New choices: Revisiting futures for higher education in England
Think tank: HEPI
Author(s): Professor Sir Chris Husbands
July 23, 2026
This report from UK think tank HEPI sets out four potential scenarios for how the sector might resolve its financial challenges.
English universities face ‘unstable hybrid’ future as funding model collapses faster than predicted, warns new report.
English higher education is heading into a future nobody planned, according to a new paper from the Higher Education Policy Institute written by Professor Sir Chris Husbands.
New Choices: Revisiting Futures for higher education in England (HEPI Debate Paper 48) is a follow-up to an earlier paper, Four Futures (HEPI Debate Paper 37) by the same author from 2024, which set out four potential scenarios for how the sector might resolve its financial challenges.
Two years on, Sir Chris argues that higher education faces long-term strategic choices. The financial pressures previously identified have arrived faster than expected and have been compounded by three further disruptive forces: the rapid spread of generative AI into teaching and assessment; a fundamental shift in student expectations, as more students study from home, work part-time and manage mental health pressures; and eroding public trust in the higher education sector’s value and purpose.
The report warns that England finds itself in an unplanned mix of decline, quiet research concentration and stalled regional reform, ‘less stable than any of the original scenarios’, and none of it is being managed as deliberate polic
