Market competition is hollowing out humanities in England

The University of Hertfordshire’s decision to “suspend” five humanities undergraduate courses is a further stark warning about how readily higher education has jettisoned its former commitment to such subjects. For students wishing to study English language and linguistics, English literature, history, philosophy or creative writing, yet another opportunity to do so has been lost.

There is an unsettling irony here. Although primarily vocational institutions, many polytechnics – including Hertfordshire’s earlier incarnation, Hatfield Polytechnic – sought to widen access to the humanities by developing their own provision. Indeed, the conversion of polytechnics into universities in 1992 was justified in part by the principle that a general intellectual education should not be the preserve of a narrow elite.

But market competition is now undermining that principle. A key turning point in England came in 2015, when student number controls were removed. For most of the post-war period, governments had limited how many students universities could recruit. The system was imperfect but provided a degree of stability that allowed institutions to sustain broader subject portfolios, including those with fluctuating demand but high intellectual or cultural value.

The removal of recruitment caps allowed universities to recruit without limit. In theory, this was meant to reward quality and widen access. In practice, it intensified competition for students and made subject provision increasingly dependent on recruitment patterns and financial viability – particularly as tuition fees now account for over half of institutional income, tying funding ever closer to student numbers.

The consequences have been especially damaging for lower-tariff institutions because students have increasingly gravitated to universities with stronger reputations. And humanities have been hit particularly badly because they tend to lack the linear career paths and immediate salary premiums widely associated with STEM disciplines.

The emphasis by politicians and regulators on graduate employment data has reinforced the idea that higher education is primarily a financial investment. Increasingly, the Office for Students has made employability a proxy for educational quality. The latest OfS proposal to incorporate earnings data into quality ratings would further entrench the problem: when prospective students, facing substantial tuition fees, weigh future debt against expected returns, humanities degrees appear less attractive – particularly if the student cannot rely on institutional reputation to enhance their employability. Rather than protecting breadth of intellectual enquiry, regulation has narrowed it by amplifying market pressures.

Vice-chancellors and senior managers have been complicit in this hollowing out. The intermediate measures often cited as evidence that managers are not passive – interdisciplinary programmes, joint degrees, cross-subsidisation – cannot hold back the systemic tide of market competition. And when these measures fail to arrest falling numbers, senior leadership teams do not mount a robust defence of the university’s broader intellectual purpose. Rather, they pursue the logic of the market to its conclusion – even if they express regret and couch their decisions in the euphemistic rhetoric of “resilience” and “sustainability”. They normalise the closure of subjects once central to universities in the name of “competitive portfolios”.

Some proponents of the current system argue that the increasing concentration of humanities education in a shrinking number of elite institutions is not a system failure but an “outcome”: better, they say, that English and history thrive at 20 universities than struggle at many lower-tariff ones. This “outcome” is not a considered policy choice but the unplanned consequence of market competition. To rationalise a loss ex post facto as an efficiency gain is simply unconvincing.

Others contend that the real remedy lies not in reintroducing student number controls but in restoring maintenance grants and reducing debt burdens. But while this might lessen the financial stakes around course choice, which would be welcome, it cannot overcome the determining logic of an uncapped market in students whose choices are driven by institutional prestige.

Underlying much of the debate is an appeal to “student choice”: if students prefer to study humanities at stronger universities, why should every institution offer them? But the language of choice is beguiling. It treats individual choices as isolated rather than socially embedded and then ignores their wider social consequences. When thousands of students are encouraged to behave as consumers in a competitive market, the aggregate result is not equal choice for all but expanded choice for some and diminishing choice for others.

The well-established link between socio-economic background and academic attainment means that closing humanities courses at lower-tariff universities places them increasingly out of reach of lower-income students – who, in addition to typically earning lower A-level grades, are most likely to study locally or live at home to reduce debt.

A 2025 British Academy report found that large parts of the country are already “cold spots”, with no humanities provision within a commutable 60km radius, while other areas have fewer local options. Further closures will only exacerbate the divide between the choices available to a student from a lower-income household in a cold-spot area compared with those available to a privately educated student in a city with multiple universities.

Reintroducing student number controls would stem the ongoing reduction of subject choice. While controls would mean redirecting some students to post-92 universities, that is categorically preferable to the current loss of humanities provision for many others.

Within the broader constraints of a hierarchical university system and an unequal society, we can do rather better. If humanities education is to be broadly accessible, universities competiting for students cannot remain the organising principle. The essential first step must be to reintroduce student number controls and secure the equitable distribution of students across the sector.

Dragan Plavsic is president of the University of Hertfordshire branch of the University and College Union and senior lecturer in law.