Universities told to manage own budgets after call for bailouts
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd9mgk028lo
by Ephemeral-Throwaway
Universities told to manage own budgets after call for bailouts
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd9mgk028lo
by Ephemeral-Throwaway
24 comments
How are universities surviving when fees have barely moved in 12 years?
That is unfair. It isn’t a free market, the fees they can charge are capped by law, and today don’t even cover the cost of teaching a domestic student. The only lever universities have to ‘manage their budgets’ is to keep skewing the ratio of domestic to international students. I’m sure that’s not what the government wants?
I was hoping this would be a government willing to make hard choices. One of those choices, is that tuition fees will have to go up – substantially – and be linked to inflation going forward instead of arbitrarily capped.
Labour kept saying wait until we’re in power before we reveal our plan for higher education. Turns out the plan was “fuck off”
And the irony is that UK Universities have some of the best MBA courses in the world and cubic kilometres of unexploited IP, sigh.
This is a good thing. Too many universities exist as degree mills, often only possible on international student fees, and are clearly surplus to requirements.
Fewer universities, fewer student places, fewer degrees with a greater focus on standards and delivery at the remaining degree options, and increase the cap on fees.
Fewer students with a greater fee cap is better than more students with a lower fee cap.
Why is it that the hard choice is whether or not to raise tuition and shaft the working class, rather than increasing funding
Over the last decade I’ve seen insane high salaries for Deans and the like.
It’s tough. Fees need to rise with inflation.
But universities also need to calm down buying so much land. They own so much and a disappointing amount is unused. Anyone who’s lives in a city (non-campus) uni knows this.
We need to generally cap CEO and Uni Dean salaries. They’re wild.
Cut down on some degrees offered. Maybe the government can turn some into apprenticeships with a subsidy for learning on the job or shorten some of the fringe certifications into 2-year courses.
One thing not yet mentioned here is that because successive governments have refused to raise tuition fees, the only way to keep the books balanced is to bring in international students of increasingly lower grades. As a result, universities have been borrowing massively to build student accommodations in anticipation of large international student population. But since the government has also restricted student visas, universities now have to pay off these loans without the income from international students. They are in a really bad place right now, with many calls of universities merging or closing down entirely.
I know we have a different government in charge now, and thank goodness for that. But let’s just take a second and think, a vital service that ought to be free (higher education) needs a bailout but might not get it. But we allow water companies (yes another vital service that ought to be publicly owned) are allowed bailouts whilst paying billions in dividends. We also constantly bail out fully private and non vital companies because they mismanaged their funds. But fuck you if you want to be a doctor, dentist, nurse, teacher, engineer, or whatever that requires a uni degree. We need to save poor little Jeff Bazos again.
When everything urgently needs funding becuase of years of neglect, do you trickle a little into everything and likley many will still fail but all will struggle or do you focus on the highest priority/wealth generators which will let you pick up the pieces after? I’m glad I’m not the one making the decision as either are gonna suck.
If a company (which universities are) needs a bailout they should have their top people fired and taken over by the government.
On the one hand, it seems that if anything should be subsidised (not by money ‘borrowed’ at interest, but by new money, to be counterbalanced by the ‘added value’, not of greater wage-earners, but an enlightened population) it is education.
On the other, one gets the feeling that education has in some wise gone astray: education costs nothing in fundamental terms; the pupil and teacher (and you must have them to begin with; you cannot make them as convenient) will assuredly be able to feed, clothe and shelter themselves without additional payments for education, and fundamentally education is an interaction between pupil and teacher, not a mechanised process using machinery and resources.
I do not advocate ‘cost-cutting’ in education; I *do* think a return to first principles may be needed, so that money and resources are placed in their proper relation to the process of education; I fear they have become of outsize importance in the process as it stands.
If councils can’t get bailouts to essentially run the country, I feel anything else in the public sector is pretty much boned.
I work in HE and really wish someone would come to the media and talk about what the hard truth of this will mean.
Cities that are very reliant on universities for their economy – because they have a large number of employees and students there – will suffer if something is not done to fix HE as it stands.
Huge numbers of international students will continue to be recruited wherever possible. Those students are allowed to stay here after graduation for 2 years at least.
This is not just a universities issue, this is an economic and immigration issue – both of which seem like they need to be a priority for this government.
I don’t agree with bailouts necessarily but universities are only able to manage the price of courses for students outside the UK. Without control of their pricing structure for home based students they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, and it is bad for British citizens who both wish to study/have their children study here, and those who work in the industry. It’s also probably bad for research as an industry as well.
The weird thing is that if tuition fees go up (but the rules about repaying them stay the same) it will have materially no effect on the majority of students. In most cases it just means more being written off at 45 years old or whatever the limit is.
If you go to Uni now, you’re lucky to escape with less than 50k of debt. Unless you’re a high earner you’re not paying that off under the current rules. So doesn’t really matter if it’s 50k or 150k for the majority of students.
Staggeringly small-minded Tory-continuity thinking from Labour here.
Marketized education has been a colossal failure. HE institutions have been driven to turn themselves into impersonal student barns, farming tuition fees from international students and delivering rock-bottom teaching quality in order to meet impossible market logic.
We need an enormous reimagining of education: the rebuilding of the decimated FE sector, a return to free-at-the-point-of-delivery education, giving proper support to students from lower income families, and the restoration of educational excellence and student outcomes as core values in HE.
Uncap fees, but subsidise tuition fees for people going to top 30 universities who are also from poor backgrounds, or who are exceptionally bright and/or studying a subject in critical demand. And by ‘free’, I mean ‘paid off by the government over 5-10 years if you work in the UK’ in order to discourage brain drain.
Is everyone forgetting universities tripled their fees in 2012? What have they been doing with all that money besides from building cheap generic student accomodation
I work at a UK university and, let me tell you, they literally waste millions a year unnecessarily.
The university I work for wasted millions in putting in a new sports department in my location, only to move the course to another location when the work was done.
Then they spent millions restoring old buildings which they had rented out … Only to give the buildings back once the work was done.
They spent thousands on doing up buildings, restoring them, adding pathways to nowhere … And, in the end, they had so little money they needed to give the buildings up.
UK hasnt hit the old vs young bell curve yet with majority pensioners, and it already spends half its income on health services for the old.
Next 20 years will only increase that, move to a 3rd world county soon, theres no growth in europe.
Not being funny, a lot of universities are managed like dog shit and most directors of faculties move from uni to uni and employ their mates. They try the classic “restructure” by merging job roles, deadlines stop met and staff job satisfaction plummets, they then blame everyone else and move on to the next uni.
universities need to reduce salaries for senior staff. id also like them to stop cutting courses in the humanities and the arts. its depressing. give the universities that are struggling the most more funding.
calls for divestment (such as from fossil fuels and arms industries) are also a problem. it puts universities in a difficult position: divest and lose money they sorely need, or anger students?
as much as i hate this, the government cant afford to bail out universities constantly.
I think only STEM subjects should be discounted if you remain and work in the UK.