A busy week with lots of meetings, research, and responding to emails and questions.

I have been reflecting on the challenges that the higher education sector are facing and how difficult it appears to be for the sector to respond to these challenges. 

Looking back over my blog posts, back in August 2024, I wrote about how hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I wrote then 

There are lots of examples of how organisations and companies did not respond to changes and trends. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, as you can ask, why didn’t they change, they could see the challenge, they could have changed, they could have adapted. The problem often is that though internally the organisation may know it needs to change, the current situation means they are unable to change.

Higher Education knows that they are facing challenges, and that they need to change. They know this. However a deeper question is not the one that Higher Education needs to be told they need to change, they know that, but they are actually unable to change and so the question is how do we change a sector, that knows it needs to change, but actually can’t make that change.

Two year after writing that post on the need for change, I am not seeing significant change or transformational change. There have been at most two mergers, but not a huge amount of collaboration either.

Where we have seen significant change has been in job losses across the sector. This week I wrote a post about the implications of the current round of redundancies at the University of Dundee.

It is been reported that the University of Dundee is looking to cut an additional 190 jobs. Despite already cutting about 675 jobs through voluntary redundancies, the university said it still needed to make annual savings of about £20m.

They are not alone in needing to make savings and job cuts.

One of the unanswered questions is how will all this impact on the student experience.