New research/polling from The Sutton Trust outlines the impact of the cost of living crisis on students & their experience of university.
Around two-thirds of students have needed to take on part-time work while studying, with an impact on their studies including missed classes as well as missed assignment deadlines.
While more evident for students from the most deprived areas, many rich(er) students also need to work to survive university.
"When applying a risk assessment framework to universities, research is an activity that is inherently high risk, since we are working to create something that is not yet known."
Its crunch time for the current university business model as (in a representative sample of 24 unis), deposits from international students ahead of studying in 2024/25 have dropped by over 50%.
Having been thrust into a cross-subsidy model where non-UK students have been keeping many universities afloat, this drastic reduction (if widespread) will either force universities into yet another business model (who knows what?) or will see some/many bankrupted!
The number of international students paying deposits to study at UK universities has “plummeted” after Rishi Sunak put restrictions on education visas.
Now Sunak is under pressure from ministers to abolish the graduate visa route entirely. Ludicrous short-sightedness, just to appease rightwing headbangers.
This week the Migration Advisory Committee reports back to James Cleverly on his latest 'tightening up' on international student visas, explicitly intended to stop 'abuses' of the system.
But the real impact will to further disrupt an already problematic business model for universities into which they have been forced by successive government (the dependence of international student fees to balance the books) & disrupting the UK's global reputation.
“…For students and faculty exercising their right to academic freedom including the freedom to protest? Or for those who require a militarized system of surveillance and policing in order to feel “comfortable” in maintaining a status quo that has continued for far too long?”
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Clearly we can think of universities as platforms, where many actors plays roles of producers and consumers, users and customers.
I’m wary of nostalgia about the role universities have played in the past, and of idealized models.
But I think we may be in the middle stage - the university platform in many countries seems to have been transformed into worker-production systems where, absurdly, the proto-workers go into debt to gain credentials that allow them access to labour markets.
The business customers here are employers and lenders, who gain access to a pool of people who are financially precarious from whom to extract both labour and loan repayments.
I’m not sure universities (or many businesses, for that matter) actually reach the final stage of enshittification. Though maybe the pressure to cut costs and generate operating revenue (from tuition, often from exorbitant fees charged to international students, but also via commercialization of research) is an example of moving into the third stage?
On universities dealing with campus protests - universities as factories. 'They are not seeing their role as what traditionally was the role of universities, that is to try to impart to the younger generation values of freedom, morality, compassion, self-abnegation, empathy or whatever else is considered desirable. Their role today is to be the CEOs of factories that are called universities.' https://glineq.blogspot.com/2024/05/universities-as-factories.html #universities
76 universities in #Spain decided to sever cooperation relations with #Israeli#universities and research centers and linked the return of cooperation to the occupation universities’ condemnation of the #occupation army’s invasion of the #Gaza Strip.