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Tuition fees are likely to rise above the minimum £9,000 (Rs.8.8 lakh) per year to enable spending cuts proposed by the new Conservative government, senior leaders in education have suggested, as universities also prepare a “powerful” public campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union.
The Tories’ election triumph will set in motion lobbying efforts by the sector on key issues including Europe and university funding, given that the party is committed to £30 billion (Rs.296,553 crore) in cuts. The department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), which includes research and higher education, is a non-protected department.
Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of Universities UK (UUK), says one of the group’s priorities would be government funding because of the possibility that there “may be an emergency budget preceding a broader spending review later in the year”. That would raise “some pretty urgent questions about the impact on the BIS budget”, including research funding as a “top priority”, she told Times Higher Education. Within BIS, there could be pressure to prune the research budget or cut the remaining areas of direct public funding for university teaching (widening participation and high-cost subjects).
Do the looming cuts to the BIS budget make it likely that a rise in fees might accompany them? “Yes, I think that there may be (a rise),” says Dandridge. “I think it’s something that we will be making explicit when we publish the work of our student funding panel… we’re still crafting our position on that.”
William Hague, the former Tory leader, said before the election that a rise in fees in the next Parliament had not been ruled out. And Vince Cable, the former Liberal Democrat business secretary who lost his seat in the general election, had previously suggested there would be “consequences” for universities from the policies of George Osborne, the chancellor.
Last October at the Lib-Dem conference, Cable said: “… there would be a significant increase in fees, a reduction in the (student loan repayment) threshold, and the thing which would save money would be really taking a lot of money out of student support — effectively by stopping grants and turning them to loans, something of that kind.”
On Europe, the Conservatives are committed to holding an in-out referendum on EU membership by 2017, although there are suggestions that David Cameron could seek to hold the vote next year. UUK has previously said Britain’s universities could benefit from £1.2 billion a year in European research funding.
According to Dandridge, UUK would be involved in “a public-facing campaign to talk very clearly and explicitly about the value of European membership and the damage…that would be done if we were to leave. We hope it will be a powerful voice in that campaign. But I think we’ve got to move on that quite quickly because we don’t know the timescale of any referendum.”
University mergers wave
University mergers are on the rise in Europe, according to a new report of the European University Association (EUA). The research reveals there were 55 mergers between 2009-14, up from 25 in the five preceding years. Key factors driving consolidation include the desire to improve the quality of teaching and research, the need to strengthen the competitive position of a university and the aim of saving money.
The report, University Mergers in Europe, maps and analyses the incidence of mergers and concentration in the higher education systems of 19 countries.
It indicates there were 92 mergers between 2000-15 and that the number “increased significantly” from 2007. Information for 2015 is incomplete, but 14 mergers took place in 2014, 12 in 2013 and eight in 2012, according to the report. This compares with just one in 2000, two in 2001 and three in 2002, it adds.
Thomas Estermann, director for governance and funding at EUA and one of the report’s authors, says that 2013 and 2014 were “record years” for mergers, but that the phenomenon has grown continually in Europe, particularly in the past five years.
The report says the upswing since 2007 is “notably due to the wave of mergers in Denmark in 2007 and to a series of individual mergers taking place in different countries”. There were large-scale changes in Belgium between 2009-11 in the French-speaking part of the country, and “university associations” were set up in 2013 in Flanders, while in France a series of mergers took place as part of a broader trend to create “university communities”.
A plan to rationalise higher education in Greece by merging some institutions and closing others in the wake of the economic crisis was also implemented during 2013 and 2014. “In other countries, mergers have been a more isolated phenomenon,” the EUA says.
THE Under-50 varsity rankings
Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) has topped the list of the world’s 100 best universities under 50 years old for the first time, while Australia has overtaken the UK as the nation with the deepest reservoir of young talent.
Founded in 1969, EPFL has moved to pole position from second place, where it has been sitting since the first Times Higher Education 100 Under 50 rankings in 2012. It has swapped places with three-time leader Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea.
The remainder of the top five in the THE 100 Under-50 2015 is static, with East Asian institutions continuing to dominate: the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) holds on to third, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology retains fourth, while Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University remains in fifth. Unsurprisingly, no new-age Indian university is listed among the Top 100.
The 100 Under 50 list is the only THE global ranking in which the Asia-Pacific region outperforms the traditionally dominant Western powerhouses of North America and Europe. However, Simon Marginson, professor of international higher education at the UCL Institute of Education, says this is set to change over the next few years. “Given the fast-moving growth of published science in East Asia, by another 15 years or so there will be significant growth in East Asian universities in the top 200 (of the overall THE World University Rankings), displacing some of the established players from English-speaking countries,” he predicts.
Australia is the best-represented country in the list for the first time in its history, with 16 institutions. The UK, which has 15 universities featured, has fallen to second. The two countries shared the top spot last year, with 14 institutions each.
“While there is no suggestion that the UK’s great 1960s institutions are likely to lose their world-class status any time soon, it must be cause for concern that the fresh waves of British universities created since the 1990s have yet to make any mark in the global rankings,” says THE rankings editor, Phil Baty.
(Excerpted and adapted from )