Higher education commentators have been warning for years of a looming crisis in university funding. Now, they are beginning to ask which institution will go bankrupt first. Few expect that the government would step in to bail out a university in serious financial difficulty. For one policy expert, it’s already “too late” to avert the oncoming disaster; “all everyone can do now is brace”.
Almost half of UK vice-chancellors expect their university to run at a loss this year. The value of tuition fees for domestic students has been falling in real terms, amid high inflation, since they were frozen in 2017 at £9,250 per year. For reasons that are not at all difficult to understand, almost no one – from politicians to students or their parents – wants to raise them. Universities have increasingly been making up for this shortfall by recruiting students from abroad, who pay dramatically higher fees. And now international student numbers, too, might be falling.
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