English Universities in Crisis ― Markets Without Competition

Recent policies have replaced direct government funding for teaching with fees paid by students. As well as saddling graduates with enormous debt, satisfaction rates are low, a high proportion of graduates are in non-graduate jobs, and public debt from unpaid loans is rocketing. This timely and challenging analysis combines theoretical and data analysis and insights gained from running a university, to give robust new policy proposals: lower fees; reintroduce maintenance awards; impose student number caps; maintain taxpayer funding; cancel the TEF; re-build the external examiner system; restructure the contingent-repayment loan scheme; and establish different roles for different types of institutions, to encourage excellence and ultimately benefit society.

Jefferson Frank was founding head of the Economics Department at Royal Holloway. Trained as a macroeconomist, Jeff has also extensively investigated the gender pay gap, BME and LGBTQ discrimination, inequality in the university sector, and the current funding and fees crisis. He is the author of The Responsible Economy (Routledge, 2014) and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Norman Gowar, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of London, is a former Principal of Royal Holloway. He presented the first lecture ever to be broadcast by the Open University. He co-founded the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Student Complaints and was its first Chairman. Michael Naef is Reader in Economics at Royal Holloway. He works in experimental economics using weird and wonderful substances (testosterone, estrogen, sulpiride) to see what happens. He has published widely, including in Nature and the American Economic Review.