A Crisis Is Brewing at U.K. Universities
CAMBRIDGE, England—The U.K.’s storied universities have a problem. They lose money on almost every British student they teach. The country’s university system boasts 11 of the world’s top 100 universities, with three in the top 10—in a country that has just 1% of the global population.
The system’s health has an outsize impact on both the future of the world’s sixth-biggest economy and globally important research. That system is increasingly at risk from politics. Unlike in the U.S., where private universities and many state schools set their own tuition, in England and Wales the government sets a price cap on tuition for all domestic undergraduate students—the same cap for every college from Cambridge to Coventry.
Since 2010, the price cap has remained essentially frozen, even as inflation sharply raises costs. Northern Ireland cuts tuition in half for domestic students. In Scotland, there is no tuition at all.
The upshot: While U.S. universities charge ever higher tuition in an arms race for the best facilities and research, leading to a soaring student debt crisis, U.K. universities have the opposite problem.
They aren’t able to charge enough. To bridge the gap, they are cutting back on everything from research to teacher salaries to dorm rooms, and teaching more classes online. They are increasingly relying on foreign students, who are charged market rates.
And they are cutting back on local students: The percentage of British teens going to college is now falling for the first time in generations. “It’s a turning point," said Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at the University of Oxford. Even the U.K.’s most elite universities could see finances and quality decline if the government doesn’t step in,
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