What universities count – and what they cannot afford to ignore

This blog was kindly authored by Anna Zimdars, Christopher Playford, Eve Worth, Luke Graham, Joanna Merrett and Joseph Crawford, members of the Centre for Social Mobility, University of Exeter.

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

UK higher education is under acute pressure. Senior leaders face difficult decisions shaped by frozen fees, rising costs, underfunded research, volatile international recruitment and the legacy of shifting universities from a public good towards a private good within a market logic.

Yet those pressures do not fall evenly, and they do not determine a single institutional response. Each university has its own historic, financial and regional story as well as a strategy and vision for what it wants to be. Sector pressures are real, but institutional decisions remain decisions and difficult circumstances are an opportunity to bring core values into sharper focus. Universities have stood the test of centuries because they have always been rooted in something deeper than the economic and political storms blowing over them.

There is a well-known line, often attributed to Einstein but more reliably traced to sociologist W.B. Cameron:

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

It is a vital warning. In times of stress, universities can begin to value only what is easily measured: modules, student numbers, staff-student ratios, workload allocations, rankings, review scores and contribution margins. These matter. But they are not the sum total of a university’s value and worth.

Much of the important work universities do is slow, relational, civic and cumulative. It is built through trust, local knowledge and commitment. It sits awkwardly within workload models and is not easily attributable to one department, income stream or KPI. Yet this is often how universities fulfil their public and civic purpose.

This matters particularly for the Humanities and Social Sciences. These disciplines ask not just “what works?” but “for whom?”, “at what cost?”, “under what assumptions?” and “towards what kind of society?” They are central to good policy, democratic accountability and social mobility. These questions have become even more important in the AI revolution, which further increases the need to think about purpose, about what to do first and how to do it second.

They also matter for security. Government investment in defence-related higher education recognises the need for engineering, computing, cyber, robotics and autonomous systems. But if universities educate the next generation of defence specialists while weakening subjects that teach conflict resolution, ethics, diplomacy, history, languages and cooperation, then something has gone wrong. National security requires technical capability. But security in a broader sense – including policing and intelligence work – also requires knowledge of humanities. The judgement to prevent conflict and build cooperation remains human and not technological. Avoiding war is better than fighting one.

At the Centre for Social Mobility, our interdisciplinary work across data sciences, English literature, history, sociology and education sometimes sits beyond some metrics. Consider the Exam Access Project: a partnership between the University of Exeter, our local FE College, Exeter College, local authorities and AQA. The project enables young people who are out of school – often because of unmet needs, anxiety, sensory overload, off-rolling or other difficulties – to sit GCSE exams free of charge. Private exam entry can cost hundreds of pounds per subject. Until this project, there was no dedicated centre of this kind in Devon and Cornwall.

In its pilot year, the project supported 26 young people who were at serious risk of becoming NEET(not in education, employment or training). All 26 have now secured a next step into further study, training or an apprenticeship. We have had interest from over 30 local authorities to expand and replicate this  pilot.

How should a university count that?

One could construct an individual and collective KPI: future earnings, reduced welfare costs, progression rates or regional skills benefits. Yet such measures still do not capture the human value of what has happened: a young person moving from exclusion to recognition; from a closed door to an exam desk; from a stalled pathway to choices. That is not easily priced. In any meaningful sense, it is priceless.

This kind of work is possible because regional universities are entwined with the places in which they sit. At regional institutions such as Exeter, staff live and work in the communities they serve, communities which are all too often neglected or misunderstood by metropolitan administrative centres. They raise children there, work with schools and colleges, serve on their PTAs and boards, support cultural institutions, contribute to civic and political life and encounter regional inequalities, transportation systems and water quality issues as lived realities. As a result, such universities have a special role in understanding the specific social landscapes of their regions and advocating for their needs. These responsibilities are not always visible in university metrics, but the loss of them is keenly felt whenever they are cut back or withdrawn.

University leadership is stewardship as well as financial management: holding together measurable outputs and immeasurable goods, institutional sustainability and public purpose. While it may seem prudent to cut while institutions still have manoeuvring space rather than when that is the only choice, there is not only danger that universities cut too much; it is that they cut the things they do not know how to value – and that cannot be easily restored once lost.

Universities need to count carefully. But they must also remember what cannot be counted.