Every comparison in higher education policy is misused. Systems are lifted out of their context, admired, and recommended by people who would not accept the tax settlement that pays for them.
So this chapter applies a transfer test first: what would actually have to be true, here, for a given stabiliser to work? Then it looks at four. Stopping inflation from making policy by stealth. Replacing annual improvisation with multi-year compacts. Treating financial buffers as infrastructure rather than as evidence of hoarding. And funding autonomy at a level that makes autonomy mean something.
It is equally interested in what does not transfer, and says so. The value of the comparison is not that somewhere else has solved it. It is that these systems are stabilised deliberately, and England's is not.
They stop inflation, delay and volatility from answering them accidentally.
Regulated to Fail, Chapter 15
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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