In the early 1990s, I visited the State University of Tbilisi to do some research. It was quite a time ¨C and not in a good way. Georgia was experiencing the most extreme economic collapse of any of the former Soviet states and wages were worth single figures of dollars per week.

As an official visitor, I was actually paid a salary: received in cash (still roubles) from a kiosk in a brown envelope. But in the absence of a UK academic¡¯s salary to top it up, my colleagues had to grow food on their state-allocated land or take on other jobs ¨C or both.

My closest collaborator was well connected and could drive me round in a Lada. When it had mechanical problems, we went to a garage where the mechanic who mended it (very quickly and efficiently) greeted my friend very cordially: he was the senior professor of physics at the university.

One fairly young colleague had neither land nor a second job and he freely admitted that he was going hungry. Quite understandably, he shouted at me (with benefit of translator) about how much better the just-collapsed USSR had been than independent Georgia was.

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The Soviet higher education system had certainly been impressive ¨C at least on paper. More than half ¨C 54 per cent ¨C of the relevant age cohort went to university, whereas in Switzerland it was just 12 per cent ¨C though, of course, a large part of this is mere nominalism: Switzerland had many excellent tertiary institutions that weren¡¯t called universities whereas the USSR was a pioneer in calling every kind of adult educational institution a university even if its range of disciplines was narrow. Vladimir Putin¡¯s second degree, for example, is from the St Petersburg Mining University.

The UK had also restricted the part of its tertiary education system deemed ¡°higher¡±, but that was about to change. In 1990, 19.3 per cent of the age cohort were enrolled in tertiary education as a whole, of which polytechnics formed a very significant chunk. But in 1992, the polytechnics were permitted to rebrand as universities and the sector entered a period of massive expansion which, over the next two decades, turned out to be even greater than anticipated.

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I was opposed to this expansion, believing it to be bad for the universities and for society in general. I kept bumping into the vague assumption that the more people who went to university, the more ¡°developed¡± a society would be and the more prosperous it would become. But the Soviet example was not the only one to call that assumption into question. And I believe that my scepticism has been proved to be well founded.

Source:?

Unkel/ullstein bild via Getty Images

On what the OECD called ¡°tertiary attainment¡±, the UK has now overtaken the US, 57 per cent to 51 per cent. Switzerland is also at 51 per cent, while Russia stands at a huge 67 per cent.

But the implications of having more than half of the relevant age group go to university means different things in different societies.

In much of the world, people attend a university in their home city that has large classes and flexible arrangements. It doesn¡¯t cost much and is compatible with holding all sorts of jobs. By contrast, in the UK (and in England in particular), students traditionally go away from home for a relatively short but expensively provided experience which is, among other things, a rite of passage and a particular interpretation of the process of growing up. That is certainly how I saw it when I was a student in the early 1970s. But I was one of less than 5 per cent who went to university then, and my expensive-by-international-standards education was paid for by other people in the form of grants and scholarships. That is very difficult when the proportion approaches 50 per cent. Hence the need for significant tuition fees, first introduced in England in 1998.

The strains on UK higher education financing are increasingly being felt by academics as well as students. As someone who retired willingly early in 2004, conversations with contemporary academics usually put me in a state of incredulity tinged with guilt. A friend of a friend, for instance, was recently asked by his university to reapply for his job and strongly advised that, though he was a senior lecturer, he would be better placed if he actually applied for a lectureship at a lower salary.

During my career, it never crossed my mind that I could lose my job or face effective demotion. The only issue that troubled me in the 1980s was whether I would lose ¡°tenure¡± by accepting promotion, as seemed to be implied by . But I researched the matter thoroughly and became convinced that, in practice, the legislation would have no effect ¨C and so it proved.

In short, from my 20th-century perspective, the current state of universities seems like a very bad deal for those involved, bad for society and ultimately unsustainable.

As?far as society is concerned, the UK now has a very dysfunctional 5-45-50 split among school-leavers. That is to say, there are 5 per cent who would have always gone to ¡°good¡± universities and continue to do so. There are about 45 per cent who now go to university whereas they probably would not have done in previous eras; they usually have better jobs than they would have if they had not gone to university, but in most cases they do not have better jobs than they might have achieved in the previous system even though they start work later and in debt.

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Then there are about half the population who now face a definite ceiling on their career prospects and earnings because they are not graduates. Even in my generation people were getting to the top of every kind of business and many professions, such as law, nursing and policing, without going to university.

And the most tragic aspect of the current system is that there are an unknown proportion of the lower half of the population who would have gone to university under the system of half a century ago but now feel they cannot. My wife and four of her brothers grew up in a council house with one wage coming in. They all went to university and had successful careers, but they are all adamant that this would not or could not have happened if they had had to get into debt to go to university.

Of course, things have changed since the 1970s, when, for a working-class family, going to university was not considered normal and debt was something to be feared. Both higher education and debt have been normalised ¨C to such an extent that even the tripling of English fees in 2012 did not have the deflationary effect on university participation that was widely feared at the time.

Still, there must be at least some people for whom the widespread aspiration to be a graduate is trumped by the double problem of debt accumulation and income postponement. I note that according to the NUS, the largest extant student debt is ?230,000.

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Source:?

Stephen Dorey ABIPP/Alamy

The reasons to fear the collapse of the system, however, are not that it¡¯s bad or unfair but that it¡¯s unfundable. In that respect, it¡¯s like the Roman Empire and the French ancien regime. Numerous universities are said to be in financial difficulties. In the worst cases, all forms of income are going down: domestic fees, overseas fees, research grants and what was rather irritatingly classified on committees I used to sit on as ¡°earned income¡± (conferences and the like).

In 2023, Helen Hayes, the (Labour) chair of the Commons Education Committee, said that there was ¡°a perfect storm bearing down on institutions¡±, but nothing seems to have been done to help universities weather it. On the contrary, in June that decisions made by the current government ¨C notwithstanding the modest ?285 rise in tuition fees for this coming academic year ¨C have reduced university funding by ?1.4 billion for 2025-26. Is anyone else reminded of the scene in Independence Day when the US president ¨C considered the world leader in those days ¨C manages to establish communication with the invading aliens and asks them what they want humanity to do, to which they reply ¡°Die¡±?

Labour¡¯s fee rise is only the second since 2012, following a similarly modest ?250 rise in 2017-18, and I think the refusal to raise them even enough to keep up with inflation reflects a very widespread disillusionment with universities. I move in very broad circles and hear many stories about universities which combine scepticism and cynicism as never before. The sports journalism course where nobody gets a job as a sports journalist. The young relative who complains that lectures are like graveyards because the material is available online anyway and the graduate students who teach her in smaller classes are so unenthusiastic that they could be mistaken for the living dead. The daughter of a friend who did an art course and says she knew more about art before she went than when she graduated. The parents who watch their offspring using AI to produce assessed work and conclude that the degree isn¡¯t worth the paper it¡¯s written on.

Defenders of the current system often argue that, on average, graduates are still better off than those who do not go to university even when you take student debt into account. But the likes of Paul Wiltshire, who has had four children go to university in the fee-paying era, have pointed out that the average is irrelevant to the marginal candidates whose school qualifications would not have seen them at university in a previous period, many of whom, he estimates, enjoy no graduate premium at all.

Personally, I have six grandchildren currently in secondary school. Even a decade ago, I would have assumed that they would all go to university, as a normal part of growing up. But now there is an issue?that requires careful thought and personal judgement; unless the individual concerned is seriously academic or requires a particular degree for their chosen career, alternatives will be considered.

Either way, I find it difficult to believe that the kind of increase?that would be needed to solve universities¡¯ financial problems would be politically possible. And if it were imposed anyway, I strongly suspect that many people would only be willing to pay it to go to institutions seen as pathways to elite jobs.

Source:?

Elena Rostunova/Alamy

But it is unthinkable that universities will close, isn¡¯t it? To which I must reply that I have a pretty good record for predicting that unthinkable declines and collapses would actually happen ¨C including that of the Soviet Union. The university sector has been bloated to an unsustainable level and is now bound to decline; the questions are by how much and how will it happen.

At one end of the spectrum, a government of a new party ¨C or an old party on a new trajectory ¨C may get into power and boldly and deliberately dismantle large parts of the system. As a competitor for public funding, universities don¡¯t look good compared with health, defence and environment, and we must bear in mind that the British constitution can allow nearly complete control over policy based on 40 per cent of the vote. Such a government might institute a programme of closures and insist on the sale of assets and real estate.

If such a government was seriously hostile, it might even pass a law penalising employment discrimination against non-graduates except in specified instances. Difficult to codify and enforce, yes ¨C but such a law, like other anti-discriminatory legislation, would be more about moral leadership than enforcement and hard cases. And perhaps the government that passed it would not have to do it in a hostile spirit: is anyone really in favour of a system which puts limits on the ranks that can be achieved by non-graduates and, thereby, coerces people to incur tens of thousands of pounds of debt for than those enjoyed by graduates in my era ¨C whose higher education was free to them?

At the other end of the scale, institutions may simply wither and contract like declining football clubs because nobody is prepared to pay for them. Some may die; some may even survive with an overseas presence but not a UK site. Even a moderate government is surely likely to at least encourage the sale of university assets, including land.

Perhaps there will be proposals to fund loans for only certain courses, as the Conservative Party suggested in its manifesto pledge to clamp down on what it called ¡°rip-off¡± degrees. That¡¯s a difficult one: if I were in charge, only purely academic courses would be funded, whereas, in reality, it¡¯s likely to be the opposite; the Conservatives seemed to have in mind courses with lower earnings potential, which could fall into either category.

Regardless of whether that nettle is grasped, future governments will almost certainly be involved in developing and encouraging shorter and cheaper forms of higher education. There were very good nurses and primary school teachers in the past who did not have degrees and surely there will be again. As they used to say in departmental meetings even in my day, the status quo is not an option.

Back then, UK governments did not have to think very hard about whether the higher education system could be maintained or was worth maintaining. But now they very much do. We¡¯re still a long way off professors of physics moonlighting in garages, but we are heading in that direction.

If more and more graduates find that garage work ¨C and other menial employment ¨C is the best career that even a degree can buy them then the wheels could fall off higher education¡¯s bus just as dramatically as they fell off the Soviet Union¡¯s.

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Lincoln Allison is emeritus reader in politics at the?University of Warwick.