Three in four England universities expected to be in the red next year

16 comments

1. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s a quite spectacular policy failure that we’ve created a funding model that is bad for everyone involved. Bad for universities, bad for students, bad for the government.

   There’s a long litany of policy failures in the past decades, but higher education is right up there with the worst.

2. Maybe if they’d concentrated on selling quality education instead of Visas they wouldn’t have this issue.

3. British universities have been rotting from the inside for decades. Educators are all now expendable and students (or “customers”) are nothing more than cash cows to be milked dry. The way international students in particular are exploited is truly repulsive.

4. If only they didn’t spend millions on “equality officers”

5. I just cannot understand how universities aren’t making a profit.

   It’s normally 50+ students paying 10k each… And you aren’t in class most of the time. When I was in uni… I was in class no more than 12 hours per week.

   I get that there’s other costs (building, maintenance, staff) but there must be more to it… Because it seems very hard to not make a profit with those costs. That’s not even taking into account international student fees and the additional profits they make through student hall accommodation which must be an absolute ton

6. Not surprised. I’m in redundancy consultation with my university. The cuts have been brutal.

7. That’s “English Universities” not “England Universities”. You can see why we have problems.

8. They all got incredibly greedy and took out huge loans to build expensive student accommodation geared towards international students.

   And now Brexit has turned the tap off.

9. One thing that has to be addressed is the extortionate costs charged to universities by external companies.

   For example, access to scientific journals can cost [literally millions per year](https://www.science.org/content/article/how-much-did-your-university-pay-your-journals). A university might have to take in several hundred students to fund just the journal article costs.

   For those unaware, scientific journals are literal parasites, as in, an organism which lives entirely on another organism while providing no benefit to that organism. You pay to submit your work to them, volunteers review the paper and then the journal charges people for access, including the author if they need to access them. Why does it exist? Because years ago, government bodies decided that funding should be allocated based on publishing in journals so unless you publish, you perish. It’s an outright abusive relationship, with scientists having no choice to go to these companies at every step, work for them for free so they don’t get blacklisted.

10. End. Student. Loans.

    Fund. Universities. Centrally. With. A. Progressive. Graduate. Tax. Explicitly.

11. This is surely only down to bad management. The university in our nearest city owns tons of residential buildings. The tallest building in the city is one of the university’s student accommodation, housing hundreds of students. They will be pulling in a fortune. Education isn’t cheap either.

12. Could someone help me understand why so many universities seem to be recently insolvent? Has it always been this way, or is it just much more expensive to run a university than it used to be?

13. Always nice to see your uni as a stock photo on a shit story.

14. Used to be free now it all costs a trillions of pounds…

15. I can only use my example
    I work at a uni (midlands)

    Leadship decided to gut the cleaning team (to save costs) and then buy an expensive robot cleaner…. which is not maintained, and at the same time THROW OUT all the cleaning stock they had in (buckets, hoovers etc etc) and buy all new for thosends and thosends of pound. The old stock was not re used or put elsewhere, it was THROWN. Again thosends of pounds just dashed.
    Mass hiring of middlemanagemnt, that do abosultly nothing.
    There is a list, but its a tale as old as time:

    You hire execs who have no care/clue, they bump up there own bonuses, whilst cutting staff, courses, and general funding and wonder why the unis are falling apart.
    A massive review of all uni leadership should be undertaken, and u’ll soon see why alot are in the red!

16. Offer Americans 4-year visa free and slightly discounted courses, they’ll pay a fortune right now.

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