The magic of the UK higher education sector lies in its diversity. Whether old or new, urban or rural, multi‑faculty or specialist, the UK is blessed with a rich range of institutions that cater to different student needs and ambitions.
We rightly celebrate this variety of institutional missions and their student bodies, and we often insist that such plurality is a strength of the system. Yet, when it comes to policy design, funding competitions and public debate about higher education, we revert time and again to a remarkably narrow idea of what a ‘successful’ university looks like.
The dominant model
In England, at least, the higher education landscape increasingly operates as though one model fits all. That model is implicitly research‑intensive, multi‑faculty and internationally competitive, with the Russell Group often serving as the unspoken benchmark against which all others are judged.
Of course, Russell Group universities do excellent work – and I am personally all the richer for having attended two Russell Group institutions as part of my own higher education journey. But these institutions are certainly not the only game in town. Their continued dominance reflects not just their strengths, but a collective failure across the sector to articulate a credible alternative vision of success for institutions that look and behave very differently.
Boxed-in by design?
In a 2025 HEPI report co‑authored with City St George’s colleague Professor André Spicer, I argued that British universities have become “boxed in” by policy frameworks that reward convergence rather than differentiation. Funding mechanisms, assessment exercises and regulatory expectations may appear inclusive, but in practice they tend to privilege scale, research intensity and administrative capacity. The result is that institutions already best equipped to compete on these terms continue to pull away, leaving others to mimic their operating model rather than innovate or evolve in line with their unique missions.
Success is measured through a narrow set of indicators that only a small proportion of institutions can realistically dominate
This has created a fundamental paradox at the heart of our higher education system – one that claims to champion diversity and student choice, yet quietly encourages institutions to become more alike. Under this settlement:
- small specialist institutions are expected to perform like large, multi‑faculty universities, despite lacking both the capacity to cross‑subsidise in periods of financial pressure and the back‑office infrastructure to manage growing regulatory demands;
- teaching‑focused, vocational and technical providers are nudged towards research agendas that may sit uncomfortably with their core purpose; and
- regionally rooted universities with strong civic missions are judged against metrics that prioritise global reach over local impact.
All the while, success is measured through a narrow set of indicators that only a small proportion of institutions can realistically dominate.
Fear of differentiation
Nevertheless, the idea of placing universities into different “boxes” provokes strong resistance across the sector. For many, differentiation conjures up uncomfortable memories of the binary divide between universities and polytechnics, raising fears of entrenched hierarchies. In this context, concerns that re-categorisation might limit ambition or lock providers into a lower social status are understandable.
Yet, there is also a risk in allowing these fears to shut down the debate entirely since our system already sorts institutions into boxes – albeit implicitly. Current regulatory and funding settlements also produce a hierarchy, whether we acknowledge it or not. And this hierarchy fails to recognise the full range of contributions that different providers make to students, communities and their local economies.
Mission over mimicry
A more honest conversation would therefore start from the premise that higher education is not, and should not be, a single ecosystem with a single purpose. Research‑intensive universities, vocational and technical institutions, small specialists and regionally anchored providers all play distinct roles in our sector. Expecting each of them to thrive under a blanket policy framework is not only unrealistic, but it can be actively damaging to their sustainability.
Instead, if policy were designed around institutional missions rather than ideals, we might begin to see meaningful change. Funding competitions could be shaped with different provider types in mind, recognising varied forms of excellence and impact. Accountability measures could reflect what institutions are actually trying to achieve, rather than what we assume all universities ought to look like. And success could be defined more expansively, encompassing high‑quality teaching, skills development, civic engagement and applied research alongside traditional academic outputs.
A plea for realism
This is not a call for a rigid re-categorisation or top‑down labelling of our universities, nor is it an argument that institutions should be prevented from evolving. Rather, it is a plea for policy realism. Differentiation, if designed transparently and collaboratively, could protect institutional mission integrity rather than erode it. It could give providers permission to lean into what they do best, instead of continually chasing someone else’s definition of prestige.
Crucially, this is not a challenge that policymakers can solve alone. Governments default to ‘one‑size‑fits‑all’ solutions partly because they are time‑poor, but also because the sector itself has never reached consensus on what a differentiated system should look like – or been willing to confront the trade‑offs such a system would entail. Too often, calls for diversity stop short of accepting that genuine diversity requires different rules.
Hard talk
If we want a higher education system that truly serves a wide range of societal needs, then we may need to be braver in our internal conversations. That means acknowledging uncomfortable truths about power and privilege, and resisting the temptation to believe that holding all institutions to identical regulatory requirements necessarily delivers fair outcomes.
If we want a higher education system that truly serves a wide range of societal needs, then we may need to be braver in our internal conversations
The question, then, is not whether all universities can or should be the same. The real question is whether the sector is ready to work collectively towards a system that reflects our rich diversity and allows it to thrive.
