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.

Yes that's great idea - the world is definitely EXACTLY the same as it was 100 years ago.

Oh wait...

You've assume all the staff are FT, they won't be.

Academic staff typically will be expected to teach 180 hours a year, so 6 hours a week assuming 30 week terms btw. It'll vary from place to place but it's a reasonable broad brush estimate.

<Waits for ill-informed posters to shriek and ask why can't they teach 25 hours a week cos that's what teachers do>

That is insane. Only 4 student for each staff member! No wonder they are going bust

I think that is fairly typical. The ratio of staff to students at my university is lower than 4. It isn’t currently at risk of going bust.

However, that is all staff employed at the university, from the vice chancellor to apprentice gardeners. It’s not just academic that will lose their jobs at a university if it goes bust.

Exactly @YellowAsteroid

What's not to love about that idea?! Oh wait...

As a first generation student going to university transformed my life.

Some things that were the norm 100 years ago come back.

Internet shopping, for example, is like Victorian era shopping but with IP addresses. You contact the seller and a delivery person comes round with the goods. 21st century technology with 19th century service! Marvellous.

I honestly don’t see a university degree as anything special enough to be a goal other than for academically inclined students. There are many better ways to train and earn.

What is the ratio of teaching hours to non-teaching hours across all staff?

as a senior lecturer and programme lead on a teaching only contract last year I had timetabled 170 teaching hours. Even my non programme lead colleagues were probably on 210 hours of teaching only. None of us do research. And that figure is probably higher than it should be due to sickness/redundancies.

The rest of it is answering student emails (seems to take half my day) and course admin and admissions work, lecture prep, marking, making various pie charts about module outcomes, doing mid module reviews and end of module reviews and collating the information and meetings, exam board stuff.

undergrads at my uni get 220 hrs of live teaching per academic year now. Max, across all courses so I’m told. The rest needs to be directed/self directed study…..we don’t get any time to prep or answer questions about directed study so it’s all self directed study on my programme. I might tell them a topic/area to read up on….but I’m not setting questions, etc.

That is insane. Only 4 student for each staff member! No wonder they are going bust. They need to radically re-think their staffing structure.

Tell me you know nothing about universities without telling me you know nothing about universities.

Essential staff at universities:
Cleaners - lots of them - you should see the mess that students make in every teaching space!
Grounds staff
Maintenance staff to keep the lights on
Academics
Technicians to keep the tech going and who are involved in teaching
Lab assistants (who are involved in teaching)
Research assistants (who are also involved in teaching)
Librarians so your PFBs can find their books
Counselling staff
Medical staff
Catering staff
Security staff
Administrative staff - student-facing
Administrative staff - research facing
Administrative staff - university services facing
Security staff (at my place during term time, they send out night patrols to take your drunken darlings home safely - so let's get rid of those, eh?)

I could go on.

I'd go even further eventually and force all unis to provide an option for all teaching to be online. Its likely the costs would then be in the hundreds for tutorials, exams and IT - and low thousands for science.

We did have something like that- the OU.
Who promptly put their prices up like everyone else in order not to be seen as "cheap."

This halfway house of marketisation for the universities has been just as disastrous as the railways and utilities.

Either:
A) Go fully private where universities can charge what they like, coupled with changes to the tax system to encourage endowments. Nurses, social workers, etc can get burseries from the Government. However, universities also take on the risk of fees not being paid, not the taxpayer. At the moment it's the worst of all worlds for the student, parent, taxpayer and institution.

B) Scrap fees entirely for home students. Instead, the university get the benefit of a linked graduate tax on earnings for a number of years. The sooner the graduate gets a good job, the more the university will collect. If nothing else, it will galvanise their careers service business links and work schemes.

Either let them operate like businesses or accept they are part of our infrastructure and pay accordingly.

You know what @ElaineMBenes I'm a hardened old lag professor (oooh I earn a lot of money after 35 years of really hard work & long hours, so punch me) and when I read something like that, it still makes my eyes well up a bit. So thank you for saying that.

I paid my way through my PhD partly by teaching adult education classes two nights a week. I know that my apparently "useless" subject (according to some here) helped several women get back in to university as mature students. For me, that is something I'm so proud of even after 35 years at the white board face.

to all the people for whom university was a life-changer. There are more of them than some PPs on this thread know about, and at those "low-ranked" universities doing "Mickey Mouse" degrees.

What is the ratio of teaching hours to non-teaching hours across all staff?

We are contracted to do 550 hours but historically it's averaged around 350. However, we've been told to expect our teaching hours to increase as we've made so many staff redundant.
We are also contracted to have 1 research day a week but I know that hardly anyone manages to take it. Therefore research is done in our own time.

@YellowAsteroid
That's lovely.
I'm now an academic at a post 92 university. My masters and PhD focussed on fair access to university.
I've spoken to hundreds of students over the years who have had a transformative university experience. It makes me so angry when I hear of people wanting to go back to a system where access to higher education was the preserve of a very small percentage of society.

I think most people (including politicians) underestimate just how much of a contribution universities make to the economy.

It's so easy to say 'Let universities drown and set up trade schools instead'. Where is the money for training going to come from?

Where is the money the admin staff for these new trade schools going to come from?

The older, experienced admin staff at my university were made redundant or took voluntary severance. There are not enough admin staff to go around. This leads to errors being made that affect staff and students. More admin staff are likely to be made redundant this year.

Where is the curriculum going to come from? The research informing the curriculum?

Many universities now run apprenticeship programmes themselves. Why not support them?

""I honestly don’t see a university degree as anything special enough to be a goal other than for academically inclined students. There are many better ways to train and earn."*"
*
As I've said before university is about so much more than just the degree.

Edge Hill uni do amazing work with care leavers. Look at the outcomes for care leavers usually. Support like Edge Hill offers is transformative for these students.

A lot of ignorance on here

I some ways I admire your use of restrained and relatively diplomatic language @DoorPath

@boys3 Are you trying to close down opinions? Just because people work in a sector it doesn’t mean they have all the right answers. It’s self-fulfilling isn’t it? Don’t question anything, you ignorant masses, we are perfect! Except the sector isn’t. It’s haemorrhaging other peoples money. Be it taxpayers, parents or students. It’s utterly valid for payers to have an opinion and for discussion not to be closed down by the “you are ignorant and talk rubbish “ brigade who are totally self invested. Hopefully students are allowed to have views that are not closed down.

Just because a few people change life for the better after uni it doesn’t apply to vast numbers now. Times have changed. We need to look at alternatives.

From HESA these are the very high level breakdown of UK university income and costs for each academic year from 2014/15 through to 2022/23 (the most recent full year financial data analysed and published by HESA). Numbers are £m

These are the absolute numbers, and therefore don't reflect inflation, or of course the increase in student numbers. In isolation and without context income from tuition fee and education contracts increasing from £15.5bn to £27bn over that period is open to misinterpretation.

The income header columns are in the main fairly self-explanatory; however "other income" comprises income from:

1. Other Income- Other services rendered
2. Residences and catering operations (including conferences)
3. Grants from local authorities
4. Income from health and hospital authorities (excluding teaching contracts for student provision)
5. Capital grants recognised in the year
6. Income from intellectual property rights
7. Other operating income

I completely agree with this.

I'm in the process of setting up an apprenticeship at a university and the amount of additional work and admin required compared to a 'normal' degree is ridiculous. It's not cost effective for the university at all as we need more staff (both academic and professional services) to run it.

It's degree level and still needs to be research informed. Therefore we need qualified academics to teach on the programme.

Are you trying to close down opinions?

No issue at all with informed opinion, discussion and debate @TizerorFizz

Unfortunately a not insignificant number of posts on this thread make the suggestion that the earth is flat seem a quite balanced and reasonable assertion. We know full well that 50% of school leavers don't go to university and yet we have pps repeating that nonsense; we have a pp asserting the Student Loans Company is a private business profiting from student loans - it is / does neither; we have many PPs who fail to grasp that education is a devolved matter; some who appear not to be aware that that there are no tuitions fees in Scotland; some who appear to think university and school are synonyms.

Do I have a low tolerance for uninformed opinion? Absolutely.

I'm in the process of setting up an apprenticeship at a university and the amount of additional work and admin required compared to a 'normal' degree is ridiculous. It's not cost effective for the university at all as we need more staff (both academic and professional services) to run it.

Yep been there. I strongly recommend you get out now!!!!

Hopefully yours is one where the fee is set at the cap, and not £000s less... (another thing no one is aware of - many degree apprenticeship fees are way less than normal degrees 🤦‍♀️).

Yep been there. I strongly recommend you get out now!!!!

Hopefully yours is one where the fee is set at the cap, and not £000s less... (another thing no one is aware of - many degree apprenticeship fees are way less than normal degrees 🤦‍♀️).

I've resisted for a number of years but under pressure to get one set up now 🤷🏼‍♀️

One of the major reasons for creating one now is that I train people to work in education (both schools and HE) as the only way they can afford to train staff is through an apprenticeship. If I don't do it my competitors will!

If I was able to integrate it into my current programmes and teach apprentices and non apprentices together then that would be far more cost effective but that not allowed. So many rules .....😞

Thank you Elaine, I hadn't realised that. This is another pressure upon already overstretched admin staff and academics, then.

@boys3 Just as long as it’s not debate you have low tolerance for! I know you like your facts and they are welcome. . Unfortunately there are others who would see academic merit in tiddlywinks if it allowed a non academic dc to go to a uni! Clearly that’s a joke but we do need a better measure of what the state should support and what it should not. It isn’t great that apprenticeships are so difficult to get and administer. Who, exactly, designed them?

Post 92 unis have been used to boost higher paying jobs in some locations but too many are in the uni itself. So nowhere near broad enough so students cannot stay in the wider area . I think there are stats for areas with lowest number of grads in the working population and some of these areas have unis. So do we think having a uni makes a difference to these communities for everyone living there? Not sure how this could be measured but as we still have deprived impoverished areas with unis, I’m not sure.

I have a friend a lecturer at an English university who went home to NYC when the first lockdown came into effect. It was online lectures after that. However she was pregnant agreed to continue teaching on line. Had baby, another lockdown pregnant again. Agreed to teach online again. Five years later she's still lecturing online from NYC.

So do lecturers still need to teach in person?

That wouldn't be allowed at my university.

Unless your course is specifically validated as a distance learning course then you are expected to do the majority of teaching in person.

If you are teaching on a DL course then you need to be specifically trained in delivering online teaching and online pedagogy.

People WANT in person teaching. Those that don't opt for DL specifically.

Definitely.
I'm really not sure how my team are going to cope. We're already stretched beyond capacity 😞