Too many universities?

Sir Roderick Floud, the former president of Universities UK, has said that the UK has “too many universities” and institutions in cities such as London, Leeds, Oxford and Sheffield should be closed or merged. He said that the existing system of higher education was “unnecessary and inefficient”. He also said that Oxford and Cambridge should focus on research and stop recruiting undergraduates altogether. In his article in the Times Higher Education Supplement he said, “We don’t need two or more universities in each of our major cities, glowering at each other and competing to attract the attentions of businesses and local authorities. Why does Leeds or Sheffield or Oxford, for example, need two vice-chancellors, registrars or groups of governors? In London, the situation is even more bizarre, with some 40 universities within the M25 and more arriving by the day. The Higher Education Funding Council for England has remained supine in the face of evidence that all this is unnecessary and inefficient.”

He also criticised universities for attempting to “do too many things at once”, such as research, organising conferences, catering, offering careers advice, investing in the stock market, maintaining historic buildings, financing start-up companies, developing science parks, promoting sport and even running bus services. He said that there was a “strong argument for specialisation”, and that some universities “could concentrate entirely on postgraduate education”, saying that the top universities needed to make “better use of the best researchers who are already, in many places, concentrating on master’s and PhD students and leaving undergraduate teaching to junior staff”.