The administrative class in UK higher education is bloated, overpaid and arrogant
This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Every week, another funding crisis for our poor universities. The causes are multiple, but it’s always one that provokes the most anger from employees: bureaucratic mismanagement. Without question, the administrative class in UK higher education is bloated, overpaid, short-termist, arrogant and constitutionally antithetical to the very spirit of the university. So there is plenty to rail against.
However, the whole ecosystem is in turmoil. UK universities employ 206,000 academic and 246,000 non-academic staff to serve nearly three million students. Yet we see rolling news of cost-cutting mergers, compulsory redundancies, voluntary retirements and inconsequential strike action. The ever-strident if increasingly self-destructive University and College Union (UCU) claims that higher education is in “unprecedented crisis”, forecasting that 10,000 posts will be lost this academic year.
Maybe. But every protester deserves commendation for managing to close their eyes and ears to the elephant in the room, who trumpets a very simple question: how many universities should the UK have? At present, we are in the perverse scenario of regarding the current number (166) as Goldilocksian perfection, neither too high nor too low: any downscaling or closure of an institution is, it follows, pure sacrilege.
How, though, can we address the grim financial reality of the university sector without considering the raw matter of student input and output? To what degree does supply correlate with demand, and to what degree does the public outside academia value a degree, of which nearly a million are awarded in Britain every year?
It took almost 20 years for Tony Blair’s fever dream to become reality
Some more numbers, then. In 1994, 271,000 British students were accepted into universities via UCAS; come 2020, that figure was 570,000, and has plateaued since. It took almost 20 years for Tony Blair’s fever dream that 50 per cent of young Britons enter higher education to become reality, in 2017. Now the figure for under 25s is 58 per cent — appreciably higher than in the United States (43 per cent), Germany (49 per cent) and Italy (50 per cent), although we are outperformed — if that’s the mot juste — by Spain (64 per cent) and Greece (69 per cent). Overseas students have of course supercharged the sector’s growth. Over the last three decades their number has risen almost fourfold: more than a quarter of UK undergraduates are now from overseas, and on postgraduate courses more than half.
The phenomenon is comparatively recent. Everybody knows that England refused to let a third university thrive for more than six centuries — until the 1820s. But the pace of change over the last few generations is less well known. In 1952, there were 19 universities; by 1982, 45; dramatic changes of policy in 1992 raised that number to 89; in 2012, we had 127 universities, and now 147 — or rather, if all degree-awarding institutions are taken in, the blessed 166.
Public support, or indeed employer eagerness, for this stark growth remains unclear. It has certainly been too rapid for the public to comprehend: what does the Clapham Omnibus know of the activity or location of, say, Arden (2015), Ravensbourne (2018), Hartpury (2018) or BIMM (2022)? More importantly, if taxpayers don’t know what universities exist, and those in power can’t explain why they do, how can we start any serious conversation about what needs defending most in higher education?
