So What Happens Now?

 Gavin Williamson is a sorry excu...  No, wait.  I'll start again.

Gavin Williamson is sorry.  He's been wandering around the various news studios leaving great big apologies right in the middle of the floor where everyone can see them.  He's very sorry for the A-Level debacle.  It's tempting to feel sympathetic for a moment - after all, the coronovirus shutdown is unprecedented, and so there'll've been difficulties.  But the moment of sympathy is very short, because although the hope of running the summer exams as normal might have been on the table back at the beginning of March, it should quickly have become apparent that that was not going to happen.
And even if in April the government had been clinging to that hope, they ought to have realised that there was a good chance that there'd have to be something else up their sleeves as a fallback.
And then after the debacle in Scotland last week...  Oh, you get the idea.
Nobody really minds things being up in the air at the moment.  Nobody really minds plans being undermined by reality.  What we do mind is governments that don't seem to have thought more than two days ahead.  A plan that can't come to fruition is better than no plan at all.
But, anyway.  A-Level students have something approximating a result, and hopefully most of them will get into university, which is all peachy... unless you're a university.
Just off the top of my head, let me try to explain some of the problems we're going to have.

1. Last week, we thought we were dealing with cohort x.  Now we think we're dealing with cohort y.  We offered and confirmed places to people in x; but now it looks like we'll have to deal with y.  Some universities, then, are going to face an influx of students wanting to know if they can have the place that they wanted, but that they couldn't have last week, after all.  Others are going to face an exodus of students who'd accepted a second-choice offer, but who have now either been given their first choice again, or who have decided to take a year out and go to their first choice next year.  And so on.  There're other permutations.

2. But what this means, probably, is that the smaller and post-92 universities are going to have fewer students than they thought they'd have as recently as, er, lunchtime yesterday.  Fewer students means less income; less income means that they might go bust.  And because the post-92s generally cater more for students from less advantaged backgrounds, that could have serious knock on effects.

3. But hey!  I work at a Russell Group place, and in a law school to boot.  We'll be fine, won't we?

4. Well, in one sense, probably.  We face a financial threat, but it's not as serious all things considered; we can probably ride it out, assuming that it's only an academic year that's bombed.

5. Except... Well, lots of our income comes from overseas students - that is, those from outside the EU.  We recruit heavily from China and Malaysia.  We're probably not going to get as many of those students, for obvious reasons.  Hopefully, they'll come back next year.

6. But in the meantime, that means we have an income gap to fill - or we have to hold back on costs.

7. At my place, there's a hiring freeze; and that includes having fewer grad students to run seminars.  We'll have some, probably, but full-time staff are going to have to pick up quite a lot of slack.

8. That means that our teaching is going to have to be concentrated on core courses; and that means fewer optional courses, because there won't be the staff with the time to run them.  And that means less scope for students to specialise, which'll detract from their experience.

9. There'll also be a temptation to try to make good some of the lost income by recruiting more UGs.  The recruitment cap has been lifted, so we can - technically.  So the size of the cohort at Russell Group universities might actually go up this year.

10. But remember that there'll be no more staff to teach them.  And because of social distancing, the teaching will be at least substantially online.  And the teaching that isn't online will be done differently.  So there'll be a lower staff: student ratio, and the staff will be that bit more frazzled.

11. That's not going to be good for student experience.

12. So the government will spend the next few days shouting at us for failing to keep up with massive policy shifts that they've made on the hop; and the next year or so shouting at us because students are less happy because of the effects of those policy shifts.

13.  Staff will also not have the time to do research.  This will make us a bit less happy, too (because research is a big part of our jobs, and we like it: it's one of the things that keeps us in the profession; we are teachers, but we're not just teachers).  But it'll also allow the government to shout at us for not doing enough research.

And so, in many ways, HMG has managed to salvage something important out of this.  So long as they get through the next few days, the problem will have shifted to the university sector - which is not within the government's remit.  It's a perfect opportunity for some spectacular "Not-me-gov"-ism.
We know that there're elements of HMG, and its ideological supporters, that loathe the university sector already: they see it as too effete, too lefty, too critical, too independent, too... too everything.  I do fear that this summer's education SNAFU will, by the end of next week - and for the coming 12-18 months - become a brickbat that can be thrown at HE.

Which'll be no fun at all.