Your say / Education
‘The University of Bristol has embarked on a path like a death spiral’
You may not have seen anything about it, but the University of Bristol have just embarked on a process that will see hundreds of people lose their jobs.
When Cardiff Uni announced 400 redundancies, the Bristol vice-chancellor, Evelyn Welch, addressed staff saying that “we are not Cardiff but we need to be prudent”.
The plan that she has set out, however, is far from prudent and cautious. Instead, it sets the university on a path that was called a death spiral by one expert, and which will lead to a restructuring of what the university is and does.
The headline figure is that Welch wants all of the academic departments (schools) of the university to make at least a 50 per cent operating surplus.
There are two main reasons for needing such a big surplus. One is that it is the schools that bring in most of the money, in the form of student fees and research grants. The surplus is therefore needed in order to pay for the central parts of the university that don’t bring in any money.
The other reason is that the University of Bristol has taken on significant loans to pay for its new campus at Temple Quarter, next to Temple Meads station.
University of Bristol vice-chancellor Evelyn Welch in September 2024 as the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus takes shape behind her – photo: Martin Booth
Like many universities, Bristol borrowed to build. Typically, such loans have conditions attached including around requirements to run with a hefty operating surplus.
But those conditions are commercially sensitive. So whatever universities claim about transparency, in reality there is precious little of it. Staff are left in the dark.
Even so, Bristol Uni now has more options than it’s pretending to. The path that it has embarked on is like a death spiral. Its natural end point is a university that is radically different and not in a good way.
As this article about British universities in general argues, closing less profitable programmes and departments actually increases costs for more profitable programmes and departments in the medium to long term.
In Bristol’s case, a school that generates a ‘lowly’ 35 per cent surplus starts a journey of somewhat managed decline before being shut down a few years down the line.
That means that those millions of pounds that made up the 35 per cent of contributions to the central costs of the university either must be cut from the centre or, more likely, will fall on other schools.
The schools that do not look too great now will come to look bad at that stage, probably leading to new processes of managed decline.
This is what is meant by the death spiral. Chopping off your lower income generators may look like a good idea, but ends up not being so because the income that they do generate is not easy to replace.
However, the Bristol Uni death spiral is more nefarious. Because by reducing academic schools to business units, we ignore what it is that is lost on the way (apart from jobs, lots of jobs).
Specifically, the Bristol Uni surplus calculation doesn’t count many of factors that could or should be taken into account.
The University of Bristol slightly changed its logo in 2024 to remove Colston’s dolphin symbol – photo: Martin Booth
This 2019 KPMG report shows that each student on an English, law or modern languages degree costs a university about £4,400 for ‘student-related central services’, ‘corporate costs’ and ‘estate costs’.
The same cost categories for an engineering student amounted to £5,800. And for medical, dental and vet students, the amount is £6,400.
All these costs appear not to be accounted for in the Bristol surplus model, which therefore artificially inflates the surplus of some schools to the detriment of others.
Even if the model was fairer in the sense that it took more actual costs into account, it would still be deeply politically problematic.
Using Bristol’s model, two contributing factors stand out in determining the extent of the surplus.
One is the student-staff ratio and the other is the percentage of international students (because they pay so much more).
But all academic disciplines cannot be taught in lecture theatres with 200 students. And all worthy and reasonably popular academic programmes may not appeal to international students to the same extent.
That doesn’t make those programmes any less important for the university to deliver.
Universities have always needed to cross-subsidise. Particularly so since the various stages of marketising a sector that used to be mainly state-funded.
You can use the income generated from an internationally attractive and lucrative business school and law school to subsidise degrees in English or modern languages that mainly appeal to British students.
Likewise, the many students that each academic in chemistry or economics cater for makes up for the higher staff requirements in medicine.
A university the size of Bristol has a tremendous capacity for such cross-subsidy.
But this model makes that kind of cross-subsidising much less likely and more contentious. It constitutes an excessive and voluntary marketisation that will end up killing certain disciplines.
Lastly, this is all happening at a time when the so-called neo-reactionary ideologies favoured by the Trump administration and much of the right internationally are on a war path against universities.
Our new Silicone Valley overlords would surely love to see universities like Bristol pivot away from critical arts and social sciences towards disciplines of their own liking.
Let’s not help them. Let’s maintain the conditions for cross-subsidising in a multifaceted university, promoting critical thinking across as many disciplines as possible.
Let’s scrap this ridiculous uniform 50 per cent operating surplus target.
Let’s not sacrifice hundreds of colleagues in important disciplines in our attempts to meet bank loan terms and conditions.
Let’s come up with a more egalitarian way of dealing with this situation.
Let’s instead be bold and Bristolian.
This is an opinion piece by Oscar Berglund, John McTague and Laura Dickinson of Bristol UCU
In response to this opinion piece, a spokesperson for the University of Bristol said: “We have no planned programme of compulsory or voluntary job cuts as seen at universities elsewhere in the country. However, given the financial challenges facing the higher education sector, we do need to drive further efficiencies in our core practices. As part of a prudent and measured approach to managing our finances, we are continuing to work with our schools to ensure that they are operating in the most effective way.”
Main photo: Martin Booth
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