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.

I agree. As above.

I don't know for sure but I'm guessing it's because the fees (and accompanying loans) would become unaffordable to most. There was a huge outcry when fees were introduced and only one minor increase since they topped out, all bitterly protested.

Culturally we have free education. When fees came in it was a significant change for the Uk. Many current parents of university students didn’t have any fees to pay at all. I was paid to go to university since I had a full grant.

I've never understood university finances, and then saw an article that explained it. Undergrads are being fleeced to pay for all the activities in the uni that have nothing to do with students.

Even on an intensive degree such as a science subject, outside of labs a lecturer will be teaching 80-100 students at once, and each student can only see a single lecturer at any time, so only needs to pay pro-rata for one lecturer.

Lets double it - say two lecturers and round it to £200k, that is £2k per student in actual tuition. Add in £500 per student in building costs, and then for the most advanced courses add £4k for labs.

The actual cost is likely £6-7K for a science course and £2-3k for an arts course.

If we tasked universities with teaching and only paid them for undergraduate tuition - and did not allow cross-subsidies, this would be it.

The issue is that university people want to do research that nobody is willing to pay for - neither government nor industry. But why should undergraduates pay for it, they don't need it either.

Make universities account for research separately to teaching - and don't allow cross-subsidy. If universities need to stop research, well so be it. Government and industry will pay for the best research, and the rest can become teaching universities - with a lot less staff.

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.

I know someone who recruits trainees for their medium sized provincial firm. They get lots of applicants from both universities in their city but very rarely recruit from the post 1992 one. The quality of applicants just isn’t the same.

I think we all need to pay much more attention to uni finances when advising kids about their choices. My dd is going to study Arabic and I’ve looked closely at most of the depts in the country. It is not surprising that the one which appears to be head and shoulders above any of the others, where she is going, is the one fully funded by an Arab sheikh (Exeter). Even at Cambridge the department seemed moribund, like nobody had spent a quid there for decades, with barely any staff. Not surprising given the low take up I suppose… but there are well funded well-husbanded departments for all subjects and you need to hunt them out.

@Satsuma89 it seems logical but it's not that simple. If a university wants to attract high quality academics with deep and current knowledge of their field, they have to enable research. The two go hand in hand. Research excellence feeds into international reputation which attracts international students, who subsidise home students.

Similarly, knowledge exchange (contract research, consultancy, collaborative research etc.) brings benefits to students as it fuels relationships between industry and universities, leading to internships, placements and enhanced career opportunities for graduates. Universities are complex ecosystems, imperfect certainly, but they cannot be easily broken down into their component parts.

Again, this wasn't intended to be a thread about systemic issues in HE, but more specifically about how the government and regulator should treat students joining or returning to institutions that are likely to collapse in the next few months.

That makes sense @GinForBreakfast

But it makes me wonder if we simply have too many universities. This works for the top tier, but not the lower tier. Maybe they should have stayed polytechnics rather than pandering to everyone’s vanity.

The UK simply doesn’t have the scale or wealth to support so many universities. There was a bubble.

As a general rule those universities that have the most expensive professors have the lowest undergraduate satisfaction with teaching.

@Satsuma89 here in Canada online courses offered by our uni’s don’t count towards visa/immigration requirements into the country. One lecturer was telling me her face to face class in nursing (masters level I believe) was all foreign students. The UK might be similar.

I work for a university. I know of overseas students who brought their families here...these students were mature students with very good jobs. The (year-long, postgraduate) course fees and accommodation here were all paid for by their employer! The students would have a great experience here and would return to their home countries and employers at the end of the course.

But these students aren't coming here any more. They are going to Canada and Australia instead.

is it this report https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a261fda3c2a28abb50d758/Indpendent_review_of_the_office_for_students.pdf.pdf that the Times have (somewhat mis)reported?

or this one?

https://www.publicfirst.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Institution-Overboard.pdf

or, as I can't see behind the paywall, does the Times article misreference both?

Given there is an awful lot of information around university finances in the public domain either published in detail by individual universities - this for example is University of Leeds https://www.leeds.ac.uk/structure-governance/doc/reports-accounts-policies ; and at a summarised and comparator level by the likes of HESA https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/finances I don't think that parents or students should necessarily be overly worried - certainly not for this autumn - but should exercise a level of due diligence from the very relevant information that is readily available.

https://wonkhe.com/ and https://www.hepi.ac.uk/ are also excellent and accessible sources of information and analysis.

Finally it is probably worth everyone remembering that Education (including higher ed) is a devolved matter and that the OfS is the regulator for England only.

(Waves back!)

The tax system should have been tweaked. The example of US universities raking in dough has been around for ages.

Several elite universities in the US offer very generous financial aid to international undergrads. Going to the US could be very inexpensive as a result.

Yes, that pretty much sums it up.

The closer-to-home model of the Irish Institutes of Technology (formerly Regional Technical Colleges, (all set up in the late 60s to the 70s) might be adapted to British circumstances. All it takes is vision, and proper funding.

American community colleges are places where you can get a technical training if you somehow miss this opportunity in your high school, or you can do an Associates Degree (two years of general education classes) which you can apply toward the degree requirements at a four year university. Theynalsonoffer opportunities for adult education, EFL, etc. They are funded by local taxes.

Funding is the crux.

@absquatulize that may have been the case in the past but not anymore. NSS and TEF are taken really seriously by universities. Although again, these are imperfect measures. E.g. NSS is sometimes used by student activists to punish universities for a perceived transgression like investing in the wrong funds or having a statue of the wrong person outside their library.

Are you referring to this?

As a general rule those universities that have the most expensive professors have the lowest undergraduate satisfaction with teaching.

@absquatulize yes, I am. Do you have data to back that up?

sorry @GinForBreakfast or were the Times talking about this one? https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/ly1buqlj/financial-sustainability-report2024.pdf

I suspect not as the Institution Overboard report published this week quotes directly from it.

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

Not the case.
I teach both on campus and online and can assure you that online teaching is not a cheaper or easier option.
Preparing and delivering excellent quality online teaching is VERY time consuming and needs to be planned meticulously. To do this properly you need to employ people to support academics to design and create content that is fit for purpose.
If the teaching is asynchronous then this involves recording content which needs to be updated regularly.
Student engagement is different too and often more time consuming.

As a general rule those universities that have the most expensive professors have the lowest undergraduate satisfaction with teaching.

I'd love to see the data - a simple graph would suffice - that demonstrates that @absquatulize .

https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/cepeo/2024/07/02/frozen-out-how-english-higher-education-has-become-a-fragile-sector/

Another interesting read from just a few weeks back

Doesn't everyone with an interest in HE read WonkHE?

https://wonkhe.com/blogs/what-can-the-nss-can-tell-us-about-staff-pay/

Agree and the universities in trouble simply haven't got the money to do this. Good online content requires huge resources. It's not just recording a teams meeting.

And having done online only teaching during COVID, students don't want their teaching via teams either. It's miserable for everyone involved.