Universities would be prevented from going bust under new plans unveiled by Labour to protect higher education and students from “rampant” market forces.<\/p>\n
The plans to overhaul regulator the Office for Students reflect fears about some universities’ viability.<\/p>\n
Under Labour, the OfS would get an explicit objective of avoiding “disorderly failure” at universities, and be able to provide emergency loans.<\/p>\n
The government said the OfS already had strong powers to regulate universities.<\/p>\n
There have been increasing concerns about the financial sustainability of higher education institutions, with reports that three are on the brink of bankruptcy, relying on short-term loans to get by.<\/p>\n
And several others are planning to run deficit budgets and make significant cuts.<\/p>\n
Would a university really be allowed to go bust?<\/p>\n
How tuition fees change real-life decisions<\/p>\n
Lords approves two-year degree course plan<\/p>\n
Universities minister Chris Skidmore has suggested some “providers may, in a small number of cases, exit the market altogether as a result of strong competition”.<\/p>\n
But shadow education minister Angela Rayner has highlighted that the OfS itself has said it would “not bail out providers in financial difficulty”.<\/p>\n
She said: “The Tories have unleashed a failed free market experiment in higher education.<\/p>\n
“They have created a system that goes to the very heart of their ideology – a system where market logic is imposed on public goods and where the forces of competition run rampant at the expense of students, staff and communities.<\/p>\n
“Students would be left with immense uncertainty about their futures and entire communities would lose one of their major academic, economic and social institutions.<\/p>\n
“Education is a public good and should be treated as such. Our universities are there for all of us,” she added.<\/p>\n
Universities are in competition with each other to attract students, and the larger and more popular universities have been opening up more places in order to take advantage of the significant funds each student brings with them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Universities would be prevented from going bust under new plans unveiled by Labour to protect higher education and students from “rampant” market forces. The plans to overhaul regulator the Office for Students reflect fears about some universities’ viability. Under Labour, the OfS would get an explicit objective of avoiding “disorderly failure” at universities, and be able to provide emergency loans. The government said the OfS already had strong powers to regulate universities. There have been increasing concerns about the financial sustainability of higher education institutions, with reports that three are<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":17356,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17355"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17357,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17355\/revisions\/17357"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}