Britain boasts world-class universities. Increasingly, it cannot explain how they are supposed to pay their bills.

They must compete like businesses and serve the public under rules that control their prices but not their costs. The crisis is built into those rules.

Regulated to Fail follows the money behind the headlines. It examines how England's university system came to depend on frozen undergraduate fees, underfunded research and international students to make its finances work?and what happened when inflation, immigration policy and mounting regulation began to undermine those sources of support.

It explains why apparently obvious solutions are often anything but: why universities cannot simply recruit more students, cut unprofitable activities, collaborate to reduce costs, shrink gracefully or, in many cases, close. It also asks how a system designed around competition and consumer choice came to leave both universities and government with remarkably little room to manoeuvre.

Drawing on university accounts, sector data and the history of higher-education policy, Regulated to Fail avoids the familiar search for villains. Vice-chancellors, governments, regulators and universities have all made mistakes, but individually reasonable decisions have also accumulated into a system capable of producing collectively irrational results.

This is an account of how that system was built, why its financial problems are structural rather than temporary, and what universities and government can still do while there is time to choose.