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.