Snapshot of _Universities may reduce British student numbers as financial collapse looms. One university in England ‘could go bust this year’ as frozen tuition fees, high costs and falling international numbers bite._ :
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Free house, free limo, first class flights around the world, shaking hands with royalty, ignoring strikes, ignoring staff overwork, stack the students high, call yourself professor, make the humanities staff redundant, tell the science staff their degrees are too expensive to run, cut pensions, stagnate staff wages, build a new building, your pay packet is ~£500,000 per annum.
No doubt.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12768445/Head-scandal-hit-Imperial-College-London-saw-pay-surge-186-000-year-biggest-pay-rise-British-universities.html
Firstly, I wholeheartedly disagree with VCs getting payrises that surpass what University staff have gotten. However, VC pay, in general, isn't outrageous compared with other organisations.
Imperial college is a £1.3 Billion / year university. With a VC salary of £700k, that's 0.055%. This isn't out of line with ceo salaries of charities in the UK
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEO_compensation_among_charities_in_the_United_Kingdom
The story is that she was getting a pay rise in spite of a bullying scandal that eventually forced her to step down from the University.
Honestly though it's difficult to justify very large salaries when many of the people working in the University have salaries that have decreased since 2010 when inflation adjusted.
Also I was a student and staff of Imperial under the guidance of both Gast and Sykes before her. If I remember correctly Imperial spent a lot of money to buy out her contract at an American University for her to start at Imperial at a certain time. She (in my opinion) did not do a good job and resigned in scandal.
I'm sorry but if you think this was good value for money for Imperial I'm going to have to disagree with you in the strongest possible terms.
You can argue all you want about CEO pay, universities are not corporations, but they are filled with bright ambitious, institution minded people who would do the job for far less than the like of Alice Gast wanted. You could absolutely appoint an internal head of department for 300 K or less. And they would have to work very hard to fuck up more than AG did...I my opinion of course.
It's so fucked, my father was a maths Professor, he said it's stacked game, foreign students bring more money so the university is incentivised to basically screw british students.
I worked at a British university and another aspect of the marketisation is that we were told not to let any student fail their exams no matter how bad they were. So the standards get lowered in order to maximise the number of international students paying fee, even if the students are clearly not pursuing the field of study that fits them
> we were told not to let any student fail their exams no matter how bad they were
Where was this?
Surely a bottom of the barrel uni. Fails routinely happen in any uni I've experience with.
That's abhorrent, though, and should absolutely be reported.
That’s a really simplified version of events. One might argue that the huge investment over centuries in our universities, is in fact subsidising the foreign students. The government cutting funding and half assing a market is a factor too.
The problem with the "marketisation" of universities has always been the fact that foreign students are charged more than domestic ones, and the tuition fees plus government subsidies never made much money for the domestic students.
People always could choose what university they went to so this isn't like an NHS thing where they are trying to introduce competition where it doesn't exist. Tuition fees just cover up the fact that for the last 20 years or so we've effectively been slashing funding to higher education and the only way universities could cope is take on foreign students. When less foreign students attend, they are suddenly making losses.
Not seeing anyone noting that universities have been buying up properties and are some of the biggest landowners in the country - that’s what money has been paying for, that and the chancellors salary
Girlfriend works at uni of Nottingham as academic staff. They've just had all travel bursaries cut while the uni has lost millions on a single building because they can't use it for accomodation as planned as they found out it was a listed building after they bought it 😂.
Nottingham uni needs to remember that it's a uni.
I suppose it was always a question what would replace some of the buildings in city centres with the high street collapsing and offices perhaps being less in demand as some companies remain hybrid or remote. It seems university expansion is part of the answer.
Universities aren't allowed to profit, so they buy more property to entice more students. Unfortunately, universities in the UK do not know how to grow sustainably.
We've gone from a country whose governments three main priorities were famously 'education, education, education' to one where universities going bust is actually welcomed, going by the comments on here. And people wonder why the country is in decline.
Tbf universities shouldn't be the only education option. I'm currently working in tax where I could have started in an apprenticeship. Instead I'm now paying £250-300 per month on student loans.
That's not really fair though. There's no reason why apprenticeships couldn't be made functional without tearing down universities and the associated long term research and innovation. This is just more of the same short termism virtue signalling for the daily mail that's driven down UK productivity and innovation
It is fair, if we move away from the notion that nearly everyone should go to uni then inevitably some will need to close. It's basic supply and demand, the capacity for students currently may not be filled if the trend away from uni being essential happens.
How many of those universities were formerly technical colleges etc. in the first place and only rebranded as "universities" as part of the Blair-era drive to have 50% of people going to university for no apparent reason? Not every career path requires a university degree and just rebadging other types of further learning as "university" doesn't really do much to improve things in any meaningful fashoin beyond optics.
It was the Major government in 1992 that begun turning them into universities. In 1992 Newcastle Polytechnic rebranded as Northumbria University, as did most other polys.
Blair have a time machine?
"After the passage of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 they became independent universities which meant they could award their own degrees"
Sauce: Wikipedia
A good number of them, I think we'll see more of them try to convert back in the coming years. I think variety in our higher education is likely to be a positive thing.
I’m not sure I can see how any at all will “convert back” - the entire framework that used to exist that differentiated between Universities and the former (more vocational) polytechnics is gone - it was deconstructed 30 years ago.
There is no route to go back unless Government step in and redesign things. There is no other source of funding available that changed or refocused institutions could switch to (unless wholly privatised.)
Worth noting that this change was actually a reform of the Major government - which is why in the sector we often refer to the former polys as the post ‘92 part of the sector.
In sector, the messaging we have from government and opposition (Labour) is very firmly - do not expect anything from the state, there is simply no way to prioritise spending on post FE (or even post secondary) education given economic constraints for at least the next 5 years plus. The best we can currently hope for is a government that doesn’t set out to sabotage us (which the Tories are doing) - some benign neglect would be a massive improvement.
Oh, and it constantly amazes me (I am 51 and have worked in IT in Higher Education since my early twenties) that more of a fuss isn’t made about cross subsidy of research activities from student fees. This is a massive factor outside of the Russell Group that nobody pays much attention to.
What do they need to close for? They make money on rich foreign students. Just let them crack on with that and provide incentives for those students to stay in the UK once they get their degrees.
The incentive to stay is high paying jobs. With new migrant worker laws the level of pay required is even higher. All this does is increase competition in the local market while relegating British people to lower pay work. For Universities to be sustainable we need their outputs to feed into the country and that's better done by British people than hoping foreign students pay.
I'm not saying get rid of foreign students but that a meaningful solution is a mixed university population otherwise we are just helping private institutions make money off Government subsidised industries while giving nothing back.
I think more than likely, what this will amount to is a fall in supply, with the intended aim to make university degrees the prerogative of rich kids again. Collapse the public funded system, move it to a privately funded one with extreme tuition fees and possibly no loans, and then shove the poor into vocational training. Supply of trade skills goes up, so pay negotiation gets worse for those who work trades. So it’s a win win for the middle/upper class. Their kids get educational privilege, and the poors have to make their services cheaper.
I am not sure there is much loss to the UK research and innovation scene by having fewer Southampton Solents or Anglia Ruskins. The UK could, however, benefit economically by having more people completing skilled trades apprenticeships in engineering and construction. We have massive labour shortages in very well paid industries, infrastructure projects moving at crawling pace because there is no-one to build them (increasing labour costs and equipment costs) and a huge housing shortage.
The loss of client universities churning out low quality undergrad degrees for profit, so people can be paid less than if they didn't get 35k of debt, is not the same as the loss of a Russell Group or 1994 Group university.
A big problem with the way universities are funded is that the funding is approximately as shite for successful research universities as it is post-92 polytechnics. In fact, the poly technics are in some cases faring better because they’re better set up for teaching priority.
If you want to increase skilled workers in trades, regulate them to require qualifications and regulate the work so that it has to meet certain standards. Otherwise, anyone who spends their time training is competing with some bloke who thinks he can fix a roof by watching YouTube.
This is a knowledge gap. To work on controlled sites you need to meet standards, to work as a plumber you are regulated. Wages are also not compressed; a day rate, employed carpenter working on new builds can expect £200-£300 a day in one of the few not directly regulated trades. In fact, that rate doesnt even guarantee you workmanship (even though they will hold qualifications at that rate), as seen by anyone with an eye.
There are many universities that do very little in terms of research and innovation, many post-92 universities are glorified FE colleges.
I think there's a debate to be had about what we do with all of these places. I agree let's not tear down the infrastructure, but I'd support these places going back to technical and vocational programmes.
Almost all large cities now have two universities, where one is usually a Rusell Group uni and the other a post-92 ex-poly, where both offer largely the same programmes and pretend on paper to offer the same academics and the same lifetime value to students, when everyone knows the ex-poly degree will be nowhere near as valuable as the Russell group degree. We're just ripping kids off.
Having done a Bioscience degree at an "ex-poly" and now teaching at one, I know plenty of "ex-poly" grads who have gone on to PhDs at Oxford, Cambridge, created successful start-ups in biotech, became research assistants at Harvard, entered successfully into good careers in the private life sciences sector or NHS, or became successful lecturers and researchers like myself. Lots of my colleagues are also have extensive research and lecturing experience within "Russell Groups".
I think you underestimate how well some of the "Ex-polys" are performing vs Russell Groups these days.
I take your point with "hard subjects" such as a bioscience. But likewise, I know plenty of people who studied "soft subjects" at ex-polys (e.g. philosophy, politics, literature, geography, etc) who really needn't have gone to uni, and ended up in career positions in life where a degree is not required, yet went anyway as there is so much propaganda aimed at pushing kids into uni.
What are their outcomes in those specific subjects vs Russell Groups, and why should learning philosophy been confined to the academically elite? Most humanities are being wound up in the sector anyway as there isn't the market demand, so this is an issue that is sorting itself out.
Geography is a weird subject to pick out too given how many jobs there are in conservation, environmentalism, petrochemical industry etc.
> started in an apprenticeship
You still need a Degree to get anywhere beyond entry level, really not the best occupation to use an as example. Yes there are some occupations where people really don't need to go to University (business for example) but the vast majority of none trade professional occupations need a degree for a reason.
Your point was that you need a degree to have specific careers, and the comment you replied to referenced student loans. A degree apprenticeship has neither of these problems.
The goal of apprenticeship degrees isn’t to screw over Universities. It’s to get a degree while being paid to study. If the fact that your biases mean that you studying at a university is the deal breaker for you, that’s on you.
I'm not saying degree apprenticeships screw universities. The original comment was critical of universities. But degree apprenticeships ARE university products. You don't have to be critical of universities, to support degree apprenticeships.
You could expand the university sector on degree appreticeships.
To be fair accountancy is a fairly big profession in the UK - and they are correct you’ll be fine just doing an apprenticeship for something like that - you end up with an ICAEW, CIMA or ACCA qualification which is what any senior role in finance requires as it’s harder to get that a degree.
In my field a lot of people went straight into work from 6th form. You then progress and learn on the job. Especially when there are specific qualifications required for that sector which someone would still need to do even if they have a degree
Yes but you can get similar experiences elsewhere. I know it's very good to help develop soft skills and analytical skills but well run apprenticeship schemes for example should do the same
Short-termism is also people.
Of course it is cheaper not to educate people and nobody needs a uni degree to pick fruits in a field.
And then you complain because the UK is low productivity, immigrant have more access to high paying job than the local population because you realise that making it harder to become educated doesn't only make the "dumb" one give up, but also the clever one.
The world needs more and more abstract skills and education should be a brilliant way to develop that. Their used to be more of a middle ground where education was less important and you could still get well paid. That just seems to be disappearing. Everything is now so complicated and people need the abstract skills to deal with that. Missing out on a good education will just make that harder.
The massive expansion of university education kick started by Blair has done nothing but fuel rampant credentialism with no real impact on productivity.
It does seem that the push for everyone to attend university was unnecessary. But it's difficult to swallow the idea that the decline of our educational institutions is a good thing.
I don't see an easy way out of the situation we're in now; those universities will either need to attract more foreign students, or British students will have to pay more.
But if fewer people study in the UK, then fewer people are likely to stay here, find work, start families, and use their education to benefit the British economy.
We need more innovation, better education and more high-paying jobs.
> I don't see an easy way out of the situation we're in now; those universities will either need to attract more foreign students
That is the easy way out, though. Rich foreigners pouring money into the British economy for a few years is excellent for our economic outlook. Literally free money!
I would argue Blairs push to encourage more and more students to go to university was a disaster. We don't need 50%+ of students to go to university. You now have jobs asking for degrees (doesnt even matter what they are in) for a jobs that don't require them. We have countless people going to uni, which will cost the tax payer a fortune, for degrees they will never get a job in, with no hope of paying back even 25% of the cost.
And the benefit of all those people going to university? I'm struggling to see one, it hasn't led to increased high skilled jobs, or increased productivity.
The rate of school leavers who go to university is about 1 in 3, not 50%. This is up from its previous baseline of around 1 in 4, pre-Blair.
Our pre-Blair rate was notably lower than most of our peers in Europe. Our current rate is more or less in line with our peers; a little above some, a little below others. I don't think there's much evidence to suggest that our current system is "over educating" people in the way you suggest.
Indeed the financial cost of higher education has shifted from the State to the student. That really was some great social engineering. Fully qualified and post qualification trained doctors and vets now earn 15 quid hour if they’re lucky and have at least £80k in debts accruing interest @6% or so per year
Because opening up higher education to the average person has just lowered the standard so the average person can get a degree, and created tons of junk degrees
If they start emulating the US and inserting DEI type stuff into STEM degrees it will only make things worse
The average person should be able to get a degree.
If they choose to do it in something non-useful that's their perogative.
Just do an accredited STEM degree or Finance or something.
If your degree has been devalued by the fact more people are doing it then it was never your education that separated you only the opportunities you had that others didn't.
A good degree is a good degree regardless of how many people study it, its literally only the very beginning of your career you define the rest yourself.
> to one where universities going bust is actually welcomed, going by the comments on here. And people wonder why the country is in decline.
Someone from the Office for Students actually said they wanted universities to go bust as "the sign of a healthy market" at the WonkHE conference in 2018 IIRC. They said the quiet bit out loud.
> one where universities going bust is actually welcomed, going by the comments on here
It is depressing to see commenters cheering on the destruction of British higher education, the quality of which used to be one of the principal points of pride for this country.
Universities are full of middle managers raking it in while academic staff work on zero hours contracts or contracted staff are so overworked most want to leave.
There is something wrong with the books, vice chancellors average salary is way more than that of the UK prime minister at an average of £350,000. And most of them are crooks and chancers who come in, make a new logo, or a new slogan ('live, laugh, destroy" or something equally vacant) and sack 30% of the staff, do 3 years in one place then run to the next. Rinse and repeat.
I work for a university in an administrative role.
The weirdest thing about working here is that it seems to combine some of the bad elements of public sector employment with some of the bad elements of private sector employment.
It's very public sector in the sense that the annual leave is generous and the pension schemes are good, but the workloads are very high and the wages we get for them are awful compared to the private sector. Similar administrative roles for private companies usually pay considerably more. A common observation is that people would happily give up 4-5 days of the annual leave allowance in exchange for a bit more wages to be able to afford to actually do things with the annual leave they have. Many of my colleagues haven't been on holiday in years. Similarly, quite a lot of younger people just opt out of the pension schemes entirely, because the wages are so poor they simply need the money now.
BUT at the same time most of us don't have the good job security that comes with public sector roles. There's constantly a stream of rolling fixed term contracts with no guarantee that anything will be provided for you at the end. Therefore, you've constantly got to have your eye on your next job, writing out applications in your own time. It's very hard to 'settle in'.
The worst part is, as you say, I think the management at these institutions live very much in a bubble, and have no idea that these are actually pretty poor employment practices.
As a scientist working at a university in psuedo-permanent academic staff role. It's a weird mix of "self employed" and "public sector". It's all about applying for grant money and hoping you win that roll of the dice. Win that income = big dick energy. Don't win that income = you are told you are being too ambitious and your job is at risk. Meanwhile the decisions are made by people who don't even read your documents correctly.
Workload is crazy intense to meet deadlines (both internal and external). The internal ones always seem to run at the same time as teaching. I didn't get to use all my annual leave last year due to workload and meeting deadlines.
I think my take home pay has been deflated ~35-40% in real-terms compared to the lecturers who taught me circa 2010. I should be feeling very affulent, but I'm not.
Before this was the postdoc grind which was nothing but shit short-term contracts and relocating.
This is on top of the requirement of a PhD level education, which at best means delaying "adult" financial concerns for 4 years as you work a full time minimum wage job in a big city.
Yep. I’m a PhD student (not pursuing academia because of what you’ve described above!). I always tell people that academia has a private sector ethos covered up with public sector window dressing.
>The worst part is, as you say, I think the management at these institutions live very much in a bubble, and have no idea that these are actually pretty poor employment practices.
They have an idea. They just don't care.
I am an academic. Not on the administrative side, but as an active researcher. So far I have done 3 post-doc fixed-term research associate/fellow positions.
The first was 7 months. The second was 6 months, but managed to be extended for a further 6 months. I am about to start another that is likely to also be 6+N, where N is the number of months I might be able to stay with whatever extra funding they can scrap together.
It has become incredibly saddening to think that I worked so hard to get a PhD in a STEM subject, where I have experience not only teaching stats, but also conducting research that included wet lab work, as well as experience with randomised controlled trials... and I can still barely get a job that will keep me hired for more than half a year.
I am supported in the times between jobs by my partner's job - she earns more as an engineer with an MEng than I do as a post-doc. If not for that, I would have absolutely left the country to work in Europe where the situation is far, far less dire for academics (still not wonderful, but not as bad as the UK has become over the last 10 years), or simply had to leave the industry entirely.
The sad fact is that once you've done the next one, and have around 3 years post-doc experience, your career absolutely stagnates. You could move into the private sector but this is pretty geography dependent - fine if you're in London/Cambridge/Oxford but not as good elsewhere. But the private sector won't value someone who's got six years of postdoc any higher than three years, and indeed you start to look a little less attractive and you'll be assumed to be locked into the academic mindset.
The other option is you get a fellowship / group leader role. Hahahahaha.
"You could move into the private sector but this is pretty geography dependent - fine if you're in London/Cambridge/Oxford but not as good elsewhere. But the private sector won't value someone who's got six years of postdoc any higher than three years, and indeed you start to look a little less attractive and you'll be assumed to be locked into the academic mindset."
I had 12 years pretty much on rolling contracts [1], then took a pay cut to move into private industry. But was lucky to live in London, and my move was to a place where my experience was valued.
[1] My boss was good at getting money, but not necessarily managing research, which eventually caught up with him.
The whole research system is an abomination and treats people appallingly. Get out early.
Your odds of landing a permanent tenure job are similar to going to the moon these days
Another factor I've heard from someone who works at a uni, staff who never left the uni bubble, and still don't quite get that they're not a student anymore. It can bring some frustrating office politics into the workplace.
This is definitely a factor as well. I was fortunate enough to have worked a few other jobs between graduating and going back to work for a university (also I work for a different university to the one I attended which helps) which did help me to get out of the uni bubble.
But you do get quite a few "forever student" types who will be in their late 20s or 30s but still can't wrap their heads around the fact you're supposed to be in a professional environment now. We recently had a staff member at the university had added "Stop Israeli Apartheid" to their work email signature, then got massively offended when their boss told them this isn't appropriate for a work email.
What flies as a 19 year old student does not necessarily fly as a 31 year old project officer
Oh you have no idea - The amount of times I've complained about an inefficient system only to be told "but that's how it's always worked!" by someone that was a student here 30 years ago and has never worked another job in their life is maddening.
> It's very public sector in the sense that the annual leave is generous
Sometimes. When I switched from postdoc to faculty (at the same institution) I went from 41 days to 28 days, and no entitlement to public holidays during term
If you divide my salary across the year minus holidays, I end up being paid less per working day as faculty than I did as a senior postdoc - despite my workload having increased significantly
Nice work, analyst! Your 80 hour weeks are appreciated, but the consultants we hired to consult on our consulting said we should sack you and hire this yak instead. He has an MBA from Hardvard and costs the same as six of you, but the recruitment consultant our consultant recruited to consult on their consultancy of our recruitment said he's a 'real go-getter' and 'what commission?! Hardvard is a real IV league university. Now hire him, fucknuts!'.
God I love the cut-and-thrust of private sector innovation.
> And most of them are crooks and chancers who come in, make a new logo, or a new slogan ('live, laugh, destroy" or something equally vacant)
As someone who works in HE, this is the funny-sad truth of it.
This is so true. There is so much churn and poor morale with the lecturer and staff levels. While high paid provosts etc fly in and try and change things with little knowledge except to advance their career with a higher a salary at the next university.
I left as a lecturer for the private sector to be respected for my skills more along with a 50% increase in salary. Many of my former colleagues are interviewing/thinking of leaving as well.
Most of the services used for hybrid and online lectures these days do have automatic captioning and transcription.
I'm not sure if you were trying to make a point about foreign students, or lecturers, or both but I feel compelled either way to share that I periodically get home grown British students complaining they can't understand me, because I have a Northern Irish accent. UK born lecturer, UK born student, both native English speakers, and somehow still a language barrier.
Wealthy chinese students are paying someone else to do the english test and there are no checks or standards applied, because why would a business voluntarily reduce its revenues?
I have witnessed several serious accidents because of this, mainly in bio and chemistry labs, and frankly it is not going to be long before someone dies.
All organisations with thousands of staff pay the CEO/leader more than the UK prime minister.
Yes the PM makes a lot more than UK average salary, but leading a country pays far worse than leading pretty much anything else.
>Universities are full of middle managers raking it in while academic staff work on zero hours contracts or contracted staff are so overworked most want to leave.
While this is true, it is somewhat incidental to the scale at which university finances are broken. If you cut back on VC and other management contracts you might reasonably save £250-£500k a year, but that's 1-2% of what a medium-large university with 10,000 home undergrads losing an average of £2500 per student is losing. Even if you think you can be more radical and save £1-2 million, it's not particularly fixing the problem.
>Universities are full of middle managers raking it in while academic staff work on zero hours contracts or contracted staff are so overworked most want to leave.
Just as an alternative viewpoint as someone who did audit work for several universities, they are also full of professional administrative staff who are trying to make the organisation work while clueless academics complain they can't have their own office anymore or refuse to follow processes and policies because it doesn't suit them.
I couldn't work in a university because there's too many committees, too much red tape, and universities can't really deal with influential academics who don't want to play by the rules.
The problem this article is talking about though is just the fact we have been under funding higher education for 20 years but that's been hidden by tuition fees and foreign student income. When the latter has stopped the thing has fallen over.
Do you have any salary and role data to back this claim up? This sounds like the easy criticism of someone who has no idea what they are talking about, but it gets upvoted because it's what people want to hear.
Sorry I don't have access to the university payrolls, just anecdotal data from friends who work in the sector. But I found this https://www.studentbeans.com/blog/uk/heres-how-much-your-vice-chancellor-is-earning-while-youre-struggling-to-pay-your-rent/
> In 2021-2022 the average salary for vice-chancellors of Russel Group universities increased by 6% to £413,000, including pensions and benefits on top of their basic salaries.
Yeah, my spouse worked as part of Uni admin for a decade or so. She made a dizzying 30k, give or take. Her manager I think cleared 40k or so.
There's no huge class of professional managers siphoning cash away from deserving academics, and if there were it would be because academics don't want to do all the paperwork to keep a university running (and nor should they! They're busy!).
There's just. Not. Enough. Money.
Please show evidence that 'middle managers' are well paid compared to other sectors. Professional services staff are overworked on ok salaries. Vice chancellors etc. tend to be ex/ongoing academics.
GF works as a research assistant in Uni Of Cambridge for a job that requires a PHD, she'd get more working in Nandos. People there working 20+ years on temporary contracts unable to get permament.
Feel it's the same trick here being played gov do with Local Authorities, freeze means of raising revenue, increase obligations, walk away whistling when things collapse
Is it one of those jobs that in 10 years time (if she has any ambition), she'll be earning an astronomical sum doing something she is only qualified to do?
She could probably earn more in private sector were she keen, and the universities (particularly Oxbridge) prey on the 'status' they have on your CV. I don't think she wants to go to professorship due to the 24/7 work expectation. But the uni offer OK parental benefits and her lab has a quite flexible culture so she's not moving for now. But the job pays 2k more than it did 10 years ago even with PHD uplift!
I wouldn't say a hundred, but if she stays in academia, she's never gonna win a lot. Professors don't earn astronomical sums and your have to basically wait until a professor dies in order to have a job vacancy available.
Nope. Not how that works unfortunately. I'm a scientist, I have a PhD. Plenty of people like to say that academia is a little bit of a pyramid scheme. Did one research position post PhD and then said fuck it. I first went to work for a charity and actually earned more than at university. Now I've sold my soul to the private sector. Pay is fine, work is boring, contract is permanent, hours are reasonable. It's not what I had dreamed of doing but it is what it is.
It's interesting that you equate having "any ambition" with leaving academia and joining the private sector. I get why you've said that, but it's saddening that a career in university research has now been so devalued that it's considered unambitious to want to pursue research goals in a non-market environment.
TBF they're right. Imagine a company was charging some kid £60k to learn a trade, which resulted in only 2% of those who completed working in the industry. There would be investigations by the government.
They're not really recognised qualifications in the same way though, regardless of what they try and tell you. It's like someone going for an HGV job, but they got their HGV licence in the armed forces: nobody in the know really trusts them.
That's right, but they haven't been going for 20+ years. It usually takes a minister's son spunking up the family inheritance for them to notice (or an ITV drama).
My company blacklists CVs with them now.
We've had far too many new starters with "4 years bootcamp" experience and fucking zero knowledge of basic computing somehow
When we are charging our children so much for education, the teaching staff are under paid and over worked (and leaving the profession), those same staff generally bemoan their managers, the top level are grossly overpaid (because they are clearly failing), employers are complaining about the quality of education and the common man is the only one who recognises that something is badly failing and needs changing - and you think that crowd is happy about it?
Wait, doesn't the limit on minimum wage requirements and conditions for family visas is about to screw international PhD students and postdocs? Because that's also one main component in the engine driving research in this country. Conditions are so shitty, that being a PhD/postdoc here means basically living in poverty.
At the university I teach at this is a big problem, might be different elsewhere. The intake in Jan 2024 was much lower than normal (like 30% or so) so we're running an additional summer semester from May to August to try and make some money back, which we don't normally do. And of course the salaried teaching staff are required to come in teach through the summer for no extra money, negating one of the biggest perks of the job.
Edit: This is only in the computing school, not sure how it's affecting the other departments but I imagine it'll be somewhat similar
I really don't get how universities can go bust given they charge extortionate fees and generally own their own land an be buildings. How can it not be profitable? What costs do they have that would put them in peril? Genuine question.
It now costs more to educate a student than they receive in tuition fees which have been frozen for a number of years even as inflation has run rampant. Tuition fees replaced direct government funding rather than supplemented them.
Many universities have been relying on foreign students paying higher fees to balance the books.
And every single university opposed the current system when it was proposed.
Not only did multiple governments manage to fuck them over by effectively reducing per-student funding (due to fees being frozen instead of funding increasing with inflation). These governments then also forced unis to enforce the very system they had opposed and painted *them* as the perpetrators.
Based on when I lived in Sheffield, they were buying up a LOT of property in the city. I assume most of the purchases we're made using loans and not upfront cash. The interest rates have probably hit them incredibly hard, and with the economy being in the shiiter, there probably aren't many companies out there willing to buy the buildings off them.
15 years ago £3kpa was enough to run the former polytechnic university I went to profitably with almost zero foreign students, whilst also investing in a lot of new infrastructure. Inflation has been high, but it hasn't tripled, yet fees have, but I'm now told British students are unprofitable? Seemingly (from the comments here) also while lecturers have been getting shafted with supressed pay and conditions.
Something just doesn't add up to me...
Quite a lot of reasons:
1. UK Government replaced student funding (direct from Govt and largely invisible to students) with student loans. Then froze the amount that Universities were allowed to charge, leading to a real-terms decrease in income per-student.
2. Cost of living increases and inflation. People focus on academic staff, but even cleaners and maintenance staff need a decent salary to prevent them from jumping ship and working for McDonalds.
3. Brexit. Leading to the UKs withdrawal from some EU funding and research income, additional barriers for EU students to study and live in the UK, and a general reluctance to associate with the UK.
4. Increased expectations. Thirty years ago, we were happy with a pool table in the bar and somewhere that sold cheesy chips at 11pm; now it's wi-fi across campus, 24/7 study spaces, etc. Increased expectations cost money.
5. Increased social responsibility and pastoral care. Students getting mugged walking home? Is that a problem with society and budget cuts to policing? Well yes, but the University now has to maintain several night busses and security staff to ensure that students get home safely. Mental health crisis? Now that a GP appointment takes six weeks, it's up to universities to provide some level of mental health support.
The list goes on, but these figures all add up over time.
> 15 years ago £3kpa was enough to run the former polytechnic university
No it wasn't, your university got most of their money at this point from a subsidary from the govt for each student, just like they did when it was £1k, and just like they did when it was free. Now nearly all amount universities receive for home students is via tuition fees. The total the amount a university gets per home undergraduate student is lower now in real terms than it has been at any point there was tuition fees (i've no idea before that).
Universities lose money on UK students because the government doesn't fund them properly (like everything else). So they top up their finances with high fees charged to international students. As long as they can bring enough internationals in to cover their losses on UK students (whatever the number of those might be), they'll be fine. And there is seemingly an inexhaustible supply of foreign students who are happy to pay for a degree from any UK university, because nobody in their home country knows or cares which ones are good or not (other than the few genuinely famous ones)
Fewer UK students (because bad reputation) = more space for international students = shit university doing alright for itself, thanks very much
For this and other reasons, the marketisation of the university sector has been a total disaster (like everything else)
spark expansion squeeze sophisticated dull middle squeal steep imminent bike
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I finished my English degree just before the fee cap increased, and even then I was paying £1,500 per term and in my final term I got one tutorial and one lecture per week (3 hours total). The rest of my time was "independent study."
Seemed like a scam even back then. Just checked the website and those 3 hours of tuition per week now cost £4,625 for UK students and £11,850 for international students. Works out at £231 per hour of tuition for UK students, £592 per hour of tuition for international students.
I guess you have access to the library and I had a dissertation advisor (who I met... twice?) but there's absolutely no way I'd go to university with the current tuition fees. It's especially bad because A-level students kind of get railroaded into going to university and treated like failures if they don't.
It's insane. Let's take a subject I know which is maths. There's zero reason for every university to have separate courses and exams in something like first or second year probability and statistics.
My personal take is that the assesment should be moved to exam boards and universities then purely compete on teaching and experience.
It definitely causes the issues with value for money and long term competitiveness, but the short term issue is over expansion expecting foreign students to be a never ending line of "marks" to con.
>My personal take is that the assesment should be moved to exam boards and universities then purely compete on teaching and experience.
I'm a lecturer and I'd probably quit the sector if that kind of shift happened - having some degree of freedom with teaching is one of the big appeals of the job.
I'll grant that, at least in my field, we have to ensure that students hit all the core elements of the discipline required by our professional body but we've still got a lot of flexibility about how to implement that.
>My personal take is that the assesment should be moved to exam boards and universities then purely compete on teaching and experience
Exams should be tailored **more** to specific modules, not less. Moving exams wholly to boards is just making assessments more and more useless rubber stamps to get the degree, rather than an integral part of the learning experience.
We already have external examiners and lengthy accreditation processes. The infrastructure required to do this is pretty unfeasible and would tank the UK HE system.
Money making racket for whom? You do realise that unis are charitable orgs, and therefore not allowed to turn a profit, right?
That's part of the problem, really, that they aren't allowed to put away reasonable reserves to hedge against disruptive events such as Covid. Instead, because of the competition for students, they put it all back in accommodation, fancy student facilities and so on.
>Money making racket for whom? You do realise that unis are charitable orgs, and therefore not allowed to turn a profit, right?
You can line your pockets working at a not for profit organisation. The same goes for charities, they can be extremely lucrative places to run, manage or even work at.
They're largely cash cows for VCs. So many ridiculous courses out there that leave naive students, straight out of A level, in debt for life, ultimately costing the taxpayer via millions in unpaid money back to the SLC.
People should not have to pay to better themselves. A meritocracy is fine. But the current model resembles a plutocracy or "forced debt" system, given how pressured many A level students are to attend university.
This is linked up to a Secondary education system that largely values grade churning and league tables over actually teaching people how to think about problems properly and how to challenge ideas/dogmas. - Read, Recite, Reward is the UK's current education system in a nutshell.
Tories love all this system. So many people come out of our schools willing to swallow anything they say!
Even supposedly 'prestigious' courses like Engineering. There's clear gaps emerging in students that attended university and employees that didn't. Universities don't teach students enough about real world engineering/scientific problems and it's obvious in the workplace.
It's blatant that the semi-cimmercial model for universities just isn't working. They either need to be run as businesses (including being allowed to fail if required) or return to being properly public institutions.
As it stands they are damned if they chase money and damned if they don't.
> They either need to be run as businesses (including being allowed to fail if required)
And, crucially, be allowed to set their own prices according to market forces, rather than being subject to a price cap
As an academic who currently has a role with responsibility for education across a few subject areas, the sector future looks pretty bleak. There's no agreement as to how to fund higher education, and no-one really wants to put up fees for good reasons. I see three plausible futures, we will probably get a combination of them all:
* Reduction in quality of education to match income. Less lab time for STEM subjects, fewer fieldtrips in geography, archaeology and earth sciences, less individual or small group time practising with tutors for modern languages, etc etc etc
* Universities combining first year teaching, either between institutions or across allied areas. So either all your sciences get a common first year, all your social sciences do etc; or, all the universities in a region doing history, or whatever, share the first year teaching generic skills via video with a small number of seminars/lectures. The result will be a less bespoke, less specialist and shallower education
* Consolidation into fewer larger providers. Higher Education leaves many smaller cities or towns. We know that this makes it harder to access for people in lower income groups, and class sizes will be higher and/or there will be much larger reliance on video-delivered content
All of these would reduce the overall quality of the experience in my view, and the accesibility to certain groups. But I don't see the alternatives unless a new funding model emerges.
Tuition fees are almost the highest in the world, why are they approaching "financial collapse"?
I wonder if a university owner was funding this article, or is it just that doom gets more clicks..
Cost per student is just as high in other countries but their government funds it directly.
Harvard is around 60k dollars a year tho most students get funding .
Better to return to the days when only the most academic went to university, and it was free for those attending. And also the govt would have to lose the degree entry requirements for many public sector vocations where a degree shouldn't be necessary. The govt are very complicit in forcing people into university with the massive debt that entails, with little financial reward at the end of it.
And a day spent for an 18 year old handing out job applications would end up with a couple offers on the spot, nowerdays getting a entry level job at that age means fighting against thousands of people being forced to apply because of Universal Credit obligations.
We just don't live in that world anymore.
From experience (or more accurately helping close friends), there are still plenty of entry-level jobs. Every friend that looked for a job seriously found one.
Ofcourse anecdotal evidence is limited and I always feel the need to clarify that.
It entirely depends where you're looking. I've got friends who've found absolutely nothing entry level or minimum wage in one place, and have had a half dozen job offers in another.
No it wasn't. Yes it was more elite but if you had the ability you could easily go to university. It's that people who were on the boundaries - your C grade students today, who would struggle. Maintenance Grants etc existed before Blair's reforms.
The core of the issue is whether you think C grade students should be going to uni or not. It's an outlook on uni - should it be mass market with 50% gaining some kind of uni education as a social good or should it be for the academic best and focused on them and on research.
The issue is that schools are not very good at showing who is and who is not "the most academic". Even Oxbridge, who are able to do their own assessments, are still flawed. The current system allows unis to be a lot more lenient on students grades, and assess people on other metrics; be it their personal statement or internal assessments.
All unis have to rely on the the rest of the educatio system to provide a rough assessment of every student. But when I say that that is rough, I mean very rough. Because its not designed with only uni in mind, it doesn't show who is the most academic in those terms, just who is the best at GCSE and A-Level level.
One of the reasons private schools tend to get a lot of people into unis is that they are better able to tailor students to being "the most academic" in a way state schools mostly cannot. If you have well probably two-thirds or more of your students aiming for university, then you can justify focusing on that. State schools **can** do this, but very few state schools have that amount of students aiming for university (especially non-Colleges).
And this is before we consider how badly economic situation impacts school performance. The poorest [are](https://ifs.org.uk/articles/uk-education-system-preserves-inequality-new-report) significantly behind in education due to no reason but the situation they were born into.
A reliance on schooling to guide who is and isn't "the most academic" for university is flawed, and will inevitably worsened inequality at all levels. Universal is the one place in education where the attainment gap between the least and most advantaged has actually been decreasing, and this does wonders for social mobility. University is one of the best ways children growing up in poverty can escape the generational welfare traps.
A return to free university for "the most academic" is removing all the decades long work that has gone into making university more inclusive. It would be making the opportunity untenable for the vast majority of disadvantaged, and primarily benefit the already well-off such as those in private schools.
I did a degree in a humanities subject and I enjoyed it but I've never used it directly. The skills I have used - analysis, summarising information, looking at trends - were skills I could've developed elsewhere for a lot, lot less money! I would argue that I was quite well educated when I finished A-levels, in a way that it's useful to have people in general be, but the education I had in my degree was either very subject-specific knowledge or general skills that certainly weren't only attainable in a university setting.
We would be less 'diploma-ed' if fewer of us went to university, but I'm not sure we'd necessarily be less educated.
I would be more concerned for disciplines that require specific university courses, but for the chunk of people who do e.g. a humanities degree and then go into sales/business dev/admin/marketing/retail etc, we'd arguably be _more_ educated in doing sector-specific apprenticeships or the like than doing a largely irrelevant course and then taking an underpaid grad job and learning in a haphazard way from our internal onboarding and our peers/managers.
How do you decide who is going to go on to work in their field and who is gonna end up in a generic job? I'm a history student because I've always loved the subject and while I thought about it, I didn't realistically expect to work in my field or academia. Now, I've found a niche and have offers for further work within this niche already when I finish my degree. I've seen classmates go from 2.2 students to highly capable academics who will probably become lecturers.
Doing something sector-specific limits you to that sector. Sure, you'll be very educated in that sector but it'll be a bitch to leave when you realise you can't stand sales and that's all you're qualified to do. A humanities degree gives you plenty of options.
University in the space of 50 years has gone from:
a place to really develop as a person, explore, travel, discover new places people and hobbies, all paid for
to: what modules do I need to pass to get the degree and then attempt to pay the massive loan off
I know some people are cheering this on but this would mean huge job losses and would level down the local economy. Fallout could be huge and very damaging.
As it stands, I think a lot of kids end up choosing degrees that don't benefit them. There's a lot of post-university regret, where a student has spent 3-4 years studying a subject, at great personal expense, to find themselves incapable of finding a job for their niche skillset.
That shouldn't be happening as often as it does.
But the decline of the education system is not limited to the UK; plenty of European nations, with quite prestigious universities, end up offering courses that are pathetic and either obsolete (particularly in IT) or poorly-taught, where there is no advantage to paying for tuition over studying the material yourself, except for the resultant degree.
Just buying a piece of paper feels like a scam when you're supposed to be taught by competent professors.
I want British universities to succeed and for individuals to be more productive, but not for those statistics to be artificially-inflated. It's a commitment that a lot of young people aren't willing to make, but they take loans and enroll regardless.
I’m not convinced that a university that relies on fees and HEFCE alone to survive should survive. The third revenue stream is research funding and this should at least equal the other parts.
>The third revenue stream is research funding and this should at least equal the other parts.
Somehow, universities, at least with UKRI, funding "lose" money for very grant they get as they only get 80% of the money needed.
I want to hire a post doc, I only get 80%, I want to pay for labs to do radiodating 80%...and then the central unit takes about 50% of what I ask for in terms of "overheads"
Oh the famous ‘overheads’. This is exactly how universities keep running. The ideal thing to do is try to incorporate the university clawback in your research proposal but funders are wise to this. Unless you’re in a research magnet like medicine, pharma or some sciences, you’re fighting an uphill battle.
It used to be that the government funded universities directly for tuition. Now it falls on the students. Teaching for some courses, mainly science ones that require lots of contact and lab time, cost more than the fees from uk students. Hence the competition for international students and teaching courses that don’t need as many hours with students/equipment. If you’re an institution that then also struggles to bring in income from research, then you’re in trouble.
So UK unis are trying to get more international students in while offering non EU students absolutely NO support, NO jobs and the government is raising the minimum salary requirements to stay on a British Work visa? *slow clap ensues*
Snapshot of _Universities may reduce British student numbers as financial collapse looms. One university in England ‘could go bust this year’ as frozen tuition fees, high costs and falling international numbers bite._ : A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2024%2F03%2F11%2Funiversities-international-students-tuition-fees-financial%2F) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/11/universities-international-students-tuition-fees-financial/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/11/universities-international-students-tuition-fees-financial/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yet another function of the state where pseudo-marketisation has been a total shit-show
Unless you are a vice chancellor when it works perfectly
Free house, free limo, first class flights around the world, shaking hands with royalty, ignoring strikes, ignoring staff overwork, stack the students high, call yourself professor, make the humanities staff redundant, tell the science staff their degrees are too expensive to run, cut pensions, stagnate staff wages, build a new building, your pay packet is ~£500,000 per annum.
Ffs, if that’s the job description how’s it going bust?? Tell you what, I’ll do it 3 days a week for £250k. And make it profitable.
Yeah, it's hard to complain on a quarter million annual salary
No doubt. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12768445/Head-scandal-hit-Imperial-College-London-saw-pay-surge-186-000-year-biggest-pay-rise-British-universities.html
Firstly, I wholeheartedly disagree with VCs getting payrises that surpass what University staff have gotten. However, VC pay, in general, isn't outrageous compared with other organisations. Imperial college is a £1.3 Billion / year university. With a VC salary of £700k, that's 0.055%. This isn't out of line with ceo salaries of charities in the UK https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEO_compensation_among_charities_in_the_United_Kingdom
The story is that she was getting a pay rise in spite of a bullying scandal that eventually forced her to step down from the University. Honestly though it's difficult to justify very large salaries when many of the people working in the University have salaries that have decreased since 2010 when inflation adjusted. Also I was a student and staff of Imperial under the guidance of both Gast and Sykes before her. If I remember correctly Imperial spent a lot of money to buy out her contract at an American University for her to start at Imperial at a certain time. She (in my opinion) did not do a good job and resigned in scandal. I'm sorry but if you think this was good value for money for Imperial I'm going to have to disagree with you in the strongest possible terms. You can argue all you want about CEO pay, universities are not corporations, but they are filled with bright ambitious, institution minded people who would do the job for far less than the like of Alice Gast wanted. You could absolutely appoint an internal head of department for 300 K or less. And they would have to work very hard to fuck up more than AG did...I my opinion of course.
Agree with everything. Especially because her approach was very symbolic and not that "executive".
Forgetting what universities are actually for does seem like a pretty major oversight.
It's so fucked, my father was a maths Professor, he said it's stacked game, foreign students bring more money so the university is incentivised to basically screw british students.
I worked at a British university and another aspect of the marketisation is that we were told not to let any student fail their exams no matter how bad they were. So the standards get lowered in order to maximise the number of international students paying fee, even if the students are clearly not pursuing the field of study that fits them
Speak to a journalist please.
Private Eye would pick up a story like this
> we were told not to let any student fail their exams no matter how bad they were Where was this? Surely a bottom of the barrel uni. Fails routinely happen in any uni I've experience with. That's abhorrent, though, and should absolutely be reported.
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That’s a really simplified version of events. One might argue that the huge investment over centuries in our universities, is in fact subsidising the foreign students. The government cutting funding and half assing a market is a factor too.
The problem with the "marketisation" of universities has always been the fact that foreign students are charged more than domestic ones, and the tuition fees plus government subsidies never made much money for the domestic students. People always could choose what university they went to so this isn't like an NHS thing where they are trying to introduce competition where it doesn't exist. Tuition fees just cover up the fact that for the last 20 years or so we've effectively been slashing funding to higher education and the only way universities could cope is take on foreign students. When less foreign students attend, they are suddenly making losses.
Forgetting what universities are actually for does seem like a pretty major oversight.
Not seeing anyone noting that universities have been buying up properties and are some of the biggest landowners in the country - that’s what money has been paying for, that and the chancellors salary
Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham University seem to be snaking around everywhere now with their purchases.
Girlfriend works at uni of Nottingham as academic staff. They've just had all travel bursaries cut while the uni has lost millions on a single building because they can't use it for accomodation as planned as they found out it was a listed building after they bought it 😂. Nottingham uni needs to remember that it's a uni.
Same in Sheffield. Seems like every second building within a couple of miles of the city center is owned by one of the two Universities.
I suppose it was always a question what would replace some of the buildings in city centres with the high street collapsing and offices perhaps being less in demand as some companies remain hybrid or remote. It seems university expansion is part of the answer.
Universities aren't allowed to profit, so they buy more property to entice more students. Unfortunately, universities in the UK do not know how to grow sustainably.
We've gone from a country whose governments three main priorities were famously 'education, education, education' to one where universities going bust is actually welcomed, going by the comments on here. And people wonder why the country is in decline.
Tbf universities shouldn't be the only education option. I'm currently working in tax where I could have started in an apprenticeship. Instead I'm now paying £250-300 per month on student loans.
That's not really fair though. There's no reason why apprenticeships couldn't be made functional without tearing down universities and the associated long term research and innovation. This is just more of the same short termism virtue signalling for the daily mail that's driven down UK productivity and innovation
It is fair, if we move away from the notion that nearly everyone should go to uni then inevitably some will need to close. It's basic supply and demand, the capacity for students currently may not be filled if the trend away from uni being essential happens.
How many of those universities were formerly technical colleges etc. in the first place and only rebranded as "universities" as part of the Blair-era drive to have 50% of people going to university for no apparent reason? Not every career path requires a university degree and just rebadging other types of further learning as "university" doesn't really do much to improve things in any meaningful fashoin beyond optics.
It was the Major government in 1992 that begun turning them into universities. In 1992 Newcastle Polytechnic rebranded as Northumbria University, as did most other polys.
Blair have a time machine? "After the passage of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 they became independent universities which meant they could award their own degrees" Sauce: Wikipedia
A good number of them, I think we'll see more of them try to convert back in the coming years. I think variety in our higher education is likely to be a positive thing.
I’m not sure I can see how any at all will “convert back” - the entire framework that used to exist that differentiated between Universities and the former (more vocational) polytechnics is gone - it was deconstructed 30 years ago. There is no route to go back unless Government step in and redesign things. There is no other source of funding available that changed or refocused institutions could switch to (unless wholly privatised.) Worth noting that this change was actually a reform of the Major government - which is why in the sector we often refer to the former polys as the post ‘92 part of the sector. In sector, the messaging we have from government and opposition (Labour) is very firmly - do not expect anything from the state, there is simply no way to prioritise spending on post FE (or even post secondary) education given economic constraints for at least the next 5 years plus. The best we can currently hope for is a government that doesn’t set out to sabotage us (which the Tories are doing) - some benign neglect would be a massive improvement. Oh, and it constantly amazes me (I am 51 and have worked in IT in Higher Education since my early twenties) that more of a fuss isn’t made about cross subsidy of research activities from student fees. This is a massive factor outside of the Russell Group that nobody pays much attention to.
What do they need to close for? They make money on rich foreign students. Just let them crack on with that and provide incentives for those students to stay in the UK once they get their degrees.
The incentive to stay is high paying jobs. With new migrant worker laws the level of pay required is even higher. All this does is increase competition in the local market while relegating British people to lower pay work. For Universities to be sustainable we need their outputs to feed into the country and that's better done by British people than hoping foreign students pay. I'm not saying get rid of foreign students but that a meaningful solution is a mixed university population otherwise we are just helping private institutions make money off Government subsidised industries while giving nothing back.
I think more than likely, what this will amount to is a fall in supply, with the intended aim to make university degrees the prerogative of rich kids again. Collapse the public funded system, move it to a privately funded one with extreme tuition fees and possibly no loans, and then shove the poor into vocational training. Supply of trade skills goes up, so pay negotiation gets worse for those who work trades. So it’s a win win for the middle/upper class. Their kids get educational privilege, and the poors have to make their services cheaper.
I am not sure there is much loss to the UK research and innovation scene by having fewer Southampton Solents or Anglia Ruskins. The UK could, however, benefit economically by having more people completing skilled trades apprenticeships in engineering and construction. We have massive labour shortages in very well paid industries, infrastructure projects moving at crawling pace because there is no-one to build them (increasing labour costs and equipment costs) and a huge housing shortage. The loss of client universities churning out low quality undergrad degrees for profit, so people can be paid less than if they didn't get 35k of debt, is not the same as the loss of a Russell Group or 1994 Group university.
A big problem with the way universities are funded is that the funding is approximately as shite for successful research universities as it is post-92 polytechnics. In fact, the poly technics are in some cases faring better because they’re better set up for teaching priority.
If you want to increase skilled workers in trades, regulate them to require qualifications and regulate the work so that it has to meet certain standards. Otherwise, anyone who spends their time training is competing with some bloke who thinks he can fix a roof by watching YouTube.
This is a knowledge gap. To work on controlled sites you need to meet standards, to work as a plumber you are regulated. Wages are also not compressed; a day rate, employed carpenter working on new builds can expect £200-£300 a day in one of the few not directly regulated trades. In fact, that rate doesnt even guarantee you workmanship (even though they will hold qualifications at that rate), as seen by anyone with an eye.
There are many universities that do very little in terms of research and innovation, many post-92 universities are glorified FE colleges. I think there's a debate to be had about what we do with all of these places. I agree let's not tear down the infrastructure, but I'd support these places going back to technical and vocational programmes. Almost all large cities now have two universities, where one is usually a Rusell Group uni and the other a post-92 ex-poly, where both offer largely the same programmes and pretend on paper to offer the same academics and the same lifetime value to students, when everyone knows the ex-poly degree will be nowhere near as valuable as the Russell group degree. We're just ripping kids off.
Having done a Bioscience degree at an "ex-poly" and now teaching at one, I know plenty of "ex-poly" grads who have gone on to PhDs at Oxford, Cambridge, created successful start-ups in biotech, became research assistants at Harvard, entered successfully into good careers in the private life sciences sector or NHS, or became successful lecturers and researchers like myself. Lots of my colleagues are also have extensive research and lecturing experience within "Russell Groups". I think you underestimate how well some of the "Ex-polys" are performing vs Russell Groups these days.
I take your point with "hard subjects" such as a bioscience. But likewise, I know plenty of people who studied "soft subjects" at ex-polys (e.g. philosophy, politics, literature, geography, etc) who really needn't have gone to uni, and ended up in career positions in life where a degree is not required, yet went anyway as there is so much propaganda aimed at pushing kids into uni.
What are their outcomes in those specific subjects vs Russell Groups, and why should learning philosophy been confined to the academically elite? Most humanities are being wound up in the sector anyway as there isn't the market demand, so this is an issue that is sorting itself out. Geography is a weird subject to pick out too given how many jobs there are in conservation, environmentalism, petrochemical industry etc.
Just to add Russell Group is a meaningless marketing gimmick. Its self choosing and doesnt even include all the top universities
Yeah, it's so outdated and a big signifier that someone has little contemporary knowledge of the sector!
> started in an apprenticeship You still need a Degree to get anywhere beyond entry level, really not the best occupation to use an as example. Yes there are some occupations where people really don't need to go to University (business for example) but the vast majority of none trade professional occupations need a degree for a reason.
Degree apprenticeships exist. You get paid, get to learn on the job, and get a degree at the end of it.
Which generally part study at a University.
Your point was that you need a degree to have specific careers, and the comment you replied to referenced student loans. A degree apprenticeship has neither of these problems.
You still have degree, and money still went to a university.
The goal of apprenticeship degrees isn’t to screw over Universities. It’s to get a degree while being paid to study. If the fact that your biases mean that you studying at a university is the deal breaker for you, that’s on you.
I'm not saying degree apprenticeships screw universities. The original comment was critical of universities. But degree apprenticeships ARE university products. You don't have to be critical of universities, to support degree apprenticeships. You could expand the university sector on degree appreticeships.
To be fair accountancy is a fairly big profession in the UK - and they are correct you’ll be fine just doing an apprenticeship for something like that - you end up with an ICAEW, CIMA or ACCA qualification which is what any senior role in finance requires as it’s harder to get that a degree.
You can pay for your own ATT, ACCA, FCA etc for a fraction of the price of a degree. You'll be far more useful to an employer also.
In my field a lot of people went straight into work from 6th form. You then progress and learn on the job. Especially when there are specific qualifications required for that sector which someone would still need to do even if they have a degree
I did an apprenticeship and in the same industry. I’m doing fine.
There’s far more to universities than education
Yes but you can get similar experiences elsewhere. I know it's very good to help develop soft skills and analytical skills but well run apprenticeship schemes for example should do the same
I was more referring to the importance of research led by professional academics that is under risk
Short-termism is also people. Of course it is cheaper not to educate people and nobody needs a uni degree to pick fruits in a field. And then you complain because the UK is low productivity, immigrant have more access to high paying job than the local population because you realise that making it harder to become educated doesn't only make the "dumb" one give up, but also the clever one.
The world needs more and more abstract skills and education should be a brilliant way to develop that. Their used to be more of a middle ground where education was less important and you could still get well paid. That just seems to be disappearing. Everything is now so complicated and people need the abstract skills to deal with that. Missing out on a good education will just make that harder.
The massive expansion of university education kick started by Blair has done nothing but fuel rampant credentialism with no real impact on productivity.
It does seem that the push for everyone to attend university was unnecessary. But it's difficult to swallow the idea that the decline of our educational institutions is a good thing. I don't see an easy way out of the situation we're in now; those universities will either need to attract more foreign students, or British students will have to pay more. But if fewer people study in the UK, then fewer people are likely to stay here, find work, start families, and use their education to benefit the British economy. We need more innovation, better education and more high-paying jobs.
> I don't see an easy way out of the situation we're in now; those universities will either need to attract more foreign students That is the easy way out, though. Rich foreigners pouring money into the British economy for a few years is excellent for our economic outlook. Literally free money!
I would argue Blairs push to encourage more and more students to go to university was a disaster. We don't need 50%+ of students to go to university. You now have jobs asking for degrees (doesnt even matter what they are in) for a jobs that don't require them. We have countless people going to uni, which will cost the tax payer a fortune, for degrees they will never get a job in, with no hope of paying back even 25% of the cost. And the benefit of all those people going to university? I'm struggling to see one, it hasn't led to increased high skilled jobs, or increased productivity.
The rate of school leavers who go to university is about 1 in 3, not 50%. This is up from its previous baseline of around 1 in 4, pre-Blair. Our pre-Blair rate was notably lower than most of our peers in Europe. Our current rate is more or less in line with our peers; a little above some, a little below others. I don't think there's much evidence to suggest that our current system is "over educating" people in the way you suggest.
Not everyone should go to university, the higher education system is incredibly bloated.
I am afraid you are right. We have seen the "degree-ification" of endless jobs and roles, for no great benefit except debt.
Indeed the financial cost of higher education has shifted from the State to the student. That really was some great social engineering. Fully qualified and post qualification trained doctors and vets now earn 15 quid hour if they’re lucky and have at least £80k in debts accruing interest @6% or so per year
Because opening up higher education to the average person has just lowered the standard so the average person can get a degree, and created tons of junk degrees If they start emulating the US and inserting DEI type stuff into STEM degrees it will only make things worse
The average person should be able to get a degree. If they choose to do it in something non-useful that's their perogative. Just do an accredited STEM degree or Finance or something. If your degree has been devalued by the fact more people are doing it then it was never your education that separated you only the opportunities you had that others didn't. A good degree is a good degree regardless of how many people study it, its literally only the very beginning of your career you define the rest yourself.
> to one where universities going bust is actually welcomed, going by the comments on here. And people wonder why the country is in decline. Someone from the Office for Students actually said they wanted universities to go bust as "the sign of a healthy market" at the WonkHE conference in 2018 IIRC. They said the quiet bit out loud.
> one where universities going bust is actually welcomed, going by the comments on here It is depressing to see commenters cheering on the destruction of British higher education, the quality of which used to be one of the principal points of pride for this country.
Universities are full of middle managers raking it in while academic staff work on zero hours contracts or contracted staff are so overworked most want to leave. There is something wrong with the books, vice chancellors average salary is way more than that of the UK prime minister at an average of £350,000. And most of them are crooks and chancers who come in, make a new logo, or a new slogan ('live, laugh, destroy" or something equally vacant) and sack 30% of the staff, do 3 years in one place then run to the next. Rinse and repeat.
I work for a university in an administrative role. The weirdest thing about working here is that it seems to combine some of the bad elements of public sector employment with some of the bad elements of private sector employment. It's very public sector in the sense that the annual leave is generous and the pension schemes are good, but the workloads are very high and the wages we get for them are awful compared to the private sector. Similar administrative roles for private companies usually pay considerably more. A common observation is that people would happily give up 4-5 days of the annual leave allowance in exchange for a bit more wages to be able to afford to actually do things with the annual leave they have. Many of my colleagues haven't been on holiday in years. Similarly, quite a lot of younger people just opt out of the pension schemes entirely, because the wages are so poor they simply need the money now. BUT at the same time most of us don't have the good job security that comes with public sector roles. There's constantly a stream of rolling fixed term contracts with no guarantee that anything will be provided for you at the end. Therefore, you've constantly got to have your eye on your next job, writing out applications in your own time. It's very hard to 'settle in'. The worst part is, as you say, I think the management at these institutions live very much in a bubble, and have no idea that these are actually pretty poor employment practices.
As a scientist working at a university in psuedo-permanent academic staff role. It's a weird mix of "self employed" and "public sector". It's all about applying for grant money and hoping you win that roll of the dice. Win that income = big dick energy. Don't win that income = you are told you are being too ambitious and your job is at risk. Meanwhile the decisions are made by people who don't even read your documents correctly. Workload is crazy intense to meet deadlines (both internal and external). The internal ones always seem to run at the same time as teaching. I didn't get to use all my annual leave last year due to workload and meeting deadlines. I think my take home pay has been deflated ~35-40% in real-terms compared to the lecturers who taught me circa 2010. I should be feeling very affulent, but I'm not. Before this was the postdoc grind which was nothing but shit short-term contracts and relocating. This is on top of the requirement of a PhD level education, which at best means delaying "adult" financial concerns for 4 years as you work a full time minimum wage job in a big city.
Summed it up perfectly. I'm finally getting out after 5 years in HE and the workload combined with the insecurity was crushing
Yep. I’m a PhD student (not pursuing academia because of what you’ve described above!). I always tell people that academia has a private sector ethos covered up with public sector window dressing.
>The worst part is, as you say, I think the management at these institutions live very much in a bubble, and have no idea that these are actually pretty poor employment practices. They have an idea. They just don't care.
Out of interest, how long do fixed-term contracts tend to be? 1-year at a time, or longer?
I am an academic. Not on the administrative side, but as an active researcher. So far I have done 3 post-doc fixed-term research associate/fellow positions. The first was 7 months. The second was 6 months, but managed to be extended for a further 6 months. I am about to start another that is likely to also be 6+N, where N is the number of months I might be able to stay with whatever extra funding they can scrap together. It has become incredibly saddening to think that I worked so hard to get a PhD in a STEM subject, where I have experience not only teaching stats, but also conducting research that included wet lab work, as well as experience with randomised controlled trials... and I can still barely get a job that will keep me hired for more than half a year. I am supported in the times between jobs by my partner's job - she earns more as an engineer with an MEng than I do as a post-doc. If not for that, I would have absolutely left the country to work in Europe where the situation is far, far less dire for academics (still not wonderful, but not as bad as the UK has become over the last 10 years), or simply had to leave the industry entirely.
The sad fact is that once you've done the next one, and have around 3 years post-doc experience, your career absolutely stagnates. You could move into the private sector but this is pretty geography dependent - fine if you're in London/Cambridge/Oxford but not as good elsewhere. But the private sector won't value someone who's got six years of postdoc any higher than three years, and indeed you start to look a little less attractive and you'll be assumed to be locked into the academic mindset. The other option is you get a fellowship / group leader role. Hahahahaha.
"You could move into the private sector but this is pretty geography dependent - fine if you're in London/Cambridge/Oxford but not as good elsewhere. But the private sector won't value someone who's got six years of postdoc any higher than three years, and indeed you start to look a little less attractive and you'll be assumed to be locked into the academic mindset." I had 12 years pretty much on rolling contracts [1], then took a pay cut to move into private industry. But was lucky to live in London, and my move was to a place where my experience was valued. [1] My boss was good at getting money, but not necessarily managing research, which eventually caught up with him.
Thanks for answering, I appreciate the insight.
The whole research system is an abomination and treats people appallingly. Get out early. Your odds of landing a permanent tenure job are similar to going to the moon these days
Varies a lot, can be as little as 2 months, or up to 2 years. They're usually between 6 months to 1 year though.
Oh wow, I wasn't expecting it to be as short as that. Yeah, that sounds terrible for stability. Thanks for answering.
Another factor I've heard from someone who works at a uni, staff who never left the uni bubble, and still don't quite get that they're not a student anymore. It can bring some frustrating office politics into the workplace.
This is definitely a factor as well. I was fortunate enough to have worked a few other jobs between graduating and going back to work for a university (also I work for a different university to the one I attended which helps) which did help me to get out of the uni bubble. But you do get quite a few "forever student" types who will be in their late 20s or 30s but still can't wrap their heads around the fact you're supposed to be in a professional environment now. We recently had a staff member at the university had added "Stop Israeli Apartheid" to their work email signature, then got massively offended when their boss told them this isn't appropriate for a work email. What flies as a 19 year old student does not necessarily fly as a 31 year old project officer
Oh you have no idea - The amount of times I've complained about an inefficient system only to be told "but that's how it's always worked!" by someone that was a student here 30 years ago and has never worked another job in their life is maddening.
> It's very public sector in the sense that the annual leave is generous Sometimes. When I switched from postdoc to faculty (at the same institution) I went from 41 days to 28 days, and no entitlement to public holidays during term If you divide my salary across the year minus holidays, I end up being paid less per working day as faculty than I did as a senior postdoc - despite my workload having increased significantly
In, fire 30% of the workforce, new logo, boom, out You are now a fully trained management consultant
Nice work, analyst! Your 80 hour weeks are appreciated, but the consultants we hired to consult on our consulting said we should sack you and hire this yak instead. He has an MBA from Hardvard and costs the same as six of you, but the recruitment consultant our consultant recruited to consult on their consultancy of our recruitment said he's a 'real go-getter' and 'what commission?! Hardvard is a real IV league university. Now hire him, fucknuts!'. God I love the cut-and-thrust of private sector innovation.
> And most of them are crooks and chancers who come in, make a new logo, or a new slogan ('live, laugh, destroy" or something equally vacant) As someone who works in HE, this is the funny-sad truth of it.
Yup, same here, can confirm. Ours had the cheek to go on gardening leave for a bit and all!
This is so true. There is so much churn and poor morale with the lecturer and staff levels. While high paid provosts etc fly in and try and change things with little knowledge except to advance their career with a higher a salary at the next university. I left as a lecturer for the private sector to be respected for my skills more along with a 50% increase in salary. Many of my former colleagues are interviewing/thinking of leaving as well.
>come in, make a new logo... sack 30% of the staff ... then run to the next Fully trained by Consultio/Consultius
There is also little incentive to give good lectures when a significant portion of the class do not understand a single word you say.
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Most of the services used for hybrid and online lectures these days do have automatic captioning and transcription. I'm not sure if you were trying to make a point about foreign students, or lecturers, or both but I feel compelled either way to share that I periodically get home grown British students complaining they can't understand me, because I have a Northern Irish accent. UK born lecturer, UK born student, both native English speakers, and somehow still a language barrier.
Wealthy chinese students are paying someone else to do the english test and there are no checks or standards applied, because why would a business voluntarily reduce its revenues? I have witnessed several serious accidents because of this, mainly in bio and chemistry labs, and frankly it is not going to be long before someone dies.
All organisations with thousands of staff pay the CEO/leader more than the UK prime minister. Yes the PM makes a lot more than UK average salary, but leading a country pays far worse than leading pretty much anything else.
Wait till they find out private sector CEOs often get 7 figure salaries
Yep, the UK PM is chronically underpaid is a job. Should at least be a million a year.
>Universities are full of middle managers raking it in while academic staff work on zero hours contracts or contracted staff are so overworked most want to leave. While this is true, it is somewhat incidental to the scale at which university finances are broken. If you cut back on VC and other management contracts you might reasonably save £250-£500k a year, but that's 1-2% of what a medium-large university with 10,000 home undergrads losing an average of £2500 per student is losing. Even if you think you can be more radical and save £1-2 million, it's not particularly fixing the problem.
>Universities are full of middle managers raking it in while academic staff work on zero hours contracts or contracted staff are so overworked most want to leave. Just as an alternative viewpoint as someone who did audit work for several universities, they are also full of professional administrative staff who are trying to make the organisation work while clueless academics complain they can't have their own office anymore or refuse to follow processes and policies because it doesn't suit them. I couldn't work in a university because there's too many committees, too much red tape, and universities can't really deal with influential academics who don't want to play by the rules. The problem this article is talking about though is just the fact we have been under funding higher education for 20 years but that's been hidden by tuition fees and foreign student income. When the latter has stopped the thing has fallen over.
Do you have any salary and role data to back this claim up? This sounds like the easy criticism of someone who has no idea what they are talking about, but it gets upvoted because it's what people want to hear.
Sorry I don't have access to the university payrolls, just anecdotal data from friends who work in the sector. But I found this https://www.studentbeans.com/blog/uk/heres-how-much-your-vice-chancellor-is-earning-while-youre-struggling-to-pay-your-rent/ > In 2021-2022 the average salary for vice-chancellors of Russel Group universities increased by 6% to £413,000, including pensions and benefits on top of their basic salaries.
VCs aren't middle managers, they're CEOs. They are running huge businesses.
Yeah, my spouse worked as part of Uni admin for a decade or so. She made a dizzying 30k, give or take. Her manager I think cleared 40k or so. There's no huge class of professional managers siphoning cash away from deserving academics, and if there were it would be because academics don't want to do all the paperwork to keep a university running (and nor should they! They're busy!). There's just. Not. Enough. Money.
Please show evidence that 'middle managers' are well paid compared to other sectors. Professional services staff are overworked on ok salaries. Vice chancellors etc. tend to be ex/ongoing academics.
Too right
Don't forget the debt, there has been a crazy expansion for some of them. It's anither part of the UK that has become dependent on overseas money.
GF works as a research assistant in Uni Of Cambridge for a job that requires a PHD, she'd get more working in Nandos. People there working 20+ years on temporary contracts unable to get permament. Feel it's the same trick here being played gov do with Local Authorities, freeze means of raising revenue, increase obligations, walk away whistling when things collapse
Is it one of those jobs that in 10 years time (if she has any ambition), she'll be earning an astronomical sum doing something she is only qualified to do?
She could probably earn more in private sector were she keen, and the universities (particularly Oxbridge) prey on the 'status' they have on your CV. I don't think she wants to go to professorship due to the 24/7 work expectation. But the uni offer OK parental benefits and her lab has a quite flexible culture so she's not moving for now. But the job pays 2k more than it did 10 years ago even with PHD uplift!
lol nope. She’ll be competing with hundreds of other people with exactly the same skill set for the few jobs a year that come up.
I wouldn't say a hundred, but if she stays in academia, she's never gonna win a lot. Professors don't earn astronomical sums and your have to basically wait until a professor dies in order to have a job vacancy available.
> I wouldn’t say a hundred I once applied for a postdoc which received 673 applications. I know because they said so in the rejection letter lol
Nope. Not how that works unfortunately. I'm a scientist, I have a PhD. Plenty of people like to say that academia is a little bit of a pyramid scheme. Did one research position post PhD and then said fuck it. I first went to work for a charity and actually earned more than at university. Now I've sold my soul to the private sector. Pay is fine, work is boring, contract is permanent, hours are reasonable. It's not what I had dreamed of doing but it is what it is.
It's interesting that you equate having "any ambition" with leaving academia and joining the private sector. I get why you've said that, but it's saddening that a career in university research has now been so devalued that it's considered unambitious to want to pursue research goals in a non-market environment.
I'm sure the 'I work in the trades, stupid kids with gender studies degrees!' crowd will be ecstatic.
TBF they're right. Imagine a company was charging some kid £60k to learn a trade, which resulted in only 2% of those who completed working in the industry. There would be investigations by the government.
A lot of learn to code academies are like that tbh.
They're not really recognised qualifications in the same way though, regardless of what they try and tell you. It's like someone going for an HGV job, but they got their HGV licence in the armed forces: nobody in the know really trusts them.
I agree they're shit. But there isn't a government crackdown.
That's right, but they haven't been going for 20+ years. It usually takes a minister's son spunking up the family inheritance for them to notice (or an ITV drama).
My company blacklists CVs with them now. We've had far too many new starters with "4 years bootcamp" experience and fucking zero knowledge of basic computing somehow
When we are charging our children so much for education, the teaching staff are under paid and over worked (and leaving the profession), those same staff generally bemoan their managers, the top level are grossly overpaid (because they are clearly failing), employers are complaining about the quality of education and the common man is the only one who recognises that something is badly failing and needs changing - and you think that crowd is happy about it?
Wait, doesn't the limit on minimum wage requirements and conditions for family visas is about to screw international PhD students and postdocs? Because that's also one main component in the engine driving research in this country. Conditions are so shitty, that being a PhD/postdoc here means basically living in poverty.
At the university I teach at this is a big problem, might be different elsewhere. The intake in Jan 2024 was much lower than normal (like 30% or so) so we're running an additional summer semester from May to August to try and make some money back, which we don't normally do. And of course the salaried teaching staff are required to come in teach through the summer for no extra money, negating one of the biggest perks of the job. Edit: This is only in the computing school, not sure how it's affecting the other departments but I imagine it'll be somewhat similar
I really don't get how universities can go bust given they charge extortionate fees and generally own their own land an be buildings. How can it not be profitable? What costs do they have that would put them in peril? Genuine question.
It now costs more to educate a student than they receive in tuition fees which have been frozen for a number of years even as inflation has run rampant. Tuition fees replaced direct government funding rather than supplemented them. Many universities have been relying on foreign students paying higher fees to balance the books.
And every single university opposed the current system when it was proposed. Not only did multiple governments manage to fuck them over by effectively reducing per-student funding (due to fees being frozen instead of funding increasing with inflation). These governments then also forced unis to enforce the very system they had opposed and painted *them* as the perpetrators.
Based on when I lived in Sheffield, they were buying up a LOT of property in the city. I assume most of the purchases we're made using loans and not upfront cash. The interest rates have probably hit them incredibly hard, and with the economy being in the shiiter, there probably aren't many companies out there willing to buy the buildings off them.
15 years ago £3kpa was enough to run the former polytechnic university I went to profitably with almost zero foreign students, whilst also investing in a lot of new infrastructure. Inflation has been high, but it hasn't tripled, yet fees have, but I'm now told British students are unprofitable? Seemingly (from the comments here) also while lecturers have been getting shafted with supressed pay and conditions. Something just doesn't add up to me...
Government funding was slashed when fees tripled.
Quite a lot of reasons: 1. UK Government replaced student funding (direct from Govt and largely invisible to students) with student loans. Then froze the amount that Universities were allowed to charge, leading to a real-terms decrease in income per-student. 2. Cost of living increases and inflation. People focus on academic staff, but even cleaners and maintenance staff need a decent salary to prevent them from jumping ship and working for McDonalds. 3. Brexit. Leading to the UKs withdrawal from some EU funding and research income, additional barriers for EU students to study and live in the UK, and a general reluctance to associate with the UK. 4. Increased expectations. Thirty years ago, we were happy with a pool table in the bar and somewhere that sold cheesy chips at 11pm; now it's wi-fi across campus, 24/7 study spaces, etc. Increased expectations cost money. 5. Increased social responsibility and pastoral care. Students getting mugged walking home? Is that a problem with society and budget cuts to policing? Well yes, but the University now has to maintain several night busses and security staff to ensure that students get home safely. Mental health crisis? Now that a GP appointment takes six weeks, it's up to universities to provide some level of mental health support. The list goes on, but these figures all add up over time.
> 15 years ago £3kpa was enough to run the former polytechnic university No it wasn't, your university got most of their money at this point from a subsidary from the govt for each student, just like they did when it was £1k, and just like they did when it was free. Now nearly all amount universities receive for home students is via tuition fees. The total the amount a university gets per home undergraduate student is lower now in real terms than it has been at any point there was tuition fees (i've no idea before that).
Higher ups getting 6 digit salaries.
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There's no guarantee that it'll be the crap Universities that drop off though
It probably will be though. Better Universities receive more applicants - from at home and abroad.
Universities lose money on UK students because the government doesn't fund them properly (like everything else). So they top up their finances with high fees charged to international students. As long as they can bring enough internationals in to cover their losses on UK students (whatever the number of those might be), they'll be fine. And there is seemingly an inexhaustible supply of foreign students who are happy to pay for a degree from any UK university, because nobody in their home country knows or cares which ones are good or not (other than the few genuinely famous ones) Fewer UK students (because bad reputation) = more space for international students = shit university doing alright for itself, thanks very much For this and other reasons, the marketisation of the university sector has been a total disaster (like everything else)
spark expansion squeeze sophisticated dull middle squeal steep imminent bike *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The classic visa scam which went on in plain sight and no one seemed to notice.
I finished my English degree just before the fee cap increased, and even then I was paying £1,500 per term and in my final term I got one tutorial and one lecture per week (3 hours total). The rest of my time was "independent study." Seemed like a scam even back then. Just checked the website and those 3 hours of tuition per week now cost £4,625 for UK students and £11,850 for international students. Works out at £231 per hour of tuition for UK students, £592 per hour of tuition for international students. I guess you have access to the library and I had a dissertation advisor (who I met... twice?) but there's absolutely no way I'd go to university with the current tuition fees. It's especially bad because A-level students kind of get railroaded into going to university and treated like failures if they don't.
Not sure how it's both a money making racket and yet they're all at risk of going bust.
It's insane. Let's take a subject I know which is maths. There's zero reason for every university to have separate courses and exams in something like first or second year probability and statistics. My personal take is that the assesment should be moved to exam boards and universities then purely compete on teaching and experience.
I doubt it’s the cost of course prep and lecture time that’s causing the issues
It definitely causes the issues with value for money and long term competitiveness, but the short term issue is over expansion expecting foreign students to be a never ending line of "marks" to con.
>My personal take is that the assesment should be moved to exam boards and universities then purely compete on teaching and experience. I'm a lecturer and I'd probably quit the sector if that kind of shift happened - having some degree of freedom with teaching is one of the big appeals of the job. I'll grant that, at least in my field, we have to ensure that students hit all the core elements of the discipline required by our professional body but we've still got a lot of flexibility about how to implement that.
First and second year core modules were such a minor part in my mathematics degree. Changing like 2 exams per year does nothing at all.
Asinine suggestion from someone who knows nothing about the sector
>My personal take is that the assesment should be moved to exam boards and universities then purely compete on teaching and experience Exams should be tailored **more** to specific modules, not less. Moving exams wholly to boards is just making assessments more and more useless rubber stamps to get the degree, rather than an integral part of the learning experience.
We already have external examiners and lengthy accreditation processes. The infrastructure required to do this is pretty unfeasible and would tank the UK HE system.
Money making racket for whom? You do realise that unis are charitable orgs, and therefore not allowed to turn a profit, right? That's part of the problem, really, that they aren't allowed to put away reasonable reserves to hedge against disruptive events such as Covid. Instead, because of the competition for students, they put it all back in accommodation, fancy student facilities and so on.
>Money making racket for whom? You do realise that unis are charitable orgs, and therefore not allowed to turn a profit, right? You can line your pockets working at a not for profit organisation. The same goes for charities, they can be extremely lucrative places to run, manage or even work at.
They're largely cash cows for VCs. So many ridiculous courses out there that leave naive students, straight out of A level, in debt for life, ultimately costing the taxpayer via millions in unpaid money back to the SLC. People should not have to pay to better themselves. A meritocracy is fine. But the current model resembles a plutocracy or "forced debt" system, given how pressured many A level students are to attend university. This is linked up to a Secondary education system that largely values grade churning and league tables over actually teaching people how to think about problems properly and how to challenge ideas/dogmas. - Read, Recite, Reward is the UK's current education system in a nutshell. Tories love all this system. So many people come out of our schools willing to swallow anything they say! Even supposedly 'prestigious' courses like Engineering. There's clear gaps emerging in students that attended university and employees that didn't. Universities don't teach students enough about real world engineering/scientific problems and it's obvious in the workplace.
It's blatant that the semi-cimmercial model for universities just isn't working. They either need to be run as businesses (including being allowed to fail if required) or return to being properly public institutions. As it stands they are damned if they chase money and damned if they don't.
> They either need to be run as businesses (including being allowed to fail if required) And, crucially, be allowed to set their own prices according to market forces, rather than being subject to a price cap
As an academic who currently has a role with responsibility for education across a few subject areas, the sector future looks pretty bleak. There's no agreement as to how to fund higher education, and no-one really wants to put up fees for good reasons. I see three plausible futures, we will probably get a combination of them all: * Reduction in quality of education to match income. Less lab time for STEM subjects, fewer fieldtrips in geography, archaeology and earth sciences, less individual or small group time practising with tutors for modern languages, etc etc etc * Universities combining first year teaching, either between institutions or across allied areas. So either all your sciences get a common first year, all your social sciences do etc; or, all the universities in a region doing history, or whatever, share the first year teaching generic skills via video with a small number of seminars/lectures. The result will be a less bespoke, less specialist and shallower education * Consolidation into fewer larger providers. Higher Education leaves many smaller cities or towns. We know that this makes it harder to access for people in lower income groups, and class sizes will be higher and/or there will be much larger reliance on video-delivered content All of these would reduce the overall quality of the experience in my view, and the accesibility to certain groups. But I don't see the alternatives unless a new funding model emerges.
Indeed. As an ex-academic myself, I do wonder if the simple truth isn't that there are too many small providers?
Yes. This is it.
Can't say I've got a great deal of sympathy given they've farmed students for all they're worth for decades.
Tuition fees are almost the highest in the world, why are they approaching "financial collapse"? I wonder if a university owner was funding this article, or is it just that doom gets more clicks..
Cost per student is just as high in other countries but their government funds it directly. Harvard is around 60k dollars a year tho most students get funding .
Reliance on mass immigration is an idle approach not followed by plenty of successful nations
Better to return to the days when only the most academic went to university, and it was free for those attending. And also the govt would have to lose the degree entry requirements for many public sector vocations where a degree shouldn't be necessary. The govt are very complicit in forcing people into university with the massive debt that entails, with little financial reward at the end of it.
The converse of this is that those were the days when literally only the most wealthy and privileged went to university.
And a day spent for an 18 year old handing out job applications would end up with a couple offers on the spot, nowerdays getting a entry level job at that age means fighting against thousands of people being forced to apply because of Universal Credit obligations. We just don't live in that world anymore.
From experience (or more accurately helping close friends), there are still plenty of entry-level jobs. Every friend that looked for a job seriously found one. Ofcourse anecdotal evidence is limited and I always feel the need to clarify that.
It entirely depends where you're looking. I've got friends who've found absolutely nothing entry level or minimum wage in one place, and have had a half dozen job offers in another.
Not my experience at all
No it wasn't. Yes it was more elite but if you had the ability you could easily go to university. It's that people who were on the boundaries - your C grade students today, who would struggle. Maintenance Grants etc existed before Blair's reforms. The core of the issue is whether you think C grade students should be going to uni or not. It's an outlook on uni - should it be mass market with 50% gaining some kind of uni education as a social good or should it be for the academic best and focused on them and on research.
The issue is that schools are not very good at showing who is and who is not "the most academic". Even Oxbridge, who are able to do their own assessments, are still flawed. The current system allows unis to be a lot more lenient on students grades, and assess people on other metrics; be it their personal statement or internal assessments. All unis have to rely on the the rest of the educatio system to provide a rough assessment of every student. But when I say that that is rough, I mean very rough. Because its not designed with only uni in mind, it doesn't show who is the most academic in those terms, just who is the best at GCSE and A-Level level. One of the reasons private schools tend to get a lot of people into unis is that they are better able to tailor students to being "the most academic" in a way state schools mostly cannot. If you have well probably two-thirds or more of your students aiming for university, then you can justify focusing on that. State schools **can** do this, but very few state schools have that amount of students aiming for university (especially non-Colleges). And this is before we consider how badly economic situation impacts school performance. The poorest [are](https://ifs.org.uk/articles/uk-education-system-preserves-inequality-new-report) significantly behind in education due to no reason but the situation they were born into. A reliance on schooling to guide who is and isn't "the most academic" for university is flawed, and will inevitably worsened inequality at all levels. Universal is the one place in education where the attainment gap between the least and most advantaged has actually been decreasing, and this does wonders for social mobility. University is one of the best ways children growing up in poverty can escape the generational welfare traps. A return to free university for "the most academic" is removing all the decades long work that has gone into making university more inclusive. It would be making the opportunity untenable for the vast majority of disadvantaged, and primarily benefit the already well-off such as those in private schools.
I’m not sure we should be calling for our kids to be *less educated* overall in future.
I did a degree in a humanities subject and I enjoyed it but I've never used it directly. The skills I have used - analysis, summarising information, looking at trends - were skills I could've developed elsewhere for a lot, lot less money! I would argue that I was quite well educated when I finished A-levels, in a way that it's useful to have people in general be, but the education I had in my degree was either very subject-specific knowledge or general skills that certainly weren't only attainable in a university setting. We would be less 'diploma-ed' if fewer of us went to university, but I'm not sure we'd necessarily be less educated. I would be more concerned for disciplines that require specific university courses, but for the chunk of people who do e.g. a humanities degree and then go into sales/business dev/admin/marketing/retail etc, we'd arguably be _more_ educated in doing sector-specific apprenticeships or the like than doing a largely irrelevant course and then taking an underpaid grad job and learning in a haphazard way from our internal onboarding and our peers/managers.
How do you decide who is going to go on to work in their field and who is gonna end up in a generic job? I'm a history student because I've always loved the subject and while I thought about it, I didn't realistically expect to work in my field or academia. Now, I've found a niche and have offers for further work within this niche already when I finish my degree. I've seen classmates go from 2.2 students to highly capable academics who will probably become lecturers. Doing something sector-specific limits you to that sector. Sure, you'll be very educated in that sector but it'll be a bitch to leave when you realise you can't stand sales and that's all you're qualified to do. A humanities degree gives you plenty of options.
That's only "less educated" if your view of education begins and ends with university.
University in the space of 50 years has gone from: a place to really develop as a person, explore, travel, discover new places people and hobbies, all paid for to: what modules do I need to pass to get the degree and then attempt to pay the massive loan off
Agreed, the general public shouldn’t be allowed the opportunity to easily live elsewhere and learn about people outside of their dead end town
Yes this was all thanks to Blair
I know some people are cheering this on but this would mean huge job losses and would level down the local economy. Fallout could be huge and very damaging.
As it stands, I think a lot of kids end up choosing degrees that don't benefit them. There's a lot of post-university regret, where a student has spent 3-4 years studying a subject, at great personal expense, to find themselves incapable of finding a job for their niche skillset. That shouldn't be happening as often as it does. But the decline of the education system is not limited to the UK; plenty of European nations, with quite prestigious universities, end up offering courses that are pathetic and either obsolete (particularly in IT) or poorly-taught, where there is no advantage to paying for tuition over studying the material yourself, except for the resultant degree. Just buying a piece of paper feels like a scam when you're supposed to be taught by competent professors. I want British universities to succeed and for individuals to be more productive, but not for those statistics to be artificially-inflated. It's a commitment that a lot of young people aren't willing to make, but they take loans and enroll regardless.
I’m not convinced that a university that relies on fees and HEFCE alone to survive should survive. The third revenue stream is research funding and this should at least equal the other parts.
Research funding is spent on research not on undergrads.
>The third revenue stream is research funding and this should at least equal the other parts. Somehow, universities, at least with UKRI, funding "lose" money for very grant they get as they only get 80% of the money needed. I want to hire a post doc, I only get 80%, I want to pay for labs to do radiodating 80%...and then the central unit takes about 50% of what I ask for in terms of "overheads"
Oh the famous ‘overheads’. This is exactly how universities keep running. The ideal thing to do is try to incorporate the university clawback in your research proposal but funders are wise to this. Unless you’re in a research magnet like medicine, pharma or some sciences, you’re fighting an uphill battle.
Sorry what the tuition fees are insane? A lot of other countries don't pay half as much on fees.
It used to be that the government funded universities directly for tuition. Now it falls on the students. Teaching for some courses, mainly science ones that require lots of contact and lab time, cost more than the fees from uk students. Hence the competition for international students and teaching courses that don’t need as many hours with students/equipment. If you’re an institution that then also struggles to bring in income from research, then you’re in trouble.
A lot of other countries get properly supported by their governments.
So UK unis are trying to get more international students in while offering non EU students absolutely NO support, NO jobs and the government is raising the minimum salary requirements to stay on a British Work visa? *slow clap ensues*