Some universities will go bust thread 2

[GinForBreakfast]

Continuing as thread 1 has filled up.

Careers advice IS part of the education students receive 🙄
And you're very wrong about students being willing to pay for it separately. It's something students expect as part of their student experience.
I spend a lot of my time speaking to prospective students (home and international) and employability features highly on the list of things students value.

I think we disputed this type of argument in the first thread. The UK spends the least public money on HE in the OECD bar the USA. However the differences in HE systems and ownership make international comparisons very complex.

I do think university financial methodologies need overhauling. I don’t think universities are profligate.

To come back to the point of asking students to pay separately for careers advice... this completely ignores the role career guidance plays in social mobility.

@Runemum probably thinks it only involves career guidance interviews when that's actually a tiny part of what a university careers service does. It ignores the curriculum development, the teaching, employer engagement, subject based projects and support given to graduates.

I tend to believe careers services are worthwhile for students but their role, like nearly everything else at universities, has grown like topsy. It does need to be reigned back and curriculum development is definitely one area. Careers staff don’t replace academics. This is symptomatic of the issues faced by universities. Over expansion. Invention of roles. Blurring of roles. Fewer students equals fewer staff and some services will need to be culled. Of course careers guidance for students should be part of the fees but it’s not down to students to pay for social mobility policies adopted by the university.

Tell me you know nothing about how universities are run, without telling me ….

While post graduation employability is used as metric for university league tables I don’t think universities are ever going to neglect this area. The league tables are god according to the powers that be.

You could argue to get rid of student wellbeing and support to be honest. My university has a good reputation for this and reckons it spends something like 30% of each students tuition fee on student support. Which seems an awful lot when you think some students will never access the services. The universities could just wash their hands of it all and signpost people to nhs services! 🤷‍♀️. Sadly hard choices are going to have to be made and if I was the VC I’d think this was an easy way of increasing income by 30%. Luckily for my students I’m not the VC 😁. But I imagine there will be some cuts even if it’s not totally removed.

Has student support increased since the 90's? I don't remember ever accessing it or really knowing it existed at my uni then. I do think there's a question to be answered as to why so much more needs to be spent on this area in universities than in schools. And indeed, if the figures are accurate from the PP, why universities need more per student than schools at all when they generally offer far fewer contact hours and much larger groups.

No doubt the answer is that the student fees are also paying for the non-teaching / research activities, but surely they should be required to spend at least, say, 2/3rds of the fee on teaching? That's still more than secondary schools get per student!

@FoxedByACat @TizerorFizz
All students benefit from the work a university careers service does, even if they never have an appointment with a careers consultant or need support from a social mobility perspective. That's because a careers service's remit is much wider than this.

If you remove this support then you lose the specialist skills and knowledge that they bring. They aren't there to replace academics, they compliment them. They're highly qualified professionals.

It's funny, so many people on this thread but @TizerorFizz in particular talks about the return on investment on a degree, about understanding how a degree programme will benefit your employability/get you a well paying graduate job. But then suggests culling the careers service 🙄

Who do you think has the specialist labour market information and intelligence to support academics in developing curriculum that aligns with the graduate labour market?

Who develops links with employers and ensures they have access to students and vice versa?

Who supports student placements?

Who runs university job shops supporting students to work part time while studying?

Who supports academics to ensure they understand career readiness and graduate outcomes?

Who provides data and context so that the university understands course and subject performance in relation to graduate outcomes (and were doing this before graduate outcomes were even a thing)

Who provides labour market information to support course validations?

And all of this is before we talk about careers interviews and careers fairs which may or may not be accessed by individual students.
Although, every course committee and student panel I attend the students say they want more careers support and for it happen more often.

How many schools do you know that has 20,000 + students including students from over 150 counties?

Do you think a school library and a university library are comparable in cost to run?

How many schools are also specialist research centres?

I could go on...
Yes, university finances need to change and the sector needs to change but starting by comparing them to schools is completely pointless. They're not comparable in the slightest.

@ElaineMBenes i haven’t once suggested cutting careers support. I’m fully aware of their value. Although I don’t believe they support placements (not where I am anyway). We currently have a totally separate placement team for those courses which have placements. Though there is talk about making the academics do this and I know other universities have that model. Though of course that’s extra workload for the academics. As an academic I’ve also never had any contact whatsoever from the careers dept to help me understand graduate outcomes or career readiness. Afaik they just have an office where students can go for advice if they wish and they advertise campus jobs in their window. If they do more than this I’ve never seen it.

But to be honest those figures should lead to economies of scale. Is the library that many times bigger or more expensive, or it shouldn't be in these days of 90% of material being on the internet? The two may well not be comparable but economics suggests the university should be cheaper to run per person than the school.

Thats clearly not the case, but I do think that it needs to be explained why not. The international argument is hard to understand because those students bring 3x the fees at least, so 6x the cost of educating a secondary school student. Do they really cost 6x as much to educate? If so, why?

Apologies, I meant to say that I do agree about schools not being specialist research centres, but that was my point that this part of the cost needs to be ring fenced / restricted to a sustainable portion of the fee. If, for example, £3k per student went towards the research element, that would still mean universities have 50% more per student to educate them than secondary schools have.

I know the comparison is not welcome, ans apologise for that, but the public (including me) don't know what else to compare it to so we use the nearest example we have.

As an academic I’ve also never had any contact whatsoever from the careers dept to help me understand graduate outcomes or career readiness.

Have you ever asked? Do you work with your faculty careers consultant?

Afaik they just have an office where students can go for advice if they wish and they advertise campus jobs in their window. If they do more than this I’ve never seen it.

I'd need to know which university you work at but I'm pretty sure they will do an awful lot more than that. I work with university careers services all over the UK and internationally and the 1:1 student guidance is only a tiny part of the job.

As for placements, it does vary between institutions but often sits with the careers service even if it's managed on a subject/faculty level.

I’ve no idea what the running costs are or should be but just a comment about online material….that costs a lot for access. University libraries sign up for thousands of journals in a way schools don’t and have to pay for that. The ebooks need paying for, I imagine annually. The library staff run near constant workshops, referencing, literature searching, academic writing. Individual support sessions, etc. I don’t think school libraries offer this, my school library didn’t even have a librarian…we had pupils staffing it on a rota!

Also, school libraries are closed for at least 14 weeks of the year, and evenings, and weekends….

No I’ve never asked, don’t even know if we have a faculty careers consultant- never heard of one. And I’m a programme lead. 😁. To be honest I don’t feel I need them so never investigated. I’m on quite a niche vocational degree programme and I have strong industry contacts so I sort all the careers stuff out myself. I get the local employers in, I set up and teach application and interview sessions and do mock interviews with all the students. I will have more knowledge than a careers person of the sort of questions and topics which will come up in interview for this specific field. I do remind my students that the careers dept exists and if for some reason they’re thinking about not entering the profession they’ve spent three years working for then other options and support are available and they can visit the careers office. 😁

Quite possibly other programmes have more contact with the careers dept.

The placement team definitely do not sit in the careers service where I am.

I suppose it’s an idea, let universities keep school hours, 8.30am to 4pm. Kick all the students off campus Friday afternoon to Monday morning… 😀

But to be honest those figures should lead to economies of scale. Is the library that many times bigger or more expensive, or it shouldn't be in these days of 90% of material being on the internet?

Do you think that means it's free?! Text books are expensive whether they are physical books or online. Specialist journals and publications require expensive subscriptions. University libraries also include computer rooms.
Staff are required to support students in using a library which is very different to a school or public library.

The two may well not be comparable but economics suggests the university should be cheaper to run per person than the school.

How though? More students, studying more complex courses, needing more specialist resources... how can they be cheaper per person than school?

Thats clearly not the case, but I do think that it needs to be explained why not. The international argument is hard to understand because those students bring 3x the fees at least, so 6x the cost of educating a secondary school student. Do they really cost 6x as much to educate? If so, why?

I'm ignoring the comparison with a secondary school student. You can't compare the two.
However, the first thing you need to understand is that UK undergraduate fees don't cover the cost of delivering a UG programme. International fees are subsidising the home fees.

But none of this will make any sense if you just think a university a big secondary school.

My staff would bloody love that! No more teaching until 6 or on Saturdays!

No I’ve never asked, don’t even know if we have a faculty careers consultant- never heard of one. And I’m a programme lead. 😁

😬😬

That's a good point about evenings and weekends and one of the many things that neither I, nor much of the public will have considered. I think most people do really want to understand- I know I do.

Its also a good point about the cost of reference material online; what does that equate to, per student on average?

What are the other aspects of running a university which are not comparable to a school (other than the research element which is really important, of course, and it's a separate argument whether UG fees should subsidise that).

And perhaps the thing I'd like to understand most - what do those who work in universities think we should do about the current crisis? Should students pay more? Should we cut offerings? Should the taxpayer pay more? Are there efficiencies we could seek?

@NeedingCoffee

-marketing
-student recruitment /school liaison teams

• admissions
• academic /teaching staff
• student support (well being, disability, academic skills, careers)
• course administration (huge job!)
• timetable team
• registry (deal with validations, conferment of awards, graduation etc)
• catering
• estates staff
• library
• graduate schools ( supporting research students)
• research centres ( including staff supporting bids for external research)
• international support
• visa and compliance
• knowledge exchange
• apprenticeships
• IT support
• learning technology support
• student finance teams
• Huge HR department to support such a large organisation.

I think it’s a combination of those things. Students should pay more, universities should see if more savings can be made. God knows how, everything has been restructured and cut to the bone already.

courses which are costing money should be cut. Sadly that could well mean courses which are more expensive to run such as medicine, nursing, engineering. All useful stuff but universities aren’t charities I guess.

other course could cut optional modules. If you have only compulsory modules then you need less staff. Awful for students and if they don’t want this they’ll need to pay more.

the govt needs to sort the visa situation out. Go back to how it used to be and just ensure people who aren’t entitled to stay after their course actually leave.

Agree and people need to understand that any changes that are being made now will undoubtedly have a negative impact on students.

So interesting, thank you both.