Universities told to manage own budgets after call for bailouts
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd9mgk028lo
Posted by Ephemeral-Throwaway
Universities told to manage own budgets after call for bailouts
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd9mgk028lo
Posted by Ephemeral-Throwaway
23 Comments
How are universities surviving when fees have barely moved in 12 years?
That is unfair. It isn’t a free market, the fees they can charge are capped by law, and today don’t even cover the cost of teaching a domestic student. The only lever universities have to ‘manage their budgets’ is to keep skewing the ratio of domestic to international students. I’m sure that’s not what the government wants?
I was hoping this would be a government willing to make hard choices. One of those choices, is that tuition fees will have to go up – substantially – and be linked to inflation going forward instead of arbitrarily capped.
Labour kept saying wait until we’re in power before we reveal our plan for higher education. Turns out the plan was “fuck off”
The government needs to stop funding (through taxpayer backed student loans) low value degrees, it is an astonishing waste of resources.
Employers have no need for graduates of non vocational humanities degrees like Psychology, Politics, Social Sciences, Criminology (etc etc) from poor quality universities that you find all over the country.
It’s lose lose, young people doing those low value courses end up with huge amounts of debt which acts as an extra tax on their income, society doesn’t gain any increased skills, employers don’t need people with those sorts of degrees, and the taxpayer will ultimately have to pay off much of the student debt when it expires.
And the irony is that UK Universities have some of the best MBA courses in the world and cubic kilometres of unexploited IP, sigh.
This is a good thing. Too many universities exist as degree mills, often only possible on international student fees, and are clearly surplus to requirements.
Fewer universities, fewer student places, fewer degrees with a greater focus on standards and delivery at the remaining degree options, and increase the cap on fees.
Fewer students with a greater fee cap is better than more students with a lower fee cap.
Why is it that the hard choice is whether or not to raise tuition and shaft the working class, rather than increasing funding
You get £10k per student a year and still need a bailout?
Madness.
Over the last decade I’ve seen insane high salaries for Deans and the like.
It’s tough. Fees need to rise with inflation.
But universities also need to calm down buying so much land. They own so much and a disappointing amount is unused. Anyone who’s lives in a city (non-campus) uni knows this.
We need to generally cap CEO and Uni Dean salaries. They’re wild.
Cut down on some degrees offered. Maybe the government can turn some into apprenticeships with a subsidy for learning on the job or shorten some of the fringe certifications into 2-year courses.
One thing not yet mentioned here is that because successive governments have refused to raise tuition fees, the only way to keep the books balanced is to bring in international students of increasingly lower grades. As a result, universities have been borrowing massively to build student accommodations in anticipation of large international student population. But since the government has also restricted student visas, universities now have to pay off these loans without the income from international students. They are in a really bad place right now, with many calls of universities merging or closing down entirely.
I know we have a different government in charge now, and thank goodness for that. But let’s just take a second and think, a vital service that ought to be free (higher education) needs a bailout but might not get it. But we allow water companies (yes another vital service that ought to be publicly owned) are allowed bailouts whilst paying billions in dividends. We also constantly bail out fully private and non vital companies because they mismanaged their funds. But fuck you if you want to be a doctor, dentist, nurse, teacher, engineer, or whatever that requires a uni degree. We need to save poor little Jeff Bazos again.
This woman is just producing sound bites to please the right wing press. Sooner we get rid of these Tories the better. Oh wait…
When everything urgently needs funding becuase of years of neglect, do you trickle a little into everything and likley many will still fail but all will struggle or do you focus on the highest priority/wealth generators which will let you pick up the pieces after? I’m glad I’m not the one making the decision as either are gonna suck.
If a company (which universities are) needs a bailout they should have their top people fired and taken over by the government.
On the one hand, it seems that if anything should be subsidised (not by money ‘borrowed’ at interest, but by new money, to be counterbalanced by the ‘added value’, not of greater wage-earners, but an enlightened population) it is education.
On the other, one gets the feeling that education has in some wise gone astray: education costs nothing in fundamental terms; the pupil and teacher (and you must have them to begin with; you cannot make them as convenient) will assuredly be able to feed, clothe and shelter themselves without additional payments for education, and fundamentally education is an interaction between pupil and teacher, not a mechanised process using machinery and resources.
I do not advocate ‘cost-cutting’ in education; I *do* think a return to first principles may be needed, so that money and resources are placed in their proper relation to the process of education; I fear they have become of outsize importance in the process as it stands.
If councils can’t get bailouts to essentially run the country, I feel anything else in the public sector is pretty much boned.
If more people went to trades rather than being funnelled to university with no hope of a job we’d be in a much better place as a country
I work in HE and really wish someone would come to the media and talk about what the hard truth of this will mean.
Cities that are very reliant on universities for their economy – because they have a large number of employees and students there – will suffer if something is not done to fix HE as it stands.
Huge numbers of international students will continue to be recruited wherever possible. Those students are allowed to stay here after graduation for 2 years at least.
This is not just a universities issue, this is an economic and immigration issue – both of which seem like they need to be a priority for this government.
I don’t agree with bailouts necessarily but universities are only able to manage the price of courses for students outside the UK. Without control of their pricing structure for home based students they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, and it is bad for British citizens who both wish to study/have their children study here, and those who work in the industry. It’s also probably bad for research as an industry as well.
How could £1000/year fees support teaching a uni student 15-20 years ago but £10000/year today cannot?
>Staff at universities like [Huddersfield](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c99zdppxqdno), and [Lincoln](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp00en0ldvvo) and [the University of Central Lancashire](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-68744810) are facing job losses, while Coventry University has said it wants to make [nearly £100m worth of cuts](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckr827z30p2o) over the next two years.
>[The University of Kent](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpek98q4l7qo) has confirmed it is cutting six courses to manage financial challenges.
>And staff at Goldsmiths in London have been engaged in a [marking boycott, external](https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/13610/UCU-declares-academic-boycott-of-Goldsmiths-over-job-cuts)over plans to cut jobs there too.
Gosh! This is terrible! What will Britain do without such paragons of academic excellence and innovation?
Universities have only got themselves to blame. Many of them became very dependent on international students fees, while at the same time denying British students places. Many universities are poor quality, with much teaching taking place remotely.
The weird thing is that if tuition fees go up (but the rules about repaying them stay the same) it will have materially no effect on the majority of students. In most cases it just means more being written off at 45 years old or whatever the limit is.
If you go to Uni now, you’re lucky to escape with less than 50k of debt. Unless you’re a high earner you’re not paying that off under the current rules. So doesn’t really matter if it’s 50k or 150k for the majority of students.