Olaide Olasupo received an unexpected email on Monday evening. He was not to go to his classes at GSM London the following morning because the college would be going into administration.
The business student had one project left to submit before completing his degree programme when the news came that GSM London, one of England’s largest privately owned higher education providers, would cease teaching. Now he is searching for another institution that will recognise his coursework and allow him to complete his studies
“This was four years of my life. I gave up my business to study and was really looking forward to finishing,” he said. “It’s so depressing. I don’t know where I’m going. Now I’ll have to pay more. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
The plight of GSM London highlights the financial pressures facing a number of higher education institutions and raises questions about the regulatory regime for privately funded “alternative providers” promoted by the Conservative government.
A government white paper from May 2016 set out a vision for a more market-based approach to boost “competition and choice” in UK higher education. In the foreword Jo Johnson, who recently resumed his role as universities minister, pointed to the prospect of failure under the new regulatory regime.
“There may be some providers who do not rise to the challenge and who therefore need or choose to close some or all of their courses, or to exit the market completely,” he wrote.
Olaide Olasupo, student of GSM London © Charlie Bibby/FT
Established in 1974 as the Greenwich School of Management, GSM London signed an agreement in 2006 with the University of Plymouth to accredit its degrees. It was bought by Sovereign Capital, a private equity group, in 2011. The firm also has investments in the British and Irish Modern Music Institute and Education Placement Group, which provides supply teachers across UK schools.
GSM offered pre-university “foundation” courses, bachelors’ and masters’ degrees, some fast-tracked over two years. Earlier this year, it unveiled a new range of postgraduate programmes, signalling continued plans for growth.
The college played an important role in encouraging social mobility in the area, with a high proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are under-represented in higher education.
“This is very sad,” says Nick Hillman, head of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think-tank. “GSM might have grown too quickly and only really been commercially minded recently, but its students were not from middle-class families. We lose not only diversity of provision but also the make-up of higher education students becomes less diverse.”
Worse for these students is that GSM London was in the process of registering with the Office for Students, the new higher education regulator formed in 2018. The OFS has so far accepted 382 education providers, but students of institutions that are not on the register — such as GSM London — are ineligible for the government’s student loan package, cutting them off from their main source of income.
Several students milling outside the GSM London’s Greenwich campus on Thursday said they had already been told earlier this month that they would be unable to renew loans for tuition and maintenance at GSM, which are issued year by year.
GSM London’s problems are not new. Its accounts showed that it made losses of nearly £10m in 2017. Sovereign Capital had injected £22m since 2016 and hired bankers to find potential buyers. The college had instituted a restructuring plan to reduce debt exposure.
It was also tackling high drop-out rates. According to 2016-17 data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, 53 per cent of students who started full-time undergraduate studies at GSM London had stopped by the following year, against a national average of 29 per cent.
The college was identified in a BBC Panorama investigation in late 2017 into agents who were recruiting unqualified students. An inspection by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education cleared the college of wrongdoing, but fallout from the scandal — along with a decision to close the college’s Greenford campus in north-west London — hit the number of applicants, which dropped from nearly 5,500 in 2017-18 to just over 3,500 currently. Revenues fell from £39m in 2016 to £30m last year.
Other higher education providers will be watching GSM London’s fate closely as competition intensifies for students at a time when many institutions have expanded investment programmes and increased costs but are suffering a squeeze in applications and revenues.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We are working closely with the provider and all relevant sector bodies to ensure the students affected are given the support and advice they need to continue their studies.”
They added: “Whilst the vast majority of institutions are in good financial health, the Department for Education and the Office for Students have been clear that neither will bail out failing providers.”
But as Bintou, studying for a degree in oil and gas management, said on Thursday: “We worked so hard and were close to finishing. That’s what breaks my heart.”
Letter in response to this article:
HE reform should focus on managerial capacity / From Roger Cox, Westerham, Kent, UK
No comments:
Post a Comment