A system built to manage risk ended up creating it.

Synopsis

Why the system behaved this way

Universities are usually described as if they were either public services or ordinary businesses. They are neither. They compete for students and research income while operating under tight constraints on price, entry, exit and institutional form — and they are regulated as public-interest institutions while no longer being funded as a coherent public service.

Regulated to Fail follows the money, the rules and the incentives. It shows how a fixed fee, underfunded research, international recruitment, growth, borrowing and intensifying regulation interacted until individually rational decisions produced a systemic crisis. And it argues that this was not an accident: financial fragility, cross-subsidy, regulatory burden and political blame-shifting are predictable consequences of the rules as written.

The final part turns from diagnosis to repair — what institutions can do now, what the sector can only do together, and what government would have to change for any of it to hold.

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