Options for changing university choices after Nottingham concerns

[mumtosnchild]

DD has Nottingham as first choice but with all their financial troubles and now a data breach she doesn't want to go there anymore. She is due to be studying Psychology. What are her options at this late stage?

Her insurance choice is Liverpool. The other uni's she had offers from were Southampton and Royal Holloway.

She can look to see what options will be in clearing, which opens on 2 July.

What are her likely grades? I agree btw that Nottingham is struggling with various issues but there are financial issues and strikes at a number of universities tbf.

What would she think of Liverpool? Was she looking for a campus like Nottingham specifically or was that not a big factor?

She needs Nottingham to agree to release her, then Liverpool (or one of the others) to agree to stand by their offer and become her firm. Then she contacts ucas. Who I think do everything else.

https://www.ucas.com/applying/after-you-apply/making-changes-to-your-application-after-you-apply

And don't forget the staff strikes!

Dd has Nottingham as her insurance and is bitterly regretting it, she's just planning to wait it out and decide what to do once results day comes as nothing can really be done on insurance offers now.

Yes that's a good point of course from @JulietteHasAGun - if she definitely doesn't want Nottingham and definitely does want Liverpool, she needs to take that action as otherwise if she makes the grade for N on results day then the L offer disappears.

I was thinking apols that you were asking what other unis could she look at.

Nottingham will be fine. They’ve over spent on property but are asset rich.
The striking is unfortunate but loads of universities will face strike action as they reduce staffing numbers. UCU are very militant as a union.

Whichever uni she picks, there is a significant chance that there will be strikes during her time there (and a smaller but non zero chance that there will be a data breach during her time there)

For example, Liverpool last year (though I think this might have been professional not academic staff)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr795ekknmeo

Will Nottingham be fine from a student pov? I don’t think they’re necessarily going to go bankrupt but academic redundancies will impact on student support and teaching. Quite possibly with optional modules being reduced, potentially courses being merged, etc.

Yes. There are various universities in as bad or a worse state than Nottingham. A very large proportion of the sector has been going through redundancy programmes. Various places have had course issues - Cambridge for example with its vet med course. Durham has financial issues, Sheffield H is looking precarious, Cardiff has enormous problems. The universities will face changes and personally I think some consolidation in the sector would be a good thing. They will not however be permitted to fail.

Staff will be miserable and overstretched, courses will contract and professional services will struggle. This is just the start. I'd not touch it with a barge pole.

This is the case at many universities.

I have no skin in the game. In fact I work for another university. But Nottingham is getting a lot of publicity because its academic staff are fairly militant (they have prior form for starting strike action before other universities) and this started by them kicking off about the closure of the music degrees (which had very few applicants and so could not continue). The noise made about this was disproportionate and raised their profile. The staff wanted this since they wanted the university to back down but it has simply shone a light on other things going on there - they are indeed making lots of redundancies.

It's actually the universities which react to the financial difficulties in good time and make redundancies where possible that will be okay in the end. Those which bury their heads in the sand or cave to pressure from the unions will be the ones that fail.

Nottingham is not particularly well run. They pay a lot of money for things that could be done more cheaply. An example of this is that when making redundancies last year they paid about three times the going rate to have staff settlement agreements signed off (largely by the union's lawyers...).

If you’re going to pull out of that choice of university because of their financial situation then you may as well pull out of them all ( apart from 3)! I work at another RG university and we are also experiencing financial troubles. They rarely affect the students though. The staff will be affected but they pull out all the stops to not let it affect students.

'they have prior form for starting strike action before other universities'

Can you give me one example of this. If you understood how industrial action works you would see how daft this is. When there is national action called, you can't just start before colleagues elsewhere. It's not allowed. Of course, if there is a local issue these are addressed locally. It's true that UCU is active at Nottingham, but what you probably don't realise is that they predicted this crisis years ago when they reported on the problems with the university's financial model (funding expensive capital projects exclusively with surplus).

As a member of staff at UoN, I encourage all students to come. The staff are wonderful and we''ll make it work. But trying to pin this crisis on the unions demonstrates an enormous lack of understanding of what's happening at this uni
.

My work involves working with the unions. I understand them very well particularly UCU. What I meant was they are often leading the call at Nottingham and they are keen to get publicity for local issues (and often succeed since Nottingham city council is labour run and Nottingham as a whole has traditionally been very left wing).

I'm not trying to pin this on UCU at all. I'm saying that the fact that UCU are very vocal at Nottingham means they get a disproportionate amount of press. I don't think any potential student should be avoiding Nottingham because of what is happening. I think students and parents would be surprised at how widespread this is. As a PP said - if you knew the truth of it you would avoid half the universities in the country.

I really appreciate this insight. Much better than the scaremongering some people are posting

DD absolutely loves UoN. Agree lots of universities will face strike action in the coming years. DSS was at Durham a decade ago and they were always refusing to teach or mark.

She, and you, should be aware that whichever of those choices she ends up at, she WILL encounter some sort of industrial action. It’s a sector issue, not a UoN issue.

Not very militant and actually quite shit.

You're clearly not someone who has sat in a room with them arguing for six hours. UCU are far more difficult to deal with than a lot of other unions.

Anyway this talk about UCU is a derail. The point is Nottingham is not the only university facing significant issues and the scramble to try to change them from first choice is short sighted IMO.