Some universities will go bust thread 2

[GinForBreakfast]

Continuing as thread 1 has filled up.

The Police are overwhelmed with MH related call outs. Obviously not all students but the police cannot cope and never have. Nor the nhs. We just expect them to.

@GinForBreakfast

From Education at a Glance Report-OECD library

You can see that the UK spends more per student than most other countries. Clearly, we can cut back like other countries have done.
The degree is becoming worth less due to the number of students going to university and it is becoming very expensive for them at the same time.
As TizerorFizz points out some of the universities could specialise or offer something different/vocational. The government report highlight how we are one of the only countries offering such a narrow type of higher education.

The screenshot of expenditure per tertiary students in OECD countries didn't copy. It can be found at https://internationalcomparisons.org/social/higher-education/

The collapse of mental health services for young people has also put pressure on universities. I remember one call from the local police force warning my university that if students had a mental health crisis at the weekend which warranted police intervention the health trust would simply leave them in police cells until Monday morning because they were short staffed. Thank goodness that doesn't happen anymore.

Although @GinForBreakfast I can remember pre-COVID at my place, when there was a noisy & quite belligerent campaign by students about the lack of wellbeing/mental health services for our undergrads (who are the most entitled I've encountered in 30 years teaching on 3 different continents!) the rather beleaguered Director of Student Services (poor bloke) said that University services were not a substitute for the NHS, and that the NHS should be students' first port of call. Our student wellbeing services are quite big, and within my School, we're now employing a 0.5 FTE post at an academic salary rate simply to monitor and deal with our own students within the School. I'd rather we paid someone to actually be teaching them, but hey ho.

@YellowAsteroid tbh I don't blame students for putting pressure on universities, it's a weaker link than the NHS.

@Runemum again, in haste and looking at that table on a phone I don't think it's telling you what you think it's telling you. The notes below say that it's Government expenditure in tertiary education as % of GDP 2019." UK has a relatively high participation rate in tertiary education (all tertiary education, not just universities) so you would expect it to be higher. Without looking at the methodology I don't know what's included (e.g. research grants) and excluded. Again, internationally research is sometimes done in standalone research institutes.

@YellowAsteroid It is so you are not mentioned by coroners as not doing enough. Vocal parents will cause problems so paying staff becomes vital to do what’s now required. It should clearly be the responsibility of the nhs. Except now it’s not.

Or the responsibility of parents to ensure their DC are ready for university. So many are not.

@YellowAsteroid I agree entirely with that. It’s as if a human right to go. It should not be.

But it can’t be the responsibility of parents when those students are adults, especially since many will be financially self-sufficient.

As much as some parents may advise against certain action, they can’t always - and shouldn’t - be able to stop their adult children from doing what they want.

Bear in mind also that some parents will be part of the cause of their children’s bad mental health.

It's tricky, though @WriterOfWrongs University staff are not in loco parentis, but over the last few years, parents have been blaming university staff for their DCs' deaths, or serious breakdowns. To the extent of trying to get an Act of Parliament to hold universities and university staff as personally liable for their DCs' health.

I doubt very much that those young people were completely mentally healthy before going to university. Most of the time, parents know that their DC are not well enough to cope. But I see more than a few threads in here in this MN forum, where parents outline their DCs' mental ill-health, and then berate universities for not coping with that DC. There's a huge double standard here.

@WriterOfWrongs Many are not adults when they apply. I think waiting a bit is a better plan but dc want to go with friends. MN is choc full of dc who need additional help and I’m often left wondering if these dc can possibly cope. I’m sure some do but the blame lies with the uni if they don’t it seems. I’ve never thought that was fair and now it costs a lot of money.

@GinForBreakfast
If you look at the House of Commons report on Education around the world, we spend the third most on tertiary education of any OECD country and we have the highest tuition fees in the world.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9840/CBP-9840.pdf

At the same time, although we have good outcomes for students (better than the OECD average) we are not the best in terms of earning premium and job prospects compared to other countries e.g. Germany. So although the cost per student is less in some of these other countries, they are achieving better outcomes. They also have a higher student to staff ratio so this is probably why it is cheaper. However, despite the lower student to staff ratio in the UK, students in the UK are not receiving many hours of tuition.

On all tertiary, excluding R&D, we spend 23,840 USD compared to the OECD average of 12693 USC. We are spending double the amount of any EU country. Only the USA and Luxembourg spend more.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/total-expenditure-on-educational-institutions-per-full-time-equivalent-student-2020_48d444d4-en

@Runemum I did look (briefly) at that report but I don't think it says that our universities are more expensive/profligate than others.

We have a higher % of people who go to university. We have higher fees but the cost of much of those ends up back with the tax payer as graduates don't pay off the full amount. Remember that big chunks of student loans are not for university costs but maintenance grants because students usually leave home to study. So that cost reflects high housing costs and the ability of parents to financially support students.

I've worked in HE for 15 years and don't buy into the notion that our universities are inefficient. Having sat in many cost cutting meetings the issues are systemic (e.g. pensions, unions, compliance and regulation) rather than management incompetence. Yes there could be better productivity through, e.g. technology adoption and there are some smaller universities that have higher overheads but have a distinctive offer.

Ignore the point about maintenance, it's been removed from the data for comparison purposes. But bottom of page 23 says UK has amongst the lowest public funding rates of HE in the OECD.

@GinForBreakfast
Unlike other countries we have a one size fits all approach to higher education.
I believe there needs to be a restructuring of higher education.
It needs to become cheaper for students to get a degree or other qualification that allows them to enter the workplace. It is ridiculous that they have so much debt they won't be able to pay it off until they retire.
Almost every student will be paying their debt off as most people will earn over £25,000 by the time they are 40 and they have a 40 year period over which they have to pay off the debt.
Propping up universities at the expense of young people is not acceptable.

@GinForBreakfast
We know that a lot of private funding is paying for higher education in the UK. The issue is that the cost per head (private and public funding) is more than most OECD countries. If universities can't work out why it is so expensive here, we obviously need a restructure of the whole higher education system.

@Runemum you are confusing two points.

1. The burden that individual students should (in your opinion) contribute to the cost of their education and

1. Funding for tertiary institutions as a whole.

On the second point I have tracked down the data and it includes spending on R&D delivered by universities. So you cannot point to that and say "UK universities spend more on educating students."

(There's a whole other thread on TRAC and cost recovery on research activities but that's for the proper nerds.)

Forgot the attachment.

Cost cutting is not always the most creative solution though. It might be more creative to merge. York has 2 unis. So does Lincoln. Even Canterbury has 2. Why? Companies merge. Why not unis? Liverpool had 4 I think. Leeds 5? Surely it’s time for amalgamations? Plus a change of what they all offer.

Please look at the spreadsheet on Education at a glance.
On all tertiary, excluding R&D, we spend 23,840 USD compared to the OECD average of 12693 USC.

There are figures with and without R&D included. I am just quoting the figures without R&D.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/total-expenditure-on-educational-institutions-per-full-time-equivalent-student-2020_48d444d4-en

I am not confusing two issues. The burden on individual students is directly related to universities spending too much.

Many universities today absorbed many smaller institutes in the past (either mergers or takeovers). It's still happening in some places (e.g. Anglia Ruskin, which started life as a small Victorian art-school, is aggressively expanding and has just swallowed up Writtle Agricultural College) and maybe there will be a wave of consolidation?

There are many issues with the OECD figures and no rationale person would choose a course of action based on them alone . They do however provide another starting point perspective for discussion and exploration.

this one such take from WonkHE earlier this year which references the OECD.

https://wonkhe.com/blogs/there-may-be-ways-to-make-uk-higher-education-cheaper-to-run/

Plus this far shorter blog post from a couple of weeks back https://wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/we-spend-a-lot-on-he-or-do-we/

Yeah, I think we are going to have to agree to disagree, @Runemum . I've looked at the methodology in detail and there are a lot of problems with the international comparisons which means you cannot draw the conclusions you are drawing. Here's a link if you want it, from page 58 onwards: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264304444-en.pdf?expires=1727612969&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=98C22A8B9D7E7F04DA73055F180C6BDB

Re universities merging, actually in some circumstances this could be a good idea. There are some entirely artificial constructs that act as a major blocker - most importantly that the higher tariff university would plummet in the league tables. But - all we would have to do would be to adjust the league table metrics for a few years to facilitate.

I’d be more interested in the OECD median than the mean.