How the Tories sabotaged Britain’s universities

At first sight, the latest rankings of the world’s universities look like good news for the UK. Three of the top five are British, and four of the top ten. Imperial has now clearly overtaken both Oxford and Cambridge, and University College London (UCL) is in the top ten too.

But just like so much in the UK the shallowness of our capacity is evident. Elite institutions are fine, the rest are suffering.

Fully 58% of UK universities have declined in rank this time. They do not have the money, resources or support necessary to hold their places in the rankings and are facing Tory government policies that actually undermine them.

Even more worrying, only four of the top 100 universities for research quality are in the UK. There are 24 in China and 13 each in Australia and the USA.

Only four UK universities are in the top 100 for teaching quality are in the UK. They are all the same four. Where are the rest?

The UK’s universities are one of the jewels in our economic crown, or at least they used to be. But a country of well over 60 million people cannot thrive with only a few top universities, especially since three of the top four are not actually very large at all.

Oxford, for all its reputation and coverage in the media, is the 28^th largest university in the UK in terms of student numbers. Cambridge is the 38^{th largest}.

Imperial is the 49^{th largest}, just behind the University of Derby. To be fair, UCL is big – the second largest in the UK and in the world’s top ten – so size does not necessarily mean a dilution of quality.

For far too long the UK has rested on its laurels and the fact that its business, media, and political elite have been made up of Oxbridge graduates to a worrying degree. Even Imperial, which has overtaken Oxford and Cambridge in recent years, doesn’t have anything like the same heft and quite possibly it never will – “not quite the dreaming spires of academe, old boy.”

Things are also bound to get worse as Jessica Turner, who is CEO of the report’s authors QS Quacquarelli Symonds, notes “this year’s results suggest that British higher education has limited capacity remaining to continue excelling in the face of funding shortages, drops in student applications, and ambiguity about the status of international students. Whatever the result of July’s election, the next government must make a properly resourced, continually championed higher education sector an urgent priority.”

But the very opposite is happening. It is quite amazing that the current government is so obsessed with headline immigration numbers that it is willing to undermine the country’s own university sector deliberately in order to bring these down rather than simply moving university student numbers out of immigration figures, as many countries do.

What the government is doing instead is a shameless act of sabotage which will have far-reaching consequences for years to come.

The UK is still the world’s second favourite destination for foreign students, but that is not going to last long if the government sets up a hostile environment for them.

International students do not need to come to Britain. Just look at the top universities in America and Australia. These are not reluctant to take foreign students, in fact they seek them out.

This is a warning of Britain’s vulnerability; any sensible government would take action immediately and put in place a long-term plan too.

Instead, it looks like Labour will have to just add it to its long to-do list.