While recent media commentary on the crisis in British universities has chiefly focused on their financial difficulties, much less attention has been paid to a far more fundamental malaise: their conversion from places of intellectual enquiry and critical thinking into ‘human capital’ factories geared to the demands of economic growth and increasingly dominated by finance.
A remarkable event that went right to the heart of this problem occurred in July 2025, yet was scarcely noticed by politicians or commentators. An American private equity firm, Brightstar Capital Partners, bought a 50% stake in a large British university.
Arden University, a for-profit private higher education institute, is the UK’s fastest-growing university, with 33,000 students studying online or across its six campuses in England (three of which are in London) and one in Berlin. It was allowed to call itself a university only in 2015, one year after the government granted it degree-awarding powers. Up until then, it had been known as Resource Development International, an online business school founded by a British businessman in Coventry in 1990 and sold to a US for-profit company, Capella Education, in 2011.
