The pandemic has revealed that the finances of many of the UK’s best universities are highly dependent on international students, whose numbers rose by 24% between 2008 and 2019. But what is astonishing is that this increase has been almost entirely due to a rise in admissions from China.
The last decade has also seen the rapid marketisation of UK higher education, making universities compete fiercely for students and funding, along with the spread of league tables. This has led to large-scale spending – on buildings and new layers of administrative staff.
These two key developments are consequences of the way governments have funded higher education in the UK. Currently, a university loses money for every UK science, engineering or medicine student it teaches, and makes a small surplus on humanities and social sciences students. Research loses money, and the more research a university does the more it loses.
