The HE sector is facing tough financial times ahead. Thursday’s A Level results may have been a good news item, but the university sector are facing falling student numbers, both domestic and international. In addition, flat student funding combined with rising costs, means that universities can not sustain their current expenditure and operating model. This has many implications for university priorities, including universities looking to cut costs, reduce new expenditure, and their focus being on financial sustainability and being more efficient.

Despite the positive news yesterday about the A Level results, the university sector is facing a financial crisis like never before.

 Cash-strapped universities could go bust before new students graduate

Cash-strapped universities could fold within three years due to a “perfect storm” of plummeting international student numbers and being unable to attract undergraduates through A-level clearing, a leading education expert (HEPI) has warned. A funding crisis has left 40 per cent of universities facing budget deficits, a recent report has found, with around 70 undergoing redundancy or restructuring programmes amid growing fears over the higher education sector’s financial stability.

Universities face job losses as ‘perfect storm’ gathers

Some of the universities that today’s happy students will be aiming to attend from the autumn are facing huge financial pressures. Adam McCulloch investigates a sector that could well be on the cusp of contraction – with job losses and closed departments ahead.

As mentioned in the article, a list of job losses as collated by UCU

It is clear that the higher education sector is facing challenges it hasn’t had to face before.

I thought this collated thread by Cory Doctorow was an interesting read. It is about how scholarly publishing is a “collective action problem”.

Once you learn about the “collective action problem,” you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.

He has some examples from other industries and then spends time discussing academic publishing.

Here’s how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their research and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that’s owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper’s author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.

Take the time to read the thread.

I wrote a blog post about change and hindsight.

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.