Anyone else see the headlines re 3 unis possibly on the verge of bankruptcy????

[CartwheelCath]

Any one else see this in the news?

The papers say 2 south coast universities are amongst the 3. My ds has 3 south coast unis down on his UCAS application. How concerned should we be?
Anyone else concerned at all?

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/least-three-universities-on-edge-13516261

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6340045/Three-universities-brink-BANKRUPTCY-student-numbers-plunge.html

BBC news link www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/least-three-universities-on-edge-13516261

These are utterly trivial in the context of HE costs. Note that these often generate income, through external parties paying to use them.

I disagree they are trivial. One of the biggest mistakes any charity can make is in not doing full economic costing and reflecting that in their fundraising. A lot of charities are just waking up to the fact they are missing out on adequate funding by not doing a full cost recovery to include all their overheads. Not saying that universities don't currently do this, i'm sure they do, but seeing as everyone is charging the same fees it will seem it is not reflected within the fees BUT elsewhere e.g Research projects.

No university can survive on 7k per year: fees have been frozen, costs are going up, pension costs are up, Brexit uncertainty is hitting all over the place, research council income is almost frozen, increasing regulation.

Wether its 9K, 7K, 6K, 5K whatever, it is clear that all universities do not provide the same experience. In fact wether the maximum £9250 can cover the full costs of any university is a good question. I would be interested to see the breakdown of that figure and how it was arrived at. Clearly universities do not just cover their costs from fees.
What we do know is that unis are allowed to charge anything UP TO £9250, so its not so outrageous to charge a lesser amount. Some universities will need more than that, some will need less and everything in between. If government suddenly raised the maximum amount to £12,000 tomorrow, suddenly everyone will find good reason to charge that as well and 9250 would suddenly not seem adequate, after all fees was previously £3,000 before it was controversially hiked up. I simply don't agree that a huge university like e.g. Nottingham and a small university e.g Chichester should be able to charge the same amount of fees. How on earth can they justify it?

Private schools certainly manage to do this by charging in line with their associated costs. You wouldn't expect Stowe school and your small indy boarding school down the road to charge the same fees, even if the small indy is more academically capable.

(BTW would you really rather a university has an Olympic swimming pool, even if that means less academic staff...?) If the fees are cut by the Government, with no replacement income, universities are going to be in even bigger trouble.

That's a rather absurd question plus conclusion. I also haven't said government should cut fees anywhere. If anything I'm making a suggestion that fees should be more reflective of overhead costs in particular and therefore some differentiation might need to be applied, although that brings problems of its own.

seeing as everyone is charging the same fees it will seem it is not reflected within the fees BUT elsewhere e.g Research projects.

No, the biggest difference is international students, who don't pay UK fees but much more. The top universities get significant income from international students, which effectively cross subsidises UK students. Income from international MBA students is a huge cross subsidy. Institutions like LSE take a large fraction of their students from abroad.

It's actually quite funny to suggest that there is any spare money from research income for anything, in an environment where the research councils are giving the bare minimum.

Private schools certainly manage to do this by charging in line with their associated costs.

But again your assumptions about HE are simplistic and in parts fundamentally flawed. It simply does not cost less to deliver lectures and tutorials students in e.g. nursing at Chichester than it does at Nottingham.

Private schools that charge significantly more have smaller class sizes, a wider range of subjects and way more facilities. They have much better staff/pupil ratios.

If you insist that "low tariff" institutions charge less, you are advocating for worse staff/student ratios - when in reality lower ability students need more academic support, more academic contact time, not less.

BTW I have never worked in a low tariff institution and I would question the value of some courses at some institutions. Differential fees would benefit somebody like me, as it would allow the top institutions to up their salaries for their top academics. But one has to think through all the consequences.

One of the biggest mistakes any charity can make is in not doing full economic costing and reflecting that in their fundraising.

It would be absolutely absurd to suggest that any university doesn't have full and detailed accounts, financial projections etc. Of course universities know how much their sports facilities cost. For large RG universities these are indeed a trivial fraction of the overall income.

Universities are currently heavily focussed on shaving costs everywhere, to deal with increased pension costs, frozen fees, demographic dip etc. Everything that can be cut is being cut.

Here's the article I referred to yesterday:

Does Going to a Selective College Matter? For many majors, not so much.

It’s a familiar scene, a high-school student anxiously opening an email or letter that hopefully contains good news: admission to his or her college of choice. The ritual has become a recognizable part of American culture, one that plays out in movies and hyper-emotional commercials. Economists agree that going to college matters a lot for future earnings. But does the sender of that envelope matter?

That depends—for certain majors, going to a top-tier institution is invaluable. But for many career paths, it just doesn’t matter where a person got his or her education, according to a recent study from Eric Eide and Mark Showalter of Brigham Young University and Michael Hilmer of San Diego State University. The researchers compared the earnings of individuals from schools with different selectivity rankings, controlling for their majors and their level of degree attainment (e.g. those with solely bachelor’s degrees were compared to other’s with solely bachelor’s degrees) 10 years after they completed undergrad.

The article then digs into the factors the study identified that conflate the issue, like the fact that those going to an elite school tend to get more post graduate degrees, which also inflate future earnings.

The study was specifically about American universities, but I suspect the same principles are at work in the UK.

Someone up thread commented that rising tuition keeps out students from low income families, which is certainly true. That's why there's so much need based aid, particularly at elite schools, here in the US. But it creates other inequalities. Families like mine don't qualify for need based aid, but we also can't afford $300,000 to send DD to Harvard or Wellesley or Brown or Williams. So at those schools you have students from very poor families and students from very wealthy families. Students from middle class or upper middle class families are effectively excluded.

User - I think you are choosing to not understand my comments and a lot of what you've posted is very muddled up and not quite what i was saying in my previous post but you've given your own spin on it as you did other posts. This is going to be one of those arguments that go on forever and as much as i'd like to continue with it have far too many appointments to do, so i'll leave it there.

^Ministers can’t ignore the coming higher education debt crisis
Phillip Inman^

UK universities may soon struggle to repay billions in borrowing but the government can’t afford to let them fail

Looks like some are going to go bust.

A la 'trump' colleges.

www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/10/uk-growing-higher-education-debt-crisis-government

Just to say that, theoretically, if the unis are on the OfS register then even if they do go bust their students should be protected I.e. have an option to finish their degree in some way.

MissConductUS. The same research has been done here. Courses and institutions were looked at and salaries after 5 years. Medical degrees at the top and art degrees at the bottom! Nursing was quite high up in terms of earnings and the institution won’t matter much however there was huge variation in earnings for economics grads! Wolverhampton grads earn 60% less than LSE grads. However they probably have lower entry qualifications but have paid the same for the degree. Institution matters for Law grads too.

I never did get round to continuing with this thread, but just came across this article which is making the point far better than I did about fees:
Are students overpaying for tuition fees?

What that article neglected to say was that most Masters course get over £2k of government funding which they don't for Bachelors...