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Another UK university crisis brewing: University of Essex

Brian Leiter

According to the academic staff union, the administratio has proposed "a new Academic Framework, including (among other things) a *45-week* teaching period, up to *3* entry points for students within the year, and sweeping rigid changes to module structure."   Comments are open for more details about what is going on at Essex, and also what is going on more generally in UK higher education (a topic discussed before).

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11 responses to “Another UK university crisis brewing: University of Essex”

  1. RJM

    Basically, UK higher ed is a mess, it will become more of a mess, and there’s not that much that we as philosophers can do about it.

    In a bit more detail: income from home students is not increasing to match inflation because the tuition fee is not increasing at all. Income from international students is about to go down/has already gone down because of the UK government and visa restrictions. Philosophy departments are not particularly well placed to weather these storms because even the best ones don’t bring in huge amounts of grant income and we don’t tend to attract 100s of international students. A few departments are probably safe regardless. Many are not safe, even ones that are by any objective measure good philosophy departments (Kent is a case in point). It is important to understand that these problems exist even though in many cases enrolment isn’t falling—the problem is that UK students pay less every year in real terms. It is also important to understand that the problem is not that UK philosophers aren’t doing socially relevant or impactful research—this has been the norm in the UK for years. About all we can do is (a) join our union and (b) hope that the next government has some desire to sort this all out.

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  2. Birchlse

    It looks like my vision of the future from the earlier thread, i.e. "a system where the vast majority of faculty have jobs similar to those of school teachers (school teachers will typically spend about 21-22hrs a week in the classroom), with a small elite of 1 or 2 'research intensive' faculty who are expected to fund their position entirely through grant income" is turning into reality very rapidly in some parts of the sector.

    It's happening first in the most financially vulnerable universities: those with endowments of less than £10m. These universities are starting to more closely resemble their closest US financial peers, namely community colleges.

    I think most American readers would be surprised to learn how financially fragile many UK universities are. Aside from Oxbridge (and, after a large gap, Edinburgh and King's), no UK universities have endowments that would break into the US top 300.

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  3. Dr Jerry Goodenough

    Things are likely to get worse for the UK universities that Birchise mentions. A recent BBC documentary on higher education interviewed a lawyer co-ordinating legal actions being taken against universities by students who felt that they did not get the education they were promised during the pandemic period, when they were generally taught online. (In the 2 academic years covering the pandemic, most UK students would have paid their university £18,500 in fees.) He said that this campaign has signed up some 150,000 students. If they each claim half their fees back, universities would have to come up with nearly £1.4 billion!

    Of course, university legal teams will defend the claims. (Much will depend on whether courts will accept the student claims that a university education, thanks to the policies of UK governments over the last 30 years, is now a purchasable commodity, and that receipt of a commodity grossly inferior to that promised entitles the purchaser to a refund of some sort.)

    Failing this, they may seek to buy off students with a reduced offer. But if students accept a third of their claim, this still amounts to some £450 million to be paid by institutions that, as pointed out, mainly have little or no cash reserves. In these circumstances, where universities are now effectively failing companies, we could well see some going out of business. We will certainly see philosophy and the humanities cut back even more.

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  4. there are problems but not, I think, those ones

    I think the comparison with the US misses some important differences. First, yes, endowments are much lower, but US endowments are totally out of sync with the rest of the world, that's not a sign that the entire world has a education system tottering on the brink. Most systems have a fundamentally different funding structure than the US and endowments are not part of how the system works or is intended to work. To most British people, the idea that a university should have an endowment, or a large endowment, is ludicrous. It would be like wanting the roads department to have an endowment; it just makes no sense. Second, US endowments are, to some degree, sort of crazy, and not in a good way; why should Harvard run as a charitable organization with such a massive endowment given that it is, by all serious accounts as I understand it, a major contributor to social inequality? Maybe the idea is that we should have the endowment but not the perverted moral purpose, but these things of course tend to go hand in hand! (That's why Harvard, rather than the podunk state school educating working class people, has the endowment). I'm picking out Harvard here but of course this applies to the majority of the posh unis with massive endowments, even if they are small liberal arts colleges. And of course the great corruption of admissions and academic standards that comes through donor and family engagement is almost totally absent here. Third, although I don't know the UK system as a whole, my sense is that there is far less reliance on sessional labour than in many (most?) US (or for that matter Canadian) public universities; for example, I don't know of a case in my UK department over the past 15 years in which anyone was appointed as a sessional instructor to teach a course; any appointment is at least akin to a visiting assistant professorship in the US, with a decent salary by local standards, pension contribution, access to benefits like sick leave, parental leave, etc. I am sure conditions are worse at universities further down the food chain, especially given that technical colleges were renamed 'universities' at one point to increase the proportion of students attending university.

    To be clear, I think there are lots of problems in UK universities. One great thing about the UK system however is that most UK universities still are mainly actual universities with actual disciplines being studied, you know, things like physics, English, philosophy, mathematics, sociology, etc., not majors in communication studies or advertising or homeland security, which you see even at flagship state unis and major private unis in the US. I think some of the 'innovation' you see in UK universities that is annoying is just a different version of trying to cater to the market. Mostly they have resisted creating ridiculous fake majors, but are innovating in other ways, some probably more dumb, some probably less dumb. A lot of what gets proposed, and that people here freak out about, is stuff that has been common for decades in North America, e.g. have courses run in the summer or having a common curriculum or gen ed requirement at 1st year. (Many UK universities have 20 or 22 weeks total for the year of teaching, aside from the exam period, and I shrink in horror to imagine friends in the US who have to deal with 16 week semesters.)

    I'd be interested to know whether the '45 week teaching period' mentioned by the Essex union means anything more than there would only be 7 weeks of the year in which no teaching was offered. E.g. that students could take late spring and summer courses. If so, that may not ultimately be a good idea (or it may be), but it is hardly a crazy idea. (It would be crazy if the suggestion is that a faculty member has to teach for 47 weeks, but this obviously doesn't follow from the fact students can study for 47 weeks.) I tried googling but it looks like details of the Essex proposal are not public (from a quick search).

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  5. Ian Rumfitt

    While the whole 'sector' (as people like to call it) has been hit by the ever-diminishing real value of the capped home undergraduate fee, the shoe pinches at different points in different institutions and I would be surprised if there is a uniform response to the current difficulties.

    While this will not be news to those in the UK, it may be worth explaining to overseas readers why the so-called 'plate glass' universities, founded in the 1960s, such as Essex and Kent, have found themselves in crisis first. For decades, home undergraduate numbers were subject to tight central control. The Universities Grants Commission and its successors allocated a certain number of home UG places to each British university and while these could, up to a point, redistribute their places internally (i.e. among different departments), there were stiff financial penalties for over-recruiting. That meant that all the pre-1992 universities were pretty well guaranteed to fill their home UG places. Such competition as there was was over the quality of the undergraduates being admitted, rather than over numbers.

    The coalition government (in office from 2010-15) abolished these 'Student Number Controls' (I think w.e.f. 2014) and some of the more prestigious institutions (though not Oxford or Cambridge) significantly expanded their UG intakes, especially in humanities and social sciences, where they did not have to build additional laboratories. This has led to a shortage of students at institutions lower down the pecking order. The problem has been compounded by the extraordinary success of the 'Russell Group' as a marketing brand. Old lags like me remember when this was nothing more than a group of VCs with large medical schools who met in Bloomsbury every few months to compare notes on how different regions of the NHS were funding their teaching hospitals. Over time, though, it has successfully promoted itself as comprising 'the leading UK universities', to the point where many British schools boast of having got x% of their sixth-formers into Russell Group universities. This makes life very difficult for those institutions outside it, such as Essex and Kent, when home UG numbers are flat or declining. There are, to be sure, exceptions. St Andrews continues to recruit well even though it is not in the Russell Group, while some recent joiners would appear to be in trouble. But it is part of the explanation of what we are now seeing.

    As for the next government, which must take office by January 2025 at the latest, whatever it might *wish* to do about the universities, it will be constrained by the dire state of the public finances. So I do not expect much help from that quarter.

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  6. John Collins

    The problem facing the UK HE sector, or at least parts of it, is a direct consequence of the funding model starting in 2012 and leading to free recruitment in 2015. Competition was envisaged along two dimensions: the cost of a degree to the student and the number of students a course could admit. The presumption animating the first idea was that, er, an Oxford degree is worth more than one from Hull (as might be). As it turned out, every university immediately charged the same price for obvious enough reputational reasons (also, as part of the model, central government slashed the capital grant, which meant that universities had to find money that had previously been centrally covered). This made universities quite vulnerable to economic and demographic changes. On the second dimension, the result was that some universities now hoovered up students at the expense of others. Recruitment pools shrank. In short, if one has competition, then there are winners and losers. The problem that was not foreseen, either by university managers or government, is how the new system would work under economic stress. Like turning off HAL in 2001, no-one had ever let a UK university ‘fail’ before. The basic problem is that competition is fine just if it is between the same kind of service to the same market, but universities serve both their distinct local regions and the nation, and rely on local and national recruitment to varying degrees. Once the model meets a failing economy, many universities fall back onto their local base, which is insufficient to fund them with their current staff and course profiles. The net result is that some universities will continue on the standard model (national or at least non-local recruitment and full academic profile) while others will downsize and be obliged to be flexible in serving the needs of their region.

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  7. Brian Leiter

    There's a lot of amusing misperceptions about American universities in this comment, but this one really stood out: "One great thing about the UK system however is that most UK universities still are mainly actual universities with actual disciplines being studied, you know, things like physics, English, philosophy, mathematics, sociology, etc., not majors in communication studies or advertising or homeland security, which you see even at flagship state unis and major private unis in the US." I can't think of any major private research university with a major in "advertising" or "homeland security"; I'm actually hard pressed to think of major state flagships with those majors either. Some flagships have communications or journalism programs, but state flagships typically have broad coverage of all fields that might be useful to the state. That doesn't change the fact that they are "actual universities," many with outstanding departments of physics, philosophy, math, etc.

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  8. there are problems but not, I think, those ones

    The point was that if you look through the sorts of majors offered in the US, there are far more in things like advertising, homeland security, etc. This is true even at flagship state unis and major private unis, although they are less common there of course. (E.g. UT Austin, U Florida, U Georgia and U Illinois U-C have a Bachelor's in Advertising, as do Syracuse and Boston University, which are hardly Princeton but still nationally recognized private R1s; George Washington, a private R1, offers a bachelor's in homeland security, as does SUNY Albany, which I learned about from a faculty member friend there years ago when he and colleagues were lamenting its launch, not because they oppose homeland security but because they thought it was ridiculous as a university discipline (SUNY Albany is not a flagship but is one of the 4 major campuses of a state system in a state with over 30 million people and an R1)).

    These programs are a form of university innovation, different than what you see universities in the UK doing (where innovation is also annoying, but different).One of the reasons (imo) for the much sharper decline in humanities enrolment in the US is the fact that students *can* do degrees in these other 'disciplines'. In the UK they mostly can't, so if they want to go to university, and are STEM-averse, they have to study things like philosophy, history, etc. (this is only part of the explanation, there is also of course more cultural respect for the humanities in the UK for a variety of reasons). Much of the humanities-based enrolment problems in the UK are driven not by a decline in enrolment nationally in those disciplines, but by what Ian Rumfitt pointed out – there has been a sharp redistribution of students toward more elite/attractive universities.

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  9. Brian Leiter

    That's news to me that UT Austin has a school of advertising and public relations–I don't recall it from when I taught there. But state flagships, as I mentioned, often offer programs in a very wide array of areas, given their mission. That doesn't change the fact that UT Austin has a better philosophy department than every school in the UK except Oxford, and that it's physics, computer science, psychology, and sociology departments are among the best in the U.S. This is partly because of a large endowment that helps fund tuition for students who can't afford it and salaries for faculty who would otherwise not be in Austin. It's not a point of pride that UK universities are increasingly broke, that few have endowments, and are cutting their philosophy departments. (George Washington and Syracuse, by the way, are not major private universities, although each have certain strengths.)

    Anyway, let's drop this odd discussion. The reason almost all of the brain drain, including in philosophy, runs from the UK to the US is precisely because, despite some odd "professional" programs, US universities are better funded and better places to work. Of course, that may change if Trump is re-elected…

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  10. Attila Tanyi

    I don’t see how endowment can be a solution to problems in the UK. It’s not like we decide today that university Z should have a large endowment and tomorrow that endowment somehow pops up on their bank account…
    The UK system is in trouble because it is placed insecurely between two worlds. The private and the public, as it were. Its version of the former charges tuition fees but these are just not high enough and anyway, they cannot probably be high enough to be able to fund the system (hence the question of endowments but then these are not and won’t ever be available). It used to be more a version of the latter but stopped half way and got stuck there. There is no move back to public funding since 40 years of neoliberalism greatly weakened the state. I can’t right now see a way out that would also be politically expedient.
    As for jobs and departments in the UK vs US, I always thought the US is a great place for the best, but as for the rest of us, well, I don’t know. And when comparing departments we should not forget that the UK is but a fragment of the US measured in every possible way.

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  11. Attila Tanyi

    https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/28/goldsmiths-academics-to-strike-over-incomprehensible-redundancies

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