Tag: University

University of Arizona has balanced budget in sight after massive deficits
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Dive Brief:
- University of Arizona released a fiscal 2026 plan that would balance its budget by reducing it 3.2% from current levels, though officials noted federal policy changes, state budgeting and enrollment could force adjustments.
- The preliminary budget plan would make the deepest cuts to university support and administration, reducing those areas by 7.5% overall. Student support would be cut by 2.8%, and the aggregate budget for the university’s colleges would be reduced by 2.2%. It would also decrease facility and utility spending by 1.1% while increasing community outreach by 0.7%.
- At the same time, the framework funds employee raises, faculty promotions, investments in the university’s colleges and other spending areas, officials said Thursday in a community message.
Dive Insight:

The University of Arizona has been scrambling for more than a year to put its fiscal house in order.

In early 2024, the university faced a budget shortfall reaching $177 million. The situation became so severe as to draw an open rebuke from the state’s governor, Katie Hobbs, who in a statement last February derided a “university leadership that was clueless as to their own finances.”

Since that time, then-President Robert Robbins stepped down and the university has made major cutbacks to its budget.

Helping lead that work is John Arnold, who has taken on the chief operating and financial officer roles at University of Arizona after previously serving as executive director of the state board of regents.

For fiscal 2025, the university reduced its budget by over $110 million, centralizing its fiscal planning, “rebalancing” undergraduate aid for nonresident students, delaying raises, and reorganizing administrative units including information technology, human resources and marketing.

Arnold informed the state regents in November that the university was on track to wipe the remaining $65 million deficit from its budget and end fiscal 2025 with 76 days cash on hand — well above the nine days’ worth of cash that was projected last June. The regents require state universities to have 140 days of cash on hand, a target the University of Arizona hasn’t hit since 2022.

By the fall, cuts took the university’s employee headcounts and payroll expenses back to early fiscal 2023 levels.

While making numerous reductions across the university’s operations, officials also announced salary increases and a raised minimum wage earlier this year.

Arnold and Ronald Marx, the university’s interim provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, said in their message Thursday that the new budget framework “prioritizes academic excellence, faculty and staff support, and student success across colleges.”

They added the caveat that possible changes in federal policy, state budgeting, changing demographics and enrollment could all sway the final fiscal 2026 budget.

“We are actively monitoring these developments and evaluating the financial implications of the changing external environment,” Arnold and Marx said.

Arizona lawmakers last year threw a wrench into budget plans with multimillion dollar funding reductions, which came as University of Arizona sought to reduce its deficit by tens of millions of dollars.
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May 9, 2025
Christian Lampasso – Ice Hockey, The Ohio State University

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May 9, 2025
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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May 8, 2025
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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May 8, 2025
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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May 8, 2025
Indiana governor sued by state ACLU over university board control
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Dive Brief:
- The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana is suing the state’s governor, Mike Braun, over a new law giving him full control over the selection of Indiana University’s trustee board.
- Last month, Republican lawmakers added several last-minute changes to Indiana’s budget bill that expanded the state’s control over its public colleges. Braun signed the budget into law Tuesday.
- One provision empowers the governor to appoint all nine members of Indiana University’s board, eliminating the institution’s longstanding tradition of alumni trustee elections. That change illegally targets Indiana University and violates the state’s constitution, ACLU of Indiana’s lawsuit argues.
Dive Insight:

Indiana University has held alumni trustee elections since 1891, with the process codified into state law. Board members oversee everything from admissions standards to presidential appointments to faculty promotions and tenure.

Prior to the change in law this month, three trustees on the university’s nine-person were elected by alumni. The governor appointed the rest.

ACLU of Indiana is suing Braun on behalf of a candidate who was vying for a board position this summer, Justin Vasel.

“This challenge addresses a law that strikes at the heart of democratic governance at Indiana’s flagship university,” Vasel said in a statement Wednesday. “This unconstitutional legislation threatens IU’s 134-year-old tradition of alumni representation while an election for those very positions is already underway.”

Before the change in law, the university’s over 790,000 graduates were eligible to cast a ballot, according to the university’s alumni association, making the voter pool larger than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont or Alaska.

Six members of the university’s alumni association had announced their candidacy for trustee, and the month-long election was set to begin in June. Had it gone on as scheduled, the winner would have joined the board July 1.

Now, Braun has the power to appoint who he wishes, so long as five trustees are university alumni and five are Indiana residents. The governor also received the power to remove any previously elected members at his discretion.

Braun defended the change during an April 30 press conference, citing low alumni voter turnout in the trustee elections, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

“It wasn’t representative. It enabled a clique of a few people to actually determine three board members. And I don’t think that is real representation,” the governor told reporters.

The university’s next trustee meeting is set to take place June 12.

The lawsuit castigated lawmakers for not following the normal legislative process when approving the change, instead relying on last-minute amendments.

“No hearings were held concerning the proposal,” it said. “Instead the change was inserted at the eleventh hour deep within a lengthy budget bill that otherwise would have nothing to do with the election of members of the boards of trustees of Indiana’s higher education institutions.”

Vasel and the ACLU of Indiana also questioned the constitutionality of the budget’s targeting of Indiana University’s board selection.

The process for appointing trustees varies among the state’s other public universities. But the alumni of each institution have the ability to vote on or nominate graduates to the board, the lawsuit said. The change Braun signed into law takes that ability away from Indiana University alone.

“Every other four-year public university in the state has a process for allowing alumni to select at least some members of the board of trustees, and there is no justification for denying that ability to the alumni of IU,” Ken Falk, legal director of ACLU of Indiana, said in a Tuesday statement.

Indiana Republicans, who control both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s mansion, have attempted to control other aspects of Indiana University.

Earlier this year, the state comptroller and two lawmakers joined an event where an advocacy group questioned if the university was illegally routing state funds to the Kinsey Institute, a sexuality and gender research center housed on its Bloomington campus.

Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith joined the opposition of the institute and said he and Braun are committed to ensuring Indiana University “is not using taxpayer dollars to fund something that is rooted in this wickedness,” according to WFYI.

Beckwith also threatened the university and its editorially independent student newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student, over the publication’s coverage of President Donald Trump.

The lieutenant governor derided a November cover story that showcased quotes critical of the president made by former Trump officials, though Beckwith misattributed the quotes as from the paper’s staff. He went on to call the story “WOKE propaganda at its finest.”

“This type of elitist leftist propaganda needs to stop or we will be happy to stop it for them,” Beckwith said in a social media post.
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May 8, 2025
Why I Chose University of Florida, by Santa Ono (opinion)

The University of Florida is already one of the nation’s premier public universities. But it has the potential to be the very best. That belief—in UF’s momentum, its mission and its future—is what led me to pursue the extraordinary opportunity of the UF presidency.

Santa J. Ono was recently recommended as the sole finalist for the University of Florida presidency.

University of Florida

Over the past several weeks, I’ve had the chance to spend meaningful time with the university’s leadership. I believe deeply in their vision: ambitious, anchored in a culture of excellence and laser-focused on student success. The passion I’ve seen for this institution—including during my visit to campus earlier this week to meet its students, faculty and administrators—is infectious, and the alignment between the Board of Trustees, the Board of Governors, the governor and the Legislature is rare in higher education. This alignment signals seriousness of purpose, and it tells me that Florida is building something truly exceptional. I’m excited to be part of that.

I believe in Florida’s vision for higher education. I understand its priorities, and I support them. I will execute this vision with clarity, consistency and integrity. I put my name forward for this position because I agree with the state leadership’s vision and values for public higher education. My alignment is rooted in principles—like the renewed emphasis on merit, the strengthening of civics and foundational learning, and the belief that our universities should prepare students not just for careers, but for informed citizenship in a free society.

Public universities have a responsibility to remain grounded in academic excellence, intellectual diversity and student achievement. That means rejecting ideological capture, upholding the rule of law and creating a culture where rigorous thinking and open dialogue flourish. I share that commitment.

Like many, I supported what I believed to be the original intent of DEI — ensuring equal opportunity and fairness for every student. That’s something on which most everyone agrees. But over time, I saw how DEI became something else—more about ideology, division and bureaucracy, not student success. That’s why, as president of the University of Michigan, I made the decision to eliminate centralized DEI offices and redirect resources toward academic support and merit-based achievement. It wasn’t universally popular, but it was necessary. I stood by it—and I’ll bring that same clarity of purpose to UF.

The future of higher education depends on a clear mission, a culture of merit and accountability, and a deep commitment to preparing students to thrive in the real world. That means strengthening partnerships with businesses, supporting agriculture and innovation, and ensuring each student—regardless of background—has the opportunity to reach their full potential.

I also understand the challenges of leadership in today’s academic environment. During my tenure leading other public universities, I declined to politicize the institutions or publicly oppose national political figures. I did this because I believe universities must serve as platforms for learning, not partisanship or ideological activism.

Combating antisemitism has been a priority throughout my career. I’ve worked closely with Jewish students, faculty and community leaders to ensure that campuses are places of respect, safety and inclusion for all. I know that the University of Florida has been a national leader in this regard —setting a gold standard in standing firmly against antisemitism and hate. That standard will not change under my leadership. I will continue to ensure that UF is a place where Jewish students feel fully supported, and where all forms of hatred and discrimination are confronted clearly and without hesitation.

Finally, peaceful protest has a place in campus life. But the University of Florida is not a place for disruption, intimidation or lawlessness. If I am approved, UF will remain a campus where all students are safe, where differing views can be heard and where the rule of law is respected.

This is an exciting moment for Florida and for the University of Florida. I’m honored to be a part of it. And I’m ready to get to work.

Santa J. Ono has been recommended as the sole finalist to be the 14th president of the University of Florida. He formerly served as the president of the University of Michigan.

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May 8, 2025
What will happen when a university fails to prevent fraud?

The first day of September 2025 sees an important chunk of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act come into force.

And if you are involved in academic partnerships or the use of agents, you might want to pay heed.

Receiving Royal Assent in 2023, the Act was initially promoted as tidying up some of the very curious practices around submitting information to Companies House.

Measures are very much focused on understanding and regulating who gets to become a company director, and ensuring the way a company is run is transparent and properly documented. If you are a fan of the Office for Students new condition of registration E7 you may find some of the new requirements there hauntingly familiar.

The Act also introduces a range of new offences that can lead to fines, disqualification, and even imprisonment – and higher education providers are among those carefully considering the September start date for offence of “failure to prevent fraud”. And, almost inevitably – the issue comes down to franchising and academic partnership.

Quick definitions

Simply put, fraud is the act of gaining a dishonest advantage over another person. In most cases this is a financial advantage.

To give some sector focused examples – we’ve recently seen cases where student maintenance loans and student fee loans have been paid out to students who have no intention of actually studying. We’ve seen evidence that some providers (and some higher education agents) may have been knowingly registering students for financial rather than educational benefit, and that franchise and partnership agreements – where incentives may be set around income maximisation rather than educational benefit – might have played a role in some of these instances.

Fraud, obviously, is a criminal offence. Those who commit fraud face consequences, but before the Act it has been harder to ensure that the companies involved do.

The “failure to prevent fraud” offence, in the words of the government’s guidance, means that:

an organisation may be criminally liable where an employee, agent, subsidiary, or other “associated person”, commits a fraud intending to benefit the organisation and the organisation did not have reasonable fraud prevention procedures in place. In certain circumstances, the offence will also apply where the fraud offence is committed with the intention of benefitting a client of the organisation. It does not need to be demonstrated that directors or senior managers ordered or knew about the fraud.

This applies specifically to “large incorporated organisations” (one of: more than 250 employees, more than £36m turnover, more than £18m in total assets). This can apply to an entire organisation, or “a subsidiary or franchise” of an organisation.

Behind the sofa

It’s not difficult to imagine that a cash-strapped provider of higher education may not always be motivated to check up on the activities carried out in its name by agents and partners. When dubious recruitment practices are revealed in the press, the usual response by “lead providers” is alarm followed by a decision to withdraw from the partnership. Neither the OfS, Department for Education, or Student Loans Company really has the regulatory tools to deal with stuff on anything other than a whack-a-mole basis – and every time the music stops it turns out nobody realised how bad things really are. Withdraw, regroup – and very often enter into a similar partnership with another organisation.

The new “failure to prevent fraud” offence means that the onus will be on universities and other providers to prove that they had “reasonable prevention procedures” – and whether they did is a matter for the courts rather than a checklist.

Things in scope include the public law offence of cheating the public revenue alongside expected parts of the Fraud Act and Theft Act in England and Wales. The law is slightly different in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

As well as the person who committed the “base fraud” facing consequences, this new rule means that if they are a “person associated” with a relevant body – and are acting in the capacity of that body or providing services on behalf of that body as they commit the fraud – the body itself (the lead partner in our example) will also be on the hook. It is worth remembering that a small organisation can be an “associated person” for these purposes, and although there may be a formal contractual relationship there doesn’t need to be a contract in place.

Higher education, specifically

If you scroll through the guidance, you might start breathing normally when you spot that there is an exemption for some “franchisees” – these are seen as connected to the main company by contract only, rather than undertaking business for the parent company. If you think about models of franchising in other sectors, this makes sense – a franchisee basically pays for the rights to use a name and a set of products.

However, this is not the meaning of the word “franchising” in higher education – and there are specifics in the guidance dealing with the sector.

Academic franchises may be associated persons for the purposes of the offence depending on the details of the contract. Universities or other degree awarding bodies should take legal advice.

There’s a line drawn between “validation” franchises (university accredits awards) and “delivery” franchises (university subcontracts delivery of a programme), but there’s no easy line to draw as to whether either is an “associated person” or not. It all comes down to the nature of the individual relationship and what is in the contact or agreement.

Doing time

If you are involved in academic partnerships, relationships with agents, or anything similar it feels very much like now should be the moment to get on top of what is in each agreement and what “reasonable preventative measures” might be. How are you monitoring what people are doing on your behalf? How much control do you genuinely have?

In the main, franchising is done well by higher education institutions. But if corners are being cut, or inconvenient questions not being asked, for the less rigorous few the stakes just got even higher.

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May 7, 2025
Unis should get behind Country University Centres and Regional Study Hubs – Campus Review

In the heart of Broken Hill, 22-year-old Hannah Maalste is pursuing a Bachelor of Health and Medical Science, a path that once seemed out of reach due to her remote location and lack of an ATAR.

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May 7, 2025
Post-COVID University Surpluses (Deficits) | HESA

Ok, everyone, buckle up. For I have been looking at university financial statements for 2023-24 and the previous few years, and I have Some Thoughts.

In this exercise, I examined the financial statements from 2017-18 onwards for the 66 Canadian universities which are not federated with a larger institution and had income over $20 million. L’Université du Québec was excluded from the analysis below because it has yet to release financial statements for 2023-24.

Figure 1 shows the average net surplus (that is, total income minus total expenditures as a percentage of total income) across all institutions for the fiscal years 2017-18 to 2023-24. As is evident from the graph, fiscal years 2018 through 2021 were all pretty good, apart from 2020 (the stock market did its COVID tank right at the end of the fiscal year and radically reduced investment returns that year), and overall surpluses were in the 6% range, which is not bad. But post-COVID, things got a bit rough, and the returns dropped to about 4%. Note, though, that there is a significant gap between the “big beasts” of the Canadian university scene and everyone else. In the good years, U15 institutions, which in financial terms represent about 60% of the system, saw surpluses about two percentage points higher than non-U15 institutions. Since 2022, the gap has been about three percentage points.

Figure 1: Average Surpluses as a Percentage of Total Income, Canadian Universities, Fiscal Years 2018 to 2024

Why have surpluses shrunk in the past few years? No surprise here: it is simply that costs have increased by about 7% in real terms for the past five years (that is about 1.4% above inflation each year), while revenues have only grown 3.7% (0.75% above inflation each year). Income growth has been pretty similar across U15 and non-U15 institutions, but expenditure growth has been significantly larger at non-U15 institutions.

Figure 2: 5-year real change in Income and Expenditure, Canadian Universities, 2018-19 to 2023-24

It is worth pointing out here, though, that all of this data is from before any of the effects of the international student visa cap of 2024 come into play. In eight out of ten provinces, it has been income from students that has driven universities’ revenue growth over the past five years. Only in Quebec and British Columbia has government spending been the main driver (and yes, I know, the idea that revenue from students is declining in British Columbia was a bit shocking to me too, but I triple-checked and its true—this is the one part of the country where international student revenue was falling even before Marc Miller started swinging his axe around).

Figure 3: 5-year real change in Income by Source and Region, Canadian Universities, 2018-19 to 2023-24

If you assume that international student numbers overall drop by 40% over three years (which is roughly what the government says it wants to achieve), then what we are likely is a decrease of about 11% in total university revenues between now and 2027 (assuming no other changes in enrolment or tuition fees, and an annual increase in government expenditures of inflation plus 1% which is what we saw in last year’s budget cycle but I wouldn’t necessarily bet on it for the future). Meanwhile, if we keep expenditures increasing at inflation plus 1.5%, we will see an increase in expenditures of about 6% by 2028. The result is what I would call a trulyyawning financial gap over the next four years. And it is precisely this that keeps senior admins up at night.

Figure 4: Projected changes in Income and Expenditure, Canadian Universities, 2017-18 to 2027-28, Indexed to 2017-18

Now to be clear, I don’t expect the sector to be posting multi-billion dollar gaps implied by Figure 4 (for clarity: while Figure 4 displays changes in projected income and expenditure in index terms, if the gap that opens up between 2024 and 2028 is as depicted here, the change in net position for universities will be equal to about $7 billion in 2028, which given current surpluses of $2 billion/year implies aggregate deficits of about $5 billion/year or about 11% of total income). The income drop will probably not be quite this bad, both because I expect institutions to raise fees on international students, and because I suspect international student numbers will not fall quite this far because provinces will re-distribute spots going unused by colleges (due to the reduction in enrolments that will ensure from last fall’s changes to the post-graduate work visa program). Similarly, the increase in expenditures won’t be this high either because institutions are going to do all they can to “bend the curve” in anticipation of a fall in revenues. But bottom line: there’s a looming $5 billion income gap that has to be closed just to stay in balance, and larger if we want the system to have at least some surpluses for rainy (rainier?) days in future.

Anyways, back to the present. We can, of course, drill down to the institutional level, too. At this point in the exercise, I have chosen to exclude two more institutions from my calculations. The first is Concordia because it has a unique (and IMHO really irritating) practice of splitting its financial reporting between the institution and its “Foundation” (don’t ask), with the result that the institution’s financial statements alone tend to show the institution as worse off than it really is. The second is Royal Roads, which uniquely took a stonking great write-down on capital investments in 2024 and so frankly looks a lot worse than I think it should.

So with our sample now down to just 63 institutions, Table 1 shows that in fact most universities have been doing OK over the past few years. Of the institutions included in this part of the analysis, 39 have been deficit-free since 2021-22, and 28 have not shown a deficit in any of the last five years. However, there are three institutions where it might be time to start worrying: Carleton, which has posted three consecutive deficits, and St. Thomas and Vancouver Island University, which have posted deficits in each of the past five years. Carleton is a little bit less worrisome than the other two because it socked away some huge surpluses in the years prior to 2022 and so has a little bit more runway. I’ll come back to the other two in a moment.

Years in deficit Since 2019-20 Since 2021-22

5 2 –

4 0 n/a

3 6 3

2 13 7

1 16 16

0 28 39

Figure 5, below, shows combined net surplus over the past five fiscal years (2019-20 to 2023-24) as a percentage of total revenues. There are eight institutions which have net losses over the past five years, and another eight with surpluses between 0 and 2% of total revenues, which I would characterize as “precarious.” There are another 29 institutions with combined five-year surpluses, which are between 2 and 5% of total revenues, which are not great but not in the immediate danger zone either. Finally, there are 18 institutions with surpluses of 5% or more, which I would characterize as being “safe,” including two (Algoma and Cape Breton) which have five-year surplus rates of over 20% (this is what happens when your student body is 75%+ international)

Figure 5: Distribution of 5-year aggregate net surpluses, Canadian Institutions, 2019-20 to 2020-24

But note the right-hand side of that graph. There are two institutions that have five-year deficits equal to more than 4% of their total revenues. And those two are the same two that have posted deficits for each of the past five years: St. Thomas University in New Brunswick and Vancouver Island University in British Columbia. I’ll talk about them in a bit more depth tomorrow.

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May 6, 2025