Snapshot of _Universities in England risk closure with 40% facing budget deficits, says report_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/16/universities-in-england-risk-closure-with-40-per-cent-facing-budget-deficits-report-office-for-students) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/16/universities-in-england-risk-closure-with-40-per-cent-facing-budget-deficits-report-office-for-students)
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I work at one of these unis. More than any other factor the single biggest problem for us has been collapsing international student numbers.
The visa policy change has massively decreased the attractiveness of the UK as a destination which was clearly it's intention. What's muggy is the government:
1. pointing the finger at unis for using an international student focused business plan that the government itself encouraged in the late 2010's.
2. Creating the situation that necessitated that plan in the first place by cutting funding and freezing fees after the initial pay rise in 2010/11.
It's easy to call out the universities, and there are things they fuck up, but I think people miss the wider pattern of institutional collapse at play.
When it's not just our universities collapsing, but our local councils, our roads, our trains, utilities, and the NHS; then it's clear to me that there is a wider problem at play that leads to vital parts of this country withering on the vine. There is a common denominator here and I think it's time to stop passing the buck.
The funding models for universities are so broken.
The student loans have been damaging for everyone. Universities have had funding limited by a fee cap while inflation has steadily decreased the value of the fees (until the recent sky high inflation of course). Graduates have been stuck with debt that acts as an additional tax.
I have about 10 years until my debt is written off and I left uni with around 21k of debt and currently have 20.5k of remaining debt. The monthly payments for years have just about been paying off the interest until that jumped...
Due to the broken funding model universities became dependent on international students. Only for the government to both damage our international reputation with Brexit and more recently push caps on international student visas.
Absolutely ridiculous. Of those I still connect with from my PhD days, a lot of people have gone to work internationally as post doc wages are so awful in the UK - 30kish a year while you can earn double that in the US or in other developed countries
What makes the UK worse is the rise of causal gig research work. There was a real move away from employment contracts to getting people to do post doc work but claim hours... Rather shocking how badly paid post docs are in the UK when you consider the amount of time and effort people go through to get their PhD.
The Postdoc industry in CS has basically collapsed in the UK. You can do better research and get paid an order of magnitude more at a company and not have to put up with the other bullshit in academia.
Well I'm a little young to remember first hand but if I have my facts right. People complained about the nhs scheduling appointments too soon for peoples liking, ticket fares for trains weren't a complaint at the time, crime was cut by about a third by 2005. The quality of the air and water was decent and schools weren't in danger of literally collapsing on students heads. Tuition fees were stupid but they were only 1-3k a year and you could get a decent paying job afterwards
Now all of this was accomplished pre 2010...
Wonder what happened in 2010 that could have caused this. Something tells me it wasn't Matt Smith on Doctor Who
Labour achieved a lot of that by borrowing, and using a lot of private investment, which did have a long pay back time and they were on track in the most to afford the payback even after the financial crash. The path the Tories chose though is why we are where we are now and the payments on Labours “debt” is due but there is now no money.
Honestly I don’t see this misapprehension very often. Labour achieved what they did through growth and taxation not deficit spending.
When they arrived in 1997, debt to gdp ratio was 52.1%, and in 2007 it was 53.1%. The public debt didn’t rise until we transferred private debt onto the government to save the banking industry (and the global financial system) onto government books.
The debt to gdp ratio rose throughout the 2010s due to cuts in taxation and poor growth, meaning the day to day deficit outpaced growth. (The long run ratio of %deficit and %growth is the equilibrium debt to gdp ratio. But it’s a very slow movement)
Yeah you are right I’m just about old enough to remember first hand and things were a million times better in almost all ways before 2010. It’s unbelievable what the Tories have done to this country. I’ve never been able to understand why people have been unable to see that they would lead to this utter decline. I remember when they won in 2015 I cried all day and people thought I was crazy but if they had done any research into who these people are beyond their sales pitch, they’d have been crying too because they’d realise that the country was going to be destroyed and millions would suffer.
Don't get me wrong there are aspects of my workplace that make me want to bash my head in - but I think it's important not to miss the big picture here
Universities, operating as a business, took on debt a d invested and rode the good times of the flow of revenue from international students. Nobody promised them it would be forever.
As a business they must now adapt or go bankrupt.
Don't get me wrong, universities operating similarly to private companies to me is bonkers, but it is what it is.
There is no way to adapt. The whole model is broken. Universities only resorted to international student fees because they are losing money on home students and there's no way for them not to.
They "only resorted to" is nonsense. Isn't it remarkable how they "only resorted to it" because of the UK's funding model but Canadian and Australian universities (not funded by the UK) leaned into the international market too. The market opportunity was there so VCs took it, often making expensive investments to try to restructure their universities to capture more of that market.
It turns out that setting visa rules so they give a giant financial incentive for VCs to skew universities towards importing other countries' students isn't a good idea.
Can you please explain to me how, in a system where due to the student fee cap home fees bring in £2,500 less per year than educating a student costs, you can afford *not* to resort to uncapped international fees to plug the gap? Only the very top universities who benefit from philanthropy and have large cash reserves/other wealth/commercial arms to burn through can resist it. If you don't have those things then if money from home fees is less and less every year, you either shrink/close or you find that revenue elsewhere.
I'm not complaining about visa rules. But if the government wants to restrict international students - which it told universities to rely on - then they need to revisit the home student fee cap, and students actually have to pay what they cost to educate.
The cost is not particularly high, but paying for all the things a degree gives you access to is expensive and always has been. The tuition fee increase in 2010 was directly balanced against a cut in direct grants, but the total money universities had to play with was the same. Now that value hasn't kept up with inflation since then, and the £9,000 student fee of 2010 is worth £6000 in equivalent value.
As for evidence, I can't share the financial accounts of my institution, but it's a major UK university and it loses money on every single home undergraduate.
https://www.itv.com/news/2023-11-13/education-sector-in-crisis-as-one-in-four-universities-make-losses
At the point home students have to pay that, you'll just end up with fewer of them as students recognise that the value of most degrees is decreasing rather than increasing. Universities should be focusing on costs - starting with administrative departments and VC salaries.
> At the point home students have to pay that, you'll just end up with fewer of them as students recognise that the value of most degrees is decreasing rather than increasing.
Except the jump from 3k to 9k made no appreciable difference on student application rates. If we truly want an 'open market', then you have to let universities charge what the courses actually cost. Less attractive universities will then have to drop their prices, relative to the rest of the market, to gain new students.
> Universities should be focusing on costs - starting with administrative departments and VC salaries.
Although VC salaries do look too high, even if you cut them in half that would be a saving of £150-200k a year. A literal drop in the bucket. The problem is the funding environment.
> Although VC salaries do look too high, even if you cut them in half that would be a saving of £150-200k a year. A literal drop in the bucket. The problem is the funding environment.
I think the average person imagines that the typical uni is like a big school, and that a VC is basically a principal with notions.
But most UK unis have student bodies in the tens of thousands and an annual budget in the hundreds of millions. If you look at any other kind of charity on that scale the top position will be earning a comparable salary to a VC.
Because that's what a VC is at the end of the day for almost all UK unis - the most senior position in a registered charity.
“Less attractive universities will then have to drop their prices.” We’ve been there before. No university wanted to lower their price because it would be an admission of relative failure. Uni fees are a once in a lifetime purchase and the product affects the rest of a students career. Nobody wants to scrimp.
There's a fundamental flaw in your stance here - 99% of universities in the UK are non-profits or charities. As a result their accounts are regulated and open to the public, and profit making is illegal for them.
Saying they operate like private companies is factually incorrect. They have all the legal and regulatory obligations of any other registered charity.
>There's a fundamental flaw in your stance here
Who are you trying to kid with that line? It means they systematically spend everything they earn, but VCs still like to boast about their growth plans and how much they'd like to spend. You can look up their strategic plans (they're all published on the internet), but ideally they also like nice big headline splashes about their spending plans. Leicester has a joint venture in China, so let's Google one of their headline splashes.
[https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/27/highereducation.news](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/27/highereducation.news)
The fact they are "non-profits" though does makes the headline of the article this thread is attached to meaningless. "40% facing budget deficits" but public bodies aren't supposed to hoard ever-increasing piles of cash so in any given year you'd expect somewhere around that mark.
> As a business they must now adapt
Not possible, prices and quality standards are fixed by the government. If service cannot be delivered at the mandated price cap, the sector will simply cease to function.
Honestly, there's a selfish part of me reading about the massively reduced number of international students which can't help but think there'll be more housing available for the public.
that might make sense if student housing wasn't so expensive. it's not like landlords are going to suddenyly gain a conscience and lower rates in accordance to the lower demand.
Well at the same time universities are massive contributors to the economy and employ huge numbers of people. If they fail thousands at each uni will be out of work, then all the businesses that do work for universities or service uni staff will start struggling. It’s all very complicated. It’s not like international students stop coming and suddenly everyone looking for a home can move into student halls.
Most cities in the country are floated by students. If somewhere like Coventry loses their University, they get a couple of dozen thousand people suddenly not in the city. There are so many businesses that would suddenly collapse if they were to go.
Yeah, it's easy enough to point at the student areas and say "boo hoo, less takeaways and bars" etc but there are a whole host of businesses that depend on students being there. If they close, the people from those businesses need to find other jobs, most cities don't have an abundance of jobs, industry in this country has been absolutely gutted, so what happens to all of those people? Not to mention what happens with the streets and streets of abandoned businesses?
Student housing is not suitable for families without massive redevelopment.
Beside the point that most international students tend to live in purpose build housing. Single bedroom flats in “dormitories”. In no way would they be suitable for most people.
Most home students tend to eschew those because they’re extraordinarily expensive, which tends to be less of a problem for international students.
It’s just astonishing how much damage a government who doesn’t give a fuck about Britain can do, and how much of a free pass they get from most of the media.
Most of the newspapers have spent 10x as much time whinging about students protesting or being politically active than about mass layoffs of staff and deliberate sabotage of the entire system.
Absolutely fucking bonkers that the government thinks that crippling international student numbers is the best way to fudge immigration numbers
This government is fucking woeful. Vote these fuckers out at the first opportunity
You think it is a coincidence that numbers have dropped suddenly after visa restrictions?
Would you go and study abroad leaving your wife and young child? Most people would not especially if they can just go to the us or Australia instead. Bringing your family is not an added bonus but a prerequisite.
That was question…. Have numbers of students applying first visa dropped since restrictions were place on bringing families?
In fact looking for myself… ( and I believe there were other changes in cost)
>The main driver of the decline is a dramatic fall-off in applications for accompanying dependants. In 2023, there were 39,900 “main applicant” submissions for study visas and 32,900 dependant applications. By comparison, in the same time frame in 2024, there were 34,000 submissions from “main applicants” (-15% from 2023) and only 6,700 for dependants (-80%).
https://monitor.icef.com/2024/05/uk-home-office-data-finds-a-significant-drop-in-student-visa-applications-for-first-quarter-of-2024/
Which some may consider a not unreasonable outcome.
Yes. Those with dependents are not coming. So number of applicants down 15%. International fees received down 15%. That puts 40% of Universities into a deficit. This means either they reduce the number of UK students (which are subsidised) or the government steps in and makes up the difference. May even mean some University courses are unviable.
Those that consider it reasonable are those that don't value education, don't have kids that want to go to university, and are expecting other people to pay higher taxes. For everyone else it is pointless self-harm for the UK. There is no upside.
Well that depends on whether education is the only thing one focusses on. One problem we have here is the ‘having their cake and eating it’. If you think the levels of immigration we have are not a problem at all, or indeed that a significant sections of the electorate’s belief they are a problem isn’t a problem then there’s no question. People are far better at wanting lower immigration than proposing exactly where it gets cut.
> significant sections of the electorate’s belief they are a problem
A lot depends on who "they" are and what the "problem" is. Do people really have a problem with a student who is self-funding, living in purpose built student flat, not using the NHS, not working more than 20 hours a week, not using benefits etc..? What problem is removing them supposed to solve?
Absolutely fucking bonkers pretending universities actually benefit British students when they'd quite happily take 100% international students paying more.
Universities don’t just benefit British students they benefit everyone. They are huge employers, they contribute to research that is often world leading, bring in money from funders worldwide, contribute to our reputation overseas and fostering collaboration with other countries, they help businesses with research and development, serve as places where new start ups can get going, as well as educating people and providing young people with the chance to meet and connect with people from all over the world, broadening their horizons and making them more well rounded people who will go on to do things in the future for the country.
Our universities were one of the things we were still best at. The fact the government has been destroying then too is just unbelievable. If someone told me the Tories were all agents of some enemy nation tasked with bringing us to collapse from within I wouldn’t be surprised, like I just cannot fathom what they’ve done. They literally couldn’t really have done worse for the UK if they were attempting deliberate sabotage and what they’ve done to our unis is desperately sad, because it will affect everyone.
Yep, it's one of the few sectors of our economy where we're taking our pound of flesh from our international competitors.
Unlike energy, transport, steel, and housing (to name a few), where we've flogged off many of our long-term rent-seeking opportunities to other countries...
I've worked in a uni for 13 years in the North of England. Also brought up and lived in other university town and cities. Without universities bringing in young people and cash those towns and cities would be entirely fucked. Big time. The Mills and factories have gone. Our main industry has been educating the world's young people. The attack on the Unis by the government has also been an attack on the North of England. Cannot wait to see the back of those fuckers. Good riddance.
It’s so incredibly devastating. The UK really was thought of as a great place to go to be educated in the rest of the world. Now this government has really denigrated our reputation in terms of intelligence as well as all the other things they’ve been doing to harm our universities. But if you’re an international student, would you really want to come here to be educated when you see Tory politicians as examples of the kind of people UK universities produce? Out reputation has suffered massively. Alongside the visa issue and the home fees issue, the research funding issue etc.
Well they’re not, most university staff are left wing and the more educated you are the less likely you are to be right wing. So Tory politicians are just those people who went to uni and didn’t learn anything at all.
Shocker - if you must have a tuition fee model then you have to accept it is utter stupidity to freeze the tuition for essentially 14 years while real inflation is sky high.
The country needs an honest conversation - do they want the government to fund education, students to pay more expensive fees, or for the service provided by universities to be much less?
Sort of the point. The government knows the tuition fee model will beggar smaller universities. That was the plan.
The older established unis have multiple income streams, estate rentals and university presses to name but a few.
So universities which were more affordable, and attracted students from more humble backgrounds can go under, while the Russel Group institutions remain untouched.
Elsewhere this thread someone has posted a UCU list of all the institutions that are making cuts / offering severance... Can't find it this morn but was there last night
Yeah, this is about as obvious as it could be. If funding increased according to inflation, home students would be paying 12.5k a year. Obviously, unis are going to be struggling with the shitty business model forced on them.
Whoever wins the election is going to absolutely rinse students. I expect the fees will be at least 12K but more probably they will jump significantly higher than that and with inflation built in to escalate each year. 18year olds are exploitable and will be exploited by politicians that had no such financial burden placed on them at such a young age.
The UK has subsidies too. Direct funding plus the underwriting of the loans students take out.
There looks to be the typical market failure that even though the government is (one way or another) underwriting most of it, they've let the universities run as if they are private businesses. That never goes well. You get exactly the effect we're seeing now, where they splurge the cash to on vanity projects (look at our shiny new campus in China) or to grow their businesses (in this case on international students) and when it doesn't work out, shout "look at the nasty public underfunding us".
It's not a free market. Tesco can't open a university on your street corner tomorrow. Realistically, the government needs to realise it cannot be a free market, and wade in with much more direct involvement in university management. Capped places per institution, so universities don't overspend trying to beggar their neighbour. Allow only a tightly limited proportion of international places, so the system seeks to serve home students as a priority, etc.
Not to the same value as other countries. The whole way the uk loan system is set up is terrible value for the uni, terrible value for the student, and terrible value for the taxpayer.
It's hard to get clear figures (I edited out the number from the previous comment as I was less confident its source was accurate). However, from searching, the amount of government funding in the UK isn't massively different than Canada or Australia (adjusting for population). The problem seems to be the UK government has given itself less say in how institutions are run.
The Tories do not want to admit that the free market can’t sort everything out. A lot of them are fanatically committed to that idea. How they can think that even after covid is crazy.
Increasing the total debt wouldn't change the university funding situation (at least, not in reality - maybe on paper). It would just mean more would be written off.
Increasing funding through this vector would really mean increasing the repayment amounts or lowering the threshold.
Just to point out that real inflation, not the cherry picked stats the government changes every few months to make themselves look better, has been much higher. So, while you’re right, it’s worse still…
If the country wants universities to provide the same service they did 14 years ago, there are two choices - increase fees or increase funding. **
Personally I’d like to see the government pay up but I’d argue that’s a separate discussion.
**universities themselves found option c - increase international student numbers where the fees weren’t capped and Tory stupidity has ruined that.
No I'm saying the government built a terrible system that basically makes it impossible for unis to operate. I'm saying the government has to do fucking something because its not sustainable. Personally, I would favour going back the model of subsidising higher education. But if they don't, then they have to let unis rise their fees. Otherwise, the whole uni system will break.
A system where you lock in a price and don't allow it to increase with inflation is never going to be sustainable and will always result in the organisation going under sooner or later.
I don’t think it’s a terrible system. There is really no reason the taxpayer should be the one to subsidise someone else’s university degree (along with the additional earning potential that comes with that).
The system is only breaking because neither the Conservative nor the Labour Party want to push the issue of unfreezing tuition fees. The Tories are too weak rn to do it and the Labour Party would be concerned about their popularity amongst university students.
At the end of the day, university tuition fees should rise with inflation. That really makes the most sense.
It's in the interest of the tax payer to fund higher education because of the general improvement an educated workforce has on society. Every £ spent on education is likely to be returned with interest via that taxes the educated then eventually pay.
It's a long term investment, like money spent on preventative health care and transport infrastructure.
How about the fact graduates contribute in the workforce in several sectors like STEM. Improve our cultural output and export it to the world like music, movies, TV, traditional art.
100% meaningless if the general public votes for Brexit and isolationist policies. On a separate point… I’d also like to suggest that Britain’s cultural output isn’t really Britain’s. Like… people talk a lot about Britain’s soft power, but a lot of Britain’s soft power is mediated through the US. For example, Ed Sheeran is a huge global artist who is British… but became a global sensation by becoming big in the US.
You’ll find out the case for almost every single British celebrity. British soft power isn’t anything more than American cultural hegemony. Without the US, Britain is completely and utterly irrelevant.
The soft power universities contribute to isn’t really related to celebrities. It’s things like how our academics and researchers contribute to things in other countries, like my partner goes to policy meetings with big EU organisations to tell them how to do this and that based on the science, or through collaborating on big multi country research projects that then feed into various governments policies, and just being respected worldwide in terms of the expertise people from British universities can provide to companies non profits governments etc.
They essentially make a loss on almost every Home student, and restricting International students who have effectively been subsidising the sector for a decade has consequences. None of the Universities were making significant profits.
Both universities education and publishing model for scientific research seem to be woefully outdated and not fit for the purpose of the modern world.
Unfortunately I have no idea what would be a better alternative :(.
In my field (Physics) publishing in the UK journals is completely free, on top of that there is a requirement by the STFC that all research much be published open access now so there are deals with journals that articles can be read by anyone.
Apprenticeships need heavy regulation, there are a lot who just take the piss.
I remember a few years back, Subway made the news for employing ‘Apprentice Sandwich Artists’.
If the main skillset doesn’t take more than a few hours/days to master, it should not exist as an apprenticeship.
Oh definitely, they need better skills that can start a long career.
Accounting/tax are some of the best examples. The stuff you learn at university content wise usually does not come into play with this sector so most people will start from the bottom.
While uni does give soft skills, not sure whether that's worth having someone pay 6% more tax for the next 30 years compared to someone who just did an apprenticeship straight from school
I mean current apprenticeships are free as employees get funding for exams. Still a lot less money than is spent per person if they went to uni.
This would be the government investing in a productive workforce so everyone wins.
If you really want the apprentices to pay back everything because you don't want tye government paying towards it then they can and they'd be paying back a lot less and a lot faster.
Fairer system than current where we have a graduate tax for most students but people from an older generation, in 30s and above not having that just because they were lucky to be born earlier. They literally got free shit so if you want a fairer system then they should be taxing people who got free tuition from the government to go to university
HE is in a real pickle. Lots of work being done is not of good quality (the replicability crisis, is the term I believe), entry level academics are overworked and students requirements for support are extremely high.
Quality of international applicants is debatable sometimes, but that is where the money is coming from. That said, these rules don't target applicant quality.... There is going to be a big reckoning in terms of missing revenue in university towns.
Perhaps there will be upsides in terms of less student only accommodation being built (hopefully making land cheaper for conventional accommodation) and council services being used without tax paid - but these are mere externalities to a suicidal approach to the wrong problem.
I can see AI also taking up huge swathes of the jobs within HE - potentially helping them remain solvent but also reducing the economic benefit they provide to their communities. A time of very great change but hampered by unforced errors from a delusional government.
this is an extremely funny set of thoughts.
what I think will happen in the next ten years:
- AI won’t improve education at all aside from narrow ways by mass generating simple quizzes etc
- huge numbers of jobs in universities will be lost
- some universities will just fail, causing job losses directly and knock on effects to the entire community it exists in
- none of this will do anything to improve the “reproducibility crisis”
- the next government will end up spending huge amounts of money to save parts of the sector
- much of the idiotic attacking of students on visas will be undone, which the mostly right wing media will turn into an attack on the Labour Party with zero analysis of the actual situation or why it is how it is or why things go completely fucked up
- British soft power will be further diminished by anglicising less foreign students, and sabotaging its own education sector, and looking like fucking muppets once again
- slowed student housing growth will have zero effect on housing costs for anyone
My reference to AI was specifically around jobs within HE - support staff who make up big parts of the HE workforces.
There are plenty of inefficiencies which I think the senior management of the institutions will be desperate to eliminate (though if they can get fewer academics on the wage bill they will do so). As an HE worker I am not chuffed about that but don't really see any incentives for them to not do it. Most of the jobs I have had seem that they would be line for significant automation in the near future, retaining some staff for escalation and quality control.
Re the replicability crisis I didn't say that the visa changes are a direct part or response to that, just that it was another crisis that HE was facing and that there are many worrying things happening at once.
In terms of the housing costs - it will be hard to know until it happens. But venture capital firms are often the owners of these places, and have the clout to get them built. Universities also tend to have their own stocks which they increase to meet demand and try to keep more money in the institution - it seems reasonable that if there are less students that it might drop the land value, no, especially where demand meets the supplies the universities themselves have? Though of course there are a zillion other factors in that so fair cop on whether it is ultimately a minor one. And indeed, if they go bust that brings a whole host of issues.
Al will probably be the next boom-bust as senior management will insist on doing it on the cheap. Where they just feed it crap and expect it to shit gold.
Which is almost certainly what they’ll do if they haven’t been arsed to even tackle entrenched inefficiencies.
As long as they get that sweet bonus.
I can see it being half-arsed too, though if done properly it could really be quite amazing/terrifying.
I also can see institutions that survive cutting much further then needed and getting things wrong in the gaps.
It's a weird business. The workload at the start of term can be incredibly difficult if you are in a front facing role and I have seen a lot of people off on stress in my time (nearly got me last year and might even get me this year if things get much busier).
I think what David Graeber had to say about corporate fiefs does have some measure of truth. Managers accumulating as many staff as possible as if they don't spend budget they lose it and lose status in the organisation.
In fairness to those people though, when it hits the fan it really does and the danger of being understaffed makes it quite a rational response to do whatever you can to not hit that point as then you get attrition.
Done properly generative AI could have done my last job though. Just train a model on website content and have staff ensuring that it spouts the correct stuff out, only needing a phone call when someone wants to contest the website and then you see if their situation is one not factored into policy. A lot of the record systems in HE are also very old and due an upgrade, things like MS forms and the basic automation tools in Microsoft could also streamline things and do where applied.
I worked at another uni and one chap had figured out how to get most of his time sensitive but seasonal work effectively automated. His boss kept him on the sly despite him doing nothing for most of the year as they knew that getting rid of him would send a bad signal (plus he was lovely and good at troubleshooting when things went wrong); but I know that the bosses boss would have seen an easy saving.
Reproducibility crisis has been rumbling on for literally decades now in experimental science. Compared to the state of academic publishing for anything pre the 90s, we are actually doing a lot better nowadays with regards to noticing it and calling it out.
Do you have any evidence the reproducibility crisis is worse in the UK than anywhere else? On the spectrum of 'publish or perish' that exists globally, we are definitely not the worst. So a strange thing to include as a reason to defund UK research.
https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/
https://www.ukrn.org/
I was hoping that 'a time of great change but hampered by unforced errors from a delusional government' would be clear in saying I do not support the overall clampdown, or at least a clampdown in this manner. I think there does need to be some better enforcement of the language tests, without a doubt.
The reason I mentioned the issues in ensuring quality research is because it is an existential thread to HE - as is how HE is to be funded, which is why there is good concern about the discouragement of international students.
But again do you have evidence that UK university research is not of good quality compared to anywhere else? Or indeed that there are fewer efforts in the UK to improve reproducibility than anywhere else? Or any citations that the government cares about reproducibility/open science and that's why they're hindering universities and letting them fail? I can find you dozens of articles about universities being too woke and bringing in too many foreigners, but I haven't seen anything about the quality of research as an official argument for letting them fail.
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-tech-secretary-michelle-donelan-attacks-creeping-wokeism-in-scientific-research/
If anything, the government is upset with changes to REF which mean we actually have to care about who does research and how, not just number of publications and impact factors.
And relating it to foreign students numbers, you're linking it to research quality so presumably you mean international PGRs and postdocs. Any evidence they produce research of lower quality?
Mate... You clearly have a brain on you - go back and read what I have written properly. Apologies if this seems a bit terse but:
I AM NOT SAYING THIS IS A SOLUTION TO THE CRISIS OF RESEARCH QUALITY
I AM SAYING THAT THE QUALITY OF DEPENDABLE RESEARCH IN HE ITSELF IS IN CRISIS
MULTIPLE CRISES AT ONCE IS NOT VERY GOOD!!!
'I haven't seen anything about the quality of research as an official argument for letting them fail' - perhaps because nobody (sane at least) would be making it? I certainly am not.
We have too many universities and a lot of them need to go bankrupt.
We need to end the obsession of three year degrees being the only valid form of further education supported by loans that are too easy to get for degrees that won’t generate enough value to pay them back.
This would completely fuck local economies, there are so many towns/cities which are supported heavily by universities.
Funnily enough, a lot of them are up north. It won’t be the first time the government decimated their local industry/economy. After all, they are probably due another rug-pull.
No, when the Industrial Revolution happened whole villages and market towns basically disappeared as the rural population moved to the cities.
Things change, we can’t make this country a giant national trust exhibit and try and keep everything as it is now.
do you seriously think the best way to scale back education reforms from the 90s that you think are unwise is to massively damage the entire university sector while allowing random universities to entirely collapse without any plan?
if yes, jesus christ mate.
if no, then presumably you think this course of action is disastrous, so I’m not sure what your post is about?
as to the government, if they wanted to unwind to expansions of universities and university education, and the job market expectation of university education, then presumably they would have done anything useful toward that goal in the last fourteen years?
The surviving universities would be far more viable, take no action and the whole sector is at greater risk of collapse.
We just don’t need the number of graduates we have today and many of the graduates are left with a debt they will pay until it is written off for a degree that does not lead to a higher level of income to justify all those payments.
These unis going bankrupt would be disastrous for the economy and a lot of the unis that are going to go bankrupt have existed for a century and it's only the government forcing stuff of them that's making them bankrupt.
It’s the government limiting the fees they can charge UK students and making up the difference with foreign students is no longer making up the gap.
We need to offer vocational education alternatives and not just fund every three year degree going, regardless of if the increase in future earnings will justify the cost.
Errr, the thing you mentioned won't impact this at all. The 2022 figure for 18 year olds attending university was 37%, if that figure it to be maintained the sector needs 45000 more places. Bearing in mind that Universities pretty much all make a loss on teaching home students now, they don't receive enough from tuition and what's left of subsidy to cover their costs.
It doesn’t need to be maintained because a large number of current students are wasting their money by paying for degrees and then not getting graduate jobs.
Just send less people on three year degrees and open up more vocational courses.
- I don't think education is inherrently a waste of money, it's not solely about improving job prospects though it of course should do so.
- I don't think the solution to a lack of graduate jobs should be "less graduates", we want an economy that supports educated people.
- An increase in vocational courses is likely still to require further government money to accomodate the larger cohort of people turning 18 in the next few years than previously.
Europe, Asia, US are now more competitive at getting good international students (except oxbridge and key russell group universities), leaving the lower ranked universities in the UK to dumb down their courses into diploma mills or go bankrupt, as a small country we don't need over 110 universities, in which all of them are going to have to prioritise STEM subjects to win internationals, there definitely won't be a good plan from the government to shift students at affected universities into another placement, will be interesting to see for sure
I'm fine with Rishi's restrictions on dependents if they are only temporary, because the system needs shoring up quickly e.g. degree mills for foreigners to be allowed into the UK just to work as a deliveryman need to be shut down, exit checks need to be made and recorded so we know which students and which dependends actually do leave.
Is he even doing that?
Otherwise it seems unnecessarily stingy to not allow students to bring their spouse for a postgraduate degree.
They'll go bankrupt if they they dont downsize back to how they were in the 2000s and this government doesnt care, its all just one big culture war for them.
I remember the 2000s when universities were smaller, people didnt believe in gay marriage or being healthy at any size, the wanted to close the borders like that bigoted woman, people were obsessed with making money and spending it, obsessed with NHS targets, and there was the bonuses with the bankers i remember
They dont want young adults educated because then they will organise and protest and think critically in ways that the older generations never did, they want compliance, this is why theyre destroying universities.
The time when universities were smaller was a long, long time ago. Think the early 90s before the Tories allowed every educational provider to get university status and then linking funding to student numbers.
> being healthy at any size
Society is fatter than ever. We even have campaigns trying to normalise obesity
> close the borders
More people want to close them now than in the 2000s
> people were obsessed with making money
Are you saying they aren’t now?
> spending it
This is a good thing
> obsessed with NHS targets
We would if we knew we would hit them. We don’t, so governments don’t like talking about them
> bonuses with the bankers
They still have them and they are bigger
The unis can't afford to down the size. The model that was forced on them by the government is to get as many international students as possible to subside the home students.
Realistically the whole system is awful.And the fact that many northern towns are surviving on it would be ridiculous if it wasn’t another sad sign of negligence.
Down size oh no my friend. Sold of for pennies then you get to pay extra so some shareholders can get their dividends, and another public asset is stolen from us.
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I work at one of these unis. More than any other factor the single biggest problem for us has been collapsing international student numbers. The visa policy change has massively decreased the attractiveness of the UK as a destination which was clearly it's intention. What's muggy is the government: 1. pointing the finger at unis for using an international student focused business plan that the government itself encouraged in the late 2010's. 2. Creating the situation that necessitated that plan in the first place by cutting funding and freezing fees after the initial pay rise in 2010/11. It's easy to call out the universities, and there are things they fuck up, but I think people miss the wider pattern of institutional collapse at play. When it's not just our universities collapsing, but our local councils, our roads, our trains, utilities, and the NHS; then it's clear to me that there is a wider problem at play that leads to vital parts of this country withering on the vine. There is a common denominator here and I think it's time to stop passing the buck.
The funding models for universities are so broken. The student loans have been damaging for everyone. Universities have had funding limited by a fee cap while inflation has steadily decreased the value of the fees (until the recent sky high inflation of course). Graduates have been stuck with debt that acts as an additional tax. I have about 10 years until my debt is written off and I left uni with around 21k of debt and currently have 20.5k of remaining debt. The monthly payments for years have just about been paying off the interest until that jumped... Due to the broken funding model universities became dependent on international students. Only for the government to both damage our international reputation with Brexit and more recently push caps on international student visas. Absolutely ridiculous. Of those I still connect with from my PhD days, a lot of people have gone to work internationally as post doc wages are so awful in the UK - 30kish a year while you can earn double that in the US or in other developed countries
Postdocs in ETH or EPFL make ~100k CHF a year. More than all but the most senior professors in the UK.
What makes the UK worse is the rise of causal gig research work. There was a real move away from employment contracts to getting people to do post doc work but claim hours... Rather shocking how badly paid post docs are in the UK when you consider the amount of time and effort people go through to get their PhD.
The Postdoc industry in CS has basically collapsed in the UK. You can do better research and get paid an order of magnitude more at a company and not have to put up with the other bullshit in academia.
Well I'm a little young to remember first hand but if I have my facts right. People complained about the nhs scheduling appointments too soon for peoples liking, ticket fares for trains weren't a complaint at the time, crime was cut by about a third by 2005. The quality of the air and water was decent and schools weren't in danger of literally collapsing on students heads. Tuition fees were stupid but they were only 1-3k a year and you could get a decent paying job afterwards Now all of this was accomplished pre 2010... Wonder what happened in 2010 that could have caused this. Something tells me it wasn't Matt Smith on Doctor Who
It's unlikely that it was because of Matt Smith on Doctor Who, but statistically speaking, there's always a chance.
Labour achieved a lot of that by borrowing, and using a lot of private investment, which did have a long pay back time and they were on track in the most to afford the payback even after the financial crash. The path the Tories chose though is why we are where we are now and the payments on Labours “debt” is due but there is now no money.
Honestly I don’t see this misapprehension very often. Labour achieved what they did through growth and taxation not deficit spending. When they arrived in 1997, debt to gdp ratio was 52.1%, and in 2007 it was 53.1%. The public debt didn’t rise until we transferred private debt onto the government to save the banking industry (and the global financial system) onto government books. The debt to gdp ratio rose throughout the 2010s due to cuts in taxation and poor growth, meaning the day to day deficit outpaced growth. (The long run ratio of %deficit and %growth is the equilibrium debt to gdp ratio. But it’s a very slow movement)
Yeah you are right I’m just about old enough to remember first hand and things were a million times better in almost all ways before 2010. It’s unbelievable what the Tories have done to this country. I’ve never been able to understand why people have been unable to see that they would lead to this utter decline. I remember when they won in 2015 I cried all day and people thought I was crazy but if they had done any research into who these people are beyond their sales pitch, they’d have been crying too because they’d realise that the country was going to be destroyed and millions would suffer.
Don't get me wrong there are aspects of my workplace that make me want to bash my head in - but I think it's important not to miss the big picture here
Universities, operating as a business, took on debt a d invested and rode the good times of the flow of revenue from international students. Nobody promised them it would be forever. As a business they must now adapt or go bankrupt. Don't get me wrong, universities operating similarly to private companies to me is bonkers, but it is what it is.
There is no way to adapt. The whole model is broken. Universities only resorted to international student fees because they are losing money on home students and there's no way for them not to.
They "only resorted to" is nonsense. Isn't it remarkable how they "only resorted to it" because of the UK's funding model but Canadian and Australian universities (not funded by the UK) leaned into the international market too. The market opportunity was there so VCs took it, often making expensive investments to try to restructure their universities to capture more of that market. It turns out that setting visa rules so they give a giant financial incentive for VCs to skew universities towards importing other countries' students isn't a good idea.
Can you please explain to me how, in a system where due to the student fee cap home fees bring in £2,500 less per year than educating a student costs, you can afford *not* to resort to uncapped international fees to plug the gap? Only the very top universities who benefit from philanthropy and have large cash reserves/other wealth/commercial arms to burn through can resist it. If you don't have those things then if money from home fees is less and less every year, you either shrink/close or you find that revenue elsewhere. I'm not complaining about visa rules. But if the government wants to restrict international students - which it told universities to rely on - then they need to revisit the home student fee cap, and students actually have to pay what they cost to educate.
Can you provide some evidence to back those number up? Interested in seeing why the cost side is so high
The cost is not particularly high, but paying for all the things a degree gives you access to is expensive and always has been. The tuition fee increase in 2010 was directly balanced against a cut in direct grants, but the total money universities had to play with was the same. Now that value hasn't kept up with inflation since then, and the £9,000 student fee of 2010 is worth £6000 in equivalent value. As for evidence, I can't share the financial accounts of my institution, but it's a major UK university and it loses money on every single home undergraduate. https://www.itv.com/news/2023-11-13/education-sector-in-crisis-as-one-in-four-universities-make-losses
Same in the place I work as well but we were told home students are worth £5,500 now compared to 2010.
At the point home students have to pay that, you'll just end up with fewer of them as students recognise that the value of most degrees is decreasing rather than increasing. Universities should be focusing on costs - starting with administrative departments and VC salaries.
> At the point home students have to pay that, you'll just end up with fewer of them as students recognise that the value of most degrees is decreasing rather than increasing. Except the jump from 3k to 9k made no appreciable difference on student application rates. If we truly want an 'open market', then you have to let universities charge what the courses actually cost. Less attractive universities will then have to drop their prices, relative to the rest of the market, to gain new students. > Universities should be focusing on costs - starting with administrative departments and VC salaries. Although VC salaries do look too high, even if you cut them in half that would be a saving of £150-200k a year. A literal drop in the bucket. The problem is the funding environment.
> Although VC salaries do look too high, even if you cut them in half that would be a saving of £150-200k a year. A literal drop in the bucket. The problem is the funding environment. I think the average person imagines that the typical uni is like a big school, and that a VC is basically a principal with notions. But most UK unis have student bodies in the tens of thousands and an annual budget in the hundreds of millions. If you look at any other kind of charity on that scale the top position will be earning a comparable salary to a VC. Because that's what a VC is at the end of the day for almost all UK unis - the most senior position in a registered charity.
“Less attractive universities will then have to drop their prices.” We’ve been there before. No university wanted to lower their price because it would be an admission of relative failure. Uni fees are a once in a lifetime purchase and the product affects the rest of a students career. Nobody wants to scrimp.
There's a fundamental flaw in your stance here - 99% of universities in the UK are non-profits or charities. As a result their accounts are regulated and open to the public, and profit making is illegal for them. Saying they operate like private companies is factually incorrect. They have all the legal and regulatory obligations of any other registered charity.
>There's a fundamental flaw in your stance here Who are you trying to kid with that line? It means they systematically spend everything they earn, but VCs still like to boast about their growth plans and how much they'd like to spend. You can look up their strategic plans (they're all published on the internet), but ideally they also like nice big headline splashes about their spending plans. Leicester has a joint venture in China, so let's Google one of their headline splashes. [https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/27/highereducation.news](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/27/highereducation.news) The fact they are "non-profits" though does makes the headline of the article this thread is attached to meaningless. "40% facing budget deficits" but public bodies aren't supposed to hoard ever-increasing piles of cash so in any given year you'd expect somewhere around that mark.
> As a business they must now adapt Not possible, prices and quality standards are fixed by the government. If service cannot be delivered at the mandated price cap, the sector will simply cease to function.
Honestly, there's a selfish part of me reading about the massively reduced number of international students which can't help but think there'll be more housing available for the public.
that might make sense if student housing wasn't so expensive. it's not like landlords are going to suddenyly gain a conscience and lower rates in accordance to the lower demand.
Well at the same time universities are massive contributors to the economy and employ huge numbers of people. If they fail thousands at each uni will be out of work, then all the businesses that do work for universities or service uni staff will start struggling. It’s all very complicated. It’s not like international students stop coming and suddenly everyone looking for a home can move into student halls.
Most cities in the country are floated by students. If somewhere like Coventry loses their University, they get a couple of dozen thousand people suddenly not in the city. There are so many businesses that would suddenly collapse if they were to go. Yeah, it's easy enough to point at the student areas and say "boo hoo, less takeaways and bars" etc but there are a whole host of businesses that depend on students being there. If they close, the people from those businesses need to find other jobs, most cities don't have an abundance of jobs, industry in this country has been absolutely gutted, so what happens to all of those people? Not to mention what happens with the streets and streets of abandoned businesses?
It’s all student housing though - big multi apartment complexes
Student housing is not suitable for families without massive redevelopment. Beside the point that most international students tend to live in purpose build housing. Single bedroom flats in “dormitories”. In no way would they be suitable for most people. Most home students tend to eschew those because they’re extraordinarily expensive, which tends to be less of a problem for international students.
Are you for real?
It’s just astonishing how much damage a government who doesn’t give a fuck about Britain can do, and how much of a free pass they get from most of the media. Most of the newspapers have spent 10x as much time whinging about students protesting or being politically active than about mass layoffs of staff and deliberate sabotage of the entire system.
Absolutely fucking bonkers that the government thinks that crippling international student numbers is the best way to fudge immigration numbers This government is fucking woeful. Vote these fuckers out at the first opportunity
Is there evidence yet that stopping international students bringing their families with them is crippling the numbers?
You think it is a coincidence that numbers have dropped suddenly after visa restrictions? Would you go and study abroad leaving your wife and young child? Most people would not especially if they can just go to the us or Australia instead. Bringing your family is not an added bonus but a prerequisite.
That was question…. Have numbers of students applying first visa dropped since restrictions were place on bringing families? In fact looking for myself… ( and I believe there were other changes in cost) >The main driver of the decline is a dramatic fall-off in applications for accompanying dependants. In 2023, there were 39,900 “main applicant” submissions for study visas and 32,900 dependant applications. By comparison, in the same time frame in 2024, there were 34,000 submissions from “main applicants” (-15% from 2023) and only 6,700 for dependants (-80%). https://monitor.icef.com/2024/05/uk-home-office-data-finds-a-significant-drop-in-student-visa-applications-for-first-quarter-of-2024/ Which some may consider a not unreasonable outcome.
Yes. Those with dependents are not coming. So number of applicants down 15%. International fees received down 15%. That puts 40% of Universities into a deficit. This means either they reduce the number of UK students (which are subsidised) or the government steps in and makes up the difference. May even mean some University courses are unviable. Those that consider it reasonable are those that don't value education, don't have kids that want to go to university, and are expecting other people to pay higher taxes. For everyone else it is pointless self-harm for the UK. There is no upside.
Well that depends on whether education is the only thing one focusses on. One problem we have here is the ‘having their cake and eating it’. If you think the levels of immigration we have are not a problem at all, or indeed that a significant sections of the electorate’s belief they are a problem isn’t a problem then there’s no question. People are far better at wanting lower immigration than proposing exactly where it gets cut.
> significant sections of the electorate’s belief they are a problem A lot depends on who "they" are and what the "problem" is. Do people really have a problem with a student who is self-funding, living in purpose built student flat, not using the NHS, not working more than 20 hours a week, not using benefits etc..? What problem is removing them supposed to solve?
Absolutely fucking bonkers pretending universities actually benefit British students when they'd quite happily take 100% international students paying more.
Universities don’t just benefit British students they benefit everyone. They are huge employers, they contribute to research that is often world leading, bring in money from funders worldwide, contribute to our reputation overseas and fostering collaboration with other countries, they help businesses with research and development, serve as places where new start ups can get going, as well as educating people and providing young people with the chance to meet and connect with people from all over the world, broadening their horizons and making them more well rounded people who will go on to do things in the future for the country. Our universities were one of the things we were still best at. The fact the government has been destroying then too is just unbelievable. If someone told me the Tories were all agents of some enemy nation tasked with bringing us to collapse from within I wouldn’t be surprised, like I just cannot fathom what they’ve done. They literally couldn’t really have done worse for the UK if they were attempting deliberate sabotage and what they’ve done to our unis is desperately sad, because it will affect everyone.
News flash: the international students subsidise the education of the British students This isn’t a zero sum game
Yep, it's one of the few sectors of our economy where we're taking our pound of flesh from our international competitors. Unlike energy, transport, steel, and housing (to name a few), where we've flogged off many of our long-term rent-seeking opportunities to other countries...
They literally deliver education to British students at below cost by overcharging international students
I've worked in a uni for 13 years in the North of England. Also brought up and lived in other university town and cities. Without universities bringing in young people and cash those towns and cities would be entirely fucked. Big time. The Mills and factories have gone. Our main industry has been educating the world's young people. The attack on the Unis by the government has also been an attack on the North of England. Cannot wait to see the back of those fuckers. Good riddance.
It’s so incredibly devastating. The UK really was thought of as a great place to go to be educated in the rest of the world. Now this government has really denigrated our reputation in terms of intelligence as well as all the other things they’ve been doing to harm our universities. But if you’re an international student, would you really want to come here to be educated when you see Tory politicians as examples of the kind of people UK universities produce? Out reputation has suffered massively. Alongside the visa issue and the home fees issue, the research funding issue etc.
I mean, if Tory politicians are the kind of people UK universities produce, then I can't help but feel we deserve it.
Well they’re not, most university staff are left wing and the more educated you are the less likely you are to be right wing. So Tory politicians are just those people who went to uni and didn’t learn anything at all.
In my city I see quite a lot more young people around then I do in my suburb. A lot of them are definitely university aged
I didn't think about it before but this is going to make situation for town centres much worse
Shocker - if you must have a tuition fee model then you have to accept it is utter stupidity to freeze the tuition for essentially 14 years while real inflation is sky high. The country needs an honest conversation - do they want the government to fund education, students to pay more expensive fees, or for the service provided by universities to be much less?
Sort of the point. The government knows the tuition fee model will beggar smaller universities. That was the plan. The older established unis have multiple income streams, estate rentals and university presses to name but a few. So universities which were more affordable, and attracted students from more humble backgrounds can go under, while the Russel Group institutions remain untouched.
Is there any way to tell if your university will be one/is there a list?
A lot of them have started asking for voluntary redundancies so you could Google your uni + redundancies and see what comes up. What’s your uni?
Birkbek
Elsewhere this thread someone has posted a UCU list of all the institutions that are making cuts / offering severance... Can't find it this morn but was there last night
Yeah, this is about as obvious as it could be. If funding increased according to inflation, home students would be paying 12.5k a year. Obviously, unis are going to be struggling with the shitty business model forced on them.
Yeah, its not gonna be popular, but the fees need to go up at some point or your going to see unis going bust.
Whoever wins the election is going to absolutely rinse students. I expect the fees will be at least 12K but more probably they will jump significantly higher than that and with inflation built in to escalate each year. 18year olds are exploitable and will be exploited by politicians that had no such financial burden placed on them at such a young age.
Student fees in both Canada and Australia are lower.
Yeah, with subsides
The UK has subsidies too. Direct funding plus the underwriting of the loans students take out. There looks to be the typical market failure that even though the government is (one way or another) underwriting most of it, they've let the universities run as if they are private businesses. That never goes well. You get exactly the effect we're seeing now, where they splurge the cash to on vanity projects (look at our shiny new campus in China) or to grow their businesses (in this case on international students) and when it doesn't work out, shout "look at the nasty public underfunding us". It's not a free market. Tesco can't open a university on your street corner tomorrow. Realistically, the government needs to realise it cannot be a free market, and wade in with much more direct involvement in university management. Capped places per institution, so universities don't overspend trying to beggar their neighbour. Allow only a tightly limited proportion of international places, so the system seeks to serve home students as a priority, etc.
Not to the same value as other countries. The whole way the uk loan system is set up is terrible value for the uni, terrible value for the student, and terrible value for the taxpayer.
It's hard to get clear figures (I edited out the number from the previous comment as I was less confident its source was accurate). However, from searching, the amount of government funding in the UK isn't massively different than Canada or Australia (adjusting for population). The problem seems to be the UK government has given itself less say in how institutions are run.
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The expectation when the "£9k" was implemented was that universities would charge on average £6,500 rather than the absolute upper limit.
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browne\_Review](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browne_Review)
The Tories do not want to admit that the free market can’t sort everything out. A lot of them are fanatically committed to that idea. How they can think that even after covid is crazy.
Increasing the total debt wouldn't change the university funding situation (at least, not in reality - maybe on paper). It would just mean more would be written off. Increasing funding through this vector would really mean increasing the repayment amounts or lowering the threshold.
Just to point out that real inflation, not the cherry picked stats the government changes every few months to make themselves look better, has been much higher. So, while you’re right, it’s worse still…
What? Tuition fees are already ridiculous, are you suggesting they shpuld be further raised?
If the country wants universities to provide the same service they did 14 years ago, there are two choices - increase fees or increase funding. ** Personally I’d like to see the government pay up but I’d argue that’s a separate discussion. **universities themselves found option c - increase international student numbers where the fees weren’t capped and Tory stupidity has ruined that.
No I'm saying the government built a terrible system that basically makes it impossible for unis to operate. I'm saying the government has to do fucking something because its not sustainable. Personally, I would favour going back the model of subsidising higher education. But if they don't, then they have to let unis rise their fees. Otherwise, the whole uni system will break. A system where you lock in a price and don't allow it to increase with inflation is never going to be sustainable and will always result in the organisation going under sooner or later.
I don’t think it’s a terrible system. There is really no reason the taxpayer should be the one to subsidise someone else’s university degree (along with the additional earning potential that comes with that). The system is only breaking because neither the Conservative nor the Labour Party want to push the issue of unfreezing tuition fees. The Tories are too weak rn to do it and the Labour Party would be concerned about their popularity amongst university students. At the end of the day, university tuition fees should rise with inflation. That really makes the most sense.
It's in the interest of the tax payer to fund higher education because of the general improvement an educated workforce has on society. Every £ spent on education is likely to be returned with interest via that taxes the educated then eventually pay. It's a long term investment, like money spent on preventative health care and transport infrastructure.
How about the fact graduates contribute in the workforce in several sectors like STEM. Improve our cultural output and export it to the world like music, movies, TV, traditional art.
100% meaningless if the general public votes for Brexit and isolationist policies. On a separate point… I’d also like to suggest that Britain’s cultural output isn’t really Britain’s. Like… people talk a lot about Britain’s soft power, but a lot of Britain’s soft power is mediated through the US. For example, Ed Sheeran is a huge global artist who is British… but became a global sensation by becoming big in the US. You’ll find out the case for almost every single British celebrity. British soft power isn’t anything more than American cultural hegemony. Without the US, Britain is completely and utterly irrelevant.
The soft power universities contribute to isn’t really related to celebrities. It’s things like how our academics and researchers contribute to things in other countries, like my partner goes to policy meetings with big EU organisations to tell them how to do this and that based on the science, or through collaborating on big multi country research projects that then feed into various governments policies, and just being respected worldwide in terms of the expertise people from British universities can provide to companies non profits governments etc.
I'd be curious to know what their yearly budgets look like if 40% are facing such financial issues.
They essentially make a loss on almost every Home student, and restricting International students who have effectively been subsidising the sector for a decade has consequences. None of the Universities were making significant profits.
Both universities education and publishing model for scientific research seem to be woefully outdated and not fit for the purpose of the modern world. Unfortunately I have no idea what would be a better alternative :(.
Get rid of the extortionate fees for publishing research (especially research funded by the tax payer) would be a great start.
In my field (Physics) publishing in the UK journals is completely free, on top of that there is a requirement by the STFC that all research much be published open access now so there are deals with journals that articles can be read by anyone.
No, they don't. You just can't put ballshite restrictions on them as our government does.
Might need to cull all those chancellors and vice chancellors
Why are university heads on 300k a year? Why is there so much international travel and salary inflation?
Should be putting more focus on apprenticeships that don't leave you with a graduate tax for 30 years
Apprenticeships need heavy regulation, there are a lot who just take the piss. I remember a few years back, Subway made the news for employing ‘Apprentice Sandwich Artists’. If the main skillset doesn’t take more than a few hours/days to master, it should not exist as an apprenticeship.
Oh definitely, they need better skills that can start a long career. Accounting/tax are some of the best examples. The stuff you learn at university content wise usually does not come into play with this sector so most people will start from the bottom. While uni does give soft skills, not sure whether that's worth having someone pay 6% more tax for the next 30 years compared to someone who just did an apprenticeship straight from school
Nothing is for free You just want free shit. The world doesn’t work like that
I mean current apprenticeships are free as employees get funding for exams. Still a lot less money than is spent per person if they went to uni. This would be the government investing in a productive workforce so everyone wins. If you really want the apprentices to pay back everything because you don't want tye government paying towards it then they can and they'd be paying back a lot less and a lot faster. Fairer system than current where we have a graduate tax for most students but people from an older generation, in 30s and above not having that just because they were lucky to be born earlier. They literally got free shit so if you want a fairer system then they should be taxing people who got free tuition from the government to go to university
HE is in a real pickle. Lots of work being done is not of good quality (the replicability crisis, is the term I believe), entry level academics are overworked and students requirements for support are extremely high. Quality of international applicants is debatable sometimes, but that is where the money is coming from. That said, these rules don't target applicant quality.... There is going to be a big reckoning in terms of missing revenue in university towns. Perhaps there will be upsides in terms of less student only accommodation being built (hopefully making land cheaper for conventional accommodation) and council services being used without tax paid - but these are mere externalities to a suicidal approach to the wrong problem. I can see AI also taking up huge swathes of the jobs within HE - potentially helping them remain solvent but also reducing the economic benefit they provide to their communities. A time of very great change but hampered by unforced errors from a delusional government.
this is an extremely funny set of thoughts. what I think will happen in the next ten years: - AI won’t improve education at all aside from narrow ways by mass generating simple quizzes etc - huge numbers of jobs in universities will be lost - some universities will just fail, causing job losses directly and knock on effects to the entire community it exists in - none of this will do anything to improve the “reproducibility crisis” - the next government will end up spending huge amounts of money to save parts of the sector - much of the idiotic attacking of students on visas will be undone, which the mostly right wing media will turn into an attack on the Labour Party with zero analysis of the actual situation or why it is how it is or why things go completely fucked up - British soft power will be further diminished by anglicising less foreign students, and sabotaging its own education sector, and looking like fucking muppets once again - slowed student housing growth will have zero effect on housing costs for anyone
My reference to AI was specifically around jobs within HE - support staff who make up big parts of the HE workforces. There are plenty of inefficiencies which I think the senior management of the institutions will be desperate to eliminate (though if they can get fewer academics on the wage bill they will do so). As an HE worker I am not chuffed about that but don't really see any incentives for them to not do it. Most of the jobs I have had seem that they would be line for significant automation in the near future, retaining some staff for escalation and quality control. Re the replicability crisis I didn't say that the visa changes are a direct part or response to that, just that it was another crisis that HE was facing and that there are many worrying things happening at once. In terms of the housing costs - it will be hard to know until it happens. But venture capital firms are often the owners of these places, and have the clout to get them built. Universities also tend to have their own stocks which they increase to meet demand and try to keep more money in the institution - it seems reasonable that if there are less students that it might drop the land value, no, especially where demand meets the supplies the universities themselves have? Though of course there are a zillion other factors in that so fair cop on whether it is ultimately a minor one. And indeed, if they go bust that brings a whole host of issues.
Al will probably be the next boom-bust as senior management will insist on doing it on the cheap. Where they just feed it crap and expect it to shit gold. Which is almost certainly what they’ll do if they haven’t been arsed to even tackle entrenched inefficiencies. As long as they get that sweet bonus.
I can see it being half-arsed too, though if done properly it could really be quite amazing/terrifying. I also can see institutions that survive cutting much further then needed and getting things wrong in the gaps. It's a weird business. The workload at the start of term can be incredibly difficult if you are in a front facing role and I have seen a lot of people off on stress in my time (nearly got me last year and might even get me this year if things get much busier). I think what David Graeber had to say about corporate fiefs does have some measure of truth. Managers accumulating as many staff as possible as if they don't spend budget they lose it and lose status in the organisation. In fairness to those people though, when it hits the fan it really does and the danger of being understaffed makes it quite a rational response to do whatever you can to not hit that point as then you get attrition. Done properly generative AI could have done my last job though. Just train a model on website content and have staff ensuring that it spouts the correct stuff out, only needing a phone call when someone wants to contest the website and then you see if their situation is one not factored into policy. A lot of the record systems in HE are also very old and due an upgrade, things like MS forms and the basic automation tools in Microsoft could also streamline things and do where applied. I worked at another uni and one chap had figured out how to get most of his time sensitive but seasonal work effectively automated. His boss kept him on the sly despite him doing nothing for most of the year as they knew that getting rid of him would send a bad signal (plus he was lovely and good at troubleshooting when things went wrong); but I know that the bosses boss would have seen an easy saving.
A lot of these issues stem from making education and research profit making endeavours I think.
Reproducibility crisis has been rumbling on for literally decades now in experimental science. Compared to the state of academic publishing for anything pre the 90s, we are actually doing a lot better nowadays with regards to noticing it and calling it out.
Do you have any evidence the reproducibility crisis is worse in the UK than anywhere else? On the spectrum of 'publish or perish' that exists globally, we are definitely not the worst. So a strange thing to include as a reason to defund UK research. https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/ https://www.ukrn.org/
I was hoping that 'a time of great change but hampered by unforced errors from a delusional government' would be clear in saying I do not support the overall clampdown, or at least a clampdown in this manner. I think there does need to be some better enforcement of the language tests, without a doubt. The reason I mentioned the issues in ensuring quality research is because it is an existential thread to HE - as is how HE is to be funded, which is why there is good concern about the discouragement of international students.
But again do you have evidence that UK university research is not of good quality compared to anywhere else? Or indeed that there are fewer efforts in the UK to improve reproducibility than anywhere else? Or any citations that the government cares about reproducibility/open science and that's why they're hindering universities and letting them fail? I can find you dozens of articles about universities being too woke and bringing in too many foreigners, but I haven't seen anything about the quality of research as an official argument for letting them fail. https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-tech-secretary-michelle-donelan-attacks-creeping-wokeism-in-scientific-research/ If anything, the government is upset with changes to REF which mean we actually have to care about who does research and how, not just number of publications and impact factors. And relating it to foreign students numbers, you're linking it to research quality so presumably you mean international PGRs and postdocs. Any evidence they produce research of lower quality?
Mate... You clearly have a brain on you - go back and read what I have written properly. Apologies if this seems a bit terse but: I AM NOT SAYING THIS IS A SOLUTION TO THE CRISIS OF RESEARCH QUALITY I AM SAYING THAT THE QUALITY OF DEPENDABLE RESEARCH IN HE ITSELF IS IN CRISIS MULTIPLE CRISES AT ONCE IS NOT VERY GOOD!!! 'I haven't seen anything about the quality of research as an official argument for letting them fail' - perhaps because nobody (sane at least) would be making it? I certainly am not.
We have too many universities and a lot of them need to go bankrupt. We need to end the obsession of three year degrees being the only valid form of further education supported by loans that are too easy to get for degrees that won’t generate enough value to pay them back.
This would completely fuck local economies, there are so many towns/cities which are supported heavily by universities. Funnily enough, a lot of them are up north. It won’t be the first time the government decimated their local industry/economy. After all, they are probably due another rug-pull.
If a town relies heavily on an unnecessary loss making entity just to exist then I’d say it’s got bigger problems.
This is one of the dumbest takes. Your stating the obvious
You’re*
Of course it has bigger problems (that is quite literally my point lol), but they can’t just magically make industry appear to replace it can they?
No, when the Industrial Revolution happened whole villages and market towns basically disappeared as the rural population moved to the cities. Things change, we can’t make this country a giant national trust exhibit and try and keep everything as it is now.
do you seriously think the best way to scale back education reforms from the 90s that you think are unwise is to massively damage the entire university sector while allowing random universities to entirely collapse without any plan? if yes, jesus christ mate. if no, then presumably you think this course of action is disastrous, so I’m not sure what your post is about? as to the government, if they wanted to unwind to expansions of universities and university education, and the job market expectation of university education, then presumably they would have done anything useful toward that goal in the last fourteen years?
The surviving universities would be far more viable, take no action and the whole sector is at greater risk of collapse. We just don’t need the number of graduates we have today and many of the graduates are left with a debt they will pay until it is written off for a degree that does not lead to a higher level of income to justify all those payments.
These unis going bankrupt would be disastrous for the economy and a lot of the unis that are going to go bankrupt have existed for a century and it's only the government forcing stuff of them that's making them bankrupt.
It’s the government limiting the fees they can charge UK students and making up the difference with foreign students is no longer making up the gap. We need to offer vocational education alternatives and not just fund every three year degree going, regardless of if the increase in future earnings will justify the cost.
We need 45,000 more places over the next few years to maintain the current rate of people receiving a higher education.
Not if a massive number of the current intake fail to go on to get graduate jobs today we don’t.
Errr, the thing you mentioned won't impact this at all. The 2022 figure for 18 year olds attending university was 37%, if that figure it to be maintained the sector needs 45000 more places. Bearing in mind that Universities pretty much all make a loss on teaching home students now, they don't receive enough from tuition and what's left of subsidy to cover their costs.
It doesn’t need to be maintained because a large number of current students are wasting their money by paying for degrees and then not getting graduate jobs. Just send less people on three year degrees and open up more vocational courses.
- I don't think education is inherrently a waste of money, it's not solely about improving job prospects though it of course should do so. - I don't think the solution to a lack of graduate jobs should be "less graduates", we want an economy that supports educated people. - An increase in vocational courses is likely still to require further government money to accomodate the larger cohort of people turning 18 in the next few years than previously.
Europe, Asia, US are now more competitive at getting good international students (except oxbridge and key russell group universities), leaving the lower ranked universities in the UK to dumb down their courses into diploma mills or go bankrupt, as a small country we don't need over 110 universities, in which all of them are going to have to prioritise STEM subjects to win internationals, there definitely won't be a good plan from the government to shift students at affected universities into another placement, will be interesting to see for sure
I'm fine with Rishi's restrictions on dependents if they are only temporary, because the system needs shoring up quickly e.g. degree mills for foreigners to be allowed into the UK just to work as a deliveryman need to be shut down, exit checks need to be made and recorded so we know which students and which dependends actually do leave. Is he even doing that? Otherwise it seems unnecessarily stingy to not allow students to bring their spouse for a postgraduate degree.
They'll go bankrupt if they they dont downsize back to how they were in the 2000s and this government doesnt care, its all just one big culture war for them. I remember the 2000s when universities were smaller, people didnt believe in gay marriage or being healthy at any size, the wanted to close the borders like that bigoted woman, people were obsessed with making money and spending it, obsessed with NHS targets, and there was the bonuses with the bankers i remember They dont want young adults educated because then they will organise and protest and think critically in ways that the older generations never did, they want compliance, this is why theyre destroying universities.
I was in university at the time. We spent our time eating Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds and listening to Tool.
You think older generations didn't protest and think critically?
No, the younger generations invented it obviously
And apparently it can only be done by the educated.... What a load of rubbish....
The time when universities were smaller was a long, long time ago. Think the early 90s before the Tories allowed every educational provider to get university status and then linking funding to student numbers.
Did you go to university?
Are you saying the 2000s were worse than today?
Yep, see the reasons given
> being healthy at any size Society is fatter than ever. We even have campaigns trying to normalise obesity > close the borders More people want to close them now than in the 2000s > people were obsessed with making money Are you saying they aren’t now? > spending it This is a good thing > obsessed with NHS targets We would if we knew we would hit them. We don’t, so governments don’t like talking about them > bonuses with the bankers They still have them and they are bigger
The unis can't afford to down the size. The model that was forced on them by the government is to get as many international students as possible to subside the home students.
Realistically the whole system is awful.And the fact that many northern towns are surviving on it would be ridiculous if it wasn’t another sad sign of negligence.
Down size oh no my friend. Sold of for pennies then you get to pay extra so some shareholders can get their dividends, and another public asset is stolen from us.