Universities in the UK are in trouble. Big trouble with pound signs. Student fees are capped - Unis are paying about ÂŁ3K a year to teach each student Research is underfunded. Grants pay only about 70 pence of every research pound. Universities are funding their own research. The once great bastions of soft power, stricter visa regulations have put off international students.

Let’s start with what won’t work.

  1. The government won’t allow a higher fee cap. There’s no way they would allow the fee to pass the £10,000 ceiling given the state of student debt. It needs to go to £12K. This as been obvious since fees were introduced 15 years ago and immediately all universities charged the maximum allowed fee. No sign of “competition” between universities to teach cheaply. Why? ‘cos teaching is expensive when it involves actual teachers.
  2. The government won’t increase research spending more than a token amount. Never has happened, never will happen.
  3. The government won’t lift visa restrictions. The situation for international students will likely get worse rather than better.

What’s Been Tried: The Cutting Paradox

Cut costs! Universities spend a lot on people. All kinds of staff. Cut them! Well, that’s what’s happening. What’s the result? A university that cuts say 500 staff across the board will get a short term benefit of saving the balance sheet for a year or two. It’s always more complicated than you’d think because it’s expensive to get rid of people - it’s a drawn out process that involves paying voluntary severances and compulsory redundancy payments. You may be cutting £30m from your annual budget but you also have to find £10m for all these one off payments. But what are the downsides of that short term balance sheet benefit? You have just made your university smaller. Long term your income is going to go down. You’ve done a sudden shrink in response to (widely predicted) circumstances. You can pretend that “efficiencies” and “productivity boosts” will mean you can do more with fewer staff. But when your staff are already working long hours amidst the threat of compulsory redundancy, how much more productive can you get? Probably LESS productive.

But, say senior managers struggling to get by on six figure salaries, there’s no other way to cut costs. We as a university have done everything we can!

This is a true, as a university you have done everything you can do.

But collectively, as a Universities UK, with 141 member institutions, you have done jack shit.

The Ranking Tables Scam

To get where we’re going, let’s start with the pointless waste of time and money that are University ranking tables, from eg The Guardian, The Times, The Good University Guide. Every year university PR teams pore over the newly published tables to find a statement that is vaguely accurate and sounds good - “proud to announce we’ve vaulted two places in the guide”, “now the highest rated institution … in north west suffolk”. The truth is that if you ignore the dumb ranks, and look at universities’ average scores over a few years they’re all pretty much the same. Wealthy universities do well, upstart institutions with no money do poorly. The rest are middling. Whisper it: there’s not much difference between them.

For all the money spent on marketing, promoting the unique aspects of the campus, the courses, the people, the buildings, the ethos, etc. Most universities in the UK teach mostly the same courses with the same content.

The problem with universities promoting themselves as unique institutions is that they do everything own their own. (because they’re unique!). Except they aren’t. They are all spending huge sums on the same things - Virtual Learning Environments, Digital Exams, Intranet platforms.

The ÂŁ1.5 Billion Solution

In IT alone, 15% savings could be made by working together. Thats up to ÂŁ250 million a year across the sector.

Universities claim they can’t do this, and must remain independent, citing competition-law concerns and autonomy. Competition Law is a not a problem. The IT service providers will lobby that it is, but this is where your letters to junior ministers come in.

And autonomy? do me a favour. Whose autonomy? “The university”. The university should have “autonomy” to choose between say Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas and Brightspace for it’s online learning platform? What you mean is that senior management and a special working group wants autonomy. They want to flex their bulging senior management muscles. But for every single person who would actually use the system - the lectures putting crap on it, and the students using it - there is no autonomy at all. They have to use the system they’re provided.

It’s yet another example of the outdated and inefficient management structure of universities costing them millions.

And universities already use collective procurement through UK Universities Purchasing Consortia (UKPC), and other regional bodies. This currently saves about ÂŁ500 million a year. Nice. but with full nationwide collective procurement, this could be tripled to about ÂŁ1.5 billion per year. Which would be even nicer.

A Case Study: Ethics Systems

Let’s look at a case study. Most universities in the UK use Infonetica Ethics RM for processing ethics applications for research with human participants. Most people who use these systems don’t know that because each university has a separate contract with Infonetica and brands their internal version with their own stupid name for it. It’s a generally slow and clunky system, but that’s common for IT in the education sector. As anyone who has ever applied for ethical approval on this system is only too well aware, it takes hours to figure out what do to and how to complete the online forms in a way that won’t result in multiple length rejections. And as anyone who has ever reviewed ethics applications submitted this way knows only too well, it takes far too long to review each problem and highlight the inconsistencies with uni policy.

This is for many reasons, usually related to the decisions originally made when the uni set up the system with Infonetica many years ago, and the complete lack of useful documentation. Fixing systems with bad UI and bad documentation is slow and expensive. So unis don’t do it. But if the same system is used across more than a 100 universities, each uni’s contribution to fixing the problem is now only 1% of the time and cost. It’s practically free.

Shared Teaching Materials

But I would go further than that. Above I noted that most university courses are the same. Does it matter where you study psychology, or mechanical engineering or history? Especially where there is an oversight body (eg the BPS for psychology), there are great similarities, let’s put it that way. so it’s perplexing why individual lecturers spend so many hundreds of hours duplicating the efforts of hundreds of other lecturers replicating similar teaching materials (slides, videos, handouts, worksheets) and assessments (exams, essays, mcqs etc). Modify a shared core, people. Saves time and money.

With all these savings, even in the current crisis in UK HE, there would have been no need for compulsory redundancies. None at all.

It’s too late to save me. But I’d like to think that lessons could be learned. Go out there and make this happen, people!