"3 prestigious universities about to go bust" - on Radio 5 live this morning..

[devilsadvocate77]

...heard a chap who was contributing as part of Nicky's slot (still on) say that three unis are about to go bust, not to mention the many others who are running at a deficit.

Nicky asked if he would name them but he refused.

Any ideas??

Nursing and teaching filled this gap. They were taught in fe/he colleges until the 80s and the 90s. They are very skilled and should be paid more. Not that I want to return to a point where these were the only options open to bright girls.

It is not just about age though. Aberdeen University, which is a century older than Edinburgh and I think the fourth oldest, does not seem to appear anywhere in the top 50.

@TrumptonsFireEngine Mid to low 50s position for both Endowments & Donations, and Investment Income. For the 22/23 financial data - tracking movement across the past ten years might be interesting before the Strictly results show; then again maybe one too many Proseccos

hence colleges called "Kings" and "Queens".

In defence of the humble apostrophe - King's; Queens' and Queen's.

Though given the focus of the thread none at any danger of going broke.

@boys3 All this means raising sufficient funds from alumni just isn’t possible here. @mathanxiety believes in this model - being American. I’ve consistently said it cannot work. Mainly because we have a different attitude to giving and when most leave uni, they leave it behind. I do wonder if giving is higher from rich international former students? Are there any stats on who gives?

Quite agree @TizerorFizz . The mix of who gives would be interesting.

Don’t the big name Ivy League universities also operate legacy systems where alumni’s children are more likely to gain entry? That sort of thing would encourage support by successful alumni (though it does seem an astonishing and unfair system)

I'm not sure how the colleges themselves apostrophise their names and I couldn't be bothered to look it up. I've been bitten a few times by organisations apostrophising their names incorrectly counter-intuitively so I thought "bollocks to this, I'm just leaving them out".

Goldsmiths is just one example of a university which has stopped bothering with an apostrophe.

‘prestigious’ to most people is Oxbridge/UCL/Imperial/Edinburgh/Durham.
Would be a good idea to cull a lot of the rest.

No LSE @Bewareofthisonetoo?

Ha ha ha. There speaks ignorance. UCL is a money machine.....there is more excellence in the ex polys around it than at its core.

@felissamy I doubt that. UCL is popular with international students. For good reason. They are a world leading uni and ex polys don’t feature. Only in the uk do we not recognise excellence when the rest of the world does. That is not to say the lower tariff unis don’t have their place. They do. They are not UCL though and it’s just not comparing like with like. Most students attending lower tariff unis could not get into UCL.

No St Andrews @Bewareofthisonetoo ?

Americans donating to their universities is more than just culture. The tax system; the legacy system; and many of the annual rankings taking into account the percentage of alumni donating each year tends to prop up donations.

I’m sure a lit if alumni would chuck their alma maters £50 each year if it helped keep the institution on their cv looking prestigious.

That’s an interesting final point.

Taking at random one of the probably better known unis - Bristol - they publish listings of all their alumni from each decade who donated in the 2023/24.

4205 in total, with the earliest graduating in 1943.

Donating a rounded £24m

That’s an average of about £5700 each, although I’d take a wild guess and suggest the median figure was a lot lower.

whilst there is no full breakdown Bristol do name all those who donated between

• £1000 and £24,999 - about £130 donors;

• £25,000 to £99,999 - nearer 200 donors;

• £100,000 to £499,000 about 150 donors;

• £500,000 to £999,999 - 20 donors;

• £1m to 5m - 33 donors;

• and over £5m - 6 donors.

Many of these, especially once into six figures are of course foundations and corporate donors. But it gives a bit of a sense of scale.

The university has obviously expanded over the years, so quite how many living alumni it has I don’t know. Its current student body overall is near 30,000. Alumni since 2021 who have donated number 13 in total. Or perhaps less than 1 for every 1000 or so who have graduated.

Maybe 200 who graduated between 2011 and 2020 made a donation. Again a minuscule percentage.

4205 as the total looks to be a quite small overall percentage, suggesting there are a lot of £50s, (or more, we’re talking Bristol grads here! 😀) up for grabs.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/alumni/causes/our-supporters/?_gl=1xetnaj_gaMzQ2OTU4MzY1LjE2Njk3MzAyODU._ga_6R8SPL3HLT*MTY5NDA3MzI1Ny40NTQuMS4xNjk0MDc0MzI1LjYwLjAuMA..

Agreed. We've lost a lot by the last government taking away funding for FE colleges and night classes seem to be non existent in many towns.

It is often people who have benefitted from the system themselves - fee-free university, who wants to shut down opportunities for the current generation. Do they really think we're going to keep up with global competitors if we're a country full of domestic plumbers and electricians?

Companies are already employing masses of skilled people from abroad to fill jobs. The government/country needs to be putting more money into tertiary skills and education whatever the qualification is called that people come out with. And for all ages. The last government pulled funding from universities and then allowed universities to expand to plug gaps in funding. It was badly thought out, particularly with a lack of investment in industries which could have yielded more graduate jobs.

@fortyfifty

Agreed. We've lost a lot by the last government taking away funding for FE colleges and night classes seem to be non existent in many towns

Certainly not just "the last government". It started in the 90s, and continued with Brown/Blair in the noughties. There was basically no "adult" education by the time the "last government" took over in 2010. It had mostly gone by then. The Tories in the 90s ditched Polys. Blair/Brown in the noughties concentrated on 16-21 year olds and withdrew college funding for adult education so they shifted focus to 16-18 year olds. We've had probably 30 years of ongoing dismantling of adult education and evening classes.

I used to teach accounting (AAT) at our local college of FE via evening classes aimed at adults either self funding to develop themselves or paid for by local employers for their trainees. The college scrapped the entire "business and management" department in around 1999/2000, so the AAT courses were scrapped. A few teaching staff were retained to do low level business and book-keeping courses for 16-18 year olds, but the college stopped doing professional level courses entirely.

taxguru.

Fair enough. Our local college lost those type of courses in the last decade.

@taxguru Yes. I recognise that scenario too. We have had a partnership here between the FE college and a low tariff uni 10 miles away but mostly for NHS related courses. It’s a poor offering for many young people. The FE college was a vibrant centre of learning for 16 year olds and adults alike. Many started there doing day release and went on to HE.

I don’t think the expansion of the uni sector from 22 unis in 1950 to around 150 now has disadvantaged many. What we never factor in is the cost of this. The state invested heavily in HE but it’s been at the cost of failing to support non uni education. By offering loans, the uni student has access to state money. As far as I’m aware, the FE student does not.

I would still advocate that many unis could run the HND type of course and be appealing to a wider group of learners. Prep for this should be offered by FE and a high quality range of other learning opportunities that support work. Pushing too many into degrees divorces too many students from employers. I would prefer a much greater link beteeen the two at 18. Not 21 when a grad is trying to get a job they could have done at 18 and don’t need a degree for.

The level of giving at US universities is mind boggling.

2 examples - my son had a year abroad in a small liberal arts college in California called pitzer. It is one of 5 linked colleges next to each other and he could take classes across them. One of those colleges, Claremont McKenna, started a fundraising in 2015. In 8 years it raised £1bn. It takes about 1000 undergraduates a year. One tiny college.

2nd example is that I have a friend who went to Dartmouth (small Ivy League in New Hampshire). She is now 56 and highly successful - main board director of some of the world’s biggest companies. She told me that she had given to Dartmouth every single year since she had graduated, and so had almost everyone she knows. Its endowments is £8bn. It only has about 5k undergrads in total.

All of those gifts can be set against US federal taxes, and lots of US employers also match charitable donations.

The REAL issue is the male dominance, poor male behaviour, poor male attitudes in "male" trades towards women, etc. Get over that and women can do exactly the same as men.

^ This. And reading threads on MN about the arrogance and incompetence of a lot of tradesmen it seems to carry on into their working lives. It's such a shame that girls are being put off these careers, how are the college teachers allowing the awful behaviour?

A nearby smallish 6th form college has A level and vocational students all in the same building. A fair few of DD's friends have avoided going there for A levels because they know that they'll still come across the dickheads that disrupted their lessons in school.

M@Sweetpeasaremadeforbees Do the women want to do exactly as the men though? A few might but it’s now many years since women got more choice regarding careers and they still aren’t that interested. It’s not fair to blame this entirely on men. There are many engineering degrees dominated by men and I bet CS is too. Thats little to do with awful men on those courses.

Nah, it's definitely the male shittiness putting girls off. About 15 years ago I took an introductory engineering class for women only, learning machining. The class was full and the concurrent welding and electrical classes were not only full, they had a waiting list two months before they started, which is a shame because I would have liked to have learned welding.

Women are leaving the tech industry all the time because of misogyny at work. Shanley Kane writes all about this.

I’m not sure girls are queuing up for welding courses? Many engjneers here are degree level. I think you are talking about a machine operative course. Not the same thing. Shop floor vs academic.