Every account of the university crisis arrives with a culprit already selected. Vice-chancellors and their salaries. Ministers and their visa policy. Regulators, consultants, students, the market, the left, the right. Each account is partly right, which is why none of them explains very much.
The prologue does something less satisfying and more useful: it establishes the scale of the problem, and then shows that responsibility is genuinely distributed without being equally shared. Some actors chose. Some were constrained. Several were both, and the difference matters.
It also makes the case that this is not a story about universities. A university is local infrastructure with a Latin motto. When one fails, the damage lands on a city, a labour market and a cohort of students who made a twenty-year decision on the strength of a prospectus.
They made the impossible look merely difficult.
Regulated to Fail, Prologue
Where this goes next
This is the question the chapter opens with and the mechanism it identifies. What it concludes — and what follows from it — is in the book.
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