Month: May 2025

Dundee is famous as the city of “jute, jame and journalism” but may have achieved notoriety after the near insolvency of its university and the very public bail out from public funds.  The Beano and Dandy were popular comics produced here but a leadership that seemed to act like Lord Snooty and his Pals ended up looking more like Desperate Dan and Roger the Dodger.  What is interesting is that Interim Vice Chancellor Professor Shane O’Neill is on the record as saying, “Reliance on international tuition fees is the main reason for Dundee’s financial crisis. It devastated our income.”

Perhaps that makes it unsurprising that pathway provider Oxford International Education Group appears to have taken the decision to excise details of the performance of its operation at the university in the accounts for the year to August 2024.  Parent company Sparrowhawk 2 Limited, which is a subsidiary of German private equity investor THI Holdings GmbH, is only too pleased to tell us that new partners, Edinburgh Napier University and University of Kent, launched in 2023/24 are “generating significant revenues”.  But then you dig a little deeper and you find that the reticence about performance of individual operations goes even deeper.

The 2023/24 annual accounts for embedded University Partnerships – Bradford International College, Greenwich International College, Bangor International College, Kent International College and Edinburgh Napier – have been similarly obfuscated. I have no doubt it is allowable but it’s really not very helpful and when people hide things they used to share it makes one wonder why.  The one remaining example of transparency – De Montfort University (LIPC) may give us a clue about the reasons.

Basically, the graph showing turnover suggests that 2022/23 saw an extraordinary surge in terms of recruitment with a very sharp correction then happening in 2023/24.  Any defender of the higher education sector surely has to query whether De Montfort University, the ultimate beneficiary of progressing students, was aware of and/or supportive of this growth? Even more importantly, did they build future expectations of similar numbers of progressing students into their financial forecasts?    

Source: LIPC Accounts

Meanwhile, at Dundee, there is a way of approximating what might have happened. I always hold any leads or comments confidentially but I am grateful to colleagues who raised the possibility.  It makes for a revealing picture. 

The March 2024 QAA Review Report of ICD (International College Dundee) tells us that enrollment rose gradually from 41 in 2017/18 to 152 in 2021/22.  Numbers then more than doubled to 318 in 2022/23.  At the time of the review the number enrolled was 70.  It seems likely that most, if not all, of the enrollment for the year was complete.

If that is correct, ICD was down around 150 students year on year.  This would have meant that a similar number were gone from the pipeline to the university and that ICD’s operating profit/loss may have been similar to 2019 (a loss of £281k).  I would, of course, be happy to be corrected on any of this by an authoritative source prepared to share and verify definitive numbers.

Source: QAA

With so many UK universities having pathway partners it seems possible that many institutions are not paying sufficient attention to the possibility of progression numbers being met.  Commercial pathway operators are likely to be at least as gung-ho as universities about their recruitment but if institutions are blithely building those numbers into revenue forecasts there is significant risk.  It seems unlikely that this risk will decline as the Government focuses ever more intently on student visas.

NOTES

1. The City of Dundee’s motto is “Prudentia et Candore” which translates to “With thought and purity”.  Extraordinarily for a city of 148,000 people it has it has two professional football clubs Dundee United and Dundee Football Club.  United reached the final of the UEFA Cup in 1987.
2. The Beano and The Dandy are almost impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t seen them.  I can only recommend getting hold of some back copies and being appropriately delighted or appalled.
3. As noted, I would be happy to have (in confidence) a discussion with anybody able to provide definitive alternative data on any issues raised. If there is a reasonable cause for correction I will carry it as an update in this blog.  

Image by Davie Bicker from Pixabay

As the clamour around redundancies in the higher education sector grows it is difficult to see where financial distress starts and misleading data ends.  In January this year Patrick Jack claimed in the Times Higher that in 2023/24, “..severance payments, which do not reflect the whole of the sector, affected about 10,300 employees – up from 7,300 the year before..”.  The implication is that there were nearly 17,500 job losses over two years with more to come in 2024/25.

The problem is that, if the sector’s returns to HESA are accurate, this claim is misleading.  While it is entirely possible that individuals will have taken severance as universities restructure there may have been many new jobs recreated.  A recent LinkedIn posting by Colin Bailey of Queen Mary University of London claimed 66 job vacancies with Queen Mary’s UCU branch countering that there are 59 redundancies possible at the institution. 

Looking over the longer term it seems clear that the sector has had an extraordinarily good run of adding headcount and that this has accelerated in recent years.  Several commentators, including me, have noted that recent growth in staff numbers has been fuelled by an unsustainable bonanza in international student income.  The party had to stop sometime.

The real problem for the UK is that in the absence of central control and the evidence of university mismanagement there is no guarantee that the sector is acting strategically.  It is quite possible that the wrong jobs are being lost in the wrong disciplines in the wrong geographical locations.  That is a good reason there should be no “one size fits all” financial bailout of the sector. 

A golden decade of growth in academic staff employed

HESA data shows a decade of additional academic jobs every year since 2014/15.  The growth in numbers employed over the last five reported years (23,405) has been even faster than the growth of the five years before (18,730).  In the last two reported years alone more than 12,000 academic staff were added.  

Source: HESA

* The cognoscenti will know that “atypical” academic staff are listed separately.  It is reasonable to note that from 2021/22 to 2023/24 the number of atypical staff fell by about 400 to 62,730.

Before anyone starts howling that the growth is driven by a fragmented, gig economy of fractional posts it’s worth considering that the FTE number show the same pattern.  From 2014/15 to 2018/19 an additional 13,515 FTE were added but from 2019/20 to 2023/24 a further 17,070 were added.  From 2012/22 to 2023/24 the total growth of 12,910 in total academic staff compared to FTE growth of 9,915.  The most recent year reported showed growth of nearly 10,000 FTE on the year before.

Source: HESA

So, if there was a net loss of 10,000 FTE academic jobs in the current round of redundancies employment levels would fall to about where they were in 2021/22.  That might make some sort of sense if the employment of academics was largely fuelled by growing numbers of international students.  But any job losses being publicized aren’t just about academic staff.

Let’s not forget the professional staff

The professional staff in universities, quite properly, don’t want to be overlooked so they must also be taken into the overall count.  Regrettably the numbers are harder to get at.  It is a well recorded disgrace that many universities took the opportunity to shield the growth in their non-academic staff numbers from HESA records at the first possible opportunity. 

The last full set in the HESA data is 2018/19 when 166 institutions recorded the detail of non-academic headcount with 222,885 staff.  By 2023/24 only 125 showed employment of non-academic staff.  The lack of transparency is very unhelpful in gaining public understanding or trust.

Evidence from individual institutions suggests that non-academic staff employment growth has at least kept pace with academic staff growth and in some cases has exceeded it.  But if we apply the same percentage growth rate as in academic staff from 2018/19 it is plausible that non-academic numbers grew by 13.8% from 222,885 to 253,643 by 2023/24.

Adding the estimated non-academic employment to the known academic numbers suggests that total employment in the UK higher education sector stood at around 500,000.  The number employed could well have grown by over 20,000 from 2021/22 to 2023/24.  In this context a reduction of 10,000 in the overall workforce seems more like a correction than a catastrophe.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay