The marketisation of English higher education over the past 13 years has been blamed by many for the sector’s current financial woes.

The tripling of tuition fees in 2012, followed by the removal of the cap on student numbers in 2015-16 and the replacement of a sector steward, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with a market regulator, the Office for Students, is claimed to have created a free-for-all in student recruitment that has forced the losers into drastic cost-reduction measures – which may still not save them from institutional failure.

But is it really that simple?

One issue, of course, is that while student recruitment is now unregulated (except for medicine), that is not true of the fee that universities can charge domestic undergraduates – which, in most cases, is their main source of revenue. In 2012-13 the home undergraduate fee cap was set by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition at £9,000 a year, but was not increased again until 2017-18 – and then only by £250. Another eight years elapsed before the incoming Labour government raised it to £9,535 in 2025-26.

The recent Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper’s suggestion that the cap will now rise annually with inflation – provided that an institution’s teaching quality is not deemed inadequate – has been met with something of a public outcry. But shows that funding per student in real terms peaked in 2015-16. Since then, it has fallen year-on-year,��with Universities UK analysis, published earlier this week, showing a cumulative real-terms shortfall over the past��10 years��as��£31.4 billion in England.

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Hence, in 2025-26, real-terms tuition fees are lower for home undergraduates than at any point since 2011-12; DataHE estimates that the maximum fee is now worth only £5,680 in 2012 money. Needless to say, the actual cost of delivering home undergraduate courses on average, according to Transparent Approach to Costing (Trac) data, is much higher than that.

The past decade has certainly had profound impacts on the sector as a whole, and for some individual providers it has been strategically and structurally transformational – for better or for worse.

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As ever in a market, there are winners and losers. The former include those with the reputation, resources and geographic opportunity to expand, as well as those that are most responsive to change and able to take early-mover advantage. The losers consist of providers that, for a host of exogenous and endogenous reasons, have failed to maintain their enrolment numbers – either domestic or international.

There is a clear link between enrolments and fee income, although the net fee per student to an institution can vary considerably, from as little as £1,000, where teaching is delivered by a third party, to over £40,000 for an international student at a prestigious university. We are also conscious that some larger providers also have significant income from research and innovation, not to mention accommodation and other sources. Still, enrolment figures are a critical part of the story.

We have examined Hesa data for academic years 2014-15 to 2023-24 (the most up-to-date data) to show comparative institutional trends in home and international student enrolment. During that decade, the total UK university student population grew by 308,250 (31 per cent), to just under 1,320,000, and the vast majority of universities grew their enrolments: 161 did so (82 per cent), against 36 (18 per cent) that contracted.

The proportional figure for contractions, however, was higher outside England, with seven of the 30 institutions in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (23 per cent) decreasing their number of students.

Fifteen universities (13 of them English, two Scottish) grew by more than 10,000 students over that 10-year period, and 11 expanded by more than 11,000 – often considered to be the size of a medium-sized university. The three institutions with the biggest growth expanded by over 20,000 students: BPP University (28,915), Canterbury Christ Church University (22,410) and UCL (21,490).

Change in overall student recruitment for providers between 2014-15 and 2023-24

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Hesa

In proportional terms, the 10 bigger growers all increased their student numbers by at least 40 per cent. In our more detailed analysis by institution we have focused on providers in England��owing to the different funding and policy drivers in devolved nations. The largest proportionate increase – a massive 3,670 per cent – was at the University of Law, which increased its enrolment from��only 485 in 2014-15 to 18,285 in 2023-24. Like BPP, the University of Law is a privately owned university with taught degree awarding powers (TDAP). In the past several years it has expanded the subjects it offers beyond just law to now include a range of general business degrees. It has also expanded its campuses, both in the UK and overseas, and has begun offering online learning, too.

The top 20 English institutions in terms of growth are geographically widespread and split across several mission groups. As well as the two multi-campus private universities, they include:

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• Six from GuildHE (BPP, Law, Bath Spa, Leeds Trinity, Buckinghamshire New, Suffolk)
• Six from the Russell Group (UCL, Exeter, King’s, Bristol, Queen Mary and Manchester)
• Five from the University Alliance (Anglia Ruskin, Hertfordshire, UWE, Greenwich and Birmingham City)
• Four from Million Plus (Canterbury Christ Church, Bath Spa, Leeds Trinity, Suffolk)
• One non-aligned (Nottingham Trent)

(Note that some universities are in more than one group and that “GuildHE” includes its sub-association, GuildHE Research.)

Given inflation’s negative impact on the domestic unit of resource, breaking even will generally require enrolment expansion – unless there is significant improvement in other financial factors. But the Hesa figures reveal that five universities reduced their student enrolments over the 10-year period by at least 3,000, the size of a small university. And 10 reduced theirs by at least 1,750, amounting to a proportional fall of at least 7.5 per cent.

The biggest contraction was at the University of Plymouth, which saw an annual enrolment reduction of 6,665 students – a 26 per cent fall. Plymouth is a general regional university serving the south-west of England, in a city that has three other higher education providers but is only England’s 19 largest by population.

Birkbeck, University of London was the second biggest faller by raw numbers, seeing its enrolment decline by 5,495 students. This was the largest proportional fall (39 per cent) among mainstream universities. Birkbeck is well known as a specialist in evening classes, typically for mature students, but that market has suffered from a series of changes that have decreased the funding for mature learners by both the state and the private sector.

Other universities that have decreased significantly in size include Brighton, Kingston, Edge Hill, Leeds Beckett, Bedfordshire and Kent.

Again, the 20 providers that have contracted the most are spread widely across regions and categories. They include:

• Eight non-aligned institutions (Plymouth, Birkbeck, Kent, St George’s, Hull, London School of Science and Technology, London South Bank, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
• Four from the University Alliance (South Wales, Brighton, Kingston, Leeds Beckett)
• Four from Million Plus (Bedfordshire, Solent, Middlesex, Lancashire)
• Three from the Cathedral Group (Edge Hill, Chester, Liverpool Hope)
• Two from GuildHE (Solent, Worcester)
• One private (London School of Science and Technology).

The reason for contractions will be different in each case, but it is very unlikely that reductions of this size will have been strategically planned. Almost certainly, they will have been a result of market pressures, often from local and regional competitors.

Such changes will also have obliged some providers to make substantial cost savings and efficiency improvements – with inevitable consequences for the services and range of activities they deliver.

Each institution has responded to marketisation in a different way. Some have become market-makers; that is, they have shaped their relationship with the market in a way they see as strategically positive to them. Others have been market-takers. Their inability or unwillingness to control their relationship with the market has left them exposed to the cumulative impact of every other provider’s strategy – combined with exogenous factors such as population demographics, participation rates and the attractiveness of alternatives to higher education.

Of course, the student market is not just domestic. And the fact that international fees are uncapped has led many institutions to see their salvation in increasing international, rather than domestic, enrolment. That is illustrated in the figure below, which shows the distribution of providers based on the change in their numbers of international versus home students over the decade.

Generally, providers have expanded more internationally than domestically, with some making very significant changes to their enrolment numbers. Those in the top right quadrant have grown both home and international enrolments, while those in the bottom left have seen both contract.

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Change in student numbers 2014-15 to 2023-24

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We have developed a typology of universities based on how home and international student enrolments have changed over the past 10 years:

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And, below, we illustrate the trajectories of the six canonical institutions mentioned in the table.

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Hesa

By letting loose the market, the Coalition government and its successors have passively reshaped the sector. Universities that garnered more resources have enjoyed opportunities for investments in infrastructure, new staff, research and teaching. For those that have not, though, there have been inevitable consequences on staff numbers, infrastructure investment and course breadth. Worse could be yet to come.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone. Since 2017-18, there have been increasingly loud siren calls warning of the financial pressures that universities are facing and the impacts that these are having on research and teaching. To take just one example, in the autumn of 2024 that we expected there to be 10,000 job losses in the sector over the following 12 months. We now update this prediction to suggest a rolling 10,000 per year loss of jobs across the UK.

Every job loss is a tragedy for the individual concerned – some of whom already have difficult personal circumstances. And, collectively, we are seeing a major loss of talent, capability, spending power and tax revenue for the economy. It is also bad for students: the elimination of courses is resulting in regional deserts for particular subject areas, levels of qualification or types of provider.

There has been much talk of efficiencies, groupings, mergers and possibly even institutional failures. The issue with any market-based approach is that it is difficult to coordinate any of this. Hence, it is difficult��to prevent oversupply or avoid undersupply of provision in different regions.

In sum, we continue to argue that, left to their own forces, markets can make the wrong choices for the common good. The system really needs careful curation: a guiding hand to nudge providers back into shape and alignment with national and regional priorities – cultural, economic and social.

Unfortunately, though, the Skills White Paper failed to address this need. Hence, providers must continue to do the best they can to swing the market in their favour, regardless of national priorities or local and regional needs.

Might the White Paper’s call for greater specialisation in teaching and research nudge institutions to better differentiate themselves and find a unique market niche? Perhaps. But our analysis shows that, in fact, there is already considerable specialisation and differentiation in student enrolment – even if this is not explicit in many institutional strategies and marketing plans.

Whether that specialisation and differentiation is helping universities, students or the economy is quite another question.

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is vice-chancellor and Alex Bols is chief of staff at the University of East Anglia.