Put down the matches: why higher education needs evolution, not revolution

This blog outlines the speech that Rose Stephenson, Director of Policy and Strategy at HEPI, delivered to the recent Universities UK conference. Rose had been asked to debate John Blake of the Post 18 Project on the future of higher education. John was asked to argue for revolutionary change to the sector, while Rose was asked to make the case for a more evolutionary approach. You can read John’s remarks here:  https://post18.co.uk/is-another-future-possible/.

This session works best if I’m honest. Higher education has significant structural problems, and government has offered little serious response. So my provocation will focus on being honest about what’s working and being very careful about the case for burning it down.

Imagine another UK sector where most customers ended up wealthier and healthier as a result of their interactions with it. Where it was the second best in the world at attracting foreign investment for one of its products, bringing billions of pounds into the UK each year. Where it was also ranked second in the world for supplying that product to serving heads of state. Where it was globally recognised and punched above its weight for creating knowledge. And where, as a bonus, it made its customers more democratically engaged. We would not call that sector a failure. We would not want to start again. That would be madness.

That sector is higher education. We must protect it.

Measuring student choice

I’ve been asked to speak on student choice specifically. A lot has been said about how flawed that choice really is; that a seventeen-year-old can’t make an informed decision and that too many are studying so-called ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees. So, that got me thinking: how do we actually know if student choice is working?

We could ask this question financially. The recent IFS report on graduate earnings shows that most students do make choices that pay off. And for those who don’t, I welcome the push to put more of that data on UCAS, so applicants are making an informed choice.

We could ask if students would make that choice again. Ninety-three per cent of students would attend higher education again, but with only two-thirds picking the same course and institution. So again, there is something about supporting informed choice here.

Nicola Dandridge’s hindsight research on graduates finds that ninety-seven per cent would go again, though only around half would repeat the same choices – and that figure blends genuine regret with people whose careers simply took them somewhere they didn’t expect. There is real work still to do unpicking which is which.

I think this points not to government intervention, but to better advice. Students are already turning to AI to help choose their course. Perhaps we could explore building a sector-backed AI model that responds to personalised applicant information and is trained on verified data rather than the open internet.

Where choice puts real pressure on the system

We could also ask about the impact of student choice on the overall market. A growing share of domestic students are applying to high-tariff institutions every year. While the Government talks about collaboration, the system we’ve built rewards fierce competition. Your job as leaders and mine as a governor is to fight for our institution’s survival, not my neighbour’s. The upcoming reduction in the 18-year-old population, combined with the changing approach to recruitment, is squeezing medium- and low-tariff institutions hard.

It is likely that some of these institutions will close. That will be devastating for students, staff, alumni and communities. However, the impact will not be even. Lose an institution in London, and applicants still have dozens of others within reach. I live in rural Gloucestershire, where most people can reach at best one institution by public transport. The same is true across Cumbria, Cornwall and other rural regions. At a time when fewer students can afford to move away from home, losing that one institution would shut the door to in-person HE provision for whole communities, and the downstream impact would absolutely gut the regional economy.

However, I don’t think the fix is to predetermine student choice. Telling an applicant they cannot go to the University of HighTariffShire, and must go instead to the University of MiddleTariffShire might not even work and certainly isn’t the only lever we have. Institutions doing genuine regional heavy lifting

Institutions doing genuine regional heavy lifting – for skills, for employment, for the local economy – should be supported to keep doing it, even at a smaller scale, that is financially challenged. Yes, that raises a flag on institutional autonomy. But where an institution is embedded in delivering the workforce a strategic authority needs for its own growth plan, there’s a real case for that support. Devolution gives us a genuinely new lever here that’s worth exploring properly.

Are the right incentives in place?

I was also asked whether the right incentives exist to meet the needs of the economy. ‘Incentive’ might be generous. What’s actually pushed institutions this hard towards economic outcomes is four things:

1. a regulatory system (in England) fixated on graduate outcomes;
2. a student population, rightly, focused on return on investment (imagine being twenty, with no family financial backing, navigating today’s rental market, and tell me students shouldn’t care about their RIO);
3. a UK economy that has barely grown in years, which is honestly why we’re all having this discussion and the resulting challenges in the graduate jobs market;
4. and, in places, a maturing devolution settlement providing mechanisms to evolve course and curriculum design to respond to real local need. Government is already pulling levers here too, restricting maintenance loans and LLE funding to courses in predicted growth sectors.

Evolution, not revolution

So my proposal is for evolution, not revolution:

• keep the focus on outcomes,
• engage seriously with strategic authorities; particularly for institutions that serve their local areas,
• make sure student choice is genuinely informed, and
• back new models of delivery for underserved areas and lifelong learners.

There is no white knight coming. International student numbers are not bouncing back. Tuition fees are not rising in real terms. This is probably the most sympathetic government towards higher education we are likely to see for some time. Given the demographic changes ahead, the sector will very likely get smaller – and it has never done that before. We have only ever grown, and we have been good at it. There is no blueprint for shrinking well.

So, some institutions will get smaller. Most will get leaner. This will likely include mergers and the closure of some.

Regional institutions should be protected, but that protection has to be earned through the role they play.

The difference between shrinking well and shrinking badly isn’t luck; it’s leadership: the pace at which we choose to evolve, our willingness to hand policymakers solutions instead of waiting for them, and our courage to accept the trade-offs the whole sector needs, not just the ones that advantage our own institution. This is challenging, but it is essential to protect the many things we do so well.