Higher education for older adults is “seriously at risk” in England as fewer people chose to invest in learning due to the rising cost of living, university leaders have warned.
In an attempt to raise national skills levels, the Conservative government has committed to boosting training throughout a person’s lifetime following years of falling participation.
Central to its plan is a life-long loan entitlement, which will allow universal access to loan funding for short courses post-18 from 2025. A bill legislating for the change was introduced in parliament last week.
But the heads of England’s leading universities for adult learners fear the reforms do not go far enough. They are braced for mid-career learning to decline further as more people stay in work rather than take on debt to finance training.
“Life-long adult education provision is seriously at risk,” said David Latchman, vice-chancellor of Birkbeck, University of London, one of the UK’s largest adult learning institutions.
Birkbeck and other providers of adult higher education are losing part of a “core market” because people are limiting their spending as the country enters recession, he said.
UK inflation stood at 10.5 per cent in December, with households expecting a 7.1 per cent fall in living standards over the next two years, according to the fiscal watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility.
Rather than take time out to invest in courses, people are looking to take advantage of a tight labour market to work more and increase their earnings.
“Normally recessions are good for Birkbeck,” said Latchman, referring to the tendency for enrolment in education to rise with unemployment. “This one is different — it’s not about not having jobs, it’s about not having the money to pay the electricity bill.”
Birkbeck, which also specialises in offering degrees for older people on flexible schedules, and has about 10,600 students, saw its intake fall more than 10 per cent in the last academic year compared with 2020-21.
It identified a £13mn deficit, requiring cuts of around 140 jobs, which it hopes to achieve mainly through voluntary redundancies.
The Open University teaches about half of the UK’s part-time undergraduates, with around 150,000 enrolled last year according to official figures. But its total number of students fell 14 percent in the last academic year after jumping by nearly a quarter after the pandemic began.
Tim Blackman, its vice-chancellor, said adjusting to declining numbers after a rapid expansion meant the university would have to cut its operating budget by 16 per cent cut over the next four years. Both Birkbeck and the Open University said their financial constraints were intensified by inflation and the need to keep fees low.
The pressures on both institutions sound the alarm on what could be further declines in life-long learning, after a decade of falling participation.
Analysis of government figures by the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank shows that take-up of level 4 or 5 qualifications — often taken as part-time courses and at a standard between A-levels and full degrees — each fell 34 per cent between 2015-16 and 2020-21.
In the decade up to 2020, the number of part-time undergraduates in England nearly halved.
Ben Waltmann, an IFS economist, said this was “almost certainly” due to reforms to student finance in 2012 that replaced government grants for university teaching with student loans.
That increased fees and shifted the burden of paying them to students. The changes also meant loans were only available for full-length qualifications, not modules, so interest in short courses plummeted.
Older people with financial obligations, caring responsibilities and existing work commitments, also became less likely to study because it would mean taking on debt, Waltmann said.
At Birkbeck academic staff, who opposed job cuts, said the removal of direct public funding had damaged institutions that provide life-long learning and called for more support.
“The opportunities to see higher education as something you might engage with as you would a community centre or a church are becoming very marginalised,” one lecturer said.
The government hopes to fix the problem with its Lifelong Loan Entitlement, which will allow students to access loan funding for modules within courses, rather than full qualifications. Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, called the policy a “profound shift in the way students of all ages can obtain funding for further and higher education”.
Latchman said the entitlement could make a “huge difference” by making it simpler to take out a loan. However, others are concerned that the plan will repeat the problems of the existing system, by offering another loan.
Blackman feared adult learners would still be dissuaded by the prospect of debt. A lack of maintenance funding would make it impossible for them to study in a cost of living crisis, he said. “If there are economic problems it’s even more unlikely to work.”
While the Open University was “here to stay”, he said, the economic climate meant that potential students would need more incentives to enrol in courses.
“Our potential students are not coming to us because they are focusing on their family, getting a second job paying the bills,” he said. “But that’s exactly when they need to focus on . . . improving their skills.”
Source: Economy - ft.com
