The private higher education provider landscape in the UK

ABSTRACT

The private higher education (HE) sector in the UK is subject to little oversight or regulation. Consequently, it remains a largely unknown quantity. Yet, the UK government is keen to foster the growth of private providers as a means of stimulating competition across the entire HE sector that will purportedly lead to ‘a greater choice of more innovative and better quality products and services at lower cost’ (DBIS 2016a, 8). We document the landscape of private higher education provision in the UK to assess whether private providers are likely to be able to perform the role envisaged for them by government. We analyse data for 802 private providers in the UK collected from provider's websites and other publicly available sources in 2017. A latent class analysis indicates that the sector can be broken down into four distinctive types of providers: (1) for-profit providers principally offering business/IT courses at sub-degree level (c.50%) (2) or at bachelors or masters level (c.10%), (3) not-for-profit providers offering other kinds of specialist provision at bachelors and masters level (c.27%), and (4) longer-standing for-profit providers including those with their own degree-awarding powers delivering courses mainly at masters level (c.13%). Three of the four provider types offer little in the way of traditional bachelor degree provision, and the most common provider type is subject to virtually no regulatory oversight and highly vulnerable to ‘market exit’. These findings cast doubt on the capacity of private HE providers to replace or enhance publicly funded HE provision.

KEYWORDS:

• UK
• Private Education
• Higher Education
• University
• Colleges

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Anne Thomson and Professor Gareth Parry for their input, and the anonymous reviewers who's suggestions lead to improvements in the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Nominally the Privy Council retains its authority, in practice it passes applications to the Scottish (Berry 2011; QAA 2016) and Welsh (QAA 2017a) governments respectively; during suspension of the Northern Ireland (NI) Assembly the process is mediated by the NI Department for the Economy. All nations refer to the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), although it does not have decision making powers.

2 The Framework for Higher Education Qualifications for England, Wales and Northern Ireland (FHEQ) (QAA, 2014) applies to all types of HE qualification for these countries, which are distributed across levels 4 to 8. A traditional undergraduate/ bachelor degree is located at level 6. Below this at levels 5 are qualifications such High National Diplomas, at level 5 and Higher National Certificates at level 4: both these types of qualification have a distinct vocational component or bent, and cover a variety of subjects, including: agriculture, computing/IT, performing arts, retail, and sport. These qualifications can often serve as a route to a degree programme. Scotland has a different but equivalent metric, with qualifications arranged over 12 levels (SCQF 2021). There are also numerous professional, largely vocational qualifications decidedly tertiary and now principally post-graduate but not occupying a fixed point on the FE/ HE scale. These qualifications are the product of the independent bodies that regulate specific professions. They determine entry to a professional and an individual's subsequent development. The courses leading to these qualifications have seldom attracted public funding, and, due to their vocational nature, have a long history of tuition outside the publicly funded university sector.

3 Joint Academic Coding of Subjects 3.0 (JACS3). https://www.hesa.ac.uk/support/documentation/jacs/jacs3-principal.

4 The Register of Regulated Qualifications England and Northern Ireland: https://register.ofqual.gov.uk/. Qualifications in Wales: https://www.qiw.wales/. Scottish Qualifications Authority: https://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/58062.3806.html

5 Recognised Bodies: https://www.gov.uk/check-a-university-is-officially-recognised/recognised-bodies. Supplemented with accrediting bodies BTEC/ Pearson/ Excel and City & Guilds, and an ‘Other’ option.

6 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/reviews-and-reports

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Office for Students (UK) and Research England (UK) [grant reference ES/M010082/1], the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), and UCL Institute of Education, London.