UK university crisis is just getting started
Fewer international students in the country mean higher fees for British undergraduates – and fewer British institutions
NO UNIVERSITY in Britain has ever gone bankrupt, which is quite a record for a sector with more than 900 years of history. The day may not be too far away, if the sounds of distress emanating from the halls of academia are anything to go by. The head of the largest higher-education union has called for an emergency rescue package to stave off “catastrophe”. The crunch should surprise nobody. This was a crisis foretold.
A succession of reports has warned of the precarious funding structure underpinning UK universities. Tuition fees for domestic students have been held at £9,250 (S$15,956) since 2017, and have been increased by only £250 in the past 12 years. They are now worth less than £6,000 in 2012 prices. Without the rich endowments that backstop US universities or other significant sources of income, British institutions have turned to international students, who pay far-higher fees. Their dependence on this lucrative revenue stream has increased as the numbers surged. Once growth turned to shrinkage, a reckoning was inevitable.
About 40 per cent of higher-education providers, or 108 out of 269, expect to be in deficit in the current university financial year ending Jul 31, according to a May financial-sustainability report by the Office for Students, which regulates the sector. That’s before they feel the full effect of the decline in international recruitment. The word “challenging” appears 13 times in the study.
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