Would the fact uni of York is in financial difficulties put you off your dc going there?

[JennyTals]

? Would that influence you at all ?

@cantkeepawayforever the IFS doesn’t put any English degree as the road to riches. M

I really dislike the idea that first in family need a local uni. Where there were not local hubs, students went to the best available. How come we now have people who won’t go anywhere apart from home? Some are very third class and it’s really not good advice to stay local. Our local uni is bottom 10%. Why would a bright kid be advised to look at it? Totally wrong thing to do. I appreciate living costs are high but dc need all the advice available, not just “stay local because you are risk averse”. It’s why Oxbridge struggle to recruit from some areas.

I did not say first in family has to go local. Some - especially where there are other factors such as poverty (less of an issue in the past when full grants covered both tuition and living costs), disability or carer status - may benefit from having an ‘easier’ first step.

Amongst the young people I know of, this ‘easy’ first step has often led to a much more ambitious second step, one they would never have considered initially.

Particularly where MH issues amongst young people are now so prevalent, it may be ‘local first degree’ vs ‘stay at home’ seeming to be the only safe or viable options. ‘Be ambitious’ is very good advice for the robust.

And unfortunately, ime, ‘prestige of university’ is not always positively correlated with ‘quality of pastoral, disability and mental heath care’.

Just to add on Keele. It received it University charter back in 1962. So not even one of the newer unis to start with.

Because for many, the choice isn't 'local bottom of the table' or 'move away to a RG' - it's 'local bottom of the table' or 'don't go'.

Carers, MH, homeless, impoverished - these are kids who wouldn't have gone to uni even 10 years ago. The fact that they do, even if it is their local one, is a huge step for them.

Seriously @TizerorFizz don't underestimate the struggles that some young people have to deal with. And frankly, that RG far away is unlikely to have the support they need - no point going anywhere only to drop out after six months.

@titchy But the “don’t go” could well be the better choice! It’s really not good enough to say to very bright DC that they should stay local if it’s not good enough. There are not that many of the 350,000 going to uni every year that cannot leave home. Most can. Being risk averse is supported by saying local will do too. And then it’s a local job. Probably not at a grad salary. Poor info and advice helps no one.

I agree if you live in a city you are probably well served but there are millions of people who don’t have that luxury in HE terms. We really won’t get social mobility if we continually support local will do when it won’t. It should be academic horses for academic courses at the best you can aspire to.

Going back to the point of the thread, the outgoing VO of Edge Hill (aged 71) is horrified at better unis nabbing his students. None of this is about quality for the students. It’s all about bums on seats and money. He’s anti his type of student trading up. It’s all wrong!

There are always one-off stories of success from lower unis.

An English degree still isn’t training you for much though is it? Even from Cambridge/Oxford. A parent’s DS er know still hasn’t got a job after graduation 18 months ago despite hundreds of applications.

Degrees must add some future value otherwise, what is the point?

Roll your eyes all you want but why get into debt if the degree you gain is never going to pay back.

There should be some consolidation of low-earning under-performing degrees.

I think part of the point I am making is that we are perhaps looking too short term and too individualistically - we see it as necessary that an individual sees positive economic impact from their degree within their immediate career.

Whereas it may be that by becoming ‘a university-attending family’ it is younger relatives and future generations (numerous people) that benefit most materially from the higher and more outward- looking aspirations of a parent / sibling.

However, I would reiterate the point I made upthread - that a structure of regional / city wide ‘universities’, under which there are individual colleges each focusing on their strongest areas, may be a way forward.

To take an example - Birmingham could cover UofB (traditional academic subjects), Birmingham Medical School, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (music performance), Aston (technology), BCU (specific technical courses related to local industry, including jewellery, horology, furniture and design). Pruning out individual bureaucracies and overlapping courses could lead to efficiencies without loss of local access to high quality courses.

There are always one-off stories of success from lower unis.

The majority of grads from lower unis get grad level jobs - hardly one-offs! Even tizer's much maligned local uni has 70% of its grads in skilled jobs a year after they graduate!

A parent’s DS er know still hasn’t got a job after graduation 18 months ago despite hundreds of applications.

Ah - anecdote. The plural of which is not data....

And shared services would streamline even more!

Exactly. One lot of admissions, accommodation, finance, IT support, harmonised student support, local student union ‘spokes’ connected to a central ‘hub’, negotiation of cleaning, maintenance and waste management contracts….

And skills that one ‘college’ has (eg courses designed to take on those already working at a low level in an area and ‘filling the gaps’ to gain a professional degree level qualification) could benefit other college’s specialisms too, as could novel ‘joint’ courses (eg a Birmingham parallel to the very highly sought after joint music course between Manchester Uni and Royal Northern conservatoire).

Totally agree with this. On my course I’d say 50% of students are local and commute in. A mix of mature students who’d never be able to move to a different university town or 18yos whose families can’t afford to let them move away to university.

It’s not a bad uni, it’s not the best uni. However it’s doing a great job of upskilliing and educating local people who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity. I imagine the Keele locals might think the same.

VC of Edge Hill wasn’t quite arguing that. He was arguing RG unis shouldn’t fish down for students to fill places due to the loss of OS student income as it risks them over expanding and reducing their quality and shrinking the market in the process as the non-RG institutions are forced to contract. And finding they couldn’t really support their larger studeht populations. All fair points.

Mergers will need to be forced or will be last resorts as VCs and uni administrators won’t actively seek to strip out their roles and jobs.

@titchy and how much do those grad level jobs pay?

“half of recent graduates got in touch and had taken on low-skilled work”.

https://amp.theguardian.com/money/article/2024/aug/29/uk-graduates-struggle-job-market

and

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/02/death-of-middle-class-professional-spells-danger-for-labour

both worth reading.

Centralised pooled resources and departments make a lot of sense as suggested by PPs above.

Unis need to think more like businesses sadly.

@lollylo Theres no such thing as over expanding - the cap on numbers was lifted in 2014. He’s protecting his own uni which is of dubious value. Why should a better uni not try and replace overseas students? It’s dog eat dog isn’t it? Unfortunately Edge Hill won’t compete although some unis won’t want their students but others, the next rung up, will.

Also it’s only been a uni since 2006 I believe. Of course it should merge with umpteen others nearby.

The problem is that, to replace the income from 1 overseas student, a university may need to take on several UK-based students - with predictable effects on the capacity of labs, lecture halls, student accommodation et al. If fishing in unfamiliar pools of students, their different profiles as well as increased numbers (and cohort-wide increase in needs) is likely to particularly over-stretch welfare, disability and pastoral staff, and may expose weaknesses in their teaching models. Varying the nature of the intake may mean that there may be more need for eg study skills support; small seminars / groups; alternative methods of delivery and assessment to take account if a wider range of needs and previous experiences etc etc.

(As one of the age group of women to be amongst those first admitted to some male Oxbridge colleges, it was genuinely a surprise to many Fellows that simply providing a mirror in each undergraduate room was insufficient preparation to meet the needs of this new group of students.)

The choosy unis won’t be going after Edge Hill students though. They could fairly easily be absorbed in the next rung above. If it damages a uni too much, merge. That’s the obvious answer. Release brown field uni sites for housing. If there is over supply, the provider has to contract.

But is it genuine over-supply? Or is it like toilet rolls in lockdown, where one family grabbing 6 packs (because they could), left some with not enough?

Higher tier universities essentially ‘stockpiling’ students because they can, and then not meeting their needs (or those of their ‘traditional’ student group) AS WELL AS creating an artificially-inflated crisis for lower tier unis serves no-one well.

Well-managed regional / city-wide mergers of a mixed economy of universities with different strengths would be a much better option, both for students and to meet the needs of employers.

Edge Hill, iirc, used to have a great reputation for education. Turn it into a specialist ‘college of education’ within a regional university structure, and (stripped of the additional costs of trying to be a full-spectrum university) let it get on with doing what it does well. Equally it can draw on subject specialists from across its regional
university to ensure its teaching graduates have truly excellent subject knowledge.

Let’s be fair to Edge Hill it’s not in the lower echelons of the rankings - though admittedly the league tables need to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Nevertheless based on the CUG it sits in the upper rather than lower half.

of course in the rarefied world of the MN HE board I should remember that any Uni outside the top 10, or maybe at a push top 15, is considered low ranked.

Apologies, I had mistakenly taken a PP’s view of Edge Hill as ‘the truth’ in making my own comment - though interesting it is like a number of other now-unis in having its origins in very good teacher training colleges. I was trained in one, and would rate the quality of its teacher education at least as highly in its sphere as my much more prestigious original uni was in its different way and subject.

Thanks for the clarification, boys3.