Tower and Town, April 2018

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From School To University

Fifteen years ago Facebook did not exist, but today a nation of Facebook users would be the third largest in the world. University education has experienced extraordinary change too, and one shift is also in scale which we may measure in Football World Cup terms: when the last significant competition was hosted and won by England 63 universities were attended by 27,000 students, and by the time of the most recent competition in Brazil the number of universities had nearly tripled to accommodate over 2.3 million students. For comparison, this vast student population equates to all those serving in the British Armed Forces added to the number of employees in the NHS, our largest employer.

Another change is in finance. When I went to university the government paid for tuition and living expenses that included beer.  My daughter, currently in her second year, is painfully aware that her opportunity will cost over £50,000 by the time she graduates, and she is not much encouraged by IFS calculations that four out of five of her cohort will never earn enough to finish paying the money back. 

A further remarkable development, often linked to finance, has been the interest in universities abroad.  Costs in the rest of Europe are far less than here, with tuition ranging from zero in Finland to under £2,000 in anglophile Holland, where BA courses taught in English have doubled from 188 in 2011 to 426 today, and the number of British students has tripled to 2,778 over the same period. With Canada costing about the same as the UK, North America has attracted closer scrutiny too, and even the pricy US universities have a growing appeal to Brits, mostly with their scholarships.  11,489 British students were lured to America in 2016-17, some 30% more than in 2009-10. Further afield, the globally ranked Australasian universities also beckon, along with other exotic possibilities such as that my son is enjoying in Abu Dhabi where he has just begun at the American university of NYU. The scholarship that makes this possible would even cover beer, if it were available. If, despite the threats of Brexit and Trump, overseas growth is maintained then increasing numbers of students and their families will need to keep in touch, and Facebook looks set to expand yet more.

Guy Nobes