In The Times, OfS chief executive Susan Lapworth says “the time for bold and transformative action” is here, and on the BBC, OfS interim chair David Behan says universities will “need to consider mergers.”
Universities need a plan – and there’s an urge to merge. Behan told the BBC:
It doesn’t make sense for universities in the same city – or the same region – to compete in terms of the courses being offered.
At the risk of over-generalisation, the settled view seems to be that mergers in and of themselves neither save the money nor happen fast enough to fit the framing being offered by the regulator. A long or even medium term transformation fund might help – but no such initiative has been announced.
Maybe more shared national infrastructure might make a difference – if for example our idea of a “module” is common enough to build an LLE (and a standard fee per credit) it surely can’t be beyond the sector to share a module enrolment and recognition backend – which would also help facilitate credit transfer. Maybe one of the schemes already doing this across Europe could offer advice.
What universities can do is increase fees to the maximum for everyone and start to cut with rapidity both the module breath originally offered to students and the wider services sold to them at open days. Actually, generally, they can’t – but as usual, OfS seems to be being neither bold nor urgent when it comes to its student protection duties.
What we can say with more certainty is that whether part of a merger or not, closing a campus is where real and fairly rapid savings lie. But is that really what the government wants?
Don’t fight the urge
In Wales, Leighton Andrews’ “urge to merge” in the early part of the last decade saw promises that the merger and rebranding of the university into the University of South Wales in 2013 would not reduce campuses or student numbers.
But its 32-acre Newport campus was closed in 2016, “hitting the city’s businesses and its prospects for the future.”
Another one of those mergers – UWTSD – has been trying to sustain the campus in Lampeter for some years now. At one point one wheeze was to do a deal with Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to bring a bunch of students to rural Wales, only to then bus them every day to where their course was actually being delivered in Swansea or Carmarthen.
Now it has “initiated a dialogue” over a proposal to move its current and future taught Humanities provision to its Carmarthen campus by September 2025.
Save Lampeter uni. My daughter studied here. It’s a lovely, smaller uni in which the lecturers get to know their students. It’s also ideal for those who want to study but who can’t cope with large campuses. Please read & sign
— Lindylou (@lindy_lindylou) November 13, 2024
When there’s plenty of money around, you can support this sort of stuff within the wider basket of cross-subsidies. But once the vast bulk of funding comes from private contributions, why should other students be propping up a campus with fewer than 100 undergraduates rather than Welsh Government or HMT?
Put another way, if the funding of universities was more of a partnership between the state and students, the former would have more of a case to call the shots over where it wants its money spent.
If we must have a system where students pay for some things and the state pays for others, a campus nobody wants to study at wouldn’t be in my list for students’ responsibility. Especially not just students that have chosen UWTSD.
I seem to remember similar promises on place being made when the University of Plymouth was formed out of providers in Plymouth, Exmouth, Exeter and Newton Abbot – only for the latter three to be closed shortly afterwards.
OK cupid
The thing about both the Wales margers and the FE group mergers a decade or so ago is that they were facilitated by governments that notionally had plans both around financial sustainability and place.
To the extent to which that sort of planning might be coming in a tertiary review, it won’t show up early enough to prevent what may well end up being panicked campus closure to avert financial disaster.
And that’s when the usual cycle kicks in. M&S moves out. Wilko’s collapses. Other businesses cluster around bigger cities. And then years later people start to wonder how they might revitalise their local area.
If you’ve not seen it, there’s a cracking collection of essays out on the “Utopian universities” built in the late fifties and sixties.
As well as a whole bunch of fascinating stuff about campus design, student experience and governance, there’s quite a bit on place. Expanding existing universities was considered, but there was little demand from them, partly over concerns about there being enough campus and community infrastructure – concerns that magically melt away as soon as the financial pressure piles goes on.
In the UK it was greenfield sites on the peripheries of cities that were seen as a more practical and cost-effective solution – and the University Grants Committee (UGC) played a key role in choosing those locations, favouring places with a strong cultural tradition that lacked a university presence.
Further afield, for example, in West Germany the government sought to distribute universities more evenly across the country, locating them in areas that had not traditionally benefited from higher education institutions. There have been similar debates in Denmark in recent years as rents in the big cities rocket up.
In the fifties and sixties, Ashford, Dover, Folkestone and the Isle of Thanet all fought with Canterbury to host the University of Kent. The UGC’s preference for Colchester over Chelmsford for the location of the University of Essex was based partly on concerns that being too close to London would negatively impact the university’s development as a self-contained community.
In Northern Ireland, the decision to locate the New University of Ulster in Coleraine instead of Derry/Londonderry sparked all sorts of controversy and protests, and is an issue that’s still trying to be fixed today.
Efforts to establish a new university in Scotland were specifically driven by a mix of what was then called manpower planning, regional development, and concerns over educational and national identity. Campaigns led by the National and Local Government Officers’ Association cited regional disadvantages, and following the Robbins Committee’s 1963 recommendation for another Scottish university, debates intensified over economic feasibility, regional planning, and tensions over control between Scottish and UK authorities.
What’s the plan?
I know I’m a broken record on this, but the chances that (for example) the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has been anywhere near the current woes of the sector in terms of place-based implications are slim. And if it’s true that universities have a major local economic impact (endless PDFs seem to be telling me they do), the risk that some of those university places might not be there ought to be front and centre in the Treasury’s mind, no?
Where’s DCMS on the risk of campus collapse? What does DfT think about students potentially having to travel further? What does DHSC think about even fewer places for student nurses or doctors to be based? And so on.
Without deliberate student number distribution – both by campus and by “provider” – clustering gonna cluster. And in an era when we might want fewer students to be having to leave home to go to university, when there remains significant demand and need for a more tight-knit student experience, and when the impersonal city experience won’t suit everyone, there’s a certain irony in the idea that a much more mass HE system is on the cusp of losing its geographical distribution.
It’s because someone will plan that, it’s because we seem somehow to have lost the ability to plan anything – doomed forever into a cycle of watching chaotic public policy car crashes in slow motion that are later accompanied by half-arsed plans to “address” them once the real damage is done.
