A tale of two spectra

Some higher education institutions in England are in rude health, but others face a living death. Time to stop pretending they’re all in it together.

The English higher education system is unsustainable. That is the inescapable message from the latest review of the financial health English universities, which looks at the position in 2015-16 and makes forecasts for 2018-19. The review, published on 10 November by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, doesn’t say this in so many words, of course. The funding council has always carefully avoided potentially self-realising predictions of crisis. Instead it concludes that, based on the forecasts provided by higher education institutions, the collective outlook is stable, with projections of positive cash flow and financial surpluses.

The caveat, which seriously undermines that conditional conclusion, is the credibility of those self-asserted forecasts that both home and international student numbers will grow substantially, that staff costs will be contained and that public funding for teaching and research will rise. The funding council barely disguises its scepticism about these assumptions, which fly in the face both of recent experience and of all the indicators of market trends.