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  • SIU Trains Safety Officers to Respond to Mental Health Crises

    SIU Trains Safety Officers to Respond to Mental Health Crises

    Southern Illinois University in Carbondale is investing in a new dedicated team of first responders to provide care for students experiencing mental health challenges.

    A $290,000 grant from the Illinois Board of Higher Education will fund training and support for a crisis response team to engage students during emergency calls. Student Health Services at SIU developed a response model based on best practices that ensures students, particularly those from vulnerable populations, receive immediate support and direct connection to appropriate treatment.

    The grant is designed to expand and enhance the existing services mandated by the state’s 2020 Mental Health Early Action on Campus Act, which requires two- and four-year colleges to implement various preventative measures and clinical care services for student mental health, including increasing awareness of support services, creating partnerships for mental health services and implementing peer-support networks.

    SIU leaders hope the new model, CAPS Plus, will both improve safety for students in critical moments and promote retention and success for students by connecting them with relevant support resources for ongoing care.

    What’s the need: Rates of anxiety and depression, as self-reported by students, have grown over the past five years, with about one-third reporting moderate or severe anxiety or depression symptoms, according to the 2024 Healthy Minds study.

    While a large number of college students experience poor mental health or have struggled with mental health challenges, connecting students with relevant resources when they need them remains an obstacle to timely care.

    About one-third of college students say they don’t know where to seek help on campus if they or a friend are experiencing a mental health crisis, according to a spring 2023 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse. Roughly one in five students said they have not received services for mental or emotional health because they prefer to deal with issues on their own or with support from friends and family, according to the 2023 Healthy Minds survey.

    SIU’s Department of Public Safety responded to almost 50 mental health-related incidents in the past year. Student focus groups revealed that participants were aware of the ways encounters with law enforcement have escalated, sometimes resulting in death for the person in crisis. Similarly, past research shows that police involvement can exacerbate mental health challenges, and individuals from marginalized communities are less likely to trust the police.

    “We recognize that those in crisis may benefit from intervention services not specifically provided by a law enforcement agency,” said Benjamin Newman, SIU’s director of public safety and chief of police, in an April press release.

    A 2022 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed found that about one-third of all respondents had “a great deal” of trust in campus safety officers, but only 19 percent of students who had negative interactions with police growing up said the same. Almost half (46 percent) of respondents said they felt safer with police on campus, but Black and Hispanic students were less likely to say they felt this way.

    Over 38 percent of survey respondents also said they want colleges and universities to expand mental health supports to improve safety and security on campus, the most popular response.

    Put in practice: The university’s Department of Public Safety and the Counseling and Psychological Services office created a collaborative response team to engage students who may need mental health support. Now, if an officer encounters a community member in crisis, a mental health professional is contacted to assist, Newman said.

    The collaborative mental health response teams first started in February. The group includes the Department of Public Safety, Counseling and Psychological Services, clinicians, campus administrators, faculty members and external partners, including local emergency room staff.

    Team members completed critical incident response and crisis intervention training, in which they learned to identify symptoms of mental illnesses, developmental disabilities, trauma, dementia and delirium as well as de-escalation techniques, intervention steps and transition to treatment services.

    Additionally, dispatchers receive training on how to screen and de-escalate calls that could involve mental health concerns so they can effectively alert the crisis team.

    In addition to using the grant funding, the university also implemented a mental health and wellness fee for the upcoming academic year to support continued access to services.

    If your student success program has a unique feature or twist, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.

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  • Gates Foundation to Spend $200B Before Closing in 2045

    Gates Foundation to Spend $200B Before Closing in 2045

    Bill Gates is planning to close his philanthropic foundation in 2045, but not before he ramps up spending on health research and other humanitarian efforts.   

    STAT News reported Thursday that the Gates Foundation, which launched in 2000, will spend $200 billion over the next two decades—double the $100 billion it spent on global health, development, gender equity and other work during its first 25 years. The announcement comes amid President Trump’s directives to cut billions of dollars in federal research funding to universities, effectively shutter the United States Agency for International Development and withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization. 

    In an interview with The New York Times, Gates said some of those decisions stunned him and predicted that unless there’s a big reversal of the Trump administration’s policies, “we’ll probably go from 5 million to 6 million” child deaths a year instead of earlier projection that child deaths would decrease by one million. 

    “The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children,” he said, referring to the unelected billionaire bureaucrat Elon Musk, who runs the Department of Government of Efficiency, which ordered the decimation of USAID. “He put it in the wood chipper because he didn’t go to a party that weekend.”

    Over the next 20 years, the Gates Foundation will focus its resources on achieving three goals: that “no mom, child or baby dies of a preventable cause”; that “the next generation grows up in a world without deadly infectious diseases”; and that “hundreds of millions of people break free from poverty, putting more countries on a path to prosperity.”

    “There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people. That is why I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned,” Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “I will give away virtually all my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world.”

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  • Choice, culture and commitment in learning, part two

    Choice, culture and commitment in learning, part two

    As I explored in part 1, the implications of Michael Godsey’s article for higher education are profound, particularly in the way it highlights disparities in student motivation, engagement and academic culture between different types of institutions.

    His observations about the buy-in effect at private K-12 schools—where students and their families actively choose and invest in the educational experience—find a parallel in higher education, where the most selective colleges tend to foster stronger academic engagement, often by self-selecting for motivation as much as talent.

    Selective Colleges and the Culture of Academic Commitment

    Just as Godsey observes that students at private schools like his daughter’s exhibit greater enthusiasm and self-discipline, students at elite colleges and universities often display a higher level of academic investment. This is not necessarily because they are inherently more talented but because they have been filtered through a selection process that prioritizes motivation, work ethic and demonstrated academic dedication.

    • Students at these institutions expect rigorous coursework and embrace the challenge rather than resisting it.
    • Faculty are less preoccupied with maintaining order and more focused on deep intellectual engagement because the students themselves uphold a culture of academic seriousness.
    • The peer effect reinforces engagement—when all students around you are driven, it’s harder to disengage without standing out.

    This dynamic is similar to tracking in K-12 schools, where students deemed more academically capable are placed in advanced or honors programs, shielding them from the distractions of less engaged peers. The difference is that in higher education, this sorting happens through admissions rather than within schools.

    The Motivation Gap Across Different Types of Colleges

    At broad-access institutions, such as regional public universities or community colleges, faculty often encounter a wide spectrum of student engagement—some highly dedicated, others struggling with external obligations and some with little intrinsic motivation for academic work. This presents a challenge similar to what Godsey describes in public high schools:

    • Many students don’t see themselves as having bought in to the academic experience. They may be there out of necessity (to qualify for a better job or a chance to participate in athletics) rather than a deep commitment to intellectual growth.
    • External distractions—jobs, family responsibilities, financial pressures—compete with academic priorities, making it harder to sustain focus and engagement.
    • A culture of disengagement can take hold, just as in the public school classrooms Godsey describes, making it difficult for even motivated students to thrive.

    Should Higher Education Track Students More Explicitly?

    One implicit takeaway from Godsey’s argument is that students benefit when they are surrounded by peers who share their academic enthusiasm. This raises a controversial but important question for higher education: Should colleges do more to track students into different learning environments based on motivation and engagement, rather than simply ability?

    In some ways, this already happens:

    • Honors programs at public universities function as internal selective institutions, grouping together highly motivated students and giving them smaller, discussion-driven courses with top faculty.
    • Gated entry into high-demand majors is widespread, often driven to enhance a particular college’s rankings.
    • Specialized cohorts and living-learning communities create subgroups of engaged students who reinforce each other’s academic commitment.
    • Highly structured programs (such as those in STEM and pre-professional tracks) implicitly filter for motivation by their demanding course sequences.

    Yet, tracking within higher education is far less explicit than in K-12 schools. At many institutions, faculty find themselves teaching classes with highly diverse levels of motivation, which can lead to tensions:

    • Should professors lower expectations to accommodate less prepared or less motivated students?
    • Should they hold firm on rigor and risk alienating or failing a significant portion of their class?
    • How can institutions better cultivate a culture of academic commitment, particularly in settings where students do not automatically arrive with strong buy-in?

    Bridging the Motivation Gap in Higher Education

    Rather than creating rigid tracking systems that could exacerbate educational inequalities, colleges need to find ways to embed buy-in within all types of institutions. Possible strategies include:

    • Creating more cohort-based learning models: Small, high-impact learning communities, similar to honors programs but available to all students, can cultivate shared academic identity and accountability.
    • Rethinking advising and orientation: Encouraging intentional major selection and career goal setting early on can help students see education as a personal investment rather than an obligation.
    • Using pedagogical strategies that reinforce engagement: Active learning, project-based work and immersive real-world applications can encourage students to see their studies as meaningful.
    • Reinforcing faculty-student relationships: At elite institutions, students benefit from close faculty mentorship; replicating this at other colleges through structured faculty-student interactions could increase motivation and accountability.

    The Best Schools Don’t Just Teach—They Create a Culture of Learning

    At first glance, the purpose of education seems straightforward: Schools exist to teach students knowledge and skills. But the most effective institutions do far more than simply deliver content. The best schools create an intellectual culture—a shared commitment to curiosity, critical thinking and lifelong learning.

    This distinction is especially relevant in higher education, where student engagement, institutional culture and faculty mentorship shape not just what students learn, but how they learn and apply knowledge beyond the classroom.

    The Difference Between Teaching and Cultivating a Learning Culture

    This distinction is critical. If universities merely teach, students may approach their studies passively, checking off degree requirements with minimal engagement. But when institutions create a vibrant learning culture, students take ownership of their education. They become active participants in discussions, independent researchers and engaged citizens who seek knowledge not just for grades, but for its intrinsic value.

    How a Learning Culture Manifests in Higher Education

    A learning culture is shaped by many factors, including institutional values, faculty engagement, student expectations and extracurricular opportunities. The best colleges and universities foster this culture in several ways:

    1. High-impact educational practices: Research has shown that certain experiences—such as undergraduate research, study abroad, service learning and collaborative projects—dramatically enhance student learning. Institutions that embed these practices into coursework ensure that students don’t just passively absorb information but engage with real-world applications of knowledge. For example:
      1. Portland State University incorporates service learning into its capstone courses, requiring students to work on community-based projects.
      2. CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College integrates research experiences into its curriculum, ensuring students engage in inquiry-driven learning from their first year.
    2. Faculty as mentors, not just lecturers: At institutions with strong learning cultures, faculty members do more than deliver lectures—they mentor students, involve them in research and challenge them to think critically. Close faculty-student relationships create opportunities for intellectual exchange outside the classroom. Some universities institutionalize this by:
      1. Encouraging faculty-student lunches or informal discussion groups (e.g., the University of Michigan’s M-PACT mentoring program).
      2. Embedding research experiences in first-year courses (e.g., the University of Texas at Austin’s Freshman Research Initiative).
    3. Intellectual curiosity beyond the classroom: The best colleges cultivate a campuswide intellectual atmosphere. This happens through:
      1. Public lectures, symposia and visiting scholar programs that expose students to ideas beyond their coursework.
      2. Student-driven initiatives like debate societies, interdisciplinary discussion groups and maker spaces.
      3. Engagement with the arts and humanities, ensuring that even students in technical fields experience creative and philosophical inquiry.
    4. Challenging, not just accommodating, students. Many institutions focus heavily on student retention and satisfaction, sometimes at the cost of intellectual rigor. A true culture of learning, however, challenges students. The best universities set high academic expectations while providing the support needed to meet them. Examples include:
      1. Honors programs and cohort-based learning communities that create rigorous academic environments within broader universities.
      2. Writing-intensive courses across all disciplines, reinforcing analytical skills that extend beyond students’ majors.
      3. Project-based and interdisciplinary coursework that requires synthesis of ideas rather than rote memorization.

    Implications for Colleges and Universities

    If higher education institutions want to cultivate a true learning culture, it must move beyond simply delivering content and reimagine how it engages students. Some key implications include:

    • Rethinking how we measure success: Universities often emphasize graduation rates, job placement and standardized learning outcomes. While these metrics are important, they do not necessarily reflect a thriving intellectual culture. Institutions should also assess engagement: Are students participating in meaningful discussions? Are they involved in research? Are they developing the habits of lifelong learners?
    • Ensuring high-impact practices are accessible to all students: Many transformative experiences—such as study abroad and research opportunities—are disproportionately available to students at elite institutions. Public universities and community colleges must find ways to embed these experiences into the curriculum, making them accessible to part-time, commuter and first-generation students.
    • Prioritizing faculty-student interaction: Universities must incentivize mentorship by valuing faculty engagement with students in promotion and tenure decisions. Large lecture-based institutions should integrate more small-group learning experiences to facilitate faculty-student connections.
    • Encouraging intellectual risk-taking: A culture of learning is not about teaching students to parrot back information but about encouraging them to take intellectual risks. This means fostering open debate, embracing interdisciplinary inquiry and encouraging creative problem-solving.
    • Creating a campus climate that values inquiry: Universities must ask themselves: Do students feel that intellectual curiosity is encouraged? Are there informal spaces for discussion and debate? Are students challenged to think critically about complex issues rather than being shielded from uncomfortable ideas?

    The University as a Catalyst for Lifelong Learning

    A true learning culture does not end at graduation. The best colleges and universities equip students with the intellectual tools to continue learning throughout their lives. This means fostering habits of critical inquiry, a passion for ideas and the ability to adapt to new knowledge.

    The best schools, like the most impactful professors, don’t just teach; they inspire curiosity, cultivate resilience and shape the way students engage with the world. If higher education is to fulfill its democratic and intellectual promise, it must embrace this mission—not just to produce degree holders, but to create lifelong learners.

    Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and the author, most recently, of The Learning-Centered University: Making College a More Developmental, Experiential and Equitable Experience.

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  • Understanding the Impact of Workplace Incivility in Higher Education – Faculty Focus

    Understanding the Impact of Workplace Incivility in Higher Education – Faculty Focus

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  • Understanding the Impact of Workplace Incivility in Higher Education – Faculty Focus

    Understanding the Impact of Workplace Incivility in Higher Education – Faculty Focus

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  • Labour is learning the wrong lessons from Reform on immigration

    Labour is learning the wrong lessons from Reform on immigration

    The working classes are an easy foil for the dreams of conservative politicians. They are the salt of the earth, proper people who do real stuff, unlike the woke metropolitan elite who sit around and think things but are removed from the real world.

    As Joel Budd points out in his new book Underdogs The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class, they are to the conservative imagination “sensible truth-tellers and bulwarks against left-wing nonsense.” Even more so they are the consensus position on immigration “The mass immigration that the elite has tolerated is crushing their wages, burdening the public services they rely on and filling their neighbourhood with strangers.” As Budd also points out this, well, isn’t true. In 2024 they voted for Starmer’s Labour Party who campaigned on public finances, NHS, and inflation.

    New Labour old problems

    It is with this in mind that Labour’s response to Reform’s election performance is as wrong as it is entirely predictable. Its wrongness could have significant consequences for universities.

    Let’s start with the big results. In May’s local elections in England Reform gained 677 councillors,ten councils, two mayors, and an MP. The votes are spread across the country but as John Curtice points out for the BBC there is an education faultline.

    Reform did best in places that most overwhelmingly voted for Brexit. University graduates overwhelmingly did not vote for Brexit. Reform received less than 20 per cent of the vote in wards where more than two in five people have a degree compared to 43 per cent in wards where over half of adults have few qualifications. As Curtice states

    In summary, Reform did best in what has sometimes been characterised in the wake of the Brexit referendum as ‘left-behind’ Britain – places that have profited less from globalisation and university expansion and where a more conservative outlook on immigration is more common.

    The policy solution alighted on by outriders in the Labour Party has so far been to say that Reform has done well therefore Labour should do things that appeal to the kind of people that vote for Reform. Or, at least, the kind of things Labour assumes appeal to the people that vote for Reform. And one of the key assumptions is that getting immigration down, whoever those immigrants might be, including students, is necessary for their electoral survival.

    Blue Labour redux

    University of Oxford graduate, and Blue Labour standard bearer, Jonathan Hinder MP has said he would not be “that disappointed” if universities went bust because of reducing international student immigration. Presumably he does not mean his own alma mater. Jo White, of the Red Wall Caucus, has urged Labour to “take a leaf out of President Trump’s book” when it comes to immigration. The end of the Labour Party which purports to be closer to its working class roots is moving rapidly and decisively against immigration. Tightening restrictions on graduates, and by extension making the UK a less attractive place to study, has been reported as an idea winning favour at the Home Office.

    The issue with the general public is that it is complicated. On its own, reducing student immigration will not win Labour a single vote in Runcorn in Helsby where Reform most recently won an MP. For a start Runcorn does not have a university so it will certainly not address immigration issues brought up during the election. Runcorn does however have several organisations that benefit from a vibrant university sector. SME net-zero collaboration with Lancaster. INEOS which benefits from the proximity of a university workforce and industrial collaborations. And Riverside College, amongst other examples, as a franchise partner of the University of Staffordshire.

    It is also worth making entirely clear that people in Runcorn also go to university. It’s a particular fault of both an understanding of class and an understanding of universities that this conflation is often made.

    Immigration, immigration, immigration

    If reducing student immigration will not make a material difference perhaps it will signal a vibes shift that will bring places like Runcorn on side. Again, here is where the working class will let you down. Analysis of the British Election Study collated by Joel Budd demonstrates that “Young white working-class people are not as liberal as young white middle-class people. But when it comes to immigration and race, they resemble them more closely than they resemble old white working-class people.” Again, there is just not a long term winning strategy in discouraging student and graduate migration.

    For universities this might be comforting but it isn’t the point.

    The extent to which anyone is willing to defend student immigration is the question of the extent to which they are willing to defend the value of universities. The value of universities is felt in exports and jobs but it is most directly felt on the extent to which the effects of a university make a place feel better. The thing that Boris Johnson, or at least his advisors, understood that higher education consistently has not is that people see politics through their places. Crime. Clean high streets. Local shops. Good jobs. Green spaces. Feeling safe to go out at night. And the myriad of tangible things that make up a place.

    In policy terms the absolute antithesis of levelling up are reforms which will depress international student numbers. The last thing Runcorn needs is a poorer Liverpool and weaker universities. The challenge for universities is to tilt the scale toward being popular not just being valuable. So popular as to make decisions on cutting student immigration culturally and electorally harder not just economically wrongheaded.

    The question then is how can universities do things in places that feel like they are doing good as well as actually doing good.

    A day like today is not for soundbites

    A key question is how infrastructure can be use toward a broad and good civic end. For example, of all of the things that the University of Liverpool did during Covid (of which there were many I have direct experience of, having worked there), the one that looms largest in my memory is when it gave up its car parks for NHS staff. Not the vaccines it helped develop or the PPE it manufactured but a low cost, high kindness gesture that resonated with people at the time. The other part of this is how largely universities loom in local communities. The extent to which their infrastructure, offices, shops, cafes, and other buildings and amenities are dispersed across the towns, cities, and localities so their presence has a resonance with the lives of people from day to day. People will often be aware of a university where it precedes the word hospital. There are opportunities for other collaborative infrastructures.

    Universities tend to be pretty good at turning their research into lectures, experiments, and days out for young people in an education setting. They are less good at making their research experiential for adults. Light Years by the University of Durham (full disclosure: I volunteer in supporting this work) has taken research to places people actually gather, places of worship, highstreets, and places of local interest across Durham county, as opposed to just the city.

    And it’s harder to articulate or even work out, but the extent to which local people feel universities are on their side matters. The cultural closeness universities build to their populations is not always about what they do but whether local people feeling it’s “their” or “the” university. There is no magic bullet for this beyond the slow grind of knowing a local place and acting with it.

    The political vibes risk overtaking a political reality. The key to Labour winning back its voters is to make tangible differences in the places they live. The economic headroom for them to do that runs through higher education institutions and their success. The permission to do so depends on people feeling like universities are a thing worth saving even with difficult political trades offs.

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  • What the latest HESA data tells us about university finances

    What the latest HESA data tells us about university finances

    The headlines from the 2023-24 annual financial returns were already pretty well known back in January.

    Even if you didn’t see Wonkhe’s analysis at the time (or the very similar Telegraph analysis in early May), you’d have been well aware that things have not been looking great for the UK’s universities and other higher education providers for a while now, and that a disquieting number of these are running deficits and/or making swingeing cuts.

    What the release of the full HESA Finance open data allows us to do is to peer even deeper into what was going on last academic year, and start making sense of the way in which providers are responding to these ongoing and worsening pressures. In particular, I want to focus in on expenditure in this analysis – it has become more expensive to do just about everything in higher education, and although the point around the inadequacy of fee and research income has been well and frequently made there has been less focus on just how much more money it costs to do anything.

    Not all universities

    The analysis is necessarily incomplete. The May release deals with providers who have a conventional (for higher education) financial year – one that matches the traditional academic year and runs through to the end of August. As the sector has become more diverse the variety of financial years in operation have grown. Traditional large universities have stayed with the status quo – but the variation means that we can’t talk about the entire sector in the same way as we used to, and you should bear this in mind when looking at aggregate 2023-24 data.

    A large number of providers did not manage to make a submission on time. Delays in getting auditor sign off (either because there was an audit capacity problem due to large numbers of local authorities having complex financial problems, or because universities themselves were having said complex financial problems) mean that we are down 18 sets of accounts. A glance down the list shows a few names known to be struggling (including one that has closed and one that has very publicly received a state bailout).

    So full data for the Dartington Hall Trust, PHBS-UK, Coventry University, Leeds Trinity University, Middlesex University, Spurgeon’s College, the University of West London, The University of Kent, University of Sussex, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, The Salvation Army, The London School of Jewish Studies, Plymouth Marjon University, the British Academy of Jewellery Limited, Multiverse Group Limited, the London School of Architecture, The Engineering and Design Institute London (TEDI) and the University of Dundee will be following some time in autumn 2025.

    Bad and basic

    HESA’s Key Financial Indicators (KFIs) are familiar and well-documented, and would usually be the first place you would go to get a sense of the overall financial health of a particular university.

    I’m a fan of net liquidity days (a measure showing the number of days a university could run for in the absence of any further income). Anything below a month (31 days) makes me sit up and take notice – when you exclude the pension adjustment (basically money that a university never had and would never need to find – it’s an actuarial nicety linked to to the unique way USS is configured) there’s 10 large-ish universities in that boat including some fairly well known names.

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    Just choose your indicator of interest in the KFI box and mouse over a mark in the chart to see a time series for the provider of your choice. You can find a provider using the highlighter – and if you want to look at an earlier year on the top chart there’s a filter to let you do that. I’ve filtered out some smaller providers by default as the KFIs are less applicable there, but you can add them back in using the “group” filter.

    I’d also recommend a look at external borrowing as a percentage of total (annual) income – there are some providers in the sector that are very highly leveraged who would both struggle to borrow additional funds at a reasonable rate and are likely to have substantial repayments and stringent covenants that severely constrain the strategic choices they can make.

    Balance board

    This next chart lets you see the fundamentals of your university’s balance sheet – with a ranking by overall surplus and deficit at the top. There are 29 largeish providers who reported a deficit (excluding the pension adjustments again) in 2023-24, with the majority being the kind of smaller modern providers that train large parts of our public sector workforce. These are the kind of universities who are unlikely to have substantial initial income beyond tuition fees, but will still have a significant cost base to sustain (usually staffing costs and the wider estates and overheads that make the university work).

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    This one works in a pretty similar way to the chart above – mousing over a provider mark on the main surplus/deficit ranking lets you see a simplified balance sheet. The colours show the headline categories, but these are split into more useful indications of what income or expenditure relates to. Again, by default and for ease of reading I have filtered out smaller providers but you could add them in using the “group” filter. For definitions of the terms used HESA has a very useful set of notes below table 1 (from which this visualisation is derived)

    There’s very little discretionary spend within the year – everything pretty much relates to actually paying staff, actually staying in regulatory compliance, and actually keeping the lights on and the campus standing: all things with a direct link to the student experience. For this reason, universities have in the past been more keen to maximise income than bear down on costs although the severity and scope of the current pressure means that cuts that students will notice are becoming a lot more common.

    What universities spend money on

    As a rule of thumb, about half of university expenditure is on staff costs (salaries, pensions, overheads). These costs rise slowly but relatively predictably over time, which is why the increase in National Insurance contributions (which we will see reflected in next year’s accounts) came as such an unwelcome surprise.

    But the real pressure so far has been on the non-staff non-finance costs – which have risen from below 40 per cent a decade ago to rapidly approach 50 per cent this year (note that these figures are not directly comparable, but the year to date includes most larger providers, and the addition of the smaller providers in the regular totals for other years will not change things much).

    What are “other costs”? Put all thoughts of shiny new buildings from your mind (as we will see these are paid for with capital, and only show up in recurrent budgets as finance costs) – once again, we are talking about the niceties of there being power, sewage, wifi, printer paper, and properly maintained buildings and equipment. The combination of inflationary increases and a rise in the cost of raw materials and logistics as a result of the absolute state of the world right now.

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    Though this first chart defaults to overall expenditure you can use it to drill down as far as individual academic cost centres using the “cc group” and “cc filters”. Select your provider of interest (“All providers” shows the entire sector up to 2022-23, “All providers (year to date)” shows everything we know about for 2023-24. It’s worth being aware that these are original not restated accounts so there may be some minor discrepancies with the balance sheets (which are based on restated numbers).

    The other thing we can learn from table 8 is how university spending is and has been split proportionally between cost centres. Among academic subject areas, one big story has been the rise in spending in business and management – these don’t map cleanly to departments on the ground, but the intention to ready your business school for the hoped-for boom in MBA provision is very apparent.

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    That’s capital

    I promised I’d get back to new builds (and large refurbishment/maintenance projects) and here we are. Spending is categorised as capital expenditure when it contributes to the development of an asset that will realise value over multiple financial years. In the world of universities spend is generally either on buildings (the estate more generally) or equipment (all the fancy kit you need to do teaching and research).

    What’s interesting about the HESA data here is that we can learn a lot about the source of this capital – it’s fairly clear for instance that the big boom in borrowing when OfS deregulated everything in 2019-20 has long since passed. “Other external sources” (which includes things like donations and bequests) are playing an increasingly big part in some university capital programmes, but the main source remains “internal funds” drawn from surpluses realised in the recurrent budget. These now constitute more than 60 per cent of all capital spend – by contrast external borrowing is less than ten per cent (a record low in the OfS era)

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    What’s next?

    As my colleague Debbie McVitty has already outlined on the site, the Office for Students chose the same day to publish their own analysis of this crop of financial statements plus an interim update giving a clearer picture of the current year alongside projections for the next few.

    Rather than sharing any real attempt to understand what is going on around the campuses of England, the OfS generally uses these occasions to complain that actors within a complex and competitive market are unable to spontaneously generate a plausible aggregate recruitment prediction. It’s almost as if everyone believes that the expansion plans they have very carefully made using the best available data and committed money to will actually work.

    The pattern with these tends to be that next year (the one people know most about) will be terrible, but future years will gradually improve as awesome plans (see above) start to pay off. And this iteration, even with the extra in year data which contributes to a particularly bad 2025-26 picture, is no exception to this.

    While the HESA data allows for an analysis of individual provider circumstances, the release from OfS covers large groups of providers – mixing in both successful and struggling versions of a “large research intensive” or “medium” provider in a generally unhelpful way.

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    To be clear, the regulator understands that different providers (though outwardly similar) may have different financial pressures. It just doesn’t want to talk in public about which problems are where, and how it intends to help.

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  • Higher education postcard: Harvard University

    Higher education postcard: Harvard University

    Greetings from Cambridge! No, not that one.

    This is Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University. Harvard is one of the world’s great universities; it’s the oldest university in the United States of America; and it is currently the target of attempted coercion by the executive of the USA. There’s quite a story to tell!

    April showers bring May flowers

    In the 1630s, the northeast of what would become the USA was a series of colonies from Britain: parties of settlers had landed, established small towns, fought and traded with the people who were already there (this was no terra incognita), and either died out or survived. The colonies were not independent states: they were British, and ultimately ruled from Britain. But local government was needed, and in the case of the Massachusetts Bay colony this was via the charter obtained by the Massachusetts Bay Company.

    The General Court of Massachusetts was the local government, and in 1636 it allocated £400 to establish a college to be located in Newetowne. In 1638, Newetowne was renamed Cambridge; this was coincident with a bequest by John Harvard, a graduate of the University of Cambridge in England, who left the college half of his estate, and his library of 400 books.

    John Harvard was born in Southwark in 1607; he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and gained a BA in 1632, and an MA in 1635. He moved to the Massachusetts colony in 1637 and was a puritan preacher, he died in 1638. The value of his estate was £1700, worth about 300,000 today. And the college got half of that. Not a huge amount, but enough to get the college going; and it was named for him in commemoration.

    Here’s two fun facts: the statue of Harvard at Harvard says on its plinth that he was the founder. Not true. Also, it isn’t an image of Harvard, but of an 1884 student who was descended from an early president of the university.

    The first students graduated in 1642. In 1650 the college was granted a charter – issued by the General Court, not the British monarch, for by 1650 Britain was temporarily a commonwealth not a monarchy. The charter created the Harvard Corporation, being the president and the fellows of Harvard College; and it is this corporation which continues to this day.

    Harvard College continued to grow and develop, as successful colleges do. Its curriculum was modelled on the Cambridge liberal arts approach; its theology was Puritan. It enrolled a native American student, John Sassemon, in 1653. When serving as interpreter to Metacom, the Wampanoag chief in 1675, he was murdered as an English informant, sparking the worst of the many wars between settlers and existing populations in New England.

    Independence day

    The late eighteenth century was momentous in America. Eight Harvard graduates (John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry, William Ellery, William Williams, and William Hooper) signed the declaration of independence in 1776.

    In 1780, when Massachusetts as a state gained a constitution, it granted to Harvard the title of university. In 1781 a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa opened at Harvard – it is the oldest continually running chapter of the society. And in 1782 it opened a medical school – which, interestingly, the university’s own history regards as the start of it being a proper university.

    A side note on Phi Beta Kappa. This described itself as an academic honour society; such societies also might be known as fraternities. Frat houses cause no end of trouble on some American university campuses, as well as providing a location for some sometimes dubious comedy.

    You may recall in my blog on Purdue University that one of its presidents resigned having failed to ban fraternities from campus. There’s loads of them – the Wikipedia entry has too many for me to count – and there are accrediting bodies. I may have to find a postcard one day…

    Football crazy

    In the nineteenth century Harvard continued to grow, adding schools of divinity and law in the first couple of decades, a science school in the 1850s, a dental school in the 1860s, and a graduate school in 1872. In 1852 the first intercollegiate boat race – Harvard versus Yale – took place on Lake Winnipesaukee. And in 1875 the first intercollegiate football match (gridiron, not association, union or league) took place. Harvard won.

    Let’s at this point note Tom Lehrer, mathematician, satirist, Harvard alumnus and academic, who I regard as one of Harvard’s finest. An early song of his, Fight fiercely, Harvard, satirizes the football fight song. And the YouTube video linked above has some fabulous footage of Harvard v Yale games through the ages.

    Lehrer also wrote Bright College Days, a satire of college songs. Which includes the wonderful line, “ivy-covered professors, in ivy-covered halls”. A great Lehrer quote: “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.” And finally, Lehrer in 2022 gave all his songs to the public, making them available without copyright on a website: well done, sir.

    Establishment

    Harvard was by now a firm fixture in the US establishment. Eight US Presidents have been educated at Harvard (as was the most recent Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney). In 1886, at its 250th anniversary celebrations, President Grover Cleveland, not an alumnus, was in attendance.

    In 1908 the Harvard Business School opened, the first in the country restricting its intake to graduates. More schools were established; the Harvard University Press opened in 1913; the first Harvard Nobel laureate was crowned in 1914 (Theodore Richards, for determination of atomic weights).

    In 1947 General George C Marshall (pictured, when he himself was a student at the Virginia equivalent of Colonel Oates’ miliary academy), then Secretary of State, received an honorary degree. He used his speech to announce the Marshall Plan, via which the US supported the rebuilding of post-war Europe. To be fair this knocks most graduation speeches I have heard into a cocked hat.

    Opening the door a little wider…

    It would be fair to characterise Harvard as not having been, historically, at the forefront of change. One example is women’s education.

    Harvard was, like (I suspect but can’t demonstrate) nearly all universities previously, restricted to men only. In 1879 Arthur Gilman, a banker, and his wife Stella Scott Gilman, wished their daughter to have a university education. Harvard would not admit women, so they persuaded the president of Harvard to allow them to employ Harvard academics, part-time, to deliver courses to women in what became known as the Harvard Annex.

    They had hoped that Harvard might relax its stance and accept women to study for degrees, but the attitude of the university was summed up in 1869 by its President, Charles Eliot, who in his inaugural address said:

    The world knows next to nothing about the capacities of the female sex. Only after generations of civil freedom and social equality will it be possible to obtain the data necessary for an adequate discussion of woman’s natural tendencies, tastes, and capabilities…It is not the business of the University to decide this mooted point.

    And this in 1888 from Eliot to a potential new faculty member:

    There is no obligation to teach at The Annex. Those professors who on general grounds take an interest in the education of women…feel some obligation but there are many professors who think it their duty NOT to teach there, in which opinion some of the Corporation and Overseers agree.

    Nevertheless, the Harvard Annex thrived, with increasing numbers of women wishing to study there. In 1894 a compromise was reached: the annex became a degree-awarding college – Radcliffe College – with Harvard staff teaching and guaranteeing standards.

    In the 1930s a subsequent Harvard President – Lawrence Lowell – felt that Radcliffe was a distraction to Harvard’s academics, and a limit was placed on the number of students who could be admitted to Radcliffe: 750 undergraduates in total, 250 graduate students. These limits stayed in place until 1979, when Radcliffe was incorporated into Harvard, which finally became co-educational.

    It wasn’t only women with which Harvard, historically, had a problem. In the 1923, Lowell had sought to put a cap on the proportion of Jewish students at Harvard. He was unsuccessful. Harvard presidents don’t always get what they want.

    Lowell also enforced racial segregation where he could. In 1921 he refused to allow black students to reside in the university’s dormitories. Writing to the father of one such student, he said:

    We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man, but we do not owe to him to force him and the white into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial.

    Do the right thing

    Faced with examples like these, you might be forgiven for thinking Harvard would always behave badly where it could. But they are currently taking a stand for academic autonomy.

    Threatened with withdrawal of funding and tax exempt status, the university has refused to accede to the US government’s demands which are, frankly, a full-on assault on academic autonomy. Here’s the letter of 11 April sent to the university; here’s the university’s response.

    It is worth taking a minute to read the demands made of Harvard. They relate to student discipline; the appointment and employment of faculty; the content of programmes; the admission of students. The US government cavilled that the letter was sent in error (and if you believe that I’d like to talk to you about a bridge I have for sale) but its my view that where a country’s government threatens universities, that country is in trouble.

    Harvard has an endowment of over $50 billion, so it has the financial resources to cushion the significant blow. But it didn’t have to resist, and we should all be glad that it is doing so.

    Missed opportunities

    With such a big university, such a famous university and such an old university, there’s a stack of things which I haven’t been able to write about. Another time, maybe.

    For now, here’s a jigsaw of the card, which was sent in November 1907 to Miss Adeline Tower at Rutgers Prep School, New Jersey. The message on the front – to save you straining you eyes – reads:

    Dear Ade: how are you? Eliza came home alright. I missed her very much. Hope to see you Xmas. Love Grandma

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  • Johnson & Wales University to lay off 91 faculty and staff

    Johnson & Wales University to lay off 91 faculty and staff

    Dive Brief:

    • Johnson & Wales University plans to lay off 91 faculty and staff members — about 5% of its workforce — as it tries to rapidly evolve its operating model, officials said. The cuts will affect its two campuses in Providence, Rhode Island, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
    • The private nonprofit faces an operating deficit of $34 million after more than a decade of enrollment declines. “We simply cannot afford to be the size that we once were, and we believe this reduction will allow us to close a financial deficit and to move forward with a balanced budget,” Chancellor Mim Runey said Monday in a community message.
    • With its cash reserves almost depleted, the university is also delaying salary increases until later this year when officials can “evaluate what is possible,” Runey said.

    Dive Insight:

    To explain why Johnson & Wales is reducing its workforce, Runey pointed to a 54% decline in overall enrollment since fiscal 2012, with headcounts falling from a high of 17,294 to over 8,000 in recent years. 

    The chancellor attributed the shrinking student body to demographic declines, fewer international students and shifting public attitudes about higher education.

    Staffing and budgets, meanwhile, have fallen at a slower pace than enrollment, Runey said, framing the layoffs as rightsizing the university’s operations. 

    “While there is some indication that we are on the right track with enrollment, we do not believe we will return to levels of enrollment that supported a much larger organization and operating budget,” she said.

    The university has already downsized in the recent past. In 2021, Johnson & Wales shuttered its campuses in Florida and Colorado — both of which opened to expand the university during times of growth in the higher education market. 

    Along with reducing expenses, the sale of those former campus buildings added to university’s endowment and reserves. Those reserves, however, have been drained to plug recent budget gaps.

    The university has also pared down the number of senior leaders by about half since 2012, Runey noted. Additionally, it has consolidated academic programs, closed others with low enrollment, reduced jobs through attrition and streamlined aspects of its operations.

    At the same time, Johnson & Wales has invested in a wide array of new programs to try to attract students. Over the past decade, some of those new offerings have “yielded great results while others less so, and some were reduced or discontinued,” Runey said. 

    She also pointed to more recently launched health and wellness programs. Those come with start-up costs such as specialized facilities, faculty and marketing efforts. 

    “These new program investments, while showing great early outcomes, have not yet had time to yield returns that would significantly improve the operational budget,” Runey said.

    That stands in contrast to more rapid enrollment growth other rounds of new programming brought the university in the past, when market conditions were better. 

    “Today we plan with the conservatism that the times demand,” the chancellor said.

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  • Podcast: Finances and cuts, VC pay

    Podcast: Finances and cuts, VC pay

    This week on the podcast we discuss “naming and shaming” over vice-chancellor pay packages when student outcomes fall short.

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