A summary and comments on the key points from the debate paper: “Four futures: Shaping the future of higher education in England” by Professor Sir Chris Husbands.
The debate paper is published by the Higher Educational Policy Institute (Hepi) and can be downloaded via this link. It does not make any commentary or reference to any specific subject area but comments on the scenarios and hospitality education are in the final section.
The paper explores four potential scenarios for the future of higher education in England over the next decade. The paper is motivated by the growing financial and policy challenges facing English universities in 2024, including frozen tuition fees, visa restrictions on international students, and structural flaws in research funding.
The four scenarios outlined are:
- The evolution of the present: In this scenario, the government does little to address the challenges within the sector, leading to course closures, reduced student choice and experience, declining participation (especially among disadvantaged groups), institutional mergers and failures.
- Delivering the 2010 vision: The government properly funds the mass higher education system it created in 2010, by increasing tuition fees back to 2010 real terms, reintroducing maintenance grants, lowering the repayment threshold for student loans, funding research at 90% of full economic costs, and enabling sustained international student growth.
- A place-based tertiary system: A unified tertiary education system incorporating further, and higher education is developed with regional coordination, based on a lifelong funding entitlement for levels, 4,5 and 6. Greater flexibility and innovation in design and delivery and modular lifelong credit transfer between institutions, and regionally-focused translational research funded by Innovate UK.
- A differentiated system: The government actively reshapes the sector by concentrating fundamental research in a small number of research-intensive universities, while other institutions focus on translational research, teaching, or niche specialisms based on triennial agreements setting student numbers and access targets.
The paper highlights the difficult choices and trade-offs involved in each scenario. While scenarios 1 (decline) and 2 (full funding) represent extremes, the author argues a combination of scenarios 3 and 4 may be most realistic, enabling regional growth and international competitiveness. However, all scenarios involve painful decisions with no easy solutions.
From a hospitality education perspective: scenario 1 is already in play with evidence of declining enrolments, course closures, homogenisation of courses, and reducing the professional and specialist content. All leading to restricting student choice, the student experience and a widening of the gap between the skills needs of the industry and hospitality education courses.
Scenario 3 offers a more realistic, integrated and cohesive approach to the development of the skills requirements for the industry. With a unified tertiary education system, flexibility in course design and a modular approach where individuals can access the learning they need at the point at which it is needed would recognise the speed of change that is necessary to adapt to new industry practices.
Scenario 4 highlights the opportunities for small institutions with niche specialisms. These institutions tend to be much closer to industry, are flexible and can adapt and change to meet the changing industry and student needs. Hotel schools are good examples of small and niche specialist institutions.
