Some universities will go bust thread 2

[GinForBreakfast]

Continuing as thread 1 has filled up.

Rumours are that HE will be rationed again in the future, reducing the number of places available in order to balance the budget.

Again, not great for young people with the ability and desire to go to university, but won't be offered a place because demand exceeds supply.

@GinForBreakfast Too many students go to university who don’t have great A levels and would actually be better served by work and part time study. I think the expectation of a university place has gone too far and we do need to ensure the right students are doing degrees at 18. Many young people would be much better off working their way up to a degree. HE entry rate 20 years ago was 25%. No one really felt that was too low at the time. We need to ensure all dc get appropriate routes into HE and it doesn’t have to be a degree at 18. The extra 10% going are not best served by the degrees they are taking in many cases and cannot find appropriate employment. They then feel weighed down by the expense of their education.

We are likely to see continuing angst at loans and cost of university so other routes into employment are vital and universities need to re focus.

Students should not pay more. It is already too much for them.
Universities must see where they can cut back further so they are more in line with expenditure per student as other European countries. It is irrelevant how much is paid for by the government in other countries, it is amount spent per head that is the important comparison figure.
Universities could cut back on admissions services. Maybe the UK needs to allocate places after results like in Ireland so less money needs to be spent on admissions staff.
Larger lectures-my lectures at an RG university in the 90s had 100-200 students.
I also don't think so much should be spent on wellbeing services at universities. Schools spend less than 0.1% of their budget on this. I think universities need to find somewhere in the middle between what they are offering now as a proportion of their budget and schools. The NHS needs to pick up the gaps in provision.
Students fees should not pay for research at all. Their fees shoukd be used on their education only like any other paid for service. If academics can't get research grants, then they shouldn't be doing research with other people's money. They should not expect students to partially fund their jobs.
Students/parents are consumers and they shouldn't have to pay for services they are not using.

The level of ignorance this displays is astounding. Do you know that many legal texts will cost £900 or more for a single copy and very often a new edition, or at least an update, must be purchased every year? And the licence for the online version is really not very much lower than the hard copy cost. And that is law, where publishing runs are relatively high. Do you want to guess how many specialist texts cost multiples of that? Across all the disciplines and specialisms of a university? And then you have to provide these key texts in sufficient copies /licences for your staff, researchers and student cohort? Even with an educational/multi user discount is this comparable to school purchases of novels and textbooks?

My DD, in her 4th year, this year has two lectures that end at 7pm. I feel for the students and the lecturers. I'm guessing that's the only way they can timetable through all the lectures. I suspect they have taken more UK first year undergrads this year to compensate for the loss of overseas students. A top 10 uni. The bums on seat funding model seems to have been so damaging.

The percentage of funding which goes on student welfare/support is astonishing. It would be interesting to know if this amount differs significantly between different universities and what the variables are. Is there something to be learnt from best practice or is it simply the kind of cohort some universities attract, or is there something about particular universities which trigger a crisis? Or is it that young people are so stressed now they are paying higher fees and accommodation costs and they feel the burden of that and ironically cost the university more as they then have to support that. Central government ought to be funding what is needed for young people's mental health whether they access through their university or the NHS.

Just an example. Absolutely basic text containing the rules for civil litigation in England and wales. £1049 for either hard copy or e copy. No discount for digital. Must be purchased every year as the rules change every year. In my organisation we have to buy 1000s of copies of this. And I am not in an educational establishment.

Universities could cut back on admissions services. Maybe the UK needs to allocate places after results like in Ireland so less money needs to be spent on admissions staff.

Perhaps look at her research into post qualification applications to understand why this wouldn't work in the UK unless there were changed across the whole education system.

Larger lectures-my lectures at an RG university in the 90s had 100-200 students.

We are going to have to do this and reluctantly get rid of smaller seminar groups for some modules.
It's shit for student experience - but you don't seem to care about that anyway.

It also doesn't save you as much as you think as marking and assessment needs to be shared across multiple staff and we see an increase in students requesting 1:1 tutorials.

Your views on research only work if you think universities are schools. But they're not 🤷🏼‍♀️
You also don't seem to think it's important that the UK competes internationally.

@fortyfifty Or is it that these dc would have been better off getting a job and studying part time? Maturing and not rushing to university makes sense for so many. I can see universities have to deal with who comes through the door but dc aren’t making the best decisions about their future but are seemingly pushed into sausage factory HE. It’s always the standard student who pays for others. Every single aspect of spending at universities has grown like topsy. Including debt. It’s obvious a revised model is needed.

Has student support increased since the 90's?

Is the Pope a Catholic @NeedingCoffee ???

Honestly, about one-third of our students in my department have special considerations. And some of the demands students make about how we have to treat them, talk to them, and teach them, cut directly across our national subject benchmarks.

Imagine you're teaching, oh I don't know, how to sell something. A tenth of your students, who have signed up for your course - of their own free will - tell you that they didn't know selling things required speaking to strangers, and they just,can't.do.it. We have students in my degree programme making equivalent demands. It's ridiculous. But reading MN helps me understand how that's happened ...

Well yes, very true. But some young people do go off to university perfectly well and something about the environment or their experience triggers the need for intervention.

I'm a big fan of gap years for working or volunteering.

Students should not pay more. It is already too much for them

well a Mercedes is too much for me so I don’t buy one 🤷‍♀️

if something costs x to provide then consumers have to pay x as a minimum.

You can’t just say well I can’t afford x so I’ll pay x-15% and expect the service to continue.

@fortyfifty if students do experience problems the old model used to be that you restarted after evaluation if that was the best thing to do. Some moved to a different university. Now it’s stay at all costs. And it does because the universities have liability. Too many start with MH issues and don’t think about whether university is right or not. I’ve seen threads where I have been stunned that dc are going away from home. Gap years can be good for some but for maths degrees it’s not recommended. People won’t accept waiting a few years or alternative routes.

If you only have courses where you can put 100-200 students in a lecture theatre then a good number of courses will need to be scrapped and an even greater number of modules. At my uni it would mean no more engineering, no more pharmacy, no more midwifery, no more mental health or child branch nursing, no paramedic sciences, no biochemistry, no medical degree, no arts course of any description, lots of humanities courses might also have to go, most of the business modules would go, no architecture, no archeology.

I assume we’re going to move to a lecture only module so no smaller group seminars, no opportunity for discussion or asking questions. 🤷‍♀️. Sounds amazing. 🤩

Get rid of all student support and wellbeing, sure, no skin off my nose. I mean we’d probably have higher numbers drop out mid course but that would make my life easier. 👍. But it’s odd isn’t it, because I’ve been on MN many years and student support at universities is something I see brought up a lot. Parents asking which universities are good for it, parents complaining that the university their dc is at isn’t supporting them enough. So it seems to be something both parents and students want and value.

The level of ignorance this displays is astounding.

One might say this for the whole thread.

My university was quoted, for one book, an annual charge that was in the tens of thousands of pounds.

Subscription costs for journals (or packages of journals) are absolutely vast sums of money. There is currently pushback from the sector at how inflated these sums have become, but publishers have universities over a barrel as those resources are needed. God knows what they do with their money, because there is no recompense for any academic who publishes, reviews or serves on the editorial board for these journals.

There is definitely not an economy of scale if you compare school and university libraries. They are not comparable in the slightest.

Brava @FoxedByACat

And let's get rid of all that important research - Oxford vaccine against COVID. Oh who needs that?

What parents don't realise is that the UK is probably second only to the USA for world-leading research. We punch waaaay above our weight. It's our only hope for the future.

China sees this, which is why I've had a stream of really bright really hard-working really clever & devoted Chinese MA and PhD students in the last decade. They are fab - and if they take over the world, I'm OK with that. If UK citizens want to trash one of the world's best HE systems, by saying it costs too much, go ahead. You're signing your DCs' and your GDCs' "death warrants " for future high quality employment.

I think it was Oscar Wilde who commented on those people who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

In my discipline there is a push for open access, however this is for English literature, which frankly has no money in it.

Yes, but students paying more is really just the government paying more isn't it, since so many loans are not fully repaid.

Just before my DH took VS, he had a group where 40% of students had study plan from Disability Services saying they couldn't participate in seminars. This was on course that is entirely seminar based. It was one of the things that made him decide to take the VS, because it was just too stressful to try to teach a seminar in which half the group couldn't participate.

On the other hand, we are measured on how many students end up in graduate employment. Within a system that tells us that our students can't do the things needed to secure graduate employment and that it would be terrible and ablist of us to try to get them to develop those skills.

Indeed.
Could not agree more.

That sort of thing drives me crazy @GCAcademic - it infantilises students. They are capable of so much more than the current mental health panic-mongers tell them they are. I was a very very shy teenager (could hardly catch a bus without shaking). Nowadays I'd be medicated for "anxiety."

But you know what? I got over myself and realised I didn't want fear to run my life. And learning to speak up for my ideas and arguments in seminars and tutorials was absolutely central to that.

I was very shy as a student too. I'm so thankful that I went to university in the 90s because, today, I would have been completely written off and wouldn't have ever pushed myself out of my comfort zone.

A friend who is a counsellor (not in a university) described the ways in which students are instantly declared, on presentation at Disability Services, as unable to participate as "abusive".

I agree with so much of this.

Yes, the whole admissions process must cost so much more as it's not based on actual results (like the case in most other countries), albeit I'm sure AI plays and will play an increasing part.

When I went to uni in the mid 1990s, I didn't even know there was a wellbeing team available (not sure if it was). I just don't remember anyone talking about it and the % spent on that seems far too high. I do think it's partly due to a more general issue with mental health almost getting too much focus to the extent that younger people self-diagnose everyday, normal up and downs as 'conditions' e.g. depression and anxiety. But that's a discussion for another day!

We also had lectures with 100s of people and that was fine; we also had some smaller tutorials. But I also didn't expect - and this was in the UK too - as much handholding that seems to happen nowadays. I think for my final-year dissertation I saw my supervisor 3-4 times tops. I did notice that some other students spent far, far more time with theirs but I honestly think maybe some of those perhaps just weren't mature enough yet or suitable for uni (and I did in the end wonder how much help they had got from their supervisor, perhaps they were used to this from home?).

Most other European have free or virtually free provision. And many countries do not have the injection of cash that the UK has from international paying students.

And, yes, research should to a larger extent be driven by academics seeking grants, surely?

Research is certainly not funded by student fee income. Home students' fees don't cover the costs of teaching them (including, as discussed, the additional support) never mind academic research.

We also had lectures with 100s of people and that was fine.

But we know that this is not the most effective way of teaching. The research tells us this quite conclusively and the feedback from students tells us that this their least preferred way of learning.

The only reason to deliver teaching in this way is cost effectiveness.

Are you (and others) saying universities should ignore the student feedback and the research on best practice in teaching?

And 'it's what we did in the 90's' isn't really a sound basis on which to make decisions in 2025.