@KilledAnotherPlant the sector started to dive with the Blair decision that half should go to uni. Degrees cost money, and when they were rarer, it was worth paying for it. But there was a 50% target which set the stage for the next act in the crisis.
Universities expanded, but in terms of home students and internationals. Yay, bums on seats, all bringing in the cash. Salaries of the top bods rose (though, notably, not for the rest) and there was investment (borrowing based) in fancy buildings and other things that looked nice). Some investments were needed, but others…not so much.
It was an era of expansion. But then it started to go wrong. Turns out that borrowing has to be repaid. This becomes harder and harder when the fees you are allowed to charge fail to rise at all, let alone with inflation. You become reliant on milking money from the internationals and grad students to try and keep the ship afloat (and continue to pay the captains ridiculous sums). You have no wiggle room for shocks - which come in the form of the financial crash, Brexit, wars, and hostility to immigration due to insufficient care being paid to the majority of the coal inhabitants..
To compound matters, there’s an ever increasing weight of regulations weighing you down. In the same way the government tries to make schools responsible for everything, that ideology infects the HE sector (or how it’s viewed). Rules and regulations proliferate, meaning you need an army of managers just to handle them all. Every thing that happens to a student becomes your fault, regardless of whether you had anything to do with it.
And the tsunami of SEN issues heading up from schools also have to be accommodated - putting pressure on the teaching staff who you can’t afford to provide with help because there’s no money now. So you accommodate by allowing twenty seven opportunities to resit. The disability centre tells the lecturers they have to differentiate all their slides and be forever available to everyone. You remove the research periods (and then wonder why your top researchers hate working for you now).
Your admin staff seem to come and go like via a revolving door. All institutional memory of how systems work and what needs to be done, when, is lost because you pay so badly that no one sticks around. admin workload magically transfers on to the academics (who can’t run the systems either), increasing their workload yet further - but don’t worry! the top echelons are going to implement some random expensive programme that won’t work, without ever asking what people need, rather than using the money to hire competent help.
Then comes the day that you can no longer cook the books enough to look viable. Game over. But you’re too big to fail and your demise will destroy the economy of a town/city/entire county. So there are more loans and deals done in the background, so that you can continue to stumble along as a zombie entity, for another 20 years, progressively decaying until you collapse.