“Uncertainty exists towards Coventry University’s ability to continue.” That single sentence — buried in a recent BBC report — should not just make us stop and think. It should ring like a siren across Britain’s decaying educational landscape.
Let’s be blunt. One of the UK’s largest university groups, sprawling across Coventry, London, and Scarborough, is on the verge of financial ruin. The figures from the BBC piece are staggering: £59.3 million in losses. 250 jobs could be slashed. Faculty and staff will be thrown into a restructuring bonfire. What we’re witnessing isn’t just the slow bleed of a single institution. It’s a tremor signaling the seismic collapse of a sector hollowed out by decades of ideological sabotage.
This is happening in Dundee, Newcastle, Cardiff, Bournemouth, Durham, and Sheffield—and the list goes on. It’s the inevitable result of a broken model — a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together by neoliberal dogma and market obsession. The tuition fee regime, hailed as a solution, is now exposed for what it truly is: a trap.
The Tuition Fee Illusion
Coventry is just one of the examples that did everything the system asked. They charged students. They recruited aggressively — especially from overseas. It streamlined and leaned into the jargon of “efficiency.” And yet, here it is: teetering. Why? Because the entire framework depends on an endless influx of student fees — particularly from international students. But global flows are not guaranteed. As the BBC reported, a 24% drop in international enrollments—driven by stricter visa policies and geopolitical pressures — sent Coventry’s financial framework crumbling.
The university didn’t fail — the model did. The fetishization of market logic has made our universities vulnerable to the whims of immigration policy, global instability, inflation, and competition. In this system, one minister’s whim or one global hiccup is all it takes to send institutions spiraling. This is not just Coventry’s reckoning. It is a structural unraveling.
When the Classroom Became a Boardroom
What happened to education as a right? As a public good? Somewhere between Thatcher and Blair, between austerity and modernization, the British university was refashioned — not as a civic institution but as a business venture. Administrators became chief executive officers. Students were recast as consumers. Knowledge was repackaged into “skills” for “employability.” Entire departments — especially in the humanities — became expendable overheads, as seen in recent cuts at institutions like Sheffield and Bournemouth.
Let us be clear: this wasn’t accidental. It was designed. The commodification of education served a political purpose — to depoliticize knowledge, to discipline the academy, and to insert profit into the heart of pedagogy. Paulo Freire saw this coming. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he warned of the “banking model” of education — a system in which students are treated as passive recipients, containers to be filled, rather than active participants in the co-creation of knowledge. This model, he argued, is not neutral. It is a tool of domination. It teaches conformity, not liberation.
Today, that logic — the logic of market efficiency, of bureaucratic control, of intellectual sterilization—dictates. The public university, once imagined as a crucible of democratic thought, is now trapped in the logic of spreadsheets and branding campaigns. And when the numbers no longer add up? It’s lecturers, cleaners, librarians — and students — who are left to pay the price.
Education is Not a Commodity.
In a country that can find billions for defense budgets and royal pageantry, the idea that we “can’t afford” to fund universities is a political fiction. Education builds the very infrastructure of our society: it fuels innovation, cultivates critical thought, and produces the doctors, scientists, and thinkers we so readily applaud during national crises.
If we accept that roads, hospitals, and clean water are public goods, why not universities?
The Slow-Motion Collapse
What’s happening at Coventry is not an anomaly. It is a harbinger. A warning shot. If an institution that did everything the market demanded is still drowning, then it’s time to admit the system is not just unfair. It is unsustainable. Worse — it is self-destructive.
Universities should not have to gamble on international markets just to survive. They should not live in fear of visa policies crafted by governments obsessed with performative nationalism. They should not be at the mercy of league tables or predatory private partnerships.
And they should not be sacrificed on the altar of economic doctrine.
Time to Choose: Collapse or Courage
If we still believe in a future where education is inclusive and empowering, then we must fund it—not as an indulgence, but as an obligation. Not because it turns a profit, but because it builds a people. That means abandoning the lie that students are customers and the university is just another brand in a marketplace of decline.
The signs of collapse are already here — in shuttered departments, discarded staff, and the quiet attrition of hope. A slow undoing, sold as reform.
But the end is not yet written. We still have a choice. So let us ask, plainly and without spin: what kind of country do we want to be?
A nation that auctions its intellectual life to the highest bidder? That treats its young as revenue streams? Or one that remembers education is not a transaction.
It is a right. A duty. A sacred cornerstone of any society that still claims to value freedom, dignity, and the possibility of a better world.
*Contributing Authors: Dr Omar Feraboli, University of Dundee, and Dr Khaza Ahmed, University of Northampton.
