Is the idea of publicly funded higher education dead and buried?

This paper revisits the publicly funded models of higher education that have been supplanted by fee-based or graduate repayment models in some sectors over recent decades. The case study is English higher education, where expansion has benefited historically underrepresented groups and arguably improved standards in some areas. However, evidence indicates that rising student debt levels negatively impact well-being, and it is noteworthy that few other nations have followed England’s policy lead. When fees were increased sharply in 2012, sector leaders and institutional managers were largely complaint, adopting a business realist mindset and normalising new metrics, league tables and other performance indicators. Political and media discourses now focus on tweaking the market-based approach to prevent or delay institutional closures, rather than questioning whether universities function as public-good institutions enriching society as a whole. Were the graduate repayment model delivering unparalleled financial stability to institutions in England, ethical and fairness concerns might be dismissed as idealistic. However, the precarious state of many universities raises fundamental questions about the principles underpinning this model. The cost of abolishing fees for home-domiciled undergraduates is estimated by London Economics to exceed £10 billion per cohort; the cost of persisting with a potentially flawed model remains largely unknown.