Non-elite UK universities face losing a quarter of their undergraduate student income in the next 10 years owing to population declines and “predatory” recruitment practices, according to a new report, which warns that good institutions may fail through no fault of their own.
Many universities are not taking current threats seriously enough, the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) paper argues, with strategic planning still assuming student numbers will grow.
Author Bahram Bekhradnia, who founded the thinktank and now serves as its president, highlights how high-tariff institutions have seen their proportion of students balloon in recent years after they grew their domestic student intake to compensate for declining overseas admissions.
This has increasingly squeezed middle-tariff providers who have in turn adjusted their own recruitment to leave the lower-tariff providers the worst off. These universities have lost between 50,000 to 75,000 students who might otherwise have attended their institutions as a result, the report says.
They have been able to compensate for this in recent years due to expanding student numbers overall but the number of young people in the UK is expected to decline rapidly after 2030.
