Should the current financial plight of some universities make potential students and parents wary?

[mids2019]

More universities are in financial difficulty partially be wise of anticipated falls in foreign student numbers. There are consequent reduction in staff numbers.

Should students worry about course quality due to cut backs or does the decline of struggling universities become a self fulfilling prophecy due to reduced student intake as they more wary of enrolling?

Short answer is probably not. The issues in the sector are deeper than that. At the moment UK universities are still mostly solvent but September 2025 will be a crunch point I think.

@GinForBreakfast .

Do you think we will see while universities actually become untenable?

I think they should be very wary. A friend of mine on her course (at a different uni) they are going down from 6 full time lecturers to 2 lecturers for over 200 students! For a health profession course. The plan to shore up the gaps is get staff from the hospital to do some teaching on an hourly rate. Which undermines what lecturers actually do and their skill set. But also the majority of a lecturer’s time is spent planning, prepping, course admin, supporting students. So the wheels will come off there.

Where I teach we’ve had a 25% cut in staff on my course. I’ve been told to significantly reduce contact hours to 200hrs a year max for students (apparently this a blanket rule across the university regardless of course). So students will have to do a lot more self directed learning. It won’t even be directed learning because we no longer get work load planned for that so we’ve just stopped planning any reading/activities/worksheets for students to do outside of lectures. Because I’m currently teaching /marking so much due to the cut in staffing levels I’m struggling keeping on top of answering student emails. Struggling keeping on top of course admin. Timetabling have emailed me with some issues about next years timetables which they want sorting asap. I can’t find time in my calendar until June to even look at it. 🤷‍♀️

Yes even in the russel group unis you have less staff to more students.

Higher education is in crisis and untill the goverment find a solution it will be continue to be in crisis. Internation fees are plugging the gap but that isn't working well and will fail.

My uni is reducing / completely getting rid of small groups we are now only allowed 1 academic in any lab which means no redundancy if an academic is sick / less staff to help with the complex labs
"Workshops" are the new tutorials but they have 100 students in them so no chance to help those struggling.

Our hours for all our prep have been halved so takes us 4 hours to build a new lecture from scratch including all the up to date research on a given topic often not even our field.

And we now get half the amount of time to mark essays / dissertations. But the staff are expected to suck it up and not let it influence the student experience. No idea how as most of us already work the weekends / evenings.

Quite possibly in the next couple of years. There’s louder and louder whispers about this. The current HE model is unsustainable and a major cause of that is the drop in overseas students which looks like it won’t change. That loss of income combined with the stagnation of home students fees will mean not every university is going to survive. Some students could find their course folding or their university going bust mid degree. If I was a parent I’d be very cautious about which university my dc was choosing to go to due to this.

No idea how as most of us already work the weekends / evenings.

I’ve stopped working weekends/evenings. I suspect next month the marking won’t get done in the arbitrary time frame. I’ve warned my manager and asked for help and been told to get on with it. Well I will only be getting on with it 9-5 mon to Fri. So we shall see what he says when it’s mark release day and half the students kick off as they have no marks. 🤷‍♀️

I think we will see some universities merge, be taken over, repurposed, or asset stripped. I work in a uni that’s expanding and frantically trying to buy up buildings to provide adequate teaching space. Meanwhile the number of applicants at a nearby institution is dropping off a cliff.

I’d like to see some universities repurposing themselves by, for example, becoming really good specialist apprenticeship colleges, or focusing on professional qualifications - returning to what polytechnics and technical colleges were designed to do.

The Times has been trying to shine a light on the way universities are heavily dependent on foreign students who are not going to come in the same numbers this year. Many come on lower academic offers than the UK students because they pay higher fees.
Some universities are going to be hit very hard including the top universities. With fewer UK seats available, the grades needed are sky high for UK students: 3 AStar for Warwick Maths, 2Astar-A for Imperial Civil Eng or any computer science course. The demand for these courses funds the less sought after courses where offers are less.
I’d love to know what happens on the results day as the offers have not dropped this year for UK students.

I agree on repurposing some universities to be apprenticeship and trades based. It’s a no brainer but it involves a major change of mindset.
Even here we see posts saying their child is struggling at A level and what university course is the least exam based and most coursework based. Posters will respond that some offers are unconditional (!) etc. It is not helping anyone.

One of the other reasons universities are struggling is that the fees haven't increased for a decade meanwhile minimum wage and employer costs have risen dramatically, especially with the increase in academic pension costs.

It's a shitshow!

Yes, you should. There was the Big Bang on uni expansion over the past 20 years or so, and we’ll see a contraction as students become more wary of student debt, now interest rates have shot up.

The sector needs to find a new equilibrium.

Potential students and parents should be very wary.

Lincoln has received so much media attention in recent days, with so many applicants now having second thoughts, etc. But it is not just Lincoln who are affected. Many universities are in a similar position to Lincoln.

The drop in the number of international students will have a major impact on universities. Those who experience the most difficulty attracting international students will go to the wall.

The HE sector, as currently conceived, does not readily lend itself to flexible, 'mid-course' transfer between unis so, once you have signed up to a three or four year course, you are captive. This emboldens unis to favour gradual degradation of courses. We will see a lot more of this.

There will be 'disorderly' institutional collapses but there does not appear to be a mechanism for 'interventions', as in the financial and legal sectors, where the regulator mandates another institution to manage the 'winding up' of a failed institution.

There will be wider economic impacts. Outside the SE core, there are many cities and towns that rely heavily on the local spending of FE employees and students as well as the spend by the institution on local suppliers.

Anyone have any info on Uni of Nottingham? DS is in first year of a MFL degree there.

There would be a number of universities I’d be more worried about than lincoln. Lincoln are making some redundancies as a proactive plan (as are many others) but their finances aren’t too bad.

Are universities keeping their problems hidden for obvious reasons as they don't want to deter applicants and their fees? Is it the case University management will be as coy as possible in terms of PR.

For example of an employee spoke out publically about the university financial reality and it's future plans would they be committing a disciplinary offence.

Their accounts have to be published annually so there is nothing to stop applicants to see their financial status for the last few years and make assumptions on which direction it will be going this year and next.

@RandomMess

has it come to that?

Higher education is in crisis and untill the goverment find a solution it will be continue to be in crisis. Internation fees are plugging the gap but that isn't working well and will fail.

I would not count on the current government even wanting to find a solution.

The Tory press would be delighted to see the whole university system collapse:

The collapse of our universities is the best thing that could happen to Britain
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/16/collapse-of-universities-would-be-great-news-for-britain/

Open university is a pretty safe bet.

My niece has decided on this route. She landed a job at the bottom in the sector she wants to get into, and is studying for her degree at the same time.

In my opinion we need a lot fewer universities, a lot more skills based institutions and a rethink of funding - either increase fees by inflation or fund the remaining universities properly through tax and some fees.
We could consider the institutions where the most students don’t pay off their debt and look at the reason why closely. High percentage going into nursing or teaching? Fair enough. But if graduates are doing jobs they could have done straight from school there is a broader issue.

@JocelynBurnell what is the general idea of the Telegraph article? It’s behind a paywall so I can’t see..

Shouldn't you have a controlled review of education though? This appears to be letting the market dictate who stays and who falls and the uncertainty about university futures is unfair to staff and students alike.

It's all very well saying be wary and I do agree, but unless you understand what you are looking for with accounts etc it's still pretty unclear which are going to be most affected and how. I have a DC planning to apply this autumn for next year and who is very keen on Lincoln but there are so many other factors to consider too, it's a complete minefield.

Does the drop in overseas students include those from outside Europe? If so, what is the reason for this?