Should struggling universities be supported or allowed to fail?

[LCM001a]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3p93j3823o

25 universities are at risk of bankruptcy. What is the answer here? Should they be supported by the government to keep going? Should they be allowed to fail and the whole university sector be restructured?

I feel like we will end up with only mega universities offering popular courses, and the smaller universities with more niche subjects will disappear. This seems to go against everything that academia should be about, and feels like we will end up with just corporate academia left.

What is the purpose of universities? It looks more and more like it is to make money, not to create knowledgeable skilled students, and to extend our understanding of the world. How did we get here?

I agree we need lots more apprenticeships and to train YP in skilled trades. Society also needs to esteem this work more highly.

Why is bringing this type of training under the umbrella of universities, where I feel sure it would cost a bomb, rather than FE, the way to go?

I completely agree it needs to change. I know someone doing a programming course who is doing much of it with AI, and doesn't seem to understand that he is shooting himself in the foot, as even if he gets his degree he will be missing basic skills, and will be unable to sanity-check the AI output.

So what do you think is the way forward? No more course work? How are exams done now, paper or computer (I'm old and have no idea!) and is there internet access during exams? If so, can we go back to no tech in the room, and everything hand-written?

I also agree, @Wishing14

Universities have it in their t&c’s (this tells you about the numbers they are facilitating) that if you lie your way onto a course and then claim asylum when you land in the UK airport, the fees you paid are not refundable.

So people with no English language skills, many heavily pregnant, fly in on their student visas, having paid their £5k course fees, do their stint the hotel, (usually fleeing because they are gay or suffering religious persecution), and then rock up for their council house(whilst constantly chatting to their spouse of the opposite sex and family and friends back home on FaceTime). It’s so brazen.

Trying to challenge why they accepted a 6 month pregnant illiterate lady onto a masters course in law and business in the first place gets the door firmly slammed in your face. I know it’s safer than the boats or lorry’s, but it’s not sustainable. If universities are doing this it makes you worry about the whole set up. So is it really letting them fail or just not going along with the scams anymore? No wonder they are pro refugee. Must be coining it in.

Most of them. Off the top of my head, Cardiff, Durham, Nottingham, Leeds, Sheffield. Even Cambridge has an operating deficit and a small redundancy programme.

Goodness me, not what it was is it?

Eh? Have you been in the sun too long? There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of that happening. A small number of those on student visas subsequently apply for asylum, but the vast majority don’t. The student visa is the least ‘cheated’ visa there is, with again the vast majority returning to their home country once they’ve graduated.

I don’t know the answer honestly … firstly we need to re-evaluate what higher education should be. It can’t just be about employability and checklists and rubrics and ‘hitting the brief’, it is also about critical thinking and ownership of ideas. I think more focus should be on apprenticeships and degree apprenticeships. Too many people do standard degrees who really shouldn’t do them, and that has been pushed on them by governments and society, bringing lots of debt and limited return. And saying it’s about the ’university experience’ isn’t enough. I think there should be more exams, and they will have to do vivas - eg. 15minutes for every piece of submitted work. I think there will need to be more value added, 121s, smaller classes, money saved in admin through AI and efficiencies and the real money and effort put into direct teaching and conversations between students and staff (not old fashioned lecturing). Unis are burying their heads, grades are inflated and grades are going up and up through AI and also down (ie lots of 2:1s and Firsts but very little exceptional work because students are no longer thinking for themselves). It’s a ticking time bomb and I think it’s worse than most people realise. It’s very disheartening, reading something, knowing it’s not been written by a real person and having to give a 65 or 70 because the brief says so.

Indeed @Wishing14 It is effectively impossible to push back on AI generated work and impossible to tell whether it's just editorial smoothing or all the reasoning and argument that has been generated too. It's not that hard to do that latter, then paraphrase so it doesn't have that Ai dialect. It's basically impossible to fail a student for this if it's done competently (and I know because I have tried).

You have to balance numbers though because admitting too many international students can change the atmosphere and put home students off.

I've walked round parts of the campus of a highly ranked university and 75% of the conversations I overheard were in Chinese.

Let them change and pivot to more practical hands on courses and subjects with a much stronger focus on work placements and practical skills. Like the Applied Science unis in the Netherlands. More accessible, more focus on training and internships and employability.

And then what happens to those students, like me, who are only halfway through their expensive degrees? They are left without degrees or a university to finish it at but thousands in debt through no fault of their own?

Work placements/internships is a tricky one - great in principle, but where will they come from? If a uni course has 100 students every year needing a work placement, how do they find them? The students I know of doing work placements have had to find them themselves, and it's a struggle. If there is a large increase in courses which require such placements, then unless the unis will link up with local companies and guarantee places, I don't see how it can happen.

There was a thread some time ago by a parent whose daughter was on a course with mostly foreign students who had poor English (and as I recall they may have lied about their English ability to get admitted). They were required to do team projects, and the poster's daughter was unable to work with the foreign students assigned to her group due to their lack of English.

In the Netherlands there is a much stronger long standing partnership between industry and the applied science universities. The latter are focused on turning out employment-ready graduates - educated to degree level but already having worked within their industry, and learning the specific skills and knowledge that’s needed. The industries benefit from a constant supply of well educated and experienced graduates. Yes it would require a lot of changes - but it seems to be such an obvious need in the UK, such an obvious gap to fill 🤷‍♀️ it seems like a win-win arrangement. And there’s none of the social stigma of choosing a more hands-on, practical option that seems to exist in other countries like the UK and France. It’s a practical solution which benefits everyone, as far as I can see.

But it’s a solution that exists in the country with the happiest children in the world, so likely it wouldn’t work in the UK 🤷‍♀️

Dutch children are the happiest in the world and I know why

https://www.thetimes.com/article/e369fbb9-5ff2-4e65-951f-8f7d6c19bd93?shareToken=4e33cb1daaa497b07a38f46a770c771f

Funding crisis:

imho, fees for domestic students need to increase a lot,
and
the unis should be allowed to massively expand and offer many more places to (high fee paying) overseas students, but mostly for courses where there can be standardisation (national exams). That would achieve higher standards for the overseas students; the reputation should be "tough but fair" about possibly passing the course & getting qualification at end. The sector would "lean into" being funded by overseas students more than ever. Health-allied/Medicine/nursing professions are the big ones to expand.

It needs to be more feasible for the overseas students to fail in general and then not be able to stay in UK, at same time the sector is enabled to expand to start to meet overseas demand. The odds of staying in UK after course ends also need to somewhat reduce.

Law & 1yr MBAs: boost international places on these courses closer to demand but with near nil chance of staying in UK afterwards. Very lucrative students and each Business/Law School will have to consider their own reputation in deciding how tough to make their entry requirements and the course.

ps: intrigued, what is the % that means "a huge proportion" of students in UK HE are overseas students?

... 20%? 40%? 60%? What is "huge" ?

depends on the university. Imperial are aiming for 80% I believe. In some courses it is that already - where I am maths is 75% chinese

FWIW, 7/24 of the Russell Group universities are currently in deficit, including Cambridge and Durham.
Cambridge is still filthy rich, especially when College wealth is included, so the picture is complex

@poetryandwine sorry, I don’t understand this. Why is Cambridge in deficit if it is still filthy rich?

depends on the university. Imperial are aiming for 80% I believe. In some courses it is that already - where I am maths is 75% chinese

In contrast, there's been an ongoing thread about Harrow School where the consensus seems to be that about 20% international students works well to still keep a British feel to the place. I think you could increase those numbers at undergraduate level but if you start to get a high proportion of students from one particular country or language (and that is China these days) with a very different culture to ours, it completely changes the student experience for UK students.

sorry, I don’t understand this. Why is Cambridge in deficit if it is still filthy rich?

Deficit is (in a simplified form) earning less money (from fees and research grants) than outgoings each year. Some universities have billions of pounds in endowments so they can dip into them at least in the short term. Other universities don't and it's more expensive now to borrow money. Some might only have ~£10 million in cash reserves which sounds like a lot but isn't when you have thousands of staff and it's only a month or two of operating costs.

Kent was never a Polytechnic.

@hittheball thank you for answering my question.

It is running an annual operational deficit.

Universities are loath to touch their reserves. Many gifts are legally restricted, and many of the gifts to Cambridge and Oxford are to specific Colleges.

What university in the UK has a degree programme with £5K annual fees for Overseas students? £25,000 is more of a minimum for the courses I know.

I have good knowledge of the English language requirements for a student visa as a former admissions tutor with a particular Overseas remit and the only way an illiterate person could get onto an MSc Law course is by deceiving the university. It is very much in the interests of the University to challenge any fraudulent qualifications presented by Overseas students, because the Home Office keeps a close eye on this. Students here as a result of fraud are sent packing, sharpish.

Anyone having a baby during studies must interrupt, and anyone on a student visa interrupting for more than 60 days (which is virtually always a practical necessity) loses their student visa and is reported by their university to the Home Office. They, and their baby, are required to leave the country, unless they prefer to surrender the baby.

Universities are required by HMG to keep close tabs on all Overseas students and regularly report to the Home Office. It is quite a palaver.

An interview with the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was reported in University News in May 2025 discussing the problem of Overseas students who claim asylum here after they graduate. Those numbers are significant, and that is a tangled problem, but it is a very different picture from the one you paint.

Edit: my post above was for @Capitalclub in response to their post yesterday at 12.02, which I meant to quote.