Cash cow?

This prompted by the interesting piece in today's FT at reference 1, mainly about an outfit called the Global Banking School (GBS) of reference 2. Which, despite the name, is probably also big in health and social care courses too, as per the snap above.

The GBS business models are Ryanair and Aldi: no frills education that people want. Which appears to translate into partnering with regular universities: you do the teaching and they award the degrees. You take most of the government student loans, which may or may not get paid back to the taxpayer in due course. Your students are probably young people, already in work, who do not fit the regular model very well, for one reason or another. Your staff are largely drawn from the large pool of teachers for whom the regulars have no work at the moment.

And GBS is big, as illustrated from the graphic above, lifted from the FT. Arden is another irregular, to be found at reference 4.

GBS is part of GEDU of reference 3, who look to have fingers in all sorts of educational pies. For example, creative management stuff in Australia, snapped above. I did not dig deep enough to find how much of it was distance learning - something that I find very difficult, although I have not tried that hard and it has come on a lot since the early days.

These operators are addressing a pressing need: we badly need better training for our young people to prosper in the world of work: far too many of them are not getting there. But the jury is out on whether this for-profit approach represents good value for the taxpayer and experience in the US has been mixed. A cynic might say that the business is really about sucking student loans out of the government, with a bit of education on the side.

We shall see.

PS: I associate to the prodigious cost of outsourcing various kinds of special needs provision out to the private sector.

References

Reference 1: The UK’s biggest university is a private company: Supporters say franchised providers widen access to further education, but others doubt the real value of their ‘no frills’ courses - Chris Smyth, Elizabeth Bratton, Amy Borrett, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 2: https://globalbanking.ac.uk/.

Reference 3: https://gedu.global/.

Reference 4: https://arden.ac.uk/.