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Interest rate changes could challenge universities, student loans and post 16 and vocational education

by Sir Adrian Webb

The publication on 13 September 2023 of the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee report on the Office for Students drew attention to the financial challenges facing universities in the UK and to the challenges associated with regulating and overseeing these risks.  

This week we look set to see these challenges increase with the possible increase in the  base interest rates by the Bank of England (the “Bank Rate”) to 5.5% when the Monetary Policy Committee next meets on Thursday 21st September (Guardian, Financial Times, 24 August 2023 ). If there is another 0.25% increase in the base rate, as is widely anticipated, this will place government and university finances under further pressure over the next few years with significant negative implications for HE students, the UK Government’s education budget in general and the further education college budget in particular. Furthermore, this anticipated rise in the Bank Rate may not be the last of these increases if Government spending remains high and inflationary pressures persist through the winter months. 

The most immediate and direct effect will be on the interest payments that universities need to pay on short term loans. According to HESA, average HE provider debt as a proportion of turnover stands at 0.16%, but with highs of 454% and lows of 0%, with unrestricted reserves of 204% of income (HESA, 2023). Of course, financial indicators expressed as a percentage of income for institutions of very variable sizes give no feel for the absolute amount of cash owed, or the annual cost of repayments.  

The top 13 higher education providers by percentage of debt are all small private institutions; most have recorded deficits in recent years and appear to have low levels of cash available to cover running costs. The next 35 institutions by scale of debt all have debt levels of over 50% of turnover. Among these institutions there are 22 large pre- and post-92 universities in all parts of the UK.  

The challenges presented by potential increases in interest payments will be exacerbated over the next two years by the continued decline in the real value of student tuition fees, limitations on the recruitment of overseas students with dependants and a decline in the proportion of students applying to low and mid-tariff universities.  

When student tuition fees were first introduced, HE providers were encouraged to set fees at between £6,000 and £9,000 per annum. Some price competition between institutions was expected but in practice the vast majority set their fees at the higher level. Recent analysis by Mark Corver of DataHE, an independent higher education consultancy, indicates that the real level of fees that higher education providers charge students as tuition fees has dropped below £6,000 if the value is deflated by the Retail Prices Index (RPI), slightly higher if other measures of inflation are used.

Over the last five years, many HE providers have been attempting to cover the reduced value of undergraduate home tuition fee income by recruiting larger number of international students, particularly from China, India and Nigeria. This approach has attracted large numbers of students to the most selective universities and those in major cities; many universities now have more than 25% of their students recruited from these sources. The announcement of restrictions on the release of temporary visas to support the dependents of international students has already had an impact on the recruitment of people from overseas who want to study at UK universities.. This impact looks set to continue and increase in 2024. 

To illustrate the issues faced by the more highly indebted institutions with a significant number of international students, consider the composite case of the University of Camberwick Green, with net debt of circa £200m and current loans with a weighted average debt cost of 3.5%. If this institution needed to renew all of its existing debt obligations this would likely double the costs of debt servicing from £7million to at least £14million. This would mean an additional annual outlay as a proportion of turnover in excess of 5%, dependent on the interest rates agreed with lenders and the term of their loan (e.g. revolving credit facility, private placement, bond or bank lending).  For a university like Camberwick Green, which has also recorded large operating deficits in recent years, additional debt is likely to be more expensive and so the short-term options are likely to focus on selling assets or laying off staff; these are not easy or attractive options. Changes to course portfolios and/or increased international student recruitment and transnational operations are unlikely to produce the necessary returns quickly and without undue financial or reputational risk.  

The more prestigious and selective universities in the more affluent parts of the UK are unlikely to face pressures that are likely to bear down hard on those which are, by conventional measures, less prestigious and less selective, in parts of the UK that engaged in levelling up activities with significant HE involvement. The impacts of high indebtedness, declining student recruitment and operating deficits are already being felt with significant redundancies planned at ten universities. 

The next most significant impact of higher interest rates will be on student loan repayments and the arrangements for funding this activity. The student loan book currently stands at £206bn with an additional £20bn of loans being issued each year. The internal real interest rate charged on these loan arrangements by HM Treasury, i.e. the real discount rate (excluding inflation), was set at -0.7% in 2021 at the height of the Covid crisis and remains the rate proposed in the Plan 5 changes scheduled to come into place during 2024. The nominal discount rate taking account of inflation is 1.9%. If Bank of England interest rates and by consequence HM Treasury bond/gilt rates move to 6.25% in 2024, as has been forecast, and the student loan rate is changed as a consequence, this will create an adverse upward movement in real interest rate charges on the loan book of circa 5%. Dependent on the scheduling of the loans this will then feed through into the calculation of the principal debt students are required to repay and also the Resource Allocation Budget (RAB) charge paid by the UK Government on loans that are forecast not to be repaid. Under revised accounting rules introduced in 2021, a proportion of this increased RAB charge will need to be accounted for in the national deficit in the year it is incurred and cannot be delayed until the loan matures. With forecast increases in the scale of the student loan book through to the next decade there are likely to be powerful voices in the Treasury wishing to pay down this debt or reduce the scale of its growth. This in turn is likely to mean a need to revisit the current arrangements in advance of the next HM Treasury Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in 2025. 

The current loan book is financed in part by the spread (difference) between the notional interest rate charged to students on loans they have taken out, which is currently set with some reference to the Prevailing Market Rate (PMR) for commercial loans, and the lower rate paid by the Treasury for its borrowings. The PMR was set at 7.3% in February 2023 and confirmed at this level for the period between September and November 2023 on 11th August. . At present the Bank of England Bank Rate is 5.3% and so the spread between the student loan rate and the Bank Rate was 2%. If a similar spread is expected if  the base rate rises further to 6.25% the PMR could be 8.25% or even higher. Interest rates at this level would make almost all student loans un-repayable, effectively converting the loan system into a graduate tax confined to new students and also potentially introducing a significant element of “moral hazard” as many students would face little incentive to do anything other than maximise their student loans. Given that they will never repay them; they will face an additional marginal loan repayment (tax) rate of 9% on undergraduate loans and 6% on postgraduate loans, so why not take out as much loan as possible and complete a postgraduate taught or research degree, even when the economic returns to them individually and to the public purse are negative. Beyond this “moral hazard” argument there is also arguably a “moral outrage” argument to be had about imposing an age-related differential income tax rate on younger people who are recent graduates. 

The problems outlined above are then likely to be heightened by forecast increases in the number of prospective undergraduate students entering the system over the next seven years.  In 2021/2022 there were 2.16 million U.K. domiciled students in UK HE institutions and a further 0.68 million students from the EU and other overseas countries. By 2030 the number of UK domiciled students is expected to increase by between 200,000 and 400,000 as a consequence of increases in the number of people in the relevant age groups. This would be at an average additional cost per student of at least £60,000 per three-year undergraduate degree, based on loans for tuition fees of 3 x £9,250 and for maintenance of 3 x up to £13,022 for students living away from home in London. Many students study for longer than three years on foundation and/or masters programmes, hence the forecast of £60,000 per student. This is an additional annual cost of loan outlay of £12bn or more. This seems unlikely to be fundable. 

The implication of these cost pressures would be serious enough if they were confined to HE, but they are not. Far from it. At present the growing costs of HE are being paid for by other parts of the UK Government’s education budget, resulting in real terms cuts to the further education budget, consequent low rates of pay for FE college staff, and cuts to the adult education budget. In adult education, FE and apprenticeship provision pay rates are set locally rather than nationally and so reductions in institutional budgets in this part of the education sector have tended to be accommodated by falling wages and unfilled vacancies rather than through redundancies as has been the case in the university sector. These different parts of the post-school education system are making greater use of part-time and temporary contracts and precarious jobs. This at a time when the need for more and better vocational education is increasingly widely recognised and the need for “industry standard” staff capable of delivering the new and upgraded skills required by rapid technological change has never been greater.  

Across the UK 70% of adults have not been to university, but like many older graduates they would benefit from the opportunity to take a course at a local college or other adult education provider. With 20% of the adult working age population (5 million people) currently economically inactive and with chronic skills shortages in all parts of economy it is very worrying that the pay of college lecturers in catering, construction, digital, engineering, health and social care is considerably below the rates paid to comparably skilled people working in the private sector. Employers in the UK spend on average 50% less than their counterparts in mainland Europe on workforce education and training. The combination of reductions in employer spending on training and cuts in UK Government funding for FE and apprenticeships has led to a reduction of over 1 million student places in adult education, apprenticeships and FE per year in the last ten years. This is not the position the UK needs to be in to improve productivity. Indeed, it is the very opposite of what is required to support such mission – let alone to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth.  

Who is responsible for monitoring and governing this system? At the moment the financial position of individual universities is overseen by their governing bodies, aided by internal and external auditors predominantly drawn in combinations of two of the big four audit firms. The Office for Students (OfS) monitors the financial position of individual higher education providers as part of its regulatory function, but it is not formally required to intervene financially at an early stage to support institutions in difficulties. It may issue a requirement to improve the plans for protecting students, but it is not required to prevent an institution from failing. The Student Loan Company (SLC) is overseen by an independent board and supported by a representative from the sponsoring departments in the UK’s national governments (i.e. Department for Education, Scottish Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Office in the absence of the Northern Ireland Executive). Whether the OfS, national regulators in the devolved nations or the SLC have modelled the scenarios outlined in this note is a moot point. Indeed, it is more of a mute point because no one is publicly talking about these issues and the problems that go with them in a joined-up way with a long-term perspective. It would be helpful if they did, and if there was a debate about the consequences for higher and further education providers and student loans of the return to real interest rates more in-keeping with the long run historical average. Given the commitment of central banks around the world to move in this direction after 15 years of ultra-low interest rates there is a pressing need for a comprehensive review of where we are heading and what needs to be done about it. 

As we approach a General Election in 2024, now is the time for the major political parties in the UK to commit to the appointment of a Royal Commission or equivalent to look at these issues with an impartial, sector neutral and critical eye.  Over the last hundred years all major changes of this type have proceeded in this way (i.e. Smith Report 1919, White Paper on Education 1943, Robbins Review 1964, Dearing Review 1997 and Browne Review 2011). Indeed, in 1997 Gillian Sheppard (Conservative minister) and David Blunkett (prospective Labour minister) agreed in the run up to the General election to respect the Dearing Committee proposals. A similar arrangement was reached regarding the Browne Review between Peter Mandelson (Labour Minister) and George Osborne (prospective Conservative Minister) in the run up to the general election in 2010.  The settlements in 1944 and 1963 were similarly effectively cross-party. This is a fundamental issue for the future of the UK and deserves to be made non-political with recommendations for the long term. Previous reviews have produced long term plans which have been implemented when they had cross-party support and straddled a General election. 

Sir Adrian Webb was an academic at the London School of Economics and Loughborough University; he was Deputy Vice Chancellor at Loughborough and Vice Chancellor at the University of Glamorgan. As well as holding a number of senior management positions and a wide range of public service/consultancy roles in local and central government (including HM Treasury, DHSS, Home Office, DFES, and the Ministry of Justice) and in Wales, he has also held many roles in the Third Sector. Sir Adrian was a member of the Dearing Review committee in the late 1990s and chaired a review of further education colleges and funding in Wales in 2007. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any organisation with which the author is affiliated.  

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Who should pay for higher education in England, and how much

by Rob Cuthbert

SRHE News is a quarterly publication, available only to SRHE members, which aims to comment on recent events, publications, and activities in a journalistic but scholarly way, allowing more human interest and unsupported speculation than any self-respecting journal, but never forgetting its academic audience and their concern for the professional niceties. These are some extracts from the April 2022 issue.

Government uses high inflation as cover for hitting students, graduates and universities

The Government sneaked a student loans announcement out on Friday afternoon 28 January 2022. Ben Waltmann (Institute for Fiscal Studies) said: “Today’s announcement … constitutes a tax rise by stealth on graduates with middling earnings. … For a graduate earning £30,000, this announcement means that they will pay £113 more towards their student loan in the next tax year than the government had previously said. … What really matters is how long this threshold freeze will stay in place. If it is only for one year, the impact on graduates will be moderate, and the government can only expect to save around £600 million per cohort of university students. If it stays in place for longer, it could transform the student loan system, with a much lower cost for the taxpayer and a much higher burden on graduates than they thought … when they took out their loans.” However, some well-informed commentators thought that the Minister had made the best of a bad job.

Waltmann followed up in his 10 February ‘Observation’: ”Students will see substantial cuts to the value of their maintenance loans, as parental earnings thresholds will stay frozen in cash terms and the uplift in the level of loans will fall far short of inflation. This continues a long-run decline in the value of maintenance entitlements. The threshold below which students are entitled to full maintenance loans has been unchanged in cash terms at £25,000 since 2008; had it risen with average earnings, it would now be around £34,000. Separately, the student loan repayment threshold will also be frozen in cash terms. … Finally, tuition fees will remain frozen in cash terms for another year, which hits universities and mainly benefits the taxpayer. … as our updated student finance calculator shows, the government is saving £2.3 billion on student loans under the cover of high inflation.”

At last, the government response to Augar

On 24 February 2022 the government finally issued a detailed response to the 2019 Augar Report, setting out a series of policy proposals and further issues for consultation: “Put simply, we need a fairer and more sustainable system for students and institutions, and of course the taxpayer. We need a system that will maintain our world-class universities not just for today, but for the decades to come. And we need a fairer deal for students …”. Rachel Wolf wrote for The Times Red Box on 24 February 2022 that she was encouraged by the Augar response (and the separate consultation on Lifelong Learning Entitlement), because it suggested that there was proper Cabinet government with a sensible Secretary of State for Education, rather than No 10 being in charge of everything. Yes, but … there was precious little welcome for most of the proposals.

Nick Hillman blogged for HEPI just ahead of the DfE announcement, trying desperately to save the Willetts fee policy (he was Willetts’ special adviser) from being labelled as a political failure. That policy was designed to be redistributive and progressive, but in practice the shortfall in repayments (RAB) became much too high and not enough people understood that many students were not expected to repay loans in full. The Theresa May government misunderstood it to the extent that they raised the repayment threshold, which cost the Exchequer much more without giving much benefit to students. The Treasury tolerated it until the national accounting systems were properly changed to show the loans for what they were, rather than spreading them as a cost over 20-30 years. Hillman selectively quoted Moneysavingexpert Martin Lewis, but he would have done better to see the 24 February Lewis quote that loans had now become a graduate tax throughout people’s working lives.

Jim Dickinson for Wonkhe on 24 February 2022 noted the absence of any response to Augar’s chapter on maintenance grants: “Overall then, almost all students will end up paying significantly more for having significantly less spent on their education … we might have at least expected a response on the bits of Augar that were concerned with students’ costs or their maintenance. That they are not even acknowledged tells us quite a bit about what the government thinks about students and graduates.”

Gavan Conlon of London Economics issued his analysis of the government proposals. “Under the current funding system in 2021-22 … the Exchequer contributes approximately £10.630bn per cohort to the funding of higher education. … given that the RAB charge (the proportion of the total loan balance written off) stands at approximately 52.5%, maintenance loan write-offs cost the Exchequer £4.105bn per cohort, while tuition fee loan write-offs cost £5.303bn. The recent freeze in the repayment threshold reduced HMT costs by approximately £300 million. The provision of Teaching Grants to higher education institutions (for high-cost subjects) results in additional costs of £1.222bn per cohort. Higher Education Institutions receive £11.144bn per cohort in net income from undergraduate students … £10.112bn in tuition fee income … £1.222bn in Teaching Grants. … institutions contribute £189 million per cohort in fee and maintenance bursaries (predominantly the latter) in exchange for the right to charge tuition fees in excess of the ‘Basic Fee’ (£6,165 per annum for full-time students). For students/graduates, the average debt on graduation (including accumulated interest) was estimated to be £47,500 (for full-time first degree students), with average lifetime repayments of £35,900 for male graduates and £13,900 for female graduates. We estimate that 88.2% of all graduates never repay their full loan, while 33.0% never make any loan repayment.” The first scenario he modelled involved “removing the real interest rate, reducing the earnings repayment thresholds to £25,000 (and the associated maximum interest rate threshold), and extending the repayment period to 40 years”. That led to savings of £539million for the Exchequer, with no change for HEIs. The average debt on graduation declined following the changes by £1,600. Average lifetime repayments for male graduates  decline by £2,000 but increase by £3900 for female graduates. “However, these are averages and there are important distributional effects associated with these proposals”. Scenario 2 added the introduction of Minimum Entry Requirements and reintroduction of Student Number Controls. The savings for the Exchequer were estimated at £1322million, with a loss for HEIs of £840million. The effect on students was unchanged.

Conlon then co-authored a blog with Andrew McGettigan (independent) for Wonkhe on 25 February 2022, which showed that most of the savings had actually been achieved by changing the discount rate used for student loans, making them more valuable. “… the graduates who will benefit the most are the highest earning – predominantly male – graduates. The messaging has been that lower earning graduates need to pay more to make the system sustainable. In fact it’s the discount rate change that does most of that – with the extra contributions from lower earning graduates helping to fund the reduced contributions from the richest. … It’s hard to see this when there is a lot of smoke and mirrors. What makes all this worse is the government knows that its discount rate change means that the extra payments made by lower earning graduates in years 30 to 40 are doing most of the heavy lifting.” Student finance campaigner Martin Lewis of Moneysavingexpert called it “a very damning piece”.

Ben Waltmann of the Institute for Fiscal Studies wrote on 24 February that: “The largest student loan reform since 2012 will reduce the cost of loans for high-earning borrowers but increase it for lower earners. Today the government has announced the largest changes to the student loans system in England since fees were allowed to triple in 2012. Starting with the 2023 university entry cohort, graduates will pay more towards their student loans each year and their loan balances will only be written off 40 years after they start repayments. For the same cohorts, the interest rate on student loans will be reduced to the rate of increase in the Retail Prices Index (RPI), a large cut of up to 3 percentage points. Maximum tuition fees will be frozen in nominal terms until the 2024/25 academic year. These changes will transform the student loans system. While under the current system, only around a quarter can expect to repay their loans in full, around 70% can expect to repay under the new system. This is partly due to substantially higher lifetime repayments by students with low and middling earnings and partly due to less interest being accumulated on loans. The long-run benefit for the taxpayer will be around £2.3 billion per cohort of university entrants, as higher repayments by borrowers with low or middling earnings will be partly offset by lower repayments of high-earning borrowers.”

Richard Adams in The Guardian on 24 February 2022 pointed out the DfE’s own analysis showed the poorest would suffer: “An equality analysis on the proposals by the Department for Education, states that “those likely to see some negative impact with increased lifetime repayments under the reforms” include younger and female graduates as well as graduates “from disadvantaged backgrounds, or reside in the north, Midlands, south-west or Yorkshire and the Humber”.

On 24 February 2022 Wonkhe’s Debbie McVitty suggested the proposals were looking for “a third way between capping opportunity and letting the HE market run amok”. John Morgan’s article for Times Higher Education on 28 February 2022 had expert commentators describing the Augar response package as a ‘missed opportunity’, with Chris Husbands (Sheffield Hallam VC) saying “what the package essentially does is to kick the difficult questions down the road”. David Willetts, in Times Higher Education on 3 March 2022, thought the Augar response was “balanced tweaks”; he was trying to rescue his fees policy, which worked in theory but not in practice. Nick Hillman was still trying in Research Professional News on 6 March 2022.

Universities Minister Michelle Donelan wrote a Conservative Home-spun version of the changes, in which she interestingly she referred to “Our top university cities – Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester and London …”. Donelan’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference in March 2022 set out what the Minister wants the narrative to be. Diana Beech (London Higher) blogged for HEPI on 7 March 2022 about the government response to Augar and the recent flurry of OfS consultations: “… what we are facing now is not a series of seemingly independent consultations concerned with the minutiae of regulation, but a multi-pronged and coordinated assault on the values our higher education sector holds dear.” Alan Roff, former Deputy VC at Central Lancashire, reprised his 2021 argument for a graduate contributions scheme with his 22 March HEPI blog. We assume that still, no-one in government is listening.

Mary Curnock Cook, former UCAS chief executive, was upbeat about the possibility of setting a minimum entry requirement (MER) in terms of grade 4 English and Maths at GCSE, in her HEPI blog on 24 February 2022. However SRHE Fellow Peter Scott pointed out, in his 28 February 2022 HEPI blog, that “In Scotland, universities set MERs to widen access. In England, the State imposes MERs to curb it. So, it is very difficult to claim the UK Government’s package of measures in response to the recommendations made by Augar are somehow progressive, let alone favourable to fair access.”

Rob Cuthbert, editor of SRHE News and Blog, is emeritus professor of higher education management, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Fellow of SRHE. He is an independent academic consultant whose previous roles include deputy vice-chancellor at the University of the West of England, editor of Higher Education Review, Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and government policy adviser and consultant in the UK/Europe, North America, Africa, and China.

Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk, Twitter @RobCuthbert.

To join a global community of scholars researching into HE, see the SRHE website.


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From money to the market: the transformation of the Strategic Plan

by GR Evans

Speaking on a Topic for Discussion, a draft of Oxford’s Strategic Plan for 2013-8, Shearer West, then Head of Humanities, spoke as a woman with experience of strategic plans. She had “been involved” with their “development” in other places. She wanted to see the new Strategy “regularly revisited and subject to adjustment as times change”. As to its content, she spoke as a pragmatist. “Oxford academics rightly pride themselves on elegant and incisive writing”, she said, but “a strategic plan will certainly never win a prize for inspiring prose, because it is an operational document”.

The Strategic Plans of Britain’s universities may have begun on that practical and unpretentious assumption, but they have evolved into glamorous presentations designed to market their universities to prospective students and benefactors as well as to offer assurance that they are well run and not in financial difficulties. As headlines announce that a dozen universities may now be at risk of financial collapse it is a topical question whether this is a desirable trend. The Institute of Fiscal Studies’ Briefing Note provides a table. Yet universities which may fall into the category of the financially vulnerable have Strategic Plans as confident and optimistic as those far higher in the league-tables. The University of Sunderland, reported by THE in January as facing a ‘challenging financial environment’ and closing courses, has a Plan for 2020-2025 presenting it in visually exciting terms and glowing wording as ‘a twenty-first century global university’.

The principal reason at first for requiring universities to have Strategic Plans was ‘operational’. They began as a device to ensure they took long term financial planning seriously and to facilitate monitoring of their use of the public funding of higher education. They became a requirement for universities when the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 created the Higher Education Funding Councils, replacing the short-lived single Universities Funding Council. For nearly a century until it was abolished in 1989 public money for university higher education been distributed through the University Grants Committee.

Although the new Councils were intended to act as buffers betwee Government control and the allocaton of block grants of public funding, the Government nevertheless gained closer control of the spending, for each year the Minister send a letter of guidance and instruction. The Councils’ Financial Memoranda required universities to give an accurate account of their finances as a condition of funding.

In 1997 the Dearing Report took it for granted that:

institutions share their strategic plans, including an estates strategy, with the three Higher Education Funding Councils; and the financial memoranda require institutions to secure value for money in the use of their assets and to follow a maintenance plan for their estates.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England was by now duly receiving and analysing these plans. In 2000 it published a guide for heads of institutions, senior managers and members of governing bodies, Strategic planning in higher education.

The call for such plans was reinforced in 2003 the White Paper, The future of higher education. The intention was to ask HEFCE to

look at how funding for departments with lower ratings under the existing system can be related to potential to progress further, and linked to good planning for future improvement.

HEFCE felt it had to set an example. Introducing its own internal Strategic Plan 2003-8 its then CEO, Howard Newby, said:

We hope that our colleagues in universities and colleges, for their part, will find in our plan a secure and practical framework for their own planning and activities throughout and beyond the planning period. We look forward to working with them to ensure that national policies and our strategy are put fully into effect, and to support and maintain a national HE system working consistently to international standards of excellence.

However, in 2017 the Higher Education and Research Act replaced HEFCE with the Office for Students and the Financial Memorandum requirement disappeared. The other parts of the UK have made their own arrangements under devolved powers. The Scottish Funding Council funds further as well as higher education and in 2020 it requires each college and university to have an Outcome Agreement in line with both ‘ministerial priorities and the SFC’s own ‘strategic framework’. It explains their purpose:

Outcome Agreements articulate how institutions provide an education that best meets the changing social and economic needs of their regions, reflecting a changing and increasingly diverse profile of students. They are an important part of the framework in which we ensure that institutions make best use of public funds and exercise good governance.

The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales published a Corporate Strategy (2017-20) setting out its strategy for ‘delivery of the Welsh Government’s priorities for higher education’, as ‘informed by our annual remit letter’. It promised to: Monitor the financial sustainability of HE providers, and the organisation and management of their financial affairs, with particular reference to the requirements of our Financial Management Code. Northern Ireland’s Government funds its universities directly through the Department for the Economy without the intervention of a Funding Council.

On 9 September 2020 the Office for Students published its Guidance for providers for the financial monitory returns. It requires an Annual Financial Return with ‘workbook’ and commentary’, and in the case of relative newcomers to higher education provision, a Business Plan. It has a Strategy (2018-21) of its own but it does not seem to see it as a regulatory essential for a university to have one.

Nevertheless, it has become a continuing custom for universities to publish their Strategy or Strategic Plan. Such Plans have broadened far beyond the endeavour to assure funding councils and government that they had their finances in good order and are spending public money appropriately and to good effect. They are unlikely to mention their finances except to invite donations. They now tend to include Visions and Missions, often dividing their content into small pieces for easy consumption. They offer photographic and even video illustrations . In its interim ‘refresh’ of its current Plan Delivering Impact for Society, our Strategic Plan 2016, Edinburgh points to developments so far and a video to watch for ‘a short summary of the values, strategic priorities and aspirations of the new draft plan’.

The transformation of a vehicle for reporting financial soundness to a public relations and marketing opportunity in which the plain truth is edited for frankly presentational purposes should surely sit uncomfortably with the purposes of a university.

SRHE member GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge, and served as CEO of the Independent Dispute Resolution Advisory Service for HE.


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Five reasons why rich people shouldn’t found universities

By Paul Temple

Some ‘alternative providers’ are the product of a rich person’s ambition to create something different or distinctive in the HE sector. But it doesn’t always work in the longer term…

1             Rich people expect to get their own way

Rich people – I mean seriously rich, not merely well-off – tend, in my limited experience, to want to have things their own way. Doing what other people suggested probably wasn’t how they became rich in the first place. So a university founded by someone like this will be planned the way they want it, with other ideas being pushed aside. (If the person had simply wanted to support higher education they could have become a benefactor of an existing university – as many rich people of course do – but they would then have had to fit in with how an established institution worked or risk having their money politely declined.) The founder’s ideas may have been quite sensible, perhaps even innovative, at the time of the university’s creation, but he or she will have been reluctant to adjust their views as time passed and the original conception became less attuned to contemporary realities. Universities need to be in states of constant evolution, while pretending that nothing has really changed: that is the secret of their longevity. A single founder, continuing to exercise at least a degree of control and certain of the correctness of their original “vision”, impedes this evolutionary process.

2             “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” (Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises)

Having access to a seriously rich person’s cheque-book might seem like a dream come true to most university finance directors. But a kind of dependency culture develops if, whenever a financial problem arises, some more cash magically appears. The university comes to resemble an oil-rich sheikhdom, able to buy-off internal tensions without having actually to resolve them, and not having to bother much about external pressures. So the university business model appears on the face of it to be working, because of regular cash injections into the balance sheet. Difficult questions about the university’s priorities and how its future sustainability can be ensured don’t get asked seriously, let alone answered: the priority is to ensure that the founder is happy in order to keep the cheque-book open. Short-term imperatives obscure longer-term perspectives. The university gradually drifts further and further away from real sustainability – but…

3             Even the rich don’t live for ever (yet)

If the university had problems when the founder was alive, they can become much more intractable once they’re dead. However clear the founder thought his or her intentions were about supporting the university financially after their death, there will be others with their own claims to understand the founder’s “vision” and what should be done to protect it (see below). The magic cheque-book is suddenly not so open: it’s not that the money isn’t there, it’s just that, well, we maybe need to reflect a little on what the founder “really” wanted and how best to achieve the “vision” in the new circumstances. Someone involved in a “wishes from beyond the grave” discussion of this sort remarked that early Christianity must have been a little like this: “Speaking as someone who knew Jesus well, I can say that what He would have wanted is…”

4             “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” (F Scott Fitzgerald, The Rich Boy)

You might perhaps think that your financial affairs are complicated because you have a couple of bank accounts, a few credit cards, a mortgage, and an ISA. The seriously rich, though, are surrounded by a horde of financial advisers and lawyers who set up offshore accounts, “investment vehicles”, trusts, foundations, real estate portfolios, the list goes on, to protect their wealth. When their client dies, these advisers become strangely reluctant to hand money over, regardless of what seems (to the intended beneficiary) to have been their client’s clear intentions (see above). Those controlling the money emphasise their heavy responsibilities to safeguard their late client’s “vision”, and can they be quite certain that the university’s plans are consistent with it? How can they be completely sure that the founder’s money will be managed wisely? “Tell us more about your plans” is a request to which the answer can be, as university planners know, a one-paragraph mission statement or volumes of studies and data – to which endless queries and objections can be presented. When the late founder’s wealth is tucked away in different forms, controlled by different people, under different legal jurisdictions, getting it can be slow, expensive – or, in practice, with the clock ticking and the university budget going into the red, impossible.

5             Just buy the yacht

Instead of founding a university, just buy a nice yacht and sit on deck in the sunshine at Monte Carlo with other rich people and, really, save the rest of us a lot of trouble.

SRHE member Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London. See his latest paper ‘University spaces: Creating cité and place’, London Review of Education, 17 (2): 223–235 at https://doi.org/10.18546


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The VERY big financial picture for English universities?

By David Palfreyman

The Financial Sustainability Strategy Group, a dedicated bunch of HE nerds, has churned out 90 pages on the funding model of UK universities (February 2019), based on TRAC data (Transparent Approach to Costing, as compiled and collated since 1999). 

The core activity of teaching UK/EU undergraduates brings in c£13.25billion of income and covers its full economic cost (FEC). Within that overall picture, subjects vary in matching fee income to their FEC. Even after some (HEFCE) top-up grant subsidy for STEM, there is an internal transfer as subsidy to STEM from the cheap-to-teach and massively expanded subjects such as Law and Psychology, as well as the cheap but less expanded Humanities. International student fee income is c£4.5billion, with a third of such high fee-payers coming from China. The FEC is more than covered – leaving a 40% surplus transferred to subsidise research. 

Research generates c£9.25billion (£1.5billion as HEFCE QR and the rest as grants/contracts from various sources) but recovers only about 75% of its FEC. Research grants from Government cover 80% of their FEC, from industry and the Research Councils 75%, from the EU 65%, and from charities 60%. The overall loss on research will, therefore, vary according to the mix of research funding from these various sources. The Russell Group lose the most but are best placed to attract more international student fees. A thing called ‘Other Activities’ generates c£5.5billion and has a 15% profit on its FEC – again a source of subsidy for over-trading in under-priced research. 

What are the challenges and threats to this financial model? 

  1. Any wobble in the UK share of the global student market – especially since most universities in their financial projections make happy assumptions about growing their International fee income. 
  2. The hikes due in employer contributions to USS (c5%) and to TPS (c8%). 
  3. The freezing of the £9250 UK/EU UG fee.  
  4. The impact of (now unlikely?) Brexit on EU undergraduate numbers and their fee income – although the loss of EU research grants when every one involves a subsidy of 35% of the FEC would be no bad thing!
  5. Whether the Augar Review will recommend UK undergraduate fees should be cut from £9250 to, say, £7500 – and, even if it does, whether any Government ever implements the proposal.
  6. How those universities that have borrowed massive amounts will be able to service the interest payments as the above happens – let alone save up so as one day to repay the capital. 

In the current financial year English universities get c£1.5billion of funding from the OfS, mainly for the extra cost of STEM teaching over and above the £9250 tuition fees but also for various specialist programmes. Then some £1.6billion is shared out by UKRI to all UK universities as support for research (based on the REF). The OfS and UKRI funding is the job HEFCE used to do before the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act. So the direct taxpayer spend on HE is c£3billion pa, plus spending on support for teaching in UK universities beyond England – and not counting the cost of the subsidy to the student loans system, nor the financing of the various research councils. 

We await the Augar Review; meanwhile the supply of UK 18-year olds continues to decline until the early 2020s, which can be bad news for some universities, as the OfS warned in its analysis of Financial Sustainability of Higher Education Providers in England on 4 April 2019. The flow of EU students may reduce IF Brexit ever happens, and on the spending side institutions face significant increases in employer contributions to pensions. All in all, this is not a rosy picture in the short term and potentially grim in the medium term – unless, of course, the Augar Review gets lost in the context of Brexit-induced government chaos or the Treasury generously substitutes extra grant funding for any Augar reduction in the £9250. Unless indeed any ‘Brexit dividend’ leaves room for more public spending on HE as a call on taxpayer largesse alongside the NHS, social care for the elderly, the funding of schools, etc etc…

SRHE Treasurer David Palfreyman is Bursar, New College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies (OxCHEPS), and a member of the Board of the Office for Students. He writes in a personal capacity.