Who owns a university?
The institution and the system
A new book about Britain’s universities
Regulated to Fail
Why British Universities Cannot Be Saved by the Rules That Broke Them
Four uncomfortable facts
01
Teaching British students loses £1.7bn a year.
02Research recovers 66p in every pound it costs.
03The fee is worth 38% less than when it was set.
04International students became the shock absorber.
Sources: Annual TRAC 2023–24 (Office for Students) and the2026 tuition fee impact assessment (Department for Education). Every figure on this site is traceable — see the source library.
Start here
Take the tour of the argument.
22 chapters, 439 sources and the mechanism behind each one. It takes about ten minutes to see the shape of the whole thing.
Origin story
How universities moved from chartered autonomy into compliance and quasi-market regulation.
Follow the argument →Financial diagnosis
Why the current system cannot pay for itself.
Follow the argument →Regulatory contradiction
How Whitehall treats universities as cash machines and controlled utilities at once.
Follow the argument →What the book explains
The obvious questions have surprising answers.
Start with a concise website explainer, then follow the argument and evidence into the relevant part of the book.
Where does the money actually come from?
Income, costs and cross-subsidy
Why are tuition fees so high if universities are losing money?
The economics of teaching
Why does research need subsidising?
The research funding gap
Why did universities become dependent on international students?
The system’s financial shock absorber
Can a university run out of money?
Liquidity, insolvency and market exit
Why can’t universities simply merge or share services?
Rules, incentives and identity
Who is responsible for the current crisis?
Policy and institutional decisions
What would actually fix it?
A route to a sustainable system
The system in six steps
A crisis produced by the system, not a single bad decision.
Each step is individually defensible. Together they produce an institution that cannot absorb a bad year.
- Fee cap + underfunded research
- Need for cross-subsidy
- International recruitment growth
- Expansion + debt + fixed costs
- Policy or market shock
- Deficits and restructuring
Beyond the covers
The website keeps the argument alive.
The book is the argument. The website is the evidence, updates and material that would not fit between the covers.
Evidence & data
439 sources, chapter by chapter, each with a note on what it contributes.
Examine the evidence →What changed
Follow what happened after the manuscript closed.
Read the updates →Watch the ideas
Visual explanations with transcripts, diagrams and sources.
Browse videos →Read further
A selective, annotated route into each major theme.
Continue reading →Latest
What happened next
After the manuscript closed
A starting point for tracking the cases and mechanisms discussed in the book.
Read update →The fee cap changes — but the underlying problem remains
Placeholder for an update connecting a policy announcement to the real economics of teaching.
Read update →A university announces a new restructuring programme
Placeholder showing how a current event should lead back to debt, fixed costs and the failure process.
Read update →