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Will GenAI be seized upon as a short-term funding fix for UK higher education?

This is a great account by Glen O’Hara of the failing model of financing UK higher education, as two short term fixes (stacking art & humanities courses, aggressive international recruitment) have been seized upon in uneven ways destructive to the sector as a whole:

For a while, some vice chancellors could patch up losses by recruiting more and more students in the arts, humanities and social sciences: “seminar-based” subjects that were cheap to teach and fairly easy to staff, and the costs of which certainly undershot the £9,000 and then the £9,250 paid for them by students every year. That money could then be used to subsidise the heavy sciences, and everyone would rub along as long as they didn’t think too much about the implications of that cross-subsidy. As chancellor, George Osborne made all that even easier when he removed student number caps for each English institution between 2015 and 2016.

Universities’ next answer to declining budgets was foreign students. If capped home fees covered less and less, perhaps teaching people from outside the UK would plug the gap. Fees for these undergraduates were never limited by statute, and they are often charged much more than locals, on average about £22,000 a year and sometimes approaching £40,000. In 2010, just under a tenth of UK universities’ revenue came from that source; by 2022, that number had doubled to nearly a fifth. That, too, was all very well for a while, but there are probably limits to how politically acceptable the numbers are. Nearly half a million students were given UK study visas in the academic year that began in autumn 2022, an 86 per cent rise from the year between 2018 and 2019. All while the government talked about taking back control of immigration.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/policy/education/66533/british-universities-collapse-debt-crisis

Given Labour’s initial statements suggest no desire to introduce more funding into the system, we’ll see the status quo ante with international recruitment. But if the viability of this is starting to erode even for large universities that have proved adept at such recruitment, where will the next fix come from? Will GenAI be seized upon as a short-term funding fix for UK higher education? The idea that mass automation could reduce administrative and academic staffing will seem utterly enticing to university leaders under these conditions.

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