There has been a lot of press coverage about the current crisis in English universities, ranging from extremely high Vice Chancellor salaries to commensurately high indebtedness of our students. The government is currently holding a review of post-18 education with a view to ‘driving up quality, increasing choice and ensuring value for money’.

There has been a major strike by the University and College Union. While occasioned by specific employer proposals to end the defined benefits pension scheme, there was a broader background of alienation. In this environment, there needs to be a healing process. We see this book as part of that process. We hope that the reader does not see us as attacking anyone and that policy makers and the higher education sector engage with the ideas we express here.

Higher education has been one of the few areas of the public sector that has been isolated from austerity and indeed has seen significant increases in taxpayer support, albeit not widely advertised. In other research, we are studying generational inequality. Universities are an example where millennials and the following generation gain immediate benefit from expenditure, but it remains the case that they will be repaying not only their individual student debts but also general government debt taken out to pay the up-front subsidies in the student loan system. They are entitled to see that we spend their money wisely.

Our interest is in designing mechanisms that efficiently achieve desired outcomes. Everyone states that they want high quality education with widening participation. The increase in fees and the contingent loan system, based upon the Browne Report, was intended to bring about those results. That the marketisation of higher education hasn’t achieved these objectives means either that it is an inappropriate venture or that there are flaws in the design of the mechanism. Others have commented extensively on the limits to markets in education. Our job in this book is to identify the design flaws in the attempts at marketization and propose remedies.

We come to this task with some strong beliefs and principles. We believe in academic freedom for lecturers and students, and that there should be diverse voices engaging in reasoned debate on university campuses throughout the country. It is also our belief that students benefit from programmes in literature and the arts, in modern languages, just as much as they benefit from studying mathematics and economics.