Shropshire Star comment: Universities face testing future

They also create the best part of a million full time jobs and deliver a fortune’s worth of exports – and that’s before we mention the vital research that the sector conducts.

Each year thousands of people head off into the working world armed with a degree from a British university, and they are all the better for it.

Yet as with every other aspect of our lives as we prepare to enter a post-Covid world, universities are facing a testing future.

While many of them are financially stable for the time being, they are run on a model that depends heavily on income from international students.

Over the past 20 years, the widely held view is that there has been no need to address this reliance.

The foreign students – many of whom are from the Far East – were not going anywhere soon, and with the reputation of our university sector continuing to blossom, the funding model seemed to be on solid ground.

Now it is time for a rethink.

A worst case scenario suggests our universities could lose nearly £800m this year alone due to the pandemic, with a new study warning that at least half of the shortfall will result from students from East Asia staying away.

If we want to preserve Britain’s universities, three things simply must happen.

The first is that all universities must look at how courses can be reorganised to ensure they are offering the best possible value for money.

This needs to happen alongside a temporary increase in government grants, with additional funding likely to be a necessity over the next couple of years in order to prevent severe cuts including job losses and, in some cases, closures.

But on top of this, there must be a drive to end the reliance on fees from international students.

If the UK’s university sector is to flourish in years to come, it will need to have a balanced student body that is capable of weathering any future shocks to the system.