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.

No, they just wanted to drop their old polytechnic image and drop the association with working class students. Most kids lived at home and travelled in, it was subjects like sports and tourism that were popular.

I work in the sector and we know which universities are most in trouble. A lot of those on that map are not in trouble. As a pp has said, it is often the universities that are not looking at restructures and reducing contracts etc that are the ones at most risk. The ones that are pro-active are the ones that are more resilient.

Many of those most at risk are the second university in their city. In most cases it is anticipated that there will be mergers. That could actually work to the benefit of many students who get a place at University B only to actually find they graduate from University A..

If we could sort out a sensible funding model, why shouldn't a university survive with mostly local students living at home and working part-time? My impression is this is the model found right across the US with community colleges. As someone said upthread, there really isn't any reason for universities to have flashy buildings. They need good facilities such as labs, workshops, design studios etc, but what they mostly need is excellent IT and library access for both staff and students, and a sufficient number of classrooms, seminar rooms and lecture halls of various sizes.

I thought it was a shame that the old polytechnics were forced to convert to universities. They used to provide excellent vocational training, including taking bright school leavers on day release from industry studying for an HND. Their teaching was often reckoned to be much better than the teaching in the more research-intensive university sector. They were doing a different job from universities and a much-needed one.

Was that the case when a number of banks went bust?

What about the Port Talbot steel works?
Harland and Woolf?

I don’t think it’s just that.

the proportion of British young people rose sharply when Blair’s Labour said it wanted half of young people to be graduates. That caused an artificial and, as it proved, unsustainable ballooning of university expansion.

Some sort of crash was inevitable, staved off a bit with the last fee increases, and a lot by international students.

Even with some of the increase now entrenched (nursing degrees, rather than the old-style qualifications) there has to be a contraction because the numbers just aren’t there.

Another question is whether this government will have the competence to look into this properly and produce a sound plan which has a decent target for size of sector and how it should be made up (courses/research, realistic estimates of overseas students numbers) and then a plan to move to that capacity with minimal harm to both existing students and local economies

No, it’s definitely the Daily Mail.

🙄

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment

A list of American universities in order of size of endowments, broken down into private and public/ state universities.
Amounts are in $billions.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_endowment
List of British universities in order of size of endowments.
Aside from Oxford and Cambridge, amounts are in £millions.

This is the problem.

Fundraising is the name of the game, not reliance on fees.

American universities have been raising serious money from alumni for decades. They do not rely on fees to keep them afloat, or on government funding.

This way of future proofing their institutions has apparently gone unnoticed by the majority of British universities, by government, and by the public.

No, you can measure it by size of endowment.

It makes no financial sense to the country to have universities take £22k in fees from students but for that student to bring a number of dependents whose schooling etc has to be paid for by the country. We would be better giving money to universities directly instead of them relying on overseas students.

It explains a lot of the migration numbers. Without overseas student fees and numbers, the whole sector would collapse.

The harsh reality is that the sector as a whole would be better off if a few universities did collapse. There are simply too many.

Why do we need so many universities anyway?

Ferguson Marine? It would certainly save the Scottish tax payers a fortune if that was finally allowed to close.

I think there are a number of inaccurate assumptions on this thread about how universities are funded, why there have been building programmes and the seeping statements about university quality lacking are just plain wrong.

Given that both Tory and Labour governments decided to stop public funding and charge recipients of degrees, universities were forced into the marketplace. For example, every time a parent complains about their DC having to (gasp!) share a bathroom, or live in old halls, think of your claims of university folly on this thread.

To make up the shortfall of the home tuition fee ( we generally lose money on every UK undergrad we teach) universities push every bit of infrastructure into generating income. Residence halls become conference accommodation in the vacations, or operate as B&B hosts over Easter and Summer vacations. Libraries do need constant adjustment and renovation. Sometimes- especially in the “plate glass” universities of the 60s and 70s, the buildings were designed to last for only 30 years. And so on.

I’ve worked at major universities in the UK and 2 other countries. I’ve never seen the waste or profligate spending that I see in other professions and industries I know via family working in them. We could start with the waste in the advertising industry or the profligate spending in the City of London. And universities produce just as much - and of more actual social good - as those sectors.

And universities produce just as much - and of more actual social good - as those sectors.

That’s really the issue. IMO they don’t. Much university education is pointless nonsense.

I would support subsidy for trades and skills.

Most social science courses should be binned.

They say ignorance is bliss.

Hence the number of social science degrees?

🙄

I used to work in a university. What I saw there was very poor management and a failure to invest in the professional services staff. If those had been remedied, productivity would have been so much better and costs could have been cut. That's what I think of as waste in the sector.

Like any business, if it can't be profitable then so be it, it fails to exist any longer.

I recall when university education was free, only about a third or less of my peers decided to actually bother getting a degree. The rest went into apprenticeships or similar.

However, ever since fees were introduced, and continued to go up, a university education became a desirable object, hence with a much higher uptake. Add on to the fact that it's pushed on young people that it's more about the "experience" not the education and the debt isn't considered because, you won't pay that back until you're earning squillons.

Perfect storm. Too many people making too much money out of selling a dream to young people with no accountability, I'm looking at the universities, and the accommodation providers who have lucrative back handed contracts with the unis to provide ludicrously over priced and hugely profitable accommodation.

( I used to work in the sector.. so I've seen it first hand)

Time for a reset. For training and skill opportunities of all kinds to be available. For a university education not to be the only expected route.

Also, for those bigots complaining about overseas students "bringing over family members", out of around 5000 overseas students we housed, perhaps 2 did this.

Oh does that mean Leeds 🙈

Less staff is what many universities are doing - see the huge redundancy programmes going on. As a parent, bear in mind what this means for your DC: larger class sizes, less personal contact with tutors, less choice of options, less good quality marking and feedback (as tutors now have to mark more work in the same window of time). This then leads to poor satisfaction scores by students and burned out staff.

Across the sector student satisfaction was higher this year than last.

Well, parents should be telling their children not to go to uni unless it is for a vocational course.

Universities going bust will be a blessing in disguise as these poor kids are just wasting their time getting a worthless piece of paper.

I went in the mid-80s when it was free and wish that I hadn't bothered but it was was more difficult then as you couldn't get anywhere without a degree.

Now you can do degrees and professional qualifications whilst working which was very rare when I went.

We should go back to that model. It would help ease the housing shortage if more students stayed living at home and went to local "Unis", "Polys", "Colleges" or whatever they want to call them. So many Uni towns now have awful housing shortages since huge numbers of "family" homes have been bought by investors and converted to HMO for students living there temporarily!

The obsession with 50% to Uni has meant options for adults retraining has been massively reduced. We used to have a brilliant adult education system in local colleges and polys, but with Polys being converted to Unis and Colleges aiming at 16-18 year olds, there are now very few adult education retraining options.