Exeter cuts

[Itchylegs]

Anyone panicking about large cuts to Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Exeter. Seems like the crisis in HE is getting bigger and bigger. It feels like such a crummy time to go to university.

The type of student often found at London universities who is fluent in 2 or 3 languages beyond English and studied another more marketable discipline than MFL is obviously going to be a much stronger candidate on the labour market, all other things being equal.

That type of student is rare in much of the country and probably has very little effect on overall numbers taking MFL.

Teaching staff for physics aren’t in great supply either! So that’s no argument

Your argument was that state schools didn’t bother to teach MFL or Classics because they were difficult. If you didn’t mean more difficult than other subjects, I’m not sure what you did mean.

Indeed.

The simple simple fact is that the home undergraduate tuition fee does not cover the cost of an undergraduate in any discipline. As it is, arts & humanities students' fees subsidise a lot of STEM undergrads such as medicine & engineering students. International student fees subsidise all Home students' fees. And academic staff unpaid overtime - the 50 to 60 hour weeks which are normal in the sector - subsidise the whole shebang.

It's not about "too many" students - we still have comparatively low rates of 18-24 year olds in further & higher education in comparison to similar countries. It's about the cap on student fees and lack of any constructive government policy, other than malicious neglect.

Tell me you nothing about UK universities without actually telling me ...

And that research feeds into all areas of public and private life in this country, in so many ways.

@Wadsworthy You are so clever! Did you think of that all on your own? I’ll say this - every single organisation can change or be forced to change. The status quo doesn’t have to stay. I’d keep watching and see what happens because there’s redundancies coming everywhere. It’s the students who lose the most of course.

@Wadsworthyexactly, the country needs the research but no buggar wants to fund it 🫠

@RandomMess It needs some research but some is dispensable and more about personal enjoyment.

Exeter's languages department is actually doing very well, so it's disheartening that it's one of the ones where the cuts are likely to fall. The only silver lining is that the university it committed to preserving all languages and keeping all departments - so students will still be able to follow Chinese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Ironically it was Exeter who secured the Languages for All programme for the southwest, which is designed to maximise 'A' level take-up in local schools and provide a channel to languages at university. This was launched at the end of 2025.

I wouldn't be as confident as all that about the student experience Exeter for MFL. A family friend is very senior in MFL at Exeter and undergraduates are poorly catered to: it's been a case of bums on seats for a very long time.

I have very good reason to be confident. The MFL staff in Exeter work really hard in terms of student experience, which is why the NSS results are strong every year, including this year.

I think the MFLs for all is great but often dilutes courses. Dc just dip into the MFL and don’t do an in depth study of literature or go abroad. They dip a toe in for business use and it’s a short course. Numbers of well qualified MFL students will matter and these are in short supply.

I believe there are strong arguments for consolidation of MFLs in a few universities where there will be sufficient numbers to make departments attractive and financially viable. Quality MFL teaching is dependent on critical mass in a way that is not true for other subjects because if you do not engage with the languages you are learning beyond the university curriculum you won't learn enough. You need to be watching films and discussing them with others, reading newspapers and discussing current affairs etc and of course travelling during holidays to places where you can practice the language immersively.

@Ceramiq DD didn’t do much of that but I think fewer first class departments is better and we are probably heading towards that. However the CCC student will then have a struggle to get in anywhere.

Such a silly take. What are first class depts? Only makes sense in relation to second class? Why would you want fewer? I don't understand.

@Itchylegs Ok. I’ll simplify it for you. Centres of excellence with larger numbers to get a critical mass. @Ceramiq explained it better than me. It’s important not to dilute MFLs as a degree and many universities are well on the way to doing that. I don’t agree with it. I’d prefer high class opportunities for MFL students, not basic ones where the degrees are not in greater depth. Does that help?

Not really. I did MFL. Pure literature. Was great and I have a brilliant career. I don't know what determines first class depts. Best researchers by REF, best NSS, best language labs...so many criteria and often mutually contradictory. As an academic centres of excellence means nothing to me and limiting student opportunities helps no one.

Actually, it is very well documented that UK MFL degrees lead to much lower than average graduate outcomes and academics in universities have been worried for a long time that MFL degrees develop intellectual faculties less well than do other humanities disciplines, all other things being equal, while also costing more to teach. It is not desirable to get young people into debt for a degree with little payback, be it financial or intellectual. The only way to remedy this is to make MFL degrees more rigorous; consolidation and high standards are the only possible remedy.

@Ceramiq That’s not true about graduate outcomes. MFLs are nowhere near the bottom in the ifs studies on graduate earnings and outcomes. They are like a lot of humanities subjects, it’s not immediately obvious where your career should be. What do you want to do with it? I think this divides the successful people and the others. History, politics, English have exactly the same issues with English grads being the worst off according to the ifs. However individuals are better off if they don’t see MFLs as their career and let them define job applications. My DD, like a number of humanities grads, converted to law. I think far too many students don’t think about a career and work early enough and then don’t apply themselves to getting a decent cv. However MFL degrees are absolutely not the worst return - that’s firmly in arts subjects!

I'm afraid it is true about MFL and I have very reliable sources in MFL academia who have told me about the real worries in humanities departments about academic standards of MFL graduates. It's intuitively quite easy to understand: the great driver of intellectual development in the university context is reading a lot of hard texts and writing complex essays. Both those things happen less in MFL degrees where a large part of the time is devoted to language acquisition and to reading in a second language which is intellectually less developmentally powerful.

As for graduate outcomes in terms of salary - there is ample data out there.

Hi, OP -

I am always sad to see Schools and Departments close if only for the human cost, to staff and existing and potential students, It chips away at the ideal of the university.

I can’t assess the claims @Ceramiq and @MeetMeOnTheCorner are making about employability for MFL graduates so I won’t go there. I do agree MFL is excellent training for a wide variety of graduate jobs requiring analytical and communications skills.

However as an academic are you not struck by the precarious nature of the sector as compared to say, 12-15 years ago? Everyone I know is beyond exhausted and cracks are showing everywhere, with steps being taken that would have been beyond the imagination 10 years ago.

In this reality, I think consolidating enrolments in the degree programmes with a history of lower enrolments sadly makes sense. (Of course geography should be a key consideration).

What are the realistic alternatives?

Fashions are fickle though. And no one benefits from overworked lecturers. Fund the sodding thing properly.

Would the lecturers in consolidated courses be overworked? Isn’t the relative paucity of work for lecturers in underenrolled programmes now one of the problems? The courses should be staffed properly, with the option of employment for staff in discontinued programmes.

GCSE/A level enrolments in MFL and Brexit suggest it may be quite a while before interest in MFL grows. IME unis are not slow to create new programmes when the market is there, though I suppose there is currently a risk from the perception that certain degrees are not pragmatic.

Of course I agree that the best answer is to properly fund the universities but again the question is, how? (I support the idea of a tax on graduates and those who have completed other training programmes after free tuition, reinvested in HE and other training. But it is controversial and open to abuse. I worry about the latter for the short term, though long term I think quality would win out.. But it is not politically palatable.)

This. Trends in MFL degree enrollment are not going to improve in the foreseeable future. It is not a funding issue but a student scarcity issue that is downstream of Tony Blair's decision to make GCSE MFL optional, issues with A-level standards, Brexit, MFL degree outcomes. Fewer larger MFL centres of excellence would make sense.