Is the sector developing a blindspot in its lifelong learning strategies?
When universities enter, or operate within, the online education space, one of the overarching challenges they face is reaching and serving a group of people that they are not well oriented towards, and doing so flexibly.
Sector-wide data reinforces this by highlighting the heavy concentration of full-time students, who make up over 80% of students at all levels in UK higher education, as well as the age distribution, with 75% of full-time students aged 24 and under, according to HESA data for 2024–25. The HE sector remains heavily skewed towards serving young adults through full-time courses.
This is in stark contrast to online students, who overwhelmingly study part-time, accounting for over 90% of all online students in 2024–25, with the majority aged over 25. There are therefore a range of different challenges and changes needed to reach and serve a different group of students in a different way. The operational challenge of doing this effectively is more wide-reaching than simply producing an online degree.
Universities are, and will find that many of these types of challenges exist in similar and different ways when developing provision under the umbrella of lifelong learning. The challenges are too many and varied to list here.
There is evidently growing interest in, and activity around, lifelong learning-focused provision, driven in part by the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE). This has thrown up a range of challenges that have entered wider discourse, such as systems and pedagogical issues.
What I have seen considered less are the challenges of reaching and recruiting students, particularly how to address the cost of marketing courses and recruiting sustainable numbers of students to courses that are shorter and therefore command lower fees.
It’s in this area, specifically, where I think we risk developing a sector-wide blind spot and missing an opportunity to think about lifelong learning in a slightly different way.
Credit transfer vs student loyalty
I’ve seen this blind spot manifest itself in the focus on issues of credit transfer for the LLE. This refers to the ability for the academic credit that a student has successfully obtained through a course at one institution to be recognised by another institution they plan to study with.
At its heart, credit transfer is about facilitating student mobility across institutions. It is about creating the conditions for people to study credit-bearing courses across different universities, and it is not something that is particularly easy or well embedded in UK higher education.
The flip side of student mobility, moving between institutions, is student loyalty, returning to the same institution again and again, and it’s this very idea that is rarely discussed. In a sector that seems to be almost exclusively focused on the challenges that policies like the LLE present, it is failing to consider some of the opportunities.
The key one, which applies to lifelong learning in general, not simply the LLE, is becoming institutions that people return to again and again. There is a subtle but very important difference between a strategy that only seeks to reach new audiences through a lifelong learning offer and one that also focuses on deepening relationships with existing and past students and seeks to serve them over their lifetimes.
The cost of student recruitment in lifelong and online learning
One of the key issues in diversifying into any new forms of provision is the financial sustainability of that provision. This is an issue that is even more acute given the state of sector finances as a whole.
There are a wide range of costs related to developing new provision, particularly when it varies significantly from full-time degrees offered to under-24-year-old audiences. However, the one I want to focus on here is the cost of marketing and recruitment.
Speak to anyone who is running online programmes within UK universities, or those partnering with universities to manage them, and they will all be acutely conscious of the cost of acquisition. This is the amount of money spent for each student recruited to programmes.
In a recent article, Anna Wood, PVC of Online and Lifelong Learning at University of the Arts London (UAL), said that institutions should anticipate “the cost of digital marketing spend will be between 20 and 40 per cent of revenue for the first intakes” to online programmes.
This relates to degree programmes, but efforts to market shorter forms of provision are not wildly dissimilar. It is not easy to surface direct evidence of cost versus return for shorter forms of provision, but there are some indicators we can observe.
In the online education world, GetSmarter, a subsidiary of 2U, is a company that, in its own words, “is principally engaged in providing non-degree online education courses to working professionals in collaboration with leading universities”. The company has an impressive list of partners, both in the UK and internationally, including the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics, in addition to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and others.
However, despite being a commercial company specialising in a form of provision that sits under the lifelong learning umbrella, its UK limited company has posted a loss in its last two years of published accounts, 2023 and 2024. In the most recent accounts for 2024, this loss was nearly £7 million. Although this financial reporting does not specifically relate to marketing and recruitment costs, these will form a significant part of overall expenditure. I think this helps to underscore some of the challenges here.
Developing lifelong learning provision, which is often but not exclusively delivered through flexible formats for working adults, demonstrably presents a challenge in terms of financial sustainability. Therefore, any moves into this provision need to be supported by robust strategies.
Unfortunately, we’ve already seen the movie, where universities enthusiastically flock to a new form of provision but fail to make it financially sustainable in the form of MOOCs. Although we will never be able to fully analyse the cost versus return of MOOCs, for many universities this was loss-making.
One of the clearest examples is the £6.7 million accounting loss recorded by the Open University in its 2023 accounts following the sale of its investment in FutureLearn, which, in the context of the company’s first iteration and its widely reported financial challenges, suggests the disposal occurred under unfavourable conditions.
Clearly, I leave myself open to the charge of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing. However, in some cases, those presenting MOOCs as purely altruistic or as a loss leader are engaging in comforting post-rationalisation. Equally, both then and especially now, there is broad agreement that public institutions have a responsibility to operate in a financially sustainable manner.
Building lifelong learning relationships with students
There are no simple answers to the conundrum of developing sustainable provision under the umbrella of lifelong learning, but I think we are missing something significant if we are only asking ourselves the question:
How do we reach new groups of people through lifelong learning?
Instead of also asking
How do we become institutions where people return to study with us again and again?
Lifelong learning presents an opportunity for loyalisation, not simply diversification, and notably the former involves engaging with those you already know, including existing students, alumni and other stakeholders who have engaged with the university before.
Quite frankly, if I were a university leader with an appetite to engage seriously with the LLE, one of my primary areas of focus would be doing so in a way that encourages learners to return to my institution again and again.
Although it would be naïve to think that loyalisation, or a different form of student retention, is an easier alternative or can be pursued exclusively, there is a case to be made that focusing solely on reaching new audiences is likely to be more costly and more challenging.
Existing students and alumni are within easier reach of universities and, in many cases, number in the thousands, with that figure growing year-on-year. There is an opportunity for the current impetus behind lifelong learning to support universities in changing their approach and orientation to alumni. Anecdotally, this still seems far more focused on what alumni give back through volunteering and donations, rather than how universities can continue to serve them through learning.
Although many institutions offer alumni discounts on things such as master's degrees, there is significant scope for more creative and effective strategies to engage alumni in taking up existing opportunities to return to study, as well as new ones as they emerge. I have thoughts on this, but they are for another time.
This current moment in the sector, in which there is a stronger focus on lifelong learning, has overall been one where the challenges presented and discussed, which certainly exist, have obscured thinking and creativity in relation to the opportunities. Equally, the challenges that have gained the most attention have been limited in scope, with half-baked understandings of demand and things like credit transfer taking centre stage.
Less discussion has taken place around the costs and challenges of reaching new students, which is analogous to moves into online education. While this challenge persists, universities mustn’t neglect to leverage the advantage they inherently have, which is a large population of people who have studied with them before. Through serious and strategic efforts in lifelong learning, they can not only serve these individuals again in the future but also become institutions that are far more oriented towards returners, rather than the annual churn of new recruits.
