Britain’s universities are firing staff, cutting courses, and curtailing research over an intensifying financial shortfall.
Prior changes to the country’s higher education system expanded access while reducing government support, increasing institutions’ reliance on fees — particularly from international students — to generate revenue.
Successive governments have, however, sought to curb foreign student numbers to cut immigration, hammering universities’ funds. Critics say that ultimately, Britain offers neither the benefits of the US system of well-endowed, fee-paying universities, nor of far cheaper European offerings.
“Britain has attempted to make an accelerated transition from an elite to a mass system of higher education without reckoning the consequences of such a huge structural change,” a Cambridge University emeritus professor wrote in the London Review of Books.
