The big idea: how can England’s universities survive?

The government’s laissez-faire approach has imperilled the whole system. It’s time for a radical rethink

If you listened to ministers, you’d think that there’s a crisis of “wokeness” on campus. Every young person is apparently simultaneously an overvulnerable snowflake terrified of opinions and a yowling fighter in the culture wars. But although there might well be a problem with the diversity and range of ideas in the academy, choosing to focus on it amounts to pointing at a fire in a wastepaper bin while the buildings burn down. The real problems are the result of government abandoning all management of the university world.

There used to be a cap on individual universities’ student numbers. Each of them got a figure imposed from the centre, and each received an appropriate level of funding. So far, so good. Every institution had a certain number of places, and they worked out what A-level offers they could make, based on those numbers, combined with past experience of how students would fare compared to predicted grades. Those universities at the “top” asked for As, in the “middle” Bs, and so on.