By Jack Yarlett
The funding crisis has been building for a few years now, but this autumn, UK universities are facing what one vice-chancellor called a “tipping point”, which could threaten some universities’ survival as their incomes fail to meet costs. The Office for Students (OfS) projects that 40% of universities will be in a budget deficit by the end of the year.
Jobs at risk
67 universities are already carrying out cost-cutting measures, like merging departments and dropping certain courses with redundancies being imposed. This has already forced the UCU to ballot for strike action in defence of jobs in some universities. As the crisis continues, more jobs will be at risk across a sector that employs hundreds of thousands. One “nightmare scenario” described by an Oxford history professor quoted in The Guardian could see some universities having to close down altogether.
Causes of the funding crisis
This crisis is both entirely preventable, and predictable under capitalism, where higher education is a for-profit business rather than a right. For decades, governments have pushed more young people into university, starting with the Universities Act in 1992 turning polytechnics into universities, then the introduction of tuition fees under New Labour, then their trebling under the Cameron-Clegg coalition in 2011.
Inflation has increased costs massively while reducing the real value of tuition fees by about a third. One option available to the government could be to increase fees, pushing students even deeper into debt. But the massive wave of struggle by young people against the increase in 2010-11, and the subsequent backlash against the Lib Dems has made both Tories and Labour reluctant to make significant increases.
Universities were using large numbers of international students as a revenue stream, but Tory crackdowns on the right to claim visas to the UK amid their culture wars strategy of attacking migrants has severely squeezed this source of income.
There is also the greed of university leadership – most vice-chancellors (VCs) make six-figure salaries with tens of thousands of pounds in bonuses each year. Meanwhile, many universities continue to spend millions on new buildings to make themselves appear more attractive, while carrying out redundancies. One example is University of Huddersfield, which has spent millions on new lecture halls that now sit empty, while making over 100 staff members redundant.
Education is a right, not a business!
Education is a basic human right. This crisis threatens not just the jobs of thousands of university staff, but also the ability to fully and freely access higher education. Starmer’s government has not outlined any clear plan for how it intends to resolve the situation because any effective solution would involve providing funding by taxing the rich and endangering the forprofit model of university education.
Socialist Alternative fights for an end to the capitalist system, where institutions worth millions of pounds close down their faculties and sack hundreds of staff because of an entirely artificial lack of funding. We stand for a socialist society where education at all levels is a right genuinely available to all and universities exist to provide that right, not to make profits for a greedy few.
Socialist Alternative says:
- No to all job cuts and faculty closures, universities should use their millions in reserves and slash lavish VC salaries to protect jobs.
- Students and staff unions unite to fight against all course closures, faculty mergers and redundancies.
- Abolish tuition fees and cancel exorbitant student debts!
- Universities should be publicly owned, state funded, and run democratically by staff, faculty and students
