Some universities will go bust thread 2

[GinForBreakfast]

Continuing as thread 1 has filled up.

Social sciences too

I teach in a subdiscipline of international politics

I'm so tired

GinForBreakfast · Today 12:06
https://wonderfulhighered.com/2025/04/14/what-are-all-these-so-called-bullshit-jobs-in-universities/ Found this, it might be of interest.

That was an interesting read. Some of it rings true, other parts not so much. I do agree about bringing private sector type bloat into institutions but I don’t think it’s fair to blame (the majority) of academics. The majority of lecturers doing the day to day job wouldn’t care too much if various departments/levels of more senior management disappeared. Obviously some are needed but there’s been a noticeable increase in staff (academics) at the levels above senior lecturer. So office jobs. Lots of paper pushing and reports. How necessary is it? Maybe it is and the understanding of the necessity is above me. 😆

If I go to a conference (rare) I do my own booking and expenses. So just book a travel lodge and claim petrol.

As a lecturer I do my own photocopying. Even stuff like formatting exam papers. No longer have admin to do that sort of stuff.

Not sure where you’re getting your stats from. There’s no way most students would pay back their loans if the tuition fees were increased to £15k. The compounding interest on the outstanding loan while they were making quite small repayments in the early years of their career would make it impossible unless the repayment terms were made much higher. You just have to run the figures through the available online calculators.

Similarly, there’s no way 1/2 of students repay their loans in full within a few years. The average student doesn’t earn enough. If someone has £28k of student debt, even ignoring the compounding interest, they would need to pay £2.8k a year for 10 years to clear their debt (a few being <10?) - and be earning £58k per year. Most students are only paying a few hundred pounds in the first few years after graduation. A minority of course in high earning jobs like investment banking will pay off their loans in a few years but most won’t. And if you add in compounding interest, the figures balloon quite rapidly. I think some people owe £280k+ from earlier student loans.

The IFS estimate that 79% of students will repay in full on the Plan 5 loans. But it’s a guesstimate as so much depends on the underlying assumptions.

From a report on Confused.com:

“According to student debt statistics from the UK government, the average student debt for someone leaving university on a Plan 5 in 2023 stood at just under £45,000.

Even though the average postgraduate starting salary for a student is likely to be somewhere between £18,000 and £23,000 a year, students will not start paying back their loan until they begin earning at least £25,000 a year. When this is the case, they should accumulate around £3,500 worth of interest in their first year of working.
Assuming a salary growth rate of 6% a year and an interest rate of 7.8% (based on government figures at the time of writing), this means a typical student could earn £26,500 by the end of 2024. This could equate to £135 being paid off their total student debt, with a further £3,778 of accumulated interest.
As time goes on, and assuming the salary growth rate and interest rates remain the same*, the average UK student may be earning over £80,000 by 2043. By this stage, they should have paid off around £42,733 of their student debt, yet could have accumulated almost £146,000 in interest on their original loan.”

One of the - significant - problems for Govt is that if they increase tuition fees which purportedly increases the cost for students, it actually significantly increases the cost for Govt/taxpayers because of the likely non repayment of loans. They would probably have to get rid of the 40 year write-off for it to even begin to make sense. And I believe at least part of this cost has to be recognised in govt finances today. (When students fees/loans were first introduced they were all off-book so didn’t have to be recognised in govt borrowing figures. It was a sneaky sleight of hand which made student fees such a popular option at the Treasury at the time. This is no longer completely the case but I’m not sure of the %.)

I think some of the history of tuition fees has been forgotten. At the time, they were a windfall for universities, which had been underfunded. Some universities were less than prudent in how they spent this money. When the fees were increased to £9k it was supposed to be a cap and not all courses were supposed to charge the same because they don’t all cost the same to deliver and aren’t all perceived to have the same “value” (I know, I know that’s offensive to some on here). It was like a gold rush and some universities went mad building new facilities. Unfortunately for universities the tap was then turned off.

I do think the entire structure and funding of the sector needs to be rethought. (Parts of it are world class and should be nurtured, but parts are not.) Either this needs to be done in a coordinated way by the Govt if you think universities are a public good and part of the public sector, or the universities need to be allowed to go entirely their own way with their own different business (teaching and research) models which means charging whatever fees they want to students and having whatever mix of research/ teaching they want.

The current system is not sustainable.

I’m not sure where the aptly named confused.com got their stats from - plan 5 loans only started in 2023 so no one could have left with one by then!

And when loans came in don’t forget the Gov funding we got pretty much disappeared. I vaguely recall working out that we averaged an extra £400 per student for that first year than we’d got from the funding council.

Here’s the link with their sources and assumptions https://www.confused.com/student/student-finance-facts

I imagine they’ve applied the repayment terms of a Plan 5 loan to the average outstanding debt of a student in 2023. The principle of compounding interest and low student repayments in the early years remains the same. The debt grows and it takes a long time to repay. At some point the repayments outpace the compounding interest and the debt begins to reduce but it takes a long time if you are an average earner.

I prefer the IFS analysis, but this shows the numbers quite starkly so I thought helped clarify the discussion.

As I noted, how much anyone repays and when is very dependent on underlying assumptions and the rate of salary growth. But there is no way that if the loan is increased to £15k most students will repay in full. The maths simply don’t work.

Oh I agree that at £15k per year loans won’t be repaid at anything like the current plan 5 repayment projections. But something needs to change - and for the sector to survive in anything resembling its current shape that means raising fees.

So - we can either let the sector largely fail (finance figures due next month - maybe two thirds will be in deficit?), which tizer and others are keen on.

Or we raise fees to a sustainable level. Which means difficult funding decisions: does the tax payer take on a much larger burden, do we pass some of the cost to employers, do we ask graduates to take on larger repayments, do we cap numbers.

Giving much more of the burden to students may backfire, with fewer choosing to go at all and bitterness about inter generational unfairness.
How would pushing it onto employers work? Would employers just quit hiring graduates, this seems self defeating.
More foreign students seems politically impossible. There is a lot of scepticism that students, particularly at less elite levels are just buying visas with a side order of education.
Taxpayers shouldering more of the costs with a cap on numbers seems the most likely outcome.

@EmpressoftheMundane Employers would go mad! NI, Apprentice levy and paying universities too? Not going to happen.

We started off with a £6009-9000 fee structure. The cheap courses swiftly disappeared. The reason the student payment period is longer is to get more back in repayments. The bigger the loan, the more that policy won’t work.

I wonder if there is going to have to be a larger means tested element, perhaps the removal of any maintenance loan for households over a certain level and/or means tested tuition fee loans, to reduce the taxpayer burden.

It does feel as if we need to encourage families to save for university from early childhood, as they do in the US, although I would really hope we could keep fees much lower than the US and also maintain financial support for those who need it.

I'm amongst those who would certainly be affected so I don't suggest this lightly. But I'd be ok with providing £5k pa tuition fees out of my own pocket, to top up the £9k tuition fee loans, if that made for a good student experience, and also ok with having to continue to support my young adult in terms of living costs. It is, after all, their and my decision how much that living costs me, as they could in theory go to a uni to which they can commute.

In the US, at private universities, the well healed pay more for the same thing. This is tenable because public universities have a reasonable sticker price.

Given that the UK doesn’t really have private universities, I wonder how it would work?

Harvard is reviled by many in the US and holds the same place in the popular imagination as Eton does in the UK.

We started off with a £6009-9000 fee structure. The cheap courses swiftly disappeared.

The cheap courses swiftly disappeared for two reasons. Students assumed lower costs meant lower quality so didn't choose them and they weren't financially viable after a couple of years as costs increased.

So who foots the bill then? Even in the vastly reduced sector that you would like to see, someone has to pay - so who would you prefer?

" I wonder if there is going to have to be a larger means tested element, perhaps the removal of any maintenance loan for households over a certain level and/or means tested tuition fee loans, to reduce the taxpayer burden"

At the moment we have the situation where single parent households often get given the full maintenance loan even though that young person has another parent who has supported them financially for 18 years.

I would say most commuter students ought not to need a maintenance loan. I know if DD2 decided to go from home we wouldn't claim it. However, to get to the nearest 'good' university, train fare would be £35 a day. If we want lots of students to live at home and commute, it would be nice to see a more European approach to youth train fares. I doubt many commuter students can even use a young people's rail card if they have to be in university for 9 or 10am.

Maybe there should be less people going to university. Which would make me sad from a widening participation pov as we all know which students would be most affected by that. But there’s certainly an argument that if the majority of people have a degree then employers come to expect it even for non graduate type roles.

I know I work in a university but it annoys me that here they won’t interview people for an admin role unless they have a degree. It’s their benchmark of intelligence/aptitude I guess. There are people in the admin office who have been there over a decade and don’t seem to be moving on even though they have a degree. I also know an experienced administrator who wants to work here who has applied numerous times and never had an interview. And they employ new graduates with no office experience over her with 20 years experience. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Perhaps FE needs to expand and become a substitute. I live in a county where employers find it hard to recruit as people typically don't want to move here. So employers work very closely with the one university and the FE college and 6th form colleges. Recently a few skills based 2 year level 5 diplomas have been added to a colleges course list with a January intake and also available on a part time basis. I believe these have been added in response to the skills shortages that need filling in the local area. Another FE college also offered degrees with £6000 fees until very recently.

We kind of have that already, based on geography rather than income/wealth. Scottish kids going to Scottish universities pay less than RUK kids going to Scottish universities, and receive the same thing.

@titchy I have never said vastly reduced. Do not put words in my mouth. I have suggested mergers and some reduction in courses. It’s an obvious way to reduce costs. Rationalise the produce offering and cut overheads. It’s a standard business response to falling sales. Make sure what is offered meets need and is not losing money.

Some students definitely need to do diploma courses, not degrees, and if they are employed and they are part time, yes employers pay. With the vast number of degree holders this model has died out. It needs reviving but not a tax.

Just listening to government debt situation this morning, I cannot see more debt as being acceptable, as in higher loans.

I prefer the model we have now but we need a close look at the vast expenditure at universities that’s not teaching related. They have been brow beaten into expanding and becoming social workers. It’s time to row back from this and accept the money pot is what it is. A university in every town is not sustainable and the sector needs to shrink or re purpose to embrace cheaper courses using established facilities for non grads. Polys were great at this. Such a shame that model was lost.

Ok a consolidated sector then. Also agree about encouraging level 4 and 5 quals, and I’d add that if employers could use the apprenticeship levy to fund part time study, even just L4/5, that would be ideal.

Not sure why you think things were any different when the post-92s were called polytechnics though! They awarded degrees, were funded the same way as universities, and those same institutions still have the employer links they had back in the day - and a lot of what they offered was not vocational at all. In fact they were the same as universities in all but name.

Thank you for clarifying you like the current funding system though, and presumably would support fees increasing if there was some contraction in the sector so the total lent was the same as now?

FE has been underfunded and has a huge part to play in the future. It will still cost though!

My view is that expansion was fuelled jointly by the fee rise plus the removal of the cap in student numbers. Again, this strategy was completely logical! If you were running a university in 2014-2018 expansion was almost mandated. It was certainly seen as a good thing. More education, more choice for students, more local provision, job and growth creation. All of these things were good.

Expert commentators did warn of demographic shifts, of overreliance on international students and of the risks to sustainability as every single university pursued a growth strategy at risk of saturation. VCs have been arguing for many years that HE funding was not fit for purpose. This is not a sudden, unexpected crisis, although COVID was a massive disruptor that society and the sector is still recalibrating after.

My concern about raising the fee to £15k is that it could just delay the inevitable - there are more fundamental changes that need to happen in HE. We need to reimagine HE for the 2030s - technology, AI etc. etc. Anyone saying "this is how it was in the 90s and it worked for me" is simply not relevant to the conversation. There's zero point in corralling 400+ students into a lecture hall to be talked at by a person when that could be delivered more effectively online. But HE has to have plenty of smaller group seminars, tutorials, lab work, challenged based learning etc. etc. to be fit for the jobs people will be doing in 5-25 years time.

@titchy I went to a polytechnic! Part time non degree. I worked. Many students were the same as me. This model has essentially been lost. Lots of parole were not doing degrees and those that were were not doing history, psychology or English. Most degrees were work related and the best lecturers had come out of industry too. They had not come via the teaching route straight from their degree. I had a lot of respect for them.

I am not sure universities have lecture theatres for 400 to meet today’s numbers but on line feels very second best. However small groups might not be cost effective if universities cannot recruit to make economies of scale work.

Also please don’t read this as me not respecting some subjects and lecturers. I do. However a dose of realism will have to be swallowed.

Oxford didn’t expand by the way. It wasn’t vital to expand. Staying exclusive was an option.

Totally agree re loss of part time. An absolute tragedy - a result of the 2012 fee regime. Your poly may not have been typical though. Dh did history at his poly back in the 80s! I would have done sociology at Oxford Poly if I had not got the grades for uni.

@GinForBreakfast I agree with preparing for the future but lots of degrees are miles away from that. The lower tarrif sector needs a “pivot” (I hate that expression) to high quality HE thats not a degree. HE is not the same as FE and never was. Colleges of HE became universities and few of them are great.

Regarding expensive labs and equipment, we used to be fine with colleges of technology and engineering. Now we want every university to do this. Financially it’s impossible. Other countries have universities that are specialist and we think Imperial is a world leader. Why not more like this bit to do so, they lose other courses to the university they have merged with. I know it’s very long term planning but planning a nationwide strategy is important.

I am not sure universities have lecture theatres for 400 to meet today’s numbers

Yes, I'm pretty sure some do.

There is an interesting thread that some of you might be interested in about parents feeling cheated that universities only have two semesters or terms. Here:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/higher_education/5320415-dd-doesnt-have-a-uni-term-3?page=2&reply=143775674

Do these parents never look on university websites?

My uni has maybe 9 or 10 large lecture theatres (200 plus). A few of those might be as big as 400. However if a university is going to run their courses (remember 3 cohorts per course) on a large cohort lecture model they will need significantly more large lecture theatres than that.

@RampantIvy They understand school terms and don’t look at detail. These are possibly first time at uni parents and those encouraged to go by social mobility programmes. I think others know what to expect. However we have all seen complaints about short terms, 6 hours teaching a week, and having to pay for accommodation when it’s not needed. That’s probably the real source of the complaints. Value for money.