Tarnished Towers: Fixing England’s Broken Higher Education System by Iain Mansfield, Natasha Feldman and Ben Sweetman (Policy Exchange, 2026)

Policy Exchange’s Tarnished Towers is one of the most important reports on English higher education published in decades. It is also one of the most restrained. The authors diagnose a sector facing financial crisis, declining standards, collapsing public confidence and growing political scrutiny. They succeed. Indeed, they succeed rather too well. By the time the reader reaches the final page, the evidence assembled throughout the report points towards a sterner conclusion than the authors themselves appear willing to draw. The crisis in higher education is not primarily financial or regulatory. It is the result of a thirty-year experiment in mass credentialism that has failed economically, intellectually and culturally.

The report opens with admirable directness. “The English Higher Education system is at breaking point” (p. 11). Universities confront rising costs, frozen tuition fees, declining international recruitment and mounting deficits. Job losses, course closures, departmental mergers and institutional restructuring have become familiar across the sector. Public confidence has deteriorated in parallel. The British Social Attitudes Survey now finds that 34 per cent of respondents believe a university education “just isn’t worth the time and money it usually takes”, compared with 14 per cent in 2005. Only 36 per cent believe graduates end up “a lot better off financially.” These figures matter because they reflect lived experience. Millions of people have watched a generation accumulate debt, credentials and inflated expectations, only to discover that the promised rewards often fail to materialise.

The economic evidence presented by the report is devastating. A third of graduates are not employed in graduate occupations. At least 30 per cent of degrees deliver no positive financial return. Policy Exchange’s own analysis shows that in fifteen of thirty-four subject classifications, including Sociology, Creative Arts and Design and Performing Arts, more than a quarter of graduates earned below the National Living Wage five years after graduation. In twenty-seven subjects, representing 87 per cent of the cohort, median earnings remained below the national median wage for full-time employees. The report concludes that “the marginal graduate has long since ceased to” benefit financially (p. 12). That sentence deserves to be engraved above the entrance to every modern university.

For three decades, politicians have treated university expansion as a social good in itself. More students meant more opportunity. More graduates meant more prosperity. More participation meant more social mobility. These assumptions were repeated so frequently that they acquired the status of revealed truth. To question them was treated as evidence of philistinism. Yet the evidence assembled by Policy Exchange demonstrates that the promise has largely failed. Millions of young people have spent three years outside the labour market, accumulated large debts, and emerged with qualifications that often provide little economic advantage. The system has succeeded in expanding participation while failing to deliver the outcomes used to justify expansion.

Baroness Deech’s foreword supplies the historical frame. Governments, she writes, “increasingly supported the uncontrolled expansion of the sector, heedless of the impact on standards, on institutional stability and on student welfare” (p. 5). Students became consumers. Universities became businesses. Academic standards became subordinate to recruitment targets and satisfaction metrics. Mr Baker’s observation, quoted by Deech, captures the process perfectly. Great institutions, he warned, “do not suddenly fall over a precipice, they simply slide down the slope, a little further each year, in a genteel way” (p. 6).

That genteel decline has become one of the defining characteristics of modern Britain. Nobody publicly announced that standards would be lowered. Nobody openly declared war on intellectual excellence. Instead, every year brought a few more Firsts, a few more administrators, a few more managers, a few more low-value courses and a few more reasons to prioritise recruitment over rigour. The process was gradual enough to avoid resistance and cumulative enough to transform the sector entirely.

The report identifies two interlocking causes. Expansion, associated largely with the left, produced a dramatic increase in full-time bachelor degree participation while weakening alternative routes through technical and vocational education. Marketisation, associated largely with the right, failed because higher education is not a genuine market. Students do not directly experience the cost of their choices, while providers do not bear the full consequences of poor outcomes. Competition therefore focused on recruitment, branding, league-table positioning and student experience rather than educational quality. Higher-tariff institutions lowered entry standards and inflated classifications. Mid- and lower-tariff providers followed or lost students. The result was not a market in excellence but a market in credentials.

The recommendations proposed by the report are correspondingly serious. Student number controls should return. Franchising should be abolished. The student loan book should close to for-profit providers. A 30 per cent reduction in places should occur over five years, targeted at institutions with poor outcomes. Degree classifications should be capped. The National Student Survey should disappear. Admissions should become transparent and wholly meritocratic. Global Universities and Regional Universities should be differentiated according to mission, standards and funding. These proposals directly confront grade inflation and distorted incentives. They deserve careful consideration.

Yet the report’s evidence points towards a deeper problem than the authors fully acknowledge. The crisis in higher education is not merely educational. It is civilisational. For centuries, universities existed to preserve and transmit civilisation’s highest intellectual achievements. They selected a relatively small number of capable students and subjected them to demanding courses of study. The process was not designed to be comfortable. It was designed to identify excellence. Universities existed because intelligence is unevenly distributed and because civilisations require institutions capable of cultivating the most intellectually gifted members of each generation.

Modern higher education increasingly pursues a different mission. Universities maximise participation. They promote inclusion. They support wellbeing. They manage student satisfaction. They advance social objectives. Intellectual excellence remains on the list, but increasingly as one objective among many. The consequences were predictable.

A system organised around excellence discourages mediocrity. A system organised around participation discourages exclusion. The difficulty is that excellence necessarily excludes. Not everyone possesses the ability required for advanced academic study. Not every subject deserves equal prestige. Not every opinion is equally intelligent. A civilisation that loses confidence in making these distinctions eventually loses confidence in excellence itself.

The report’s evidence demonstrates that this process is already advanced. Grade inflation has rendered classifications increasingly meaningless. Admissions standards have weakened. Student satisfaction has become more important than intellectual challenge. Universities compete to recruit students who would once have entered apprenticeships or technical education. This is presented as compassion. It is often cruelty. Bright students lose intellectual challenge. Less academic students accumulate debt for qualifications that frequently fail to improve their prospects. Employers lose reliable indicators of ability. Society loses confidence in the distinction between excellence and mediocrity.

The deepest failure of the modern university system is therefore not financial but moral and intellectual. A healthy civilisation rewards intelligence, competence, discipline and achievement. Modern institutions increasingly reward participation and compliance. Schools inflate grades. Universities inflate classifications. Human resources departments inflate performance reviews. Failure is softened and redefined until it becomes difficult to identify. Stupidity is protected from embarrassment. Mediocrity is protected from judgement. Everyone is assured that he is succeeding. Fewer people actually are.

The report documents many of the visible symptoms of this process. It notes “a marked growth in senior managerial and administrative roles and remuneration, and ongoing concerns over governance” (p. 12). It records the erosion of academic standards through grade inflation and the prioritisation of student satisfaction over rigour. Yet the report stops short of identifying the full mechanism behind these developments.

Universities no longer exist primarily to educate students. They exist to reproduce a class. The conventional answer to the question “What do universities produce?” is graduates. The more accurate answer is that they produce the personnel required by the managerial state. Universities manufacture policy analysts, diversity officers, communications managers, safeguarding coordinators, sustainability consultants, stakeholder engagement specialists and the wider professional-managerial layer that dominates modern institutions.

These people are not the ruling class itself. They are its clergy. Every political order requires a class whose function is to explain why the political order is right. The medieval Church performed this role through theology. Soviet intellectuals performed it through Marxism. Our managerial order performs it through diversity, inclusion, sustainability, public health messaging, behavioural science and an endless stream of reports, consultations, guidance documents and strategic frameworks. Universities increasingly exist to manufacture and reproduce the people who administer these systems.

This explains why administrative growth within universities mirrors administrative growth throughout society. Bureaucracies create demand for administrators. Administrators create demand for further administrators. The result is a self-sustaining ecosystem in which credentialled graduates supervise other credentialled graduates while producing documents for the consumption of other credentialled graduates.

The irony is that this entire arrangement may be approaching its own extinction event. Artificial intelligence threatens precisely the occupations for which universities have spent decades preparing students. A machine cannot repair a railway line. It cannot build a bridge. It cannot install a transformer. It cannot construct a power station. It can, however, summarise reports, draft policy papers, produce communications strategies, analyse information and generate administrative prose. In other words, it performs many of the functions upon which the professional-managerial class depends.

You can see the implications among the middle-class youth for whom the system was designed. They have spent their lives being told that credentials are substitutes for competence. They possess impressive portfolios, carefully managed extracurricular activities and strong opinions on approved political topics. Many have never built anything, repaired anything, sold anything or organised anything beyond a school project. Comfortable careers have been promised to them because comfortable careers existed for their parents.

Artificial intelligence may prove less accommodating. A machine costing less than a monthly streaming subscription can already perform many of the tasks on which these occupations depend. The same universities that spent thirty years manufacturing administrators may soon discover that the economy requires fewer administrators than anyone imagined.

This is to be welcomed. Many of the occupations facing disruption contribute little to national prosperity. Some contribute positively to national decline. The expansion of managerial employment created a large class whose economic function often consists of supervising other supervisors. Universities supplied the personnel. Bureaucracies supplied the salaries. The result was an economy increasingly devoted to administration rather than production.

The country requires fewer such people and more engineers, builders, scientists, electricians, technicians, entrepreneurs and skilled workers. Reality imposes standards that bureaucracies often evade. A bridge either stands or collapses. A machine either functions or fails. Physical reality remains refreshingly indifferent to fashionable theories and diversity strategies.

Mr Glasman therefore identifies the central weakness of the report when he writes: “The only problem with the paper is that it does not go far enough: rather than a 30% reduction in those going to university, I have said we should shut down half of them, and turn them into technical colleges” (p. 8).

He is correct. However, a thirty per cent reduction may prove only the beginning. Many institutions no longer justify their existence. They should be closed down at once, their academics and administrators tossed into the street. Their campuses should be converted into technical colleges where possible and sold where necessary. Funding should be redirected towards engineering, manufacturing, construction, logistics and technical education. Apprenticeships should become the default route for many young people currently being funnelled into degrees with little economic value and less intellectual value.

Students and staff displaced by contraction should not be regarded as victims. Most would benefit from working on the land, where we face a labour shortage. Hard labour with digging tools would strip some of the weight off their bloated, ugly bodies. It might also teach them something about the relationship between cause and effect. Otherwise, once my friends and I take power, there will be no shortage of work in the new factories of a reindustrialising Britain. Much of this labour will be unskilled. Several million superfluous graduates and sacked undergraduates will be a valuable pool of low-cost labour. The country would gain productive workers. The workers would gain the beginnings competence. Both outcomes would be improvements.

The Robbins principle should survive. Those qualified by ability and attainment should have access to higher education. What should disappear is the fantasy that higher education is appropriate for everyone.

Tarnished Towers performs a valuable service because it demolishes the myths on which modern higher education rests. It demonstrates that expansion has damaged standards, weakened institutions, failed many students and distorted the labour market. More importantly, it reveals the intellectual assumptions that produced these outcomes: the belief that credentials can substitute for competence, that participation can substitute for excellence, and that bureaucratic expansion can substitute for genuine achievement.

The authors propose reform. Their evidence points towards something larger. We need not only merely a restructuring of higher education, but a recovery of intellectual seriousness itself. For generations, universities justified their existence by claiming to cultivate excellence. Too many now function as machines for protecting mediocrity from reality. The financial crisis described by Policy Exchange is therefore only the surface manifestation of a deeper problem. England’s universities have forgotten what they are for. Until that question is answered, no amount of restructuring will save them.