The current edition of the OECD’s Education at a Glance, published on 13 September, noted that in 2014, only 28 per cent of the financing of all tertiary education in UK was from public sources, with 72 per cent from private sources, mostly from students. This was the lowest share of public financing in all 33 OECD countries for which figures were available. (WonkHE)
Beneath the surface though, higher education is set to be subjected to more state interference and bureaucracy as part of yet another attempt to create a market as the TEF is set to allow institutions to link fee increases to inflation. At present, with inflation at 0% and hardly projected to soar in coming years, will the TEF actually reward and incentivise good quality teaching, or just provide another drain on the resources academics need?
Despite so many fat years, universities have done little until recently to improve the courses they offer. University spending is driven by the need to compete in university league tables that tend to rank almost everything about a university except the (hard-to-measure) quality of the graduates it produces. Roger Geiger and Donald Heller of Pennsylvania State University say that since 1990, in both public and private colleges, expenditures on instruction have risen more slowly than in any other category of spending, even as student numbers have risen. Universities are, however, spending plenty more on administration and support services (see chart 2).
‘Private equity’s undisclosed business model is value capture through financial engineering focused on the enrichment of a managerial elite, with mass investors mainly involved in providing the cheap debt which makes the whole thing possible.’ Julie Froud and Karel Williams, Private Equity and the Culture of Value Extraction, New Political Economy, 2007