead of relying on the international labour market? Total public sector expenditure on education in the United Kingdom from 2010/10 to 2024/25 was £1,402 billion in nominal terms. Tertiary education can not supplement decades of weak state policies for energy, industry, and training with the objectives of employment, distributed economic growth, and higher relative productivity.
The strategy of cross-subsidising university research with international student fees is finished. Although the Cambridge Phenomenon did work in terms of status and employment, it did not work in terms of economic growth and neither on its own can the UKRI policy of building a train line between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Liberal Democrats should understand how large businesses make large-scale investment choices, including startups and state expenditure.
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Emilia Alexe says:
I read this piece with interest, and while it rightly highlights the financial pressures facing universities — declining domestic funding, reliance on international students, and demographic changes — it still avoids what I consider the first and most fundamental problem.
Before consolidation, before international recruitment strategies, before structural reform, there is a more basic question that remains largely unaddressed:
What exactly are students paying for — and is it delivering real value?
The current debate frames universities as financially strained institutions. But from the student perspective, the reality often looks very different. Students are taking on substantial debt in a system where:
The value of the qualification is increasingly uncertain
The quality and structure of courses are not always transparent
And crucially, there is no effective route for resolution when something goes wrong
The HEPI article talks about sustainability, but sustainability for whom?
Because what is missing is accountability.
We now have a system where:
Awarding bodies and institutions operate in alignment, often reinforcing each other’s positions rather than independently verifying standards
Regulators defer responsibility, relying on each other’s assurances rather than investigating underlying issues
And when discrepancies arise, students are left effectively without remedy, facing a closed loop of institutional responses
This creates a situation where the system protects itself first.
The result is a structural imbalance:
Universities are treated as financially vulnerable
But students carry the financial risk without equivalent protection
Even broader sector concerns reflect this tension. Reports highlight behaviours such as aggressive expansion, reliance on fee income, and even the inflation of degree classifications as a “marketing tool” � — all of which point to a system under pressure to generate income, not necessarily to guarantee educational value.
The Guardian
At the same time, universities increasingly operate within a market framework, where students are implicitly treated as consumers, yet without the protections consumers would normally expect �.
HEPI
So while this article outlines three strategic options for the future — consolidation, internationalisation, and improving research impact — it still overlooks the core issue:
If the underlying product lacks consistent, enforceable value, no structural reform will solve the crisis.
Until the sector addresses:
Transparent course standards
Independent accountability of awarding bodies
And genuine mechanisms for student redress
any discussion about sustainability risks becoming superficial.
Because the real crisis is not only financial.
It is a crisis of trust.
And what is most striking is that, across all this debate, one question remains largely absent:
Where is the value for money?
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BookkeeperLive USA says:
This article highlights a very important issue that many universities are quietly struggling with. The combination of financial pressure, changing student expectations, and long-term sustainability makes this a complex challenge that needs careful planning.
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Gavin Moodie says:
Thanx for this well considered contribution.
The ‘stackable funding’ proposed in LibDems’ vision for universities adopted at its Spring 2026 conference does not seem well designed to develop the substantial knowledge nor deep expertise upon which societies depend and to which all may aspire.
I support the ‘unified tertiary approach’ proposed by the LIBDems, but so far the party offers little detail. The Liberal Democrats could make a valuable contribution by further developing its policy on further education and a unified tertiary approach to tertiary education.
The party’s news release states that its plan is ‘costed’, which would be a great advance, but I couldn’t find any costing of the plan.
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Phil Lambert says:
I strongly agree that lifelong learning has huge potential. When I looked at a midlife career change, the only real route was to take on another full degree, with significant cost in both time and money, despite already having one. With a young family, that simply was not realistic.
If lifelong learning is to be genuinely accessible, it would need to be far more flexible, modular and affordable. But that raises a bigger question: if we design that kind of system for adults, why wouldn’t younger students expect the same? At that point, we are not adding a new strand to higher education, we are fundamentally reshaping the existing model. That feels like a much larger shift than is often acknowledged, and possibly one that extends beyond the UK alone.
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