The writer is a professor at Bristol university and co-author of ‘Who are universities for?’
According to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, “vast swaths of Britain are written out of our national story”. Nowhere is this more apparent than in higher education. New Labour oversaw a dramatic increase in the number of graduates in the UK, but it was driven overwhelmingly by more-of-the-same groups attending. In Bristol, where I live, nearly all the 18-year-olds in wealthy Clifton go to university, but only 1 in 12 of those in Hartcliffe, a postwar housing estate in another part of the city, attend.
Higher education is in crisis: tuition fees for UK students have been frozen since 2017 and the international student market, on whose fees it depends for cross-subsidy, is volatile and highly competitive. This is one of the UK’s most successful assets and export industries — and it is in need of urgent help.