The pandemic has exposed the impact of 20 years of turning higher education into a marketplace and students into increasingly dissatisfied customers

In 2018-19 Manchester City FC had revenues of £535.2m. Manchester United had £627m. The University of Manchester made more than £1bn – not far short, in other words, of the combined income of the city’s two global sporting brands. This is in many ways a cause for celebration, a sign of the economic power of higher education, of British success in attracting foreign students and the high fees that they pay, of the contribution that universities can make to the prosperity of their host cities.

But, for a billion-pound business, you might have expected better than their handling of the pandemic. Last summer, as students tried to decide whether to stay at home or go to the campus for the first term of the academic year, they were told they would receive “blended learning”, a combination of online and in-person teaching. They were offered the “hope” as one student says, “that everything would be as normal as possible”. They didn’t need much encouragement, especially all those first-years for whom arrival at university was the pinnacle and goal of their education to date, and they went.