Former UCAS head warns of a limit on ambition if number controls return
Higher education experts have warned against setting a student numbers cap for universities in response to financial damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic.
Mary Curnock Cook, former chief executive of admissions body UCAS, said a cap on the number of students universities can recruit would represent “a cap on ambition”. Curnock Cook was speaking during a webinar on the impact of the coronavirus on higher education on 29 April, hosted by ApplyBoard Webinars and chaired by former universities and science minister Jo Johnson.
A Universities UK proposal for a bailout package for universities struggling during the coronavirus crisis is being considered by the government, and it suggests a cap on the number of students a university could recruit for September to stop some institutions recruiting more than their fair share.
Curnock Cook said students should be allowed “some meagre benefits” from the pandemic by potentially finding it easier to attend institutions they would not otherwise have been able to go to. “I find it very strange to understand why a regulator would…want to thwart student preferences by capping places,” she said, adding that “we will still have universities that are in financial trouble” even if a numbers cap is put in place as a condition of financial help from the government.
She also suggested that tuition fee rebates could be “a very inexpensive way of giving confirmation” to students receiving online learning that they “have not been ripped off” by missing out on the full student experience. But she said the rapid switch to online learning as a result of the pandemic could “cure the schizophrenia at the heart of UK higher education” between the “dinosaurs and the modernisers”.
Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said that reimposing a student numbers cap would mean universities “could be at risk of restricting places at the very moment we need more places”, as the number of 18-year-olds in the UK population is set to rise over the next few years.
Hillman said that while it was not negative for strings to be attached to any government bailout, there were “good strings and bad strings” and he raised concerns that people could use the crisis “to impose bad policy”.
“Universities will absolutely want to do things differently in the future, but…we have to get through the crisis first,” he said.