Some universities will go bust

[GinForBreakfast]

Reported in the Times today. It must be so worrying for students joining or returning in September/October.

My question is around the regulator, who knows where the issues are. What should they be telling students and when? It seems cruel, especially to young people, to withhold information. It has financial implications as well - people moving, paying deposits etc.

Even then, if your figures are correct and these are genuine graduate level jobs, that still means 2.5 in 10 young people are leaving university and ending up in work that justifies neither the time and the money they spent doing it.
Those information is gathered as part of the Graduate Outcomes Survey and are considered official statistics.
Interestingly, the GO data also captures the number of graduates who are in jobs which they consider 'meaningful' and asks graduates if they are using skills developed as part of their degree or plan to use skills developed as part of their degree in the near future.
This is important because it acknowledges that a university education is more than just a means to a very specific, well paying job. A fact a number of people on this thread fail to recognise.

I agree. It's bordering on criminal that students are doing law and accounting degrees that take three years then coming out of Uni and having to do a shed load of "professional" exams, often self study or home study, for another few years. Unis should be doing those professional exams first and foremost, or at least equivalents that gain exemptions on a subject by subject basis. It's insane that, say, a trainee accountant working can become fully qualified in less years than a graduate who spends 3 years (plus £50k of student loans) at Uni and then probably another 2-3 years doing more exams meaning they take longer to qualify. Even more insane is that there are no "local" places (like Polys used to) offering the lessons/training for the professional exams. Unis need to be changing to be more practical and working back from proper professions - someone spending 3/4 years doing an accounting degree, should be leaving Uni as a qualified accountant!

That’s incredible. You don’t want to live in a world where nurses and paramedics haven’t been to university? Jeez.

Just to clarify - I used the term 'grad level' as a proxy for professional. Leaving aside the issues over SOC coding, these are jobs that require a particular level of skills. You no longer need a degree to become a solicitor for example, but the skills required are the same.

Nursing, teaching etc training may not have led to a degree in the past, but the skills required were always in that professional level band. And don't forget the tax payer funded their training!

Even then, if your figures are correct and these are genuine graduate level jobs, that still means 2.5 in 10 young people are leaving university and ending up in work that justifies neither the time and the money they spent doing it.

No - 24% may not be in professional employment a year later (for a number of reasons including childcare, disability, MH, working a NMW job while you work out what route to take next etc) - but you need to look a little further ahead to two, three, five years later. Just because you haven't got a professional job on September 15th of the following year doesn't mean you're written off.

My ds for example will be working a minimum wage retail job in September, but he starts a very sought after grad scheme two weeks later. Shall we write him off as he won't be doing a grad job on survey date?

This is such a narrow way of looking at a degree.

Do we really want the UK workforce to be significantly less educated than that in comparitive economies? There are major implications of taking that route. Plus depriving young people of an opportunity to develop and learn.

Going backwards is rarely a positive move.

All the roles you mention are more complicated with higher expectations on post holders these days.

We can't go back to the era of your youth, however much you wish it was all like the old days.

Look at the education regimes in comparitive economies - the UK can't become a less-educated nation without consequences.

When I got my first degree back in the 90s, degrees in the social sciences required the study of statics and survey research methods. What I have seen coming out of academia in this area for the last 20 years seems to be highly ideological, data free, and often riddled with bias.

It’s as if, when the facts were inconvenient , everyone dropped any pretence of following strict methodology.

I am not even shocked anymore. I think the general public may not be interested in survey research methods etc. But the can smell BS from a mile away.

This area of academia has lost respect via their own hand.

I disagree about this. I qualified as a chartered accountant in the 1980s. By that time chartered accountancy was well on the way to becoming an all-graduate profession (I think it already was in Scotland for new entrants). Very few trainees at my (admittedly very large) firm were non-graduates. Trainees with a degree in accountancy got exemption from the Graduate Conversion Course but no other exemptions. Trainees with a degree in Economics got exemption from the Economics paper of the GCC, but nothing else, and so on. Everybody I qualified with spent three or four years as an undergraduate and then a minimum of three years qualifying in accountancy, because the training contract was three years and we needed to gain experience in a wide range of work as well as passing the exams. I'm sure a lot has changed since then, but one thing I can say for certain is that the skills a chartered accountant needs now are not going to be identical with the ones I acquired, and they're probably more sophisticated. At a high level, accountancy is about a lot more than double-entry bookkeeping and knowing tax rates and the financial reporting standards, or whatever they're called now.

"You do not have to go to university to become an ICAEW Chartered Accountant in the UK. You can start your ACA training straight from school after you have completed your A Levels or an international equivalent."

https://careers.icaew.com/find-your-route#logic-tree

OK, I'll take your word for it (my accountancy days are decades behind me) but I bet it still takes a lot longer than the training contract you enter into as a graduate. That's how it was in the 80s. You needed to do at least a year of study post-A level to get a training contract and the contract lasted for four years instead of three, so there was very little saving in time.

But the problem is nobody knows. I’ve seen TikTok videos naming a few universities and imho the ones they’re naming aren’t correct. They’re naming ones who have been in the media for making voluntary redundancies. But actually it could be argued these are being proactive and have now taken the steps needed to assure their future. Indeed one of them said only last week they now believe they’ve balanced their books.

Theres also the fact nobody knows how bad the drop in overseas students will be until Sept/oct. Will people who are “signed up” actually turn up? If they don’t will it be a one year blip which the unis can ride out? Will the Nigerian currency recover?

We know the applications for student visas is 25% down on last year, and there isn't much time left for potential international applicants given how long the process of issuing a visa takes.

I think regardless of whether the Nigerian currency recovers, the rhetoric of the last Gov, and withdrawal of dependent visas means it's very unlikely we'll get enough international students in the next few years, despite the welcoming noises (but no reinstatement of dependent visas) made by the Labour Party. And that's not mentioning the over-reliance on China.

If you're referring to getting former students to make donations we simply don't have the same culture in the UK. It's difficult to get significant levels of donations from a body of alumni who are not highly rewarded like in the US. Doctors and lawyers in the UK are likely to be on salaries of circa £80k not hundreds of thousands and there are not the same tax advantages as in the US

Yup. The US is richer. Philanthropy is easy if you have money.

European universities, particularly in the little countries like Latvia and Ireland, can’t possibly raise cash that way, and neither can we.

Don’t think that’s strictly true. Don’t think they ever offered mfl degrees? But offered evening classes /short courses of some description? And that’s stopped. So while technically the dept may have closed it’s not as bad as it sounds. I may be wrong but I’m sure I read that somewhere.

So some/many/possibly all universities are bean counting like never before, scared about what’s ahead. So courses being culled, staff numbers decimated, support services slashed, module options reduced and teaching hours/contact time cut.

The issue is that this will affect students and they will notice. The teaching staff will bear the brunt of it and the NSS will be affected. No doubt SLT will then interrogate the said lecturers demanding to know why there’s a drop in satisfaction 🙈

The danger is it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Future applicants look at the NSS and think “I’m not going to X, the NSS is shit”. Numbers drop, more courses get cut or potentially the uni goes bust. So the bean counters need to take care, they may bean count themselves into dangerous waters.

These are my theories. Of those 'classic' humanities subjects, we'll take English and History as examples, numbers have been exponentially shrinking for years. As long ago as 2013, the TES was publishing articles on topics like why, as a discipline, English was 'not too big to fail'.

There are varying reasons for this. One is that when Blair's target of 50% of the populace being put through university was announced (along with his introduction of the tuition fee), the backsides the HE system put onto seats were largely in the arena of the Humanities and Social Sciences. New disciplines sprung up in areas like Education Studies, for one, which is now shrinking back to its pre-boom proportions. 'Gender Studies' was dying a death - but has now reappeared in a somewhat different incarnation. 'Media Studies' was lampooned as a 'Mickey Mouse' degree. Sociology was deeply unfashionable and departments were closing.

The growth in the noughties was unnatural - this was the UKHE equivalent of the boom and bust cycle. That was the boom. Now we are seeing the bust as things shrink back to where they were. STEM suffered at the time because it takes up a lot more real estate and is very expensive to teach. At that time, around 2005, I counted only six UK HE institutions who offered Chemistry (the most expensive and difficult to risk-assess of the lot). Only two universities offered Marine Biology and a further three or four Geology. That was it.

So what happens? You end up with a surfeit of Humanities jobs, more competition for what's out there, and as supply and demand dictates, what is out there is of lesser value. Meanwhile, STEM was struggling. So governments intervened and started telling students the other Humanities disciplines were 'useless' degrees and that everyone should be studying computer science, medicine or the physical sciences. And so the pendulum shifts.

And now, Philosophy (very unfortunately) is a dying discipline and departments are closing all over the place. The modern foreign languages are taking an enormous hit. History and English have shrunk as disciplines across the entire sector, not specific institutions (although some have been worst affected). Part of this is because of the absolutely soul-destroying, tedious, dismal way these subjects are taught at GCSE and A' Level. And - here's the irony! - now which are the disciplines currently recruiting and earning more kudos? If you guessed AI, computing and MEDIA STUDIES (the horror!) you'd be right, and here also we're experiencing another prime example of how the pendulum often tends to swing back in terms of university disciplines. Suddenly 'Humanities' is a dirty word and people are talking about 'Culture and Media' and 'Creative Industries'.

In summary, we need STEM (and now have plenty of graduates) and we need the arts and Humanities. A thriving, developed society needs both, not a swing from one to the other every two decades. Funding for the arts has been so badly cut that a major opera company has been reduced to using recorded music rather than a live orchestra. The same sort of thing is happening everywhere.

IMO, a culturally impoverished nation is an impoverished nation. With the richness of our country's history, culture, music, arts and literature, I think that would be a tragedy.

@CormorantStrikesBack NSS is peculiar. Do other countries have a version of NSS? Several universities didn't return for several years, it didn't seem to affect their recruitment. Very few universities have bad results and there's minute differences between the top 10/20/50. In also suspicious that NSS contributes to grade inflation.

Similarly TEF. What other countries advertise to the world that some of their universities are not gold standard. The Americans wouldn't stand for it.

American universities are all ranked. Various ranking bodies create lists.

All of them advertise their admission criteria, and you can research the GPA and standardised test scores that will give you a chance of admission.

Most US universities invite their students to complete a survey of the courses they completed. Many students decide not to do them.

A great many factors outside of teaching and teacher ability to deliver a course affect responses. Research in Australia has highlighted the fact that some students basically troll the surveys and indulge in sexism, racism, homophobia, and other abuse instead of giving thoughtful feedback.

Most US universities invite their students to complete a survey of the courses they completed. Many students decide not to do them.

It’s the same in the UK. They have to be begged and bribed to complete the NSS surveys.

@SerafinasGoose Are you saying only 6 universities offered Chemistry in 2005? This is definitely wrong. Most RG unis would have offered it.

The reason English anpplicants are dropping off is employability in the eyes of the 6th former. It’s never been a route to riches but now it’s seen as a luxury. History is a vital subject but we have many DC who are told that other subjects are just as good. Cambridge has the best advice on subjects and they still list the hard ones as their A list!

What we’ve done is allow dc to study a myriad of subjects and pretend they are academic. The only people who get work out of it is the lecturers and the uni gets bums on seats. This pattern of education needs to stop.

It’s patently obvious we have millions of people not earning enough to pay off student loans. That means they aren’t working for very long or are doing low paid work. Maybe the 40 year loan plan might make students think twice.

Law courses sell themselves heavily on being lawyers as a result of study. It’s ridiculous to think people study law but really want to teach English.

You could always apply for this law course. Virtually anyone gets on this one. The hard sell is to practice law.

The reason English applicants are dropping off is employability in the eyes of the 6th former. It’s never been a route to riches but now it’s seen as a luxury. History is a vital subject but we have many DC who are told that other subjects are just as good. Cambridge has the best advice on subjects and they still list the hard ones as their A list!

Totally agree that History and English are vital but sadly now seen as luxuries due to government rhetoric focused on stem. However plenty of the social sciences slammed on this thread can also teach effective critical thinking and aid employability. Interestingly Cambridge‘s Hsps (human social and political science) is one of their most popular and competitive courses - as competitive as engineering, more competitive than law, and 2nd only to economics across humanities/social sciences. Hsps covers politics & international relations, social anthropology and sociology. I find it hard to believe that Cambridge feels the need to offer’ Mickey Mouse’ subjects or that students capable of getting a place on this course have been hoodwinked into thinking it is relevant and useful in the modern world?

You clearly have no idea about the importance of research.

Some of the opinions in this thread are utterly uninformed tripe.

And for those of you wanting to trash and burn universities, are you actively discouraging your DC from attending? Did you benefit from a university education yourself?

Would you like to go back about 50 years to the time when only 15% of the population went to university and most of that 15% were upper middle class white men, who could afford the fees and the costs of living away from home? I mean, my family would be fine with that (3 generations of Oxbridge graduates and trust funds to pay for it all) but really? Do you want to keep on embedding such class distinctions?

And when do you think we should have called “Halt” on research? Certainly before the Covid vaccines, or perhaps before other breakthroughs in science and humanities. I’ll keep on teaching the syllabus of 50 years ago shall I?

Utter rubbish