The UK’s biggest university is a private company

Chris Smyth, Elizabeth Bratton and Amy Borrett:

In a nondescript building just off the A40 highway in the outer suburbs of London lies the centre of the fastest growing, and most profitable, part of Britain’s university sector.

Though few have heard of it, Global Banking School is now the biggest teacher of full-time undergraduates in the country having more than doubled in size in just three years.

Yet GBS is not formally a university but a private company contracted by universities around England to teach students who may never set foot on their own campuses.

A decade after the country’s formal cap on student numbers was removed in order to encourage a market in higher education, one in 10 full-time undergraduates in England is now taught by for-profit franchise companies such as GBS, according to FT analysis of data from the Office for Students, the university regulator.

Advocates say franchise providers have brought private-sector innovation and spread educational opportunity to demographic groups ignored by traditional high-cost universities.