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.

Absolutely @titchy

BTW, we've known for several years that the true basic cost (no profit) of a degree is around £12,000. That's what it costs. Domestic student fees are subsidised by international students, staff working a lot of unpaid overtime, and bringing in research grants which fund their salaries & overheads.

Some anecdata about how this works IRL: I have one such grant at the moment - the university has an outside body which now is paying half my salary. The work I do is what I'd be doing anyway (although much more slowly) as I'm on a teaching & research contract. And I still teach - my workload hours are about 30% over what I'm paid for.

But you can see that this is not a sustainable strategy for funding universities in the long term.

I still maintain degrees are supposed to be a channel to better employment. Why on earth bother if they are not? It’s ludicrous to assert all grads get grad level work in the end. I don’t care if a poster becomes a professor eventually. It’s an anecdote. It’s clear from robust data, more grads get grad work in London. Fewer do in Lincolnshire. No doubt she’d loads of them are professors at the uni. If people aren’t anywhere near paying off their loan, is it fair for the non uni taxpayer to fund it? To fund all the arts degrees and others with poor employment outcomes? I don’t believe it is. Unis are jobs for boys and have mushroomed out of control. If is about time a few were reigned in.

I never said all graduates get graduate level work. I was simply trying to be say don’t write your niece off just yet.

@TizerorFizz yes it is fair
Because degrees are not just about getting great employment
And because the tax payer pays for education at all levels. Not just University. But primary and secondary education too.

If you’d like a system where graduates pay for all the cost of a university degree, you need to create a country working well enough to allow proper wages and good employment instead. Not reduce access to university.

It is sort of bizarre that 14 years of schooling at 5k per year amounts to 70k yet 3 years of study is close to that figure because of extortionate uni living costs. We all budget close to 20k per student per year. As they then come out with debt accruing from day 1, it’s notionally very close to the cost of their remaining education.

This is because we have an expectation of initiation via moving away from home being a large part of the student experience and giving them access to a far wider range of courses and quality too potentially. But in many other countries the huge living costs don’t factor into it! Because uni education is more universal in quality. Chicken and egg!

The issue is rising student rents and living costs primarily and the fact you have to shop around to get a good degree in the first place. Unfortunately in U.K. we have major access issues and postcode lottery issues across all of our services.

Well they've been run as money trees ever since the fees went up. There's been no student care. No realism (remember thousands of young people doing forensics because of CSI? And there's no jobs for them in that field...?)
Like any business mismanagement puts them at risk.

It's appalling.

The degree my son originally wanted to do. Someone we knew at the university warned him why there wouldn't be a job at the end of it. It was more a hobby degree. So he went into something else. We were all sad for him.

Oddly checking my sons halls it's £30 pw cheaper than it was four years ago.

Well they've been run as money trees ever since the fees went up

Maybe you should read the full thread as that might explain to you why this is fundamentally incorrect.

I don't understand why so few hours of tuition every week would cost undergraduate students so much money. Per hour of teaching, they are paying way more than a private school student. Universities also have economies of scale for sports facilities, careers etc. I think they must be funding expensive admin services or research for it to be so expensive.

Surely, if we want research to power our economy and drive industry, we should fund it directly. Not load it onto students who get very little contact time.

@Runemum the reason you don't understand is because you are regarding a degree like it's an even more advanced version of A-Levels whereas a university is regarding it as the stepping stone way-point before you attempt your PhD, which itself is a stepping stone way-point before becoming a postdoc researcher.

A PhD student has lower fees than an Undergraduate and gets 1 hour a week of supervisor contact time.

A postdoc researcher pays no fees and may if they are lucky receive a small stipend, but may have no formal supervision time at all (the PhD qualification is supposed to be proof that you can be trusted to function without supervision - though if your work requires funding from the budget of a PI there will still be some).

Being an undergraduate isn't supposed to be about just going to lectures and getting taught stuff. It's supposed to be about putting someone with a true love for their subject of study into an environment where they can find out everything that is known about that subject, and providing them with the resources and opportunities to do so as they develop the skills to learn anything they set their minds to learning, listening to experts being just one strand, reading all the books on the reading list being another, and depending on subject various of writing essays, engaging in group discussions, doing practical experiments, tackling problems (not just from worksheets assigned by lecturers but seeking out more eg from set texts) - probably with less than a third of their work time being in direct contact with a senior academic because they should be capable of working without such contact by this stage.

One of the problems witn universities at the moment is too many of the students are being enrolled without this love for their subject or motivational drive to learn everything. Who expect university to be basically like school but more difficult but don't think they need to do anything beyond going to their lectures and doing the work specifically assigned to them. That's not a real university experience and yes it's probably not worth the fees that are being charged on the expectation that they are going to embrace the full opportunity they are being given. The remedy is not to lower fees but for such people to not go to university at all and have more colleges who do offer that kind of lower-grade experience at a lower price.

I don't understand why so few hours of tuition every week would cost undergraduate students so much money. Per hour of teaching, they are paying way more than a private school student. Universities also have economies of scale for sports facilities, careers etc. I think they must be funding expensive admin services or research for it to be so expensive.

Universities are not schools. It's pointless trying to compare the two.
Tuition is only one part of the undergraduate student experience but people need to remember that that tuition is ( or at least should be) provided by experts in the subject and therefore their salaries will reflect this.
In addition to tuition you have seminars, tutorials, marking, moderation and research. Research is what informs the teaching - so it's important.

Professional services are vital for the running of programmes and ensuring that universities are functioning. The amount of work involved in the creating, validating, and awarding of degrees is significant. Therefore we need large numbers of highly skilled and qualified professionals to do these jobs.

Students services are important too and the teams needs to be large enough to cater for tens of thousands of students. It's not like a school where you will have 1 or 2 careers advisers who are paid a pittance. You have teams of careers consultants who are highly qualified and are paid salaries which are equivalent to academics because their role involves curriculum development and well as one to one support. Same with disability and well being support. You need teams of qualified staff.

If you want a university staffed by qualified professionals who are able to support the whole student population then it's not cheap.

Surely, if we want research to power our economy and drive industry, we should fund it directly. Not load it onto students who get very little contact time.

Research informs teaching. University should be about being taught by the people who are undertaking the research and developing the subject.

It is sort of bizarre that 14 years of schooling at 5k per year amounts to 70k yet 3 years of study is close to that figure because of extortionate uni living costs. We all budget close to 20k per student per year.

That £20k includes their living costs. School children also have living costs - just borne by their parents.

No student care! Tell that to me and my colleagues who regularly respond to students' needs on weekends etc etc. our students are very satisfied with their degrees and their student experience. Why do people churn out such vile nonsense. Unis are not responsible for job market. And, one thing I always wonder, how do they manage in Germany etc where fees are nominal??

In the end its survival of the fittest. Fewer university's offering fewer, but high quality courses would benefit the country.

No longer would we be seeing minimum wage jobs requiring a master's.

Fewer university's offering fewer, but high quality courses would benefit the country.

Would it though?

In what way? Universities employ huge numbers of staff and contribute hugely to their local economies. Closing huge numbers of universities would impact negatively on many towns and cities.

Didn't some politician say when asked about failing universities closing say that might not be a bad thing.

Sorry I might have imagined it

Doesn't mean they were right 🤷🏼‍♀️

The problem is what the problem always is in this country. We won't invest that money in further education and vocational training. So people will say ' Oh my child can go to University because they are good at stem or are highly academic or whatever. Why can't other peoples children do apprenticeships or train to be plumbers/builders/carpenters etc?'
Well in many cases the answer to that is chronic underfunding and devaluing of FE, coupled with a chronic shortage of teaching staff. So what do we do with the children who don't want to become plumbers and don't want to do stem subjects? Do they not have a choice? We have a huge snobbery issue around vocational training that has caused the economy to stall. We also listen to elderly people who haven't been in the job market for 20 years pontificating about 'dumbing down' of education and about the lack of plumbers in this country, when actually the industries that we are good at are things like the creative industries, hospitality etc. That's down to Thatcher and the slow decline of industry championed by her and her accolytes. We can't compete now with places like China, India and the US, or even Japan and Germany.

Undergraduate students are already comjng out with on average £46,000 of debt. I do not think they should have anymore than this. It is already a huge sum. Instead, universities need to spend less on admin, vice chancellors etc. Research should be funded only by grants and private enterprise not student fees. If no-one else wants to pay researchers to carry out research then students should not be paying for it. Mickey Mouse research like Mickey Mouse degrees should not be paid for at the expense of young people. By the same token, young people are being taken for a ride because they think they can't get a decent job without a degree. The government should focus on cheaper routes into good jobs and fund those pathways more. Many big companies are now saying they are happy to train people on the job e.g. bbc, google, accountancy firms etc and that not having a degree will not disadvantage them at all. The government should support and fund these routes not more universities.

Mickey Mouse research like Mickey Mouse degrees should not be paid for at the expense of young people.

What do you consider a Mickey Mouse degree and research?

Also, what admin would you cut?
Most universities have already cut admin to the point that it will impact student experience.

There will be plenty of people who are anti unis because of the huge number of international student visas and new economic migrants. The housing etc puts pressure on local services and drives prices up.
The current government would be very happy if a ton of redundant academics make their way into schools as sixth form teachers instead.

Undergraduate students are already comjng out with on average £46,000 of debt. I do not think they should have anymore than this. It is already a huge sum. Instead, universities need to spend less on admin, vice chancellors etc. Research should be funded only by grants and private enterprise not student fees. If no-one else wants to pay researchers to carry out research then students should not be paying for it.

Fees aren't £46k. Fees are £28k. You're surely not suggesting that unis somehow have to be responsible for funding students' living costs?

Research grants DONT cover full costs - charity funded research covers direct costs only, research council 80% of costs. If we want unis to do research (we do - it informs teaching, it's where a large number of suitably qualified people are based which makes it efficient), then something has to cover those costs.

It's one of the reasons the financial difficulties are seen in the research intensive end of the uni spectrum (you know, the unis that MNer's DCs go to). So the naysayers who would be happy to see the sector contract need to be careful what they wish for.