Universities throughout the United Kingdom are currently living through a financial crisis. Consequently, they are eliminating courses or subjects with thin enrollment numbers. In another positive development, the government announced annual increases in tuition fees in response to universities’ fiscal shortfalls. Consequently, many areas are experiencing an increase in “cold spots.” For these regions, due to lack of funding, particular language education is no longer provided in schools.
Yet in recent years, enrollment in languages like German has dropped off a cliff. Full-time enrolments in German-language and Scandinavian-language courses fell by half. They have free-fallen from a peak of 3,900 in the 2012/13 academic year to just 1,400 for 2023/24. As language educator Catherine Richards explained, that decline indicates that languages are “just not valued, period.” This is the thinking of Prof. René Koglbauer. He stresses that the crisis represents the onset of a “downward spiral” for language programs.
The disinterest in language courses taught at the university level is soon going to catch up to secondary education. Areas of the UK where there are no university-level language provision could continue to lead schools and sixth form colleges to stop teaching A-level language subjects. WorldView educator Emma Walkers, a true advocate for her students. She cautioned that if funding cuts persisted her students would lose their local opportunity to study languages at the collegiate level.
“Often, if a student is moving out of Nottingham, they’re going to end up moving to a more expensive city,” – Emma Walkers
The financial implications for students remain considerable. With increasing tuition costs, students are faced with difficult decisions. Most need to think about moving much further from home. “If you’re coming from a family which isn’t particularly well-off, to then try to go to London or Bath or Bristol is a huge amount of money to try and find,” Walkers added.
The cutback on language studies is drastically at odds with the skyrocketing interest in artificial intelligence courses. Full-time enrolments in AI skyrocketed from just 900 in 2013/14 to an incredible 9,100 in 2023/24. This change is a reflection of the times in higher education, where some disciplines are booming and others wither away.
In large part these changes are a reaction to the drastic decrease in the popularity of traditional language courses. They have recently added “ab initio” undergraduate programs, allowing students to learn the languages from scratch. Additionally, institutions are providing intensive programs, joint honors options, and incorporating non-European languages like Arabic and Mandarin into their curricula to maintain student engagement.
Even with this initiative, fears over inequities based on geographic location in language learning opportunities remain. Prof René Koglbauer called for universities to take a different approach to solve cold spots to ensure their needs are properly met. He cautioned that if these trends aren’t addressed, the prospect of language courses could decrease even more.
“The challenge for places at higher education starts in primary school and the encouragement to do languages,” – Catherine Richards
Government’s proposed tuition fee rises are supposedly to allow universities to fund their way through increasing financial pressures. These increases particularly impact students that need to continue living at home as one of their few viable options. It makes it more difficult for them to commute to university. Many of those same students today have few, if any, options—none due to the cutting of courses and others because of geographic distance.
As universities continue to attempt to figure out these convoluted and competing priorities, the future of language education is left in uncertainty. In the aggregate, these course reductions can have grave long-term consequences for life after higher education. They can erode the very bedrock of language education that’s increasingly found across America’s schools.
