Philip Moriarty has been a physicist at the University of Nottingham for 32 years. "It took less than 30 seconds to fill in the voluntary redundancy form," he told Times Higher Education in June. His university reported an £85 million deficit for 2024-25, sent at-risk letters to about 2,700 staff and is removing just over 600 full-time posts, by compulsory redundancy from January 2027 if it has to. The Departments of American and Canadian Studies, Modern Languages and Music are closing permanently. Physics loses roughly a third of its staff. The union's response is a marking boycott and a strike running through June and July, with a mandate that lasts into 2027.

Nottingham is not an outlier. It is the current face of a sector-wide event. The Office for Students, the English regulator, reported in May that 35.8 per cent of institutions ran a deficit in 2024-25 and 42.7 per cent forecast one for 2025-26. Its November update was blunter: without further cuts, 124 institutions face deficits and nearly one in six is projected to hold less than 30 days' liquidity. Universities shed roughly 13,300 jobs through severance in 2024-25 alone, at a cost of £303 million, and a union tracker now lists 110 UK universities in some form of restructuring. The regulator's suggested remedy for some is "radical action, which might include considering different structures or business models", which is the administrative register for: we may not save all of you.

Richard Murphy, the tax campaigner and emeritus professor at Sheffield, put it plainly this month: UK universities "are not dying: they are being killed." The only correction his claim needs is that it understates. He says a fifth of Britain's universities face financial risk. On the regulator's own figures it is closer to half.

A market built, then strangled

Murphy's diagnosis is that neoliberal design did this, a system built to fail by people who wanted education reduced to a commodity. The record supports something both less villainous and more damning: a market was built, and then the state strangled its own creation.

The building happened in 2010. The Browne Review proposed, and the coalition government delivered, the conversion of English universities from grant-funded public institutions into fee-funded competitors. The teaching grant fell from £3.5 billion to £0.7 billion, an 80 per cent cut, with the remnant reserved for expensive subjects like medicine and engineering. In its place came the £9,000 fee from 2012, paid by income-contingent loan. Students became the funding mechanism. Universities were told to compete for them and to grow. They did what they were told.

Then the state froze the price. The fee rose once, to £9,250 in 2017, and stayed there for eight years while inflation did its work. By the Tony Blair Institute's count the frozen fee was worth about £6,200 in today's money, the lowest per-student teaching resource since the mid-1990s. The Russell Group puts the current £9,535 fee at roughly two-thirds of its sticker value. A market participant whose price is fixed below cost has one option: find customers who pay an unregulated price. International students' fees reached £12.1 billion in 2023/24, 23 per cent of the entire sector's income. Government policy did not merely permit this dependency; it instructed it, in successive international education strategies.

Then the state choked the customers. From January 2024, taught postgraduates could no longer bring dependants; dependant visas fell 85 per cent in a year. The 2025 immigration white paper cut the post-study Graduate Route from two years to 18 months and proposed a levy on international fee income, confirmed in the November budget at £925 per international student per year from 2028. Tightened compliance thresholds made sponsors so cautious that refusal rates for Pakistani applicants went from under 6 per cent to 41 per cent. By April 2026, monthly study visa applications were down 40 per cent year on year, at their lowest in five years.

Hold the sequence in one frame. Be a business. Your price is frozen. Your main revenue line is taxed and your customers are turned away at the border. That is not a market failing; it is a market being failed by its owner. The lesson is not that villains designed a killing machine. No villain is required. A state that manages a system by whatever is measurable this quarter, net migration one year, fee headlines the next, will produce exactly this, one defensible decision at a time. The conspiracy version of this history has always leaned on clipped quotes, the Edwardian philanthropist dreaming of docile workers, the minister sneering at experts. The duller truth is worse, because you cannot vote out drift.

The laboratory

Ireland has a longer relationship with British education policy than most Irish people know, and it runs in the opposite direction to the one usually assumed.

In October 1831 the Chief Secretary for Ireland, E.G. Stanley, wrote to the Duke of Leinster setting out a plan for state-funded primary schooling under a Board of Commissioners of National Education. The Stanley letter remains the legal basis of the national school system today. England and Wales did not get their equivalent until Forster's Elementary Education Act of 1870. Ireland was not handed a British system; Ireland was the experiment, 39 years ahead of the metropole, the place where Westminster trialled mass schooling before risking it at home. The canonical history is titled accordingly: Donald Akenson's The Irish Education Experiment (1970). Colonial administrators in Australia and Canada copied the Irish model explicitly.

The experiment's stated principle, a system "from which should be banished even the suspicion of proselytism", died young. The churches captured delivery school by school, and the capture outlived the empire: 88.3 per cent of Irish primary schools have Catholic patronage today, against the 69 per cent of the population that called itself Catholic in Census 2022.

Independence changed the letterhead and kept the machine. The Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 assembled the new state's departments largely by merging Dublin Castle offices; the Department of Finance was grafted onto the Irish branch of the UK Treasury; the Constitution carried the inherited law forward wholesale. The Free State's exam system was a rebadged version of the 1878 Intermediate apparatus, and the first Leaving Certificate was sat in 1925 by 955 students. Donogh O'Malley's free secondary education, announced in an unauthorised speech in 1966, was the rare genuine departure. The founding habit of the Irish political class, faced with any administrative question, was to ask what the neighbours did and transpose it.

Which makes what happened after 2010 genuinely interesting. When England marketised its universities, Ireland, for once, did not copy. It did something stranger.

The decision that keeps not being made

Ireland abolished undergraduate tuition fees in 1996 and has spent the decades since quietly reconstructing them under another name. The "registration charge" became the "student contribution" and climbed to €3,000 by 2015. Meanwhile the state's own money drained out: the core grant per student fell from almost €9,000 in 2008/09 to just over €5,000 a decade later, a 43 per cent cut, as student numbers grew through the austerity years.

Everyone involved has known the position is unsustainable since at least March 2016, because the state commissioned an expert group under Peter Cassells to say so. Cassells reported three options: a fully state-funded system, increased state funding with a continuing contribution, or income-contingent loans on the English model. The price of adequacy was put at an extra €600 million a year by 2021, €1 billion by 2030, costed on a staff-student ratio of 14 to one.

What followed is a small classic of Irish political method. The report went to an Oireachtas committee, which reached no consensus. The options were then sent to the European Commission for economic evaluation, a study commissioned in 2020 whose findings were never published, though an economist told the committee it pointed to €350 to €400 million in additional annual core funding. Six years after Cassells, in May 2022, Simon Harris produced the official answer, Funding the Future: loans ruled out, the contribution kept, and a core funding gap of €307 million acknowledged, to be closed "over a number of years through annual budgetary processes". The minister presented it as the moment that finally settled the question.

Three years on, the Irish Universities Association's count of delivery against that €307 million stood at €164 million, with much of it eaten by unfunded pay awards and roughly 4,500 extra students arriving without core funding. The department prefers its own arithmetic, claiming over €410 million of cumulative core investment on a basis it does not reconcile with the IUA's. The staff-student ratio, which the whole plan was costed to improve toward 14 to one, has worsened, from 20.6 to one in the baseline year to 21 to one now. The Programme for Government promises, again, to "close the core funding gap".

The student-facing version of the same evasion played out in public last summer. Three budgets running, students had paid €2,000 thanks to a once-off €1,000 cost-of-living cut. In June 2025 the minister, James Lawless, said the fee would revert to €3,000 "as things stand"; the Tánaiste contradicted him within days; students protested outside Leinster House. Budget 2026 then delivered what was announced as the first permanent cut in three decades, to €2,500, which left students paying €500 more than they had the year before. In May, Lawless said he was "hopeful" about a further cut in Budget 2027. The same week this month, his department announced €460 million for seven new national research centres. There is always money for the photogenic layer. The core gap is now entering its second decade of being almost addressed.

Same dependency, different coat

While the decision stayed unmade, Irish universities did the only thing available to institutions with frozen income and rising costs. They did what English universities did, without being told to.

Trinity's accounts for 2023/24 put it starkly: non-EU students are 21.2 per cent of the student body and 48 per cent of all fee income, and the non-EU fee take, around €97 million, now exceeds the college's entire state grant of €85 million. Across the sector, international enrolments passed 40,000 in 2023/24, with recruitment increasingly concentrated on India and China. This is the same revenue model the UK built, assembled here by drift rather than design, and the UK has just demonstrated what happens to it when one policy lever moves: a 40 per cent fall in applications in a single year. Ireland's choke point does not even need a hostile minister. The accommodation crisis is already rationing the intake; Dublin alone is short more than 25,000 student beds, and sector bodies call housing the single biggest barrier to completing a degree.

The timing of all this is the part that should concentrate minds. The department's own projections, published this week, have full-time enrolment growing by 16 to 19 per cent to a peak in 2033/34, the children of the 2007-2012 birth bulge arriving on schedule. CAO applications are already surging, up 6.5 per cent this year. The system is being asked to absorb a fifth more students, on a per-student funding base cut 43 per cent from its 2008 level, with the gap-closing plan running at half speed, while its marginal funder is a volatile international fee market its main customer countries can switch off and its own housing stock already cannot accommodate. Nottingham is what the end state of that arithmetic looks like. The only difference is that Ireland still has time to read the warning.

The credential is losing its signal

Underneath the funding story is a quieter one about what the funding buys, and here the two islands are running the same experiment with the same result.

England inflated its degrees: first-class awards went from 15.8 per cent of degrees in 2010-11 to 37.7 per cent at the 2020-21 peak, and even after three years of decline the regulator's modelling says nearly 40 per cent of current firsts cannot be explained by entry qualifications or subject mix. Ireland inflated its Leaving Cert: results were held roughly seven points above 2019 levels for years after Covid, and the state is now walking them back down on a published multi-year schedule, 5.9 points above 2019 in 2025, "just below 2020 levels" in 2026, the adjustment perhaps ending in 2027. Pause on what that is: a managed devaluation of a national credential, scheduled like a currency intervention so that no single cohort takes the hit at once. The honesty of the schedule is admirable. The need for it is the indictment.

Employers have noticed. The share of big UK graduate recruiters requiring a 2:1 fell from 71 per cent in 2015/16 to 47 per cent in 2025; a quarter now set no academic minimum at all and run their own assessments instead. Applications hit a record 140 per vacancy as graduate openings fell by a third in a year. The graduate earnings premium for working-age adults has slid from around 50 per cent to 36 per cent in under two decades, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies' careful estimate is that one undergraduate in five would have been financially better off never going. Irish graduates still do well in absolute terms, though it says something that no Irish body publishes the graduate-versus-non-graduate comparison that would let us check.

This matters beyond the labour market, and it connects to the inequality work this site has been following all year. Education is the story rich democracies tell about why their distributions are fair: the credentialed earned it, and the route to the credential is open to all. Piketty's data shows the educated captured the parties of the left while educational spending quietly favoured elite tracks. The World Inequality Lab's Global Justice Report, published this month, treats education not as a sorting mechanism but as the sector an equal world spends its working hours on. You do not have to follow it that far to see the local point. When the state underfunds the system, the system inflates the credential to compete, employers stop trusting the credential, and the one in five for whom it never paid begin to notice. The myth that justifies the ladder is wearing through at exactly the moment the ladder's lower rungs are being priced and housed out of reach.

The ones leaving first

Every system failure has a leading indicator, and this one's is recorded in the state's own registers. In England, elective home education has gone from roughly 92,000 children to 126,000 in two years; the most common recorded reason is now mental health. A study of children with severe school attendance difficulties found 92 per cent of them were neurodivergent. In Ireland, Tusla's home education register has grown from about 1,500 children in 2019 to around 2,400.

These are the children on whom the absorb-and-reproduce model visibly does not run, the ones the testing factory misreads as incapable, and their families are not waiting for the reform. They are exiting. It is the same signal employers are sending when they drop the 2:1 and run their own assessments: the people the system exists to serve are quietly routing around it. Exit on the way in, exit on the way out, and a funding question parked in the middle.

Not deciding is deciding

The British lesson is not that markets in education fail, although they do. It is that a state which half-builds a market and then walks away from it inherits the failures of both systems and the virtues of neither. England has the cruelty of the market without its claimed discipline. Ireland has the promise of public provision without its funding, plus the market's dependencies without its prices.

There is a version of this column that ends by asking the government to decide. That misreads what is happening. A decision is being made; it is being made annually, by default, every budget that delivers a slice of a gap first measured a decade ago. Each year it stands, the universities sink deeper into the international bet, the ratio worsens, the credential inflates, the beds don't get built and the demographic wave gets a year closer. Drift is a policy. It is currently Ireland's higher education policy, and on the next island you can watch, in real time, departments closing and a physicist of 32 years' standing taking 30 seconds to leave, which is where drift goes when it is left to finish.

In 1831 Ireland was the laboratory where Britain learned it could school an entire population. In 2026 Britain is the laboratory where Ireland can watch what happens when that schooling is left to a market the state keeps kicking. The Cassells options have been on the table for ten years. They are still there. Pick one.

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