Where now for Britain's Universities?

Abstract Although the financial crisis facing the United Kingdom's universities is by now well known, the detailed reasons behind it have been less prominent in public and political debate. It is true that frozen tuition fees have gradually reduced the true value of funding for undergraduate teaching, but the sector's deep instability is also a result of two further errors. The first—removing all controls over home student numbers—made universities’ income generally less reliable and allowed famous institutions to grow very quickly at the expense of others. The second major problem has been successive governments’ encouragement of international student recruitment, upon which universities increasingly depended until Whitehall and Westminster then reversed course and left the sector exposed. Overall, UK higher education now faces a very bleak future, continuously retreating in the face of very limited public sympathy and, therefore, political interest.