Only a mindset shift can save the university sector

IT’S doubtful that many vice-chancellors in the UK have ever heard of Peter Drucker’s book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, let alone read it.

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First published 40 years ago, the book argued that entrepreneurship was not a rare gift possessed by a few but a discipline that every organisation could and should practise. At its heart was a simple message: namely innovation is not optional but the essential activity that determines whether institutions thrive or decline.

That warning could have been written for our universities today. Across the UK, higher education is facing a storm of financial and demographic pressures.

The number of 18-year-olds in the population is rising, yet many institutions are struggling to recruit. International student numbers, the financial lifeline of the past decade, have slumped under tighter visa rules. Tuition fees remain frozen at £9,000, losing value every year against inflation, while costs, especially pensions and pay, continue to climb.

The result is a system in crisis and the Office for Students has already warned that more than half of universities in England are forecasting deficits this year. Here in Wales, Cardiff University has announced plans to cut a significant number of jobs, Bangor University continues to battle severe financial difficulties, and the University of South Wales has undergone repeated rounds of restructuring.

This is not about trimming fat at the edges but about survival and yet, as Drucker might have predicted, the response from university leadership has been more about administration than entrepreneurship. Instead of embracing change as a source of renewal, institutions are doubling down on cost-cutting, centralisation and control. The qualities Drucker believed defined innovative organisations such as clarity, decentralisation, customer focus and systematic entrepreneurship are glaringly absent.