Everything needed to cover the book.

Short description

Britain boasts world-class universities. Increasingly, it cannot explain how they are supposed to pay their bills. Regulated to Fail follows the money and the rules behind the crisis — and shows why institutions are autonomous enough to be blamed for failure, but not autonomous enough to control the conditions that produce it.

Long description

Britain boasts world-class universities. Increasingly, it cannot explain how they are supposed to pay their bills. They must compete like businesses and serve the public, while the accumulated rules of government, regulators and the sector itself constrain what they can charge, how they can operate and how they can raise revenue. They are autonomous enough to be blamed for failure, but not autonomous enough to control the conditions that produce it.

Regulated to Fail follows the money behind the headlines: eroded tuition fees, underfunded research, dependence on international students, mounting regulation, and a system in which even shrinking, sharing or closing can be surprisingly difficult and expensive.

Avoiding easy scapegoats, it shows how individually reasonable decisions created a collectively unreasonable system — one that universities helped to build, government helped to break, and neither can now easily escape.

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Author biography

Justin O'Brien is a psychologist, academic and AI consultant. His PhD research examined human visual perception, and he has spent more than three decades in academic research and teaching at London universities. He now works on the responsible use of artificial intelligence in higher education, particularly in assessment, academic integrity and institutional governance. In March 2026 he publishedThe 2026 Reckoning, an independent analysis of the finances of 150 UK universities, downloaded more than 8,000 times.