‘We’re waiting to see who goes under first’: Why universities are on the brink

21 comments

1. Would be interesting to see which universities *exactly* are likely to “go under” first. I have this sneaky suspicion that some universities (cough cough Oxford, Cambridge and LSE) enjoy ridiculous profits every single year.

2. The fruits of the shitty system that all governmental parties are guilty of.

3. I worked at Oxford a few years back and they were seriously considering knocking down a brand new £87 million building as they changed their mind on a layout……

4. Most unis I know have a hiring freeze. Some are bringing in redundancy offers. It’s grim times. But then again, they couldn’t expect Chinese students to keep coming till the end of time, yet they acted that way. 

5. With universities like Staffordshire offering shit degrees with no career prospects using frankly misleading marketing strategies good riddance

6. Genuinely where do unis spend their money on.

   My uni charges 40k for foreign students, 9k for domestic and I had 14 hours of teaching in third year.

   What are the biggest expenses?

7. They can if they want but they’d probably see mass resignations. Most restrict USS membership to permanent teaching staff only and have DC or LGPS (if Tupe’d) to minimise costs,but most non teaching staff aren’t on the level of salary that a professor is.

8. If any one of these universities go under while charging £9,250 per year to domestic bachelor students and a hell of a lot more to foreign bachelor and domestic & foreign masters students (£25kish per year?), it’s industrial scale fraud.

   They also extort unholy amounts of money via halls of residence rents.

9. Can someone explain to me why tuition costs so much? I remember a Maths lecture and it was 1 lecture and 2 assistants for about 100 students.

   Youre expected to pay for resources and books yourself. 

   Where is that £900,000/year going? 

10. They need to start failing. University doesn’t provide good value for money in this country. You’d be better off learning a trade or skill. Being a generic graduate will not have you walking into a decent job anymore.

11. These unis that are about to fold, are they red brick or even newer? Sometimes I wonder if there was utility converting them to universities and maybe they’d be better an plain old Poly fillers.

12. I worked for a University for a while and it was absolutely ridiculous how much money was spent on attracting international students.

    Every university was competing for the nicest buildings to run prospective students and their parents through, while the building next door was crumbling and student accomodation was in shambles.

13. I’ve posted this before but it bears repeating.

    There is a worrying amount of cynicism and apathy to Universities in this thread I feel. I think people are looking at Universities purely as if all they do is teach undergraduate courses in areas where degrees aren’t a necessity for a given field.

    I’d like to point out the following:

    * [Universities contribute around £130 Billion to the economy.](https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-research/publications/impact-higher-education-sector-uk)
    * [Outside of our cultural exports they are one of the few things the rest of the world considers the UK a leader in.](https://www.timeout.com/uk/news/its-official-the-uk-is-one-of-the-best-countries-in-the-world-091123)
    * [They are perhaps the most important enabler of social mobility in our country and this is driven by Non-Russell group Universities.](https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/10/19/2023-english-social-mobility-index/)
    * [A quarter of all new medicines developed in the last twenty years came out of academic research.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8552459/)
    * [UK Universities are a major source of Foreign Direct Investment. Getting cash out of other countries into ours.](https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/The-role-of-universities-in-driving-overseas-investment-into-UK-Research-and-Development.pdf)
    * [Working age migration is critical for the sustainability of our country and Universities enable highly educated migration to take place](https://www.oecd.org/migration/OECD%20Migration%20Policy%20Debates%20Numero%202.pdf)
    * [Every £1 of public sector R&D Spend leads to £7 of net benefit for the UK](https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmsctech/1453/145305.htm)

    And what people don’t realise is that Universities have been given an ever increasing portfolio of responsibilities, whilst the funding base has remained the same per domestic student for years. Unis are essentially operating with a third of the working capital per undergraduate student as they were a decade ago due to inflation.

    UK Universities, things that should be one of the countries most prized assets, are being systematically destroyed by the current funding environment and a willingness of the government to pit students against providers.

14. Change the way you do business. How horrible this generation has to sacrifice an education because of greed. Good news is the market must still be working. Students signal to market the product is inferior……in so many ways.

15. It was £9k a year for my maths degree, per hour of lectures they were making £1,000 overall.

    They make a killing on the simple to teach subjects

16. Lecturers currently aren’t paid enough to afford housing AVG salary is around 43k, more university city’s are HMO’d like crazy houses about 6-8 times that salary. With on costs to a uni it’s about 60k per annum to have the staff member there. With equipment costs and building costs (because remember the building were done because of the price increase a students largely and rightly said we are paying more we want better facilities).

    Etc. so staff are demanding pay rises because they can’t rent let alone buy and it costs about £1 million per 100 UK students to deliver which is only barely covered by the UK tuition fee on to top of that drop out rates have rapidly increased post COVID as the Level 3 quals didn’t Cover the content they should’ve so students are left stranded and largely unis won’t change the level they teach at so you can no longer even plan for 3 years worth of money.

    And to make matters worse government is moaning about reliance on international fees, and increased immigration numbers when they are the cause of the problem.

    Bring Back the Cap on UK Student Numbers and boost the top up that unis get in addition to the student fees to make it sustainable and it also increase entry standards as students with be back in proper competition for places.

17. They’re all going down probably, bankrupt universities, bankrupt councils, bankrupt country, it’s gonna be a wild ride from here on out kids, I’m just going to sit back and watch the system implode, this is what happens with £100k a year diversity coaches and £300k a year CEOs, it’s been a mental time peeps

18. Certain unis are basically private research facilities that bregrudingly teach some students on the side. They need to rise in international rankings to attract more internatonal fee payers, which means state of the art facilities and research prestige to feed the ranking. Teaching domestic students can actually be a net loss and doesn’t help the ranking much so they want as few as possible. 

19. wow, the ponzi is set to collapse just as the new government comes in to power. What a remarkable coincidence.

20. I have no idea how when I’ve been paying my student loan for 10 years and the balance has only gone up with interest each year, scandalous!

21. I worked at a university for a while. The way they splashed money about was fucking insane. New business centre, new computing block, big new student village, new sports facilities. The list was endless and the loans they would take out to do it were insane. Even as a new graduate you could see that it was just unsustainable, and it seemed all the unis were at it.

    It’s no surprise this is happening.