A Sector in Freefall

The Queen Mary University of London branch of the University and College Union, of which I am co-chair, hosts a webpage, UK HE shrinking, that lists redundancy and closure programmes at UK universities. The list, now 93 institutions long, is the only public attempt so far to track what is happening to higher education institutions in the UK. It is an index of a sector in freefall.

A year ago I received an email from an HR director at another university, asking me to change the description of their ‘transformation’ programme on the list. The HR director’s university was established in the 1960s. It has an international research reputation and a local undergraduate student population. Like most UK universities, it has an accounting model that speculates on overseas fees for postgraduate taught degrees, and, when it doesn’t meet these budgets, cuts undergraduate programmes predominantly taken by home students.

It has quite a lot in common with the fictional Brent University, the setting for Jack Rooke’s BAFTA-winning sitcom, Big Boys, filmed at the Harrow campus of the University of Westminster (where Rooke studied). Brent University is probably a ‘post-1992’ institution – named for the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act which enabled polytechnics and other colleges to take on degree-awarding powers, removing them from local government control and opening up a new market. About half of UK undergraduates study at a post-1992; more than a third of undergraduates live at home while studying. One of the many good things about Big Boys is that it reflects a university experience like most people’s university experience: which is to say, not Oxbridge.

Set in 2013-16, Big Boys captures university life at the peak of New Labour’s project for higher education, having been given a steroid shot by the 2010s coalition government. After abolishing the student maintenance grant and introducing fees (capped at £1000 a year) in 1998, New Labour passed the 2004 Higher Education Act, which brought in variable ‘top-up fees’ and the model of loans, debts and market competition between higher education ‘providers’ that we live with today.

The two main characters in Big Boys, Jack (Dylan Llewellyn) and Danny (Jon Pointing), are both the first in their families to go to university. Jack has been living with his mother, down the road from the university. His father, a taxi driver, has recently died. Danny is a mature student (aged 25) who has been living with his grandmother in Margate. He’s all but estranged from his parents, and has a cousin who’s in and out of prison. Both Jack and Danny get scholarships to study journalism. Brent University appears to fulfil the meritocratic promise of New Labour’s commitment to increase the number of students in higher education by 50 per cent. But the promise was always false, the infrastructure never meant for everyone. When Jack and Danny turn up for their first day, they are told they can’t move into their halls because of leaks (‘not water, just gas!’) and are offered alternative accommodation in a shed.

Even in a TV show about the way the people you meet at university might just save your life, no one really knows what university is for. In the opening episode, upset after a first kiss goes comically wrong, Jack tells Danny: ‘The only reason I’m even here is because I can’t just sit on the sofa with my mum anymore.’ It’s a joke, and it isn’t. Jack and Danny go to university because they don’t know what else to do. The government recently announced that the number of young people not in education, employment or training is almost a million. If all the universities in the UK closed tomorrow, the number of NEETs would rise by nearly three million.

Jack and Danny’s friend Yemi, who is studying fashion, drops out before the end of his degree because he realises it won’t buy him the future he wants. Yemi’s family can support him financially to work in fashion, so what is he doing at university? Only Corinne, the serious, studious one, knows why she is there: she wants to do a PhD (and didn’t get into Oxford).

From a university worker’s perspective, the harbinger of the current crisis is Jules, a student union officer who talks in marketing cliches about student experience, unconsciously registering her anxiety about the university being a branch of the border police: ‘I just need to return this parcel to ISIS’; ‘You mean ASOS’; ‘Right.’ Her job includes a bit of everything and requires specialist knowledge of the institution, students and staff. When UK universities were growing, staffing budgets increased to ensure high National Student Survey scores for ‘student experience’, and many people were hired to roles like Jules’s in different academic and professional service departments.

People doing the same work as Jules in universities now are often the first to be made redundant in ‘transformation programmes’ and replaced by an automated service. As in other sectors, the introduction of automation in HE is not about replacing human labour but about devaluing it, as professional service staff are redeployed in downgraded roles to moderate bots doing the work they used to do themselves.

Big Boys finishes with the end of Danny and Jack’s three-year degree. Jack graduates but Danny doesn’t; he returns to Margate, stops taking his medication and everything falls apart. The character is based in part on a friend of Rooke’s who died by suicide some time after university. In the final episode, Rooke walks on screen and sits with Ponting on a bench at the beach to discuss a different ending: what if Jules corrals friends and academics to support Danny, what if the university gets Danny a room in halls for the summer, what if Danny finishes his degree, what if he then gets a job as the student officer, replacing Jules when she leaves?

But if the show kept running, and we stayed in its heart-stopping counterfactual, Danny would eventually be replaced by an automated service, an AI. And the AI wouldn’t know to call a friend of a struggling student, or see that a student needed something without the student asking. And if a student tried to get past the AI, to talk with a human being, they would not reach someone working at Brent University. They would have to email another student officer from, say, Edgware University. Because when it turned out that replacing skilled workers with AI was not the accounting trick it seemed, the Office for Students would have stepped in and ordered the two failing universities to merge. And this other student officer, who for no extra pay would now be supporting all the students of the newly merged BrentWare University, may or may not have time to raise a ticket to tell the system that a student was in trouble.

Meanwhile, the HR director of the new BrentWare University, two years into an ambitious five-year transformation programme that required the closure of a whole academic department to pay for a management consultancy to print out a pdf with a road map to success, would write to the UCU branch hosting the ‘UK HE still shrinking’ page, and ask: can I join the union?