In late November 2022, the University and College Union (UCU) entered into Industrial Action, a three-day strike against deep-routed issues in Higher Education. 70,000 Staff from across 150 Universities were balloted on issues around pay, conditions, workload and pensions, with many academic and support staff citing pay and conditions as being the main issue. As we look towards the start of the 2025/26 academic year, the same issues are still present.
As a relatively new lecturer I have seen first-hand the issues that myself and my colleagues are (still) hoping to resolve. But these issues are not ours alone. You see, our working conditions are students’ learning conditions. They are one and the same, and if we are getting a poor deal, so are the students, and no member of staff in any university wants students to suffer.
Universities should be places of shared learning, a hub of innovation, creativity, and co-production, where both students and academic staff work together to critique and disentangle ‘known-knowns’, whilst simultaneously discovering new ‘known-unknowns’. The University should be a place of free-thinking, inspiration, motivation and achievement, a dynamic space that arouses new interests, and recognises and rewards enthusiastic minds.
Inside academia it is true that not all universities are equal, some have far more power than others. We know this, and as academics, we are reminded of this periodically through several metrics associated with the marketisation of HE. Brown (2015) locates the marketisation of HE back to the early 1980s and provides a detailed summary of policy changes by the Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown Governments, all in the pursuit of a neoliberal-capitalist ideology. The beginning of marketisation of HEIs forced the introduction of higher fees, and by the mid-2000s fees for attending university were somewhere in the region of £3,300 per year. Following the election of the Cameron-Clegg government in 2010 fees were inflated to the grotesque some of over £9,000 per year by 2012. This, and with the attendant fall-out apology issued by Nick Clegg, led to some of the largest protests that have ever happened on the streets of the UK. To say that students (and academic staff) were pissed-off would be an understatement. It was a hyper-marketisation of HE.
Now, and directly because of this, marketisation means that all teaching-focused HEIs now must be competitive with each other for ‘bums-on-seats’ - each student has a monetary value attached to them, permitting the university to, effectively, stay alive through their recruitment. But what it also means is that HEIs enter the cut-throat neoliberal world - acting like competitive businesses that literally need to attract ‘customers’, but simultaneously, they do not want ‘students’ to feel like ‘consumers’.
However, like any consumer, potential students now shop around for the best deals (places to study), usually measured by the above metrics (including things such as; learning & entertainment resources, satisfaction rate, academic support, etc.) - big-named/well-funded HEIs do very well here. What this means is that because students are paying for an education, like any paying customer, the client also wants the best value for money. What I mean by this is that many students are no longer coming to university to study a subject they love, but one that will reward them with the best job postgraduation. They have fallen into the trap of neoliberalism.
I can say with sincerity that most (if not all) university staff do not believe or even want marketisation policies to form any part of the Higher Education system. Education, on all levels, should be a public good; free, open, and accessible. We recognise that, due to the encouragement of market policies and the stimulation of competition (from students and HEIs), that students are feeling more and more precarious; yet aren’t universities supposed to be nurturing places of innovation, collaboration, and achievement?
This precarity has a direct impact on the ability and achievements of the student. In universities we recommend that students work no more than 20-hours per week, because, as part of their student charter, they are signed-up to a full-time course of study and therefore should be dedicating most of their time to that learning and development. However, what we are increasingly seeing is this is sadly not the case. I know that many of my students are forced to work full-time, or in multiple jobs, simply so that they can afford to stay as a registered student.
For many it really is a Catch-22 scenario. What this means is that because the student has to keep their head above the water the student has less time to dedicate to their studies. They inevitably miss lectures, are over-worked, tired, stretched, exhausted, stressed and struggling with poorer levels of mental ill health. This results in poor attendance and attainment, and ultimately missed deadlines for essays and issues with progression and retention. But this also puts further pressure on the staff in the universities too. It results in increases in the use of counselling and wellbeing services, significant demands on more in-depth personal tutoring, and the universities deploying more and more health and welfare resources. Some university staff, although not trained, end-up more of a social worker than a chemist.
Being a student is expensive and a recent BBC report (Gruet & Leonard, 2022) finds that students are struggling. As the cost-of-living rises, students inevitably feel the pinch more than most. Over recent years, and directly linked to the rise in tuition fees, students and staff alike are sharing the same difficulties. The pressure to achieve, the feeling of despondency and anomie, and social anxieties, the overall competitive nature of HE has increased over the last decade, and it has not been for the better. Neoliberal competition and its resulting precarity for both staff (fearing they may be out of a job if they don’t recruit well), and students for obvious financial reasons, just doesn’t sit right in what should, effectively be a public good. Competition, fees, and inequality have ruptured the integrity of the academic system. Previously, Prof Michael Draper an expert in academic integrity identified that students increasingly tempted to purchase parts of their education through contract cheating sites. These ‘essay mills’ were websites that would write bespoke essays for students in return for a fee. But usually resulted in blackmail, extortion, and expulsion from courses when the student gets caught. These have been pretty much eliminated through the advances in AI. (I have an article on this - below).
A Cost-of-Learning Crisis: poverty amongst university students
As the academic year for many draws to an end, many students across the UK will be breathing a sigh of relief, not simply because the summer represents a break from studying perse, but, because a campus breather such as this offers respite from possibly the biggest challenge to being a student today - Poverty.
The answer: what would ease all the above pressures that students face is a renewed look at how the socio-economic and political system treats students. Students need the time and the space to concentrate fully on being a ‘student’, and to longer be a pressured ‘customer’.
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one way in which the student can really become a student once more. A UBI would significantly reduce the pressure placed on students to balance competing responsibilities and would allow them to focus once more on being a student. What’s more, this will also relieve the pressure currently being faced by university staff as they see declining levels of physical and mental health with their students. It will also almost certainly remove the desire for students to use contract cheating companies too.
Students and the communities in which they live, work and support are the next generation of industry innovators, community leaders, nurses, teachers, technicians, artists, creatives, engineers, and so much more. And as a university lecturer, I hope we can help them achieve this position and really make education a public good once more; a UBI goes a long way to achieving this.