“Cutting Revenue” is Not the Way to Solve Financial Pressures
This post looks at the negative impact the massive cuts to staff could have on the University’s income-generation activity.
In the past months, the Joint Union Finances Working Group has argued Edinburgh management is manufacturing a crisis. Some have claimed that is mistaken—they point to the wider pressures in the sector to say, this is an objective financial fact, not a figment of imagination. We should be clear: when we write that they are “manufacturing a crisis”, our emphasis is just as much on the crisis as the manufacturing. We agree Edinburgh has financial pressures, but they are not at crisis levels, as our earlier analysis of the University’s finances has made clear. Further, the diagnosis Edinburgh management are providing is a mistaken construct: they are blaming staff costs and “devolution” of service provision at school and unit level, rather than appreciating the enormous cost of capital expenditure and ongoing maintenance for the flurry of prestige projects.
When we say they are manufacturing a crisis, we mean it in another way, too: the approach taken by management is threatening to make things worse. Firstly, the most recent published accounts of the University show that it made a surplus. The “shortfall” currently being discussed is a projected shortfall in future years. Of course, good financial planning is essential. But we see little evidence of such careful planning, without which the financial situation of the university could become more serious than it needs to be. Instead, we see management implementing unduly drastic cuts in an arbitrarily short time frame, which will worsen any financial challenges. At the most recent meeting of the University Court, apparently many members raised similar concerns, and neither the £140m in cuts nor their 18-month time frame was agreed.
Such damage is already happening in some ways. Since the “budget resilience” measures were imposed in July, some schools have restricted small internal grants and funding for seminar series. Others have cut funding for lab operating expenses, and conference attendance. These are essential pathways to Edinburgh academics building research expertise and networks that, subsequently, win major research funding applications. Professional services staff who leave are not being replaced, leading to increased workloads for fewer people, which will inevitably mean more resignations when working conditions become untenable.
There are signs that the negative effects of the budget cuts already in place for next year will provoke an even more drastic institutional crisis.
There are signs Colleges are trying to close down PGT programmes, especially ones deemed small. But, what counts as small? Ten students? Five? Why this number and not another? How will closing down a programme with very little marginal cost actually save the University money? Simply from a financial perspective, although this shouldn’t be the only consideration, closing courses without careful thought and planning will, paradoxically, be detrimental to the financial state of the University. Closing courses that cover their marginal costs and make a contribution towards covering overheads will heap the allocation of the fixed costs of the university onto existing programmes, driving the financial position of the university downwards. From a non-financial perspective, such measures will undermine our educational mission, especially if those programmes deemed “small” are in historically marginalised topics, or represent significant expertise among our staff body.
There are signs that Colleges are trying to shut down part-time degrees, including MSc programmes. The same financial concerns as for the closure of “small” programmes are at play here. Many part-time degree programmes are actually better conceived as not so much different programmes, but different paces for the same programme. Having a part-time version of a full-time degree costs very little, meaning each student studying on them makes a net-positive for University income. Further, these part-time degrees are a valuable way to include students that are otherwise too rare at Edinburgh (including mid-career, carers, and working class students). Closing part-time degrees will harm our commitments to widening participation and EDI.
Centralising professional services will undermine working efficiencies, including in IT support; teaching administration; and research funding support. We know from the disasters of previous projects, particularly People & Money, that management favours centralised services that not only diminish the ability to get things done effectively but also require unexpectedly large sums of money and staff time to actually use. From experience at other universities undertaking such centralisation projects, workloads have become too great for the centralised professional services teams, and have results such as delays in return of student marks and feedback, decreased NSS satisfaction scores, and increased dissatisfaction from students overall. Much of the work traditionally undertaken in teaching offices was pushed onto academic teaching staff. In some cases, including People & Money, mitigating the effects of such projects has meant hiring large numbers of additional staff.
A bias against “small” programmes and courses will increase staff-student ratios, and adding to the culture of over-work will further limit staff time with students. Edinburgh students and staff want more time with each other: more time to prep lectures, to meet with students and read their work, and to work in small groups. The effort to increase the number of students per staff member will actually undermine learning and further alienate staff.
The impact of budget cuts on staff morale across the university cannot be emphasised enough. If there are problems on the horizon, this is a time to be increasing efforts to support the long-term goals and the amazing culture of Edinburgh, rather than implementing ill-conceived budget cuts which risk destroying it.
Many aspects of the emerging response from management are driven by bad measurement, unfit for purpose. Consider a number of examples.
There is a perverse focus on “staff-student ratios,” with programmes and departments that have very many students per staff member somehow considered a model for others to emulate. This is a problem for a number of reasons. Having more students per teacher can never be a positive for learning; increasing how many students each academic teaches will only undermine learning and harm Edinburgh’s standing in league tables (which use these as a key variable). Moreover, anyone involved in school-level negotiations on this topic will know that Edinburgh is notoriously bad at accurately counting staff-student ratios. For instance, in a joint degree, do students count for each department? Do they count at 50%? What if dissertations are marked by one department while lectures are run by another?
Very closely related to this is the use of enrolment data. As discussed above, there are signs Colleges are trying to close programmes with small enrollment. In part, this has happened through linking cost cutting with the continuing “Portfolio Review” exercise, through which schools are supposed to assess their course and programme offerings. While such assessment may be an appropriate practice in general, it is now being used to cut budgets. In CAHSS, it was recognised that using enrollment data was, at best, a partial measurement, likely to mislead and often miscalculated. But rather than providing better data, enrollment data has emerged as the key metric for whether programmes should stay or be closed. This means small courses and degrees are under fire despite the money they generate, the students they attract, and the learning they impart. For example, a programme that enrols a small number of students may have courses that are popular with significant numbers of students in other programmes.
There seems to be very little consideration given to the surplus generated by programmes. While education should not be reduced to “profit”, it is a sad reality that such measures are relevant, especially in the current moment, when public funding for higher education has been so reduced. Yet, very little attention is being given to promoting “profitable” programmes and using that to cross-subsidise others. We have seen very little evidence such calculations are even being attempted; likewise, management seems to have nothing to say about boosting income (including from U.S. students who may have a reason to study outside their country at this moment). To return to a point from above: just because a programme is small or part-time does not mean it is not valuable and viable.
Finally, rather than a focus on simplifying and reducing administrative work, which has massively increased in recent years, we have a tremendously concerning turn to comparative “benchmarking” related to claims about “duplication” of support services across different parts of the institution, sometimes based on data generated by NousCubane (formerly known as Uniforum). In addition, management has refused to rule out outsourcing the work of professional services, to which unions are strongly opposed. We know from many examples that this does not result in savings, but may cost more and result in poorer services, provided by staff with little commitment to the institution.
These reforms threaten teaching -- with bigger classes and less responsiveness -- and therefore undermine student satisfaction, including in the NSS. These reforms also threaten research productivity and therefore undermine Edinburgh’s REF results. Whether we like it or not, these league tables and ranking exercises are crucial to student recruitment, REF success, and other influences on revenue.
There are, of course, many other reasons to be concerned: intellectual and ethical, as well as with regard to working and learning conditions. These are worryingly outside the concerns of management today.
What they do claim to be concerned about is income and expenditure. Yet, the evidence suggests Edinburgh’s management is going to be cutting revenue, likely to put us in an even worse position in a year’s time. You might even say they are manufacturing a real crisis through their ill-considered “slash and burn” budget cuts.
Joint Unions Finance Working Group
