England’s higher education system risks long-term decline unless ministers overhaul their “confused, if not incoherent” approach to universities, the outgoing head of the national body for the humanities and social sciences has warned.
Dame Julia Black, president of the British Academy, told the Financial Times that the government must take higher education out of the “too difficult box” and “radically” reform the sector by axing its regulator and launching a cross-party commission into its future.
“The way universities are viewed by government is very confused, if not incoherent. There is nobody within government looking at the university system as a whole and thinking, ‘What do we want this to achieve, both for students but also for the country?’” she said.
“We need a national conversation to protect our competitive advantage . . . But is it easier [for ministers] to just watch incrementally universities go to the wall on a slow burn basis? Probably.
“The Department for Education doesn’t really have much of a view of what it wants to do with higher education at all.”
The comments by Black, who will leave her post on Thursday after four years, come as universities take drastic cost-cutting measures to avert a wave of insolvencies amid a long-term funding squeeze and softening enrolment of international students.
In May, ministers slashed capital funding for higher education.
They also reduced the length of the graduate visa from two years to 18 months to discourage abuse of the system and proposed a 6 per cent levy on universities’ fee income from overseas students to fund domestic skills programmes.
But Black, a specialist in law and regulation, said the levy, if enacted, would further squeeze universities’ finances and add to the impression that Britain was “not welcoming to international students”, stunting the government’s drive to boost the economy and soft power.
“It’s hard to be a big export industry if we are not getting international students. You can’t be both . . . Do you want this or not?” she added, pointing to European countries’ “focus on research and universities as engines of their own industrial growth”.
Asked what reform would look like, Black called for the abolition of the Office for Students, set up by the previous Conservative government, which “just sees universities as a marketplace and students as consumers”.
It should make way for a new regulator with a wider remit to take account of higher education’s benefits for individual students as well as the public, she said.
Ministers should also establish a commission to explore “all the options” for the sector, including a new cap on student numbers, higher tuition fees and breaking with the traditional three-year undergraduate degree from the age of 18, she added.
“Often this kind of quite radical rethink is prompted by a massive crisis . . . I don’t really want a massive crisis to make it happen, but I think universities have to be part of that conversation,” said Black, who is warden of Nuffield College, Oxford.
The Department for Education said it was “determined to restore our world-class universities as engines of aspiration, opportunity and growth”.
“We will soon publish our plans for reform as part of the post-16 education and skills strategy white paper as we fix the foundations of higher education,” it added.
The Office for Students said it was “focused on ensuring the protection of students through challenging times for the sector . . . and that taxpayers’ investment in higher education is protected”.
“Students are much more than just consumers, but they spend a lot of time, money and effort to attend university and deserve protection when doing so,” it added.
Founded by royal charter in 1902, the British Academy has a 1,700-strong fellowship, which includes classicist Dame Mary Beard, historian David Olusoga and philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill.
In 2023-24, the latest year for which data is available, the Academy recorded income of just under £75mn, including a grant of £51mn from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
In the same period, it distributed £55.5mn in research awards to academics in the UK and overseas.
Black said that while research in social sciences and the humanities was “really strong” in the UK, the subject areas were “bearing the brunt” of university job cuts and course closures.
This opened the door to a “potential vicious spiral”, she warned, where drops in undergraduate enrolment led fewer qualified specialists to become teachers, resulting in fewer school leavers opting for disciplines such as archaeology or modern languages and more course closures.
“You can paint whichever picture you want [with the data]. But the decline will be felt slowly, and once you lose that capacity it’s incredibly hard to build back up again,” Black said, pointing to “cold spots” across the country where cutbacks meant young people already had to travel more than 200km from home to study some subjects.
She rejected the view that humanities and social sciences were less useful to students and to the country than some other subjects, such as maths and science, describing them as “absolutely essential . . . both to living a full and prosperous life but also to addressing many of the challenges we face”.
“You’ve got more languages students setting up successful start-ups than you do maths graduates, and the same number of history students setting up start-ups as engineers, so there’s a bit of myth busting that needs to go on.”
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