Tag: University

Between Excellence and Relevance: The Regional University Dilemma

Hi everyone. I’m Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education podcast.

Over the past few decades, Higher Education had taken on a number of new roles. As we discussed with Ethan Schrum on this podcast over two years, in the years after World War II, universities became obsessed with showing how essential they were with solving society’s problems. One of these problems – particularly as universities proliferated and started showing up in more and more distant locales – was regional economic development.

This was a tough problem to solve. Universities are about the knowledge economy, and by and large the knowledge economy runs most smoothly in places with significant population density. By definition, “regional” or “peripheral” institutions are in places that lack this essential quality. So with whom can universities in this situation partner? It takes two to tango – a university . And more generally, what kinds of things can universities in peripheral regions that can do to improve the economic fortunes of the places they serve?

Today my guest is Dr. Romulo Pinheiro. He is a professor of public policy and administration at the University of Agder in Norway. For years now, Romulo has been writing about how universities in different parts of Europe tackle this question. In our interview today, we go back and forth a bit about how peripheral institutions differ from metropolitan ones, how regional and global ambitions get intertwined at these institutions and how institutional and disciplinary structures do and do not affect how a peripheral universities accomplish their mission. As a wannabe-geographer, I found this discussion fascinating – pay attention to the bits where Romulo starts diving into the intricacies of how institutions and academics weave their global and local networks together into complicated webs, and – let me underline this bit – how these webs depend crucially on something pretty simple: trust.

But enough from me – let’s turn it over to Romulo.

The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 3.31 | Between Excellence and Relevance: The Regional University Dilemma

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): Romulo, your work often centers around issues of universities and regional development. And I guess it’s been 40 or 50 years now that regional development has been seen as a role that higher education is supposed to play. But how does that development role differ between universities in dense urban areas and, you know, less dense rural areas? What’s the difference in the role they have to play?

Rómulo Pinheiro (RP): Alex, for universities to be able to engage with different types of regional actors, there have to be competencies on the other side. Universities differ in terms of their competencies and skills—in terms of the depth and breadth of the types of programs they offer, the research groups, as well as the traditions of regional engagement. But they also differ in their localities, right?

Usually, you have a situation where universities in peripheral regions are thinner institutions, and they’re located in thinner institutional environments. Meaning, they don’t have a lot of interlocutors with the same level of knowledge and skills. That already creates a disadvantage.

So, should we see the symbiosis between universities and their regional settings? By and large, we see that strong institutions tend to be located in strong regional surroundings as well. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t cases of strong institutions in more peripheral settings. What the literature tells us is that, for the most part, these regions don’t have the absorptive capacity to absorb both the graduates and the knowledge that comes from these “thick” institutions.

Johns Hopkins is a case in point in Baltimore. And in Europe, we have, for example, the University of Lund. There have been a few studies as well. So the knowledge generated by these institutions tends to go away from the region because there’s no regional capacity to absorb what comes out of the university.

So, very different roles.

AU: It seems to me there are two types of rural or peripheral institutions. Let me talk about one of them first, right? So, smaller peripheral institutions—I’m thinking, you know, universities maybe in northern Norway, right? A couple thousand students. They face tight budgets, limited research capacity, and more difficulty, I imagine, in attracting top talent. Maybe not in Norway, but in some countries that would be an issue. And yet, they’re often expected to play an outsized role in regional development. How do they manage that tension?

RP: That’s a great question—and indeed, many don’t, right? You’re absolutely right that we should move away from the idea of just “centers” and “periphery,” because there are also centers within the periphery. There are strong institutions in peripheral settings. In northern Norway, for example, we have the University of Tromsø, which is a comprehensive, research-intensive institution. And there are many smaller regional colleges across the Nordic region that don’t have that capacity.

Traditionally, these institutions have catered more to the applied needs of regional actors. They didn’t have the research infrastructures, so they got involved in what we call “projects,” right? Smaller projects. And that, of course, has limitations.

Other, bolder institutions try to collaborate—develop networks. What we see, for example, in Northern Europe is a situation where, due to mergers, the smaller institutions are becoming amalgamated into larger institutions. And that, of course, creates new possibilities and new conditions, but also new tensions and dilemmas.

Because as institutions grow—and as you know, the larger the institution, the more globally oriented scientists you have—the less likely they are to be involved with regional issues, all things being equal, as economists like to say.

But in the end, it also goes back to the idea of engagement at the academic level—the bottom-up, right? So this combination between… well, you can have all these great strategic plans and funding in place, but if academics themselves—what Burton Clark calls the academic heartland—don’t feel keen to be engaged with regional actors, you can’t pressure them.

AU: I’m going to come back to that global dimension in a second. But let me counter with something here. I’m not convinced that the larger institutions are necessarily more global, but they are probably more oriented towards basic research, right? As you get bigger and bigger departments, they get deeper into basic research.

And what’s the uptake of basic research in peripheral areas? I mean, it just seems to me that when you get past a certain institutional size or complexity, it gets very hard to actually even talk with local communities—because the capacity for generating research is much bigger than the receptor capacity for it.

I remember one example, when we were doing some work in Africa. There was a small private university outside Lagos, and they had sequenced the Ebola virus. I asked, “Can you work with local industries?” And they said, “We can’t work with the local pharmaceutical industry, because in Africa the pharmaceutical industry is packaging and marketing.” Right? Those are the only two functions.

So what happens when the science at a small regional institution outruns the receptor capacity of the local environment? Are there any good ways to manage that?

RP: It goes back to the example I gave earlier. For the most part, that knowledge tends to go away—to other regions or other localities. This is the global dimension. But this goes back to the point you raised about the brokering role of universities. Universities—or university actors—have to engage in a process of translating those basic research findings into something that can be applied at the local level.

So how do they do that? There are different mechanisms. You need professors who are engaged and able to facilitate the translation of more theoretical discussions into something more concrete.

The role of students is fundamental here—an aspect that has been somewhat neglected in the literature. In the end, the most important boundary spanners are actually students who spend time back and forth between the university and the community. And then there’s the role of graduates—former students. They maintain networks with professors and others, so they play a very important role.

But in the end, if the companies—public or private—don’t have a need for that knowledge, or if that knowledge is not relevant to them, then they won’t use it. There’s that tendency.

So it’s also up to the universities to try to make that basic knowledge—if they are so inclined—relevant to local actors. In northern Norway, we have the case of Tromsø, which has been able to do this: bring excellence and relevance together. They focus, for example, on the Sámi dimension, Arctic fauna and flora, or cardiovascular diseases—taking aspects that are relevant to the region and developing excellence around those areas.

And in the process, they develop institutional capacity, which helps them with strategic profiling in a globally competitive world.

AU: You’re raising again that issue of global excellence versus regional relevance. I’m interested in that from the perspective of university strategy. What avenues do you have to make sure that your institution is actually balancing those two properly? You used Tromsø as an example—can you think of some others? And are there any commonalities between them?

RP: Yeah. I mean, university leaders do have some tools at their disposal. As we know, most universities—particularly large ones—are very bottom-heavy institutions. Academics tend to have a lot of autonomy and are relatively independent in what they pursue.

That being said, they also follow incentives, as rational actors. So there are things that strategic or university leaders can do to align those incentives—whether that’s through PhD student opportunities, sabbaticals, or other types of incentives to collaborate with regional actors.

Beyond Tromsø, there are other examples I’ve worked on. Oulu is another case in point—in Finland. There’s a very interesting anecdote, going back to the importance of networks. One study asked actors in Oulu, in Northern Finland, “Who are your most important collaborators?” People at the university mentioned individuals from industry and local government.

Then the same question was asked in another region—northern Sweden, in a place called Luleå—which wasn’t as regionally engaged. They asked, “Who are your most important collaborators?” Regional actors in the private sector mentioned other actors in the private sector. University academics mentioned other academics.

Those are examples of disconnected networks—networks that are operating within their own silos. So, there has to be a sort of synergy effect, and the most successful regional institutions are able to achieve that.

One interesting caveat: when you ask these institutions whether they see themselves as regional universities, most of them don’t like that label. They say, “We are, first and foremost, a university in the region—not a regional university.” There are some negative connotations associated with being too closely tied to locality.

AU: What I’m hearing you say is that we have to pay attention to the incentives for professors within the university to engage locally and form those local partnerships. Are there specific institutional reforms that can achieve that? And presumably, disciplinary mix matters, right? There are different incentives and different possibilities for collaboration across disciplines. So how do you manage that engagement? How do you incentivize it effectively?

RP: There’s been a long discussion within the field about what types of incentives work. And again, there’s no one-size-fits-all—this has to be tailored. Academics are incentivized in very different ways. But we do know that, for the most part, monetary incentives have a limited effect when compared to other professions.

So it’s more about things like whether you can gain more autonomy, develop your research group, or set up a center. What we’re seeing now, for example, in the Nordic countries is an orchestrated effort by national and regional funding agencies to ensure that research applications require buy-in from regional actors.

I can’t submit an application to the Norwegian Research Council or to Business Finland, for example, without having partners from the region or the nation—whether from the public or private sector. Those are structural mechanisms designed to ensure that, if academics want access to significant research funding and to grow their research teams, they need to bring on board those key external actors.

The second aspect is the very strong emphasis over the past, say, seven to ten years—especially post-COVID—on co-creation and co-production of knowledge. Rather than involving regional actors only at the end of a research project, now there’s an effort to bring them in at the design stage.

So, researchers will go into a project already with input from those actors, understanding key questions and issues of relevance. And then, throughout the project, they involve these actors through various mechanisms—workshops, feedback exercises, and so on—to ensure there’s a loop of engagement and input.

It’s a much more egalitarian sort of ecosystem. Whether or not this is working is still an empirical question—we don’t yet know the full results. But at least those are the intentions.

AU: Romulo, you talked about this interface between the global and the local, right? And the global part of that is usually about relations between academics in one part of the world and academics in another. That helps a local university—a university in a region—act as kind of a window on the world for that region. It brings them into contact with these global networks.

What’s the right way to think about developing those networks effectively? I mean, I know in Europe right now we’ve got the European Universities Initiative. And I think a number of those alliances are meant to unite institutions with similar missions. A number of them look like alliances of universities and regions. Is this promising? Is this the right way forward? Or are these initiatives missing something?

RP: Let me touch first on the issue of networks. Most of these networks emerge organically, and they’re very much linked to the relationships that academics have with other academics—or academics have with regional actors. Students can also play a role here—if they get employment locally, and of course, former students may become part of regional government or industry.

The key element here is trust. This is not new—trust takes time to generate. I think it’s not easy, if you’re sitting in the director’s chair at a university, to articulate a clear strategy for how to develop trust among all these actors. You have to create the conditions.

That might mean freeing up some resources, or identifying your most engaged academics—those most likely to involve students or work regionally—and then creating a kind of ecosystem to bring these people together. We used to say that the most important thing in regional engagement is having money for lunches and dinners—that’s where people get to know each other.

When it comes to the second part of your question—strategic alliances—I’m a bit skeptical about the extent to which these will benefit the regional engagement agenda, to be honest. Even those alliances, like the one my own institution is part of—with a regional name and focus—tend to become very inward-oriented.

I’ve got a number of publications coming out now with a colleague, where we argue that these alliances are primarily collaborative exercises meant to enable institutions to compete globally. And there’s a tendency—despite some efforts, like policy labs for students involving regional actors and regional questions—for other strategic imperatives, outside of the region and locality, to end up dictating institutional priorities.

That’s my sense. But again, it’s an important empirical question. We’ll have to see in the future what the results actually are.

AU: So, there’s been a tendency in North America—probably going back to World War II or maybe even a little before—to think about universities as fixers of social or economic problems. And you’ve cautioned against assuming that universities can act as fixers of regional challenges, especially in peripheral contexts in Europe.

I guess this is a more recent assumption about institutions—maybe 30 or 40 years old instead of 60 or 70. Where do you think that expectation comes from? And what are the risks of leaning too heavily on it?

RP: That caution also comes from my fieldwork. I remember when I was doing my PhD many years ago, I was in South Africa at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, speaking with the vice-chancellor there. And he told me:

“Look, we are keen to play an active regional role, but we are not going to clean the streets just because the local government is failing to clean the streets. We don’t have the capacity to tackle crime just because the police lack the resources to do so.”

He was very clear in saying that part of their job was to go into the community and educate people—not just about the possibilities, but also about the limitations that universities and academics face. It is not their role to solve the failures of market forces or government systems.

There’s a tendency among some local officials to scapegoat the university—to say, “You’re not delivering,” because they’re not helping to tackle poverty or similar issues. That’s not to say universities don’t have an important role. But most of us in the field believe universities have primarily a facilitating role—a generative role—rather than acting as engines of regional development.

Of course, in those peripheral regions where the university is the largest employer or the only knowledge institution, expectations tend to be that the university must play a disproportionate role. Often, it tries to do so—and in many cases, it succeeds. But in the majority of cases, the university is just one of many knowledge actors in a very complex ecosystem.

AU: Your work has obvious ramifications for higher education leaders—but also for politicians, right? The ones who are funding these institutions. If there’s one concept or one conceptual insight from your work that you think those groups should take seriously—higher education leaders and politicians—what would it be? It might not be the same for both. They could be different for the different audiences.

RP: As a traditional academic, let me give you two instead of one.

The first one—and I’m not the only one saying this, but I think my work reinforces it—is that both universities and regions are complex entities. They are not monolithic, but they tend to be approached by both politicians and university managers as if they are simple, strategic actors. In reality, they have deep histories and institutionalized traditions, which are very difficult to change. So, any attempt to use strategic agency to move universities or regions in a particular direction should take that into account.

The second aspect links to my recent work on resilience. Over time, we’ve seen that universities have an innate capacity to adapt to social change and play very different roles. The “third mission” of the university—regional development or societal impact—looked very different in the early 20th century than it does today. Yet, universities have managed to withstand and adjust to adversity while retaining a degree of function and identity.

To do that, they need two important ingredients. One is autonomy—which is currently under threat, both in terms of procedural and substantive autonomy. The second is diversity. From resilience studies, we know that resilient institutions are diverse institutions. So when politicians or managers promote a “lean” approach—saying, “we have two research groups working on similar areas, let’s kill one or merge them”—they’re actually reducing diversity. And reducing diversity reduces an institution’s ability to withstand future adversity—whether it’s a pandemic, geopolitical conflict, or other disruptions. That may seem efficient in the short term, but it’s dangerous in the long term.

That’s why universities have historically been able to adapt to changing societal conditions—they’ve had those two ingredients, which are now at risk.

AU: So given that, what’s the future of university–community engagement in peripheral regions? Is there a trend we can expect over the next 10 years? Are institutions going to be able to deliver more fully on the needs of their regions—or will they find it more difficult?

RP: Well, as you know, Alex, academics are very bad at predicting the future! But we can look to history to see how things have evolved.

What we’ve seen is that the university’s “third mission”—whether framed as regional development, social impact, or engagement—has increasingly moved closer to the university’s core activities. Today, you could argue that social impact is central to the mission of any university. That might not be new in the U.S., but at least in Europe, it’s a more recent shift over the last 10 to 15 years.

What I think is important—and colleagues like David Charles in the UK have also emphasized—is that we need to look at the challenges facing our societies: rising polarization, the spread of illiberal democracies, the post-truth society. We should be asking: what role can universities—particularly in peripheral regions—play in helping societies navigate this turbulent environment?

As the quintessential knowledge institutions, universities have a very important role to play. They should perhaps be more active and assertive in defending the importance of knowledge, of truth. I’m currently involved in projects on regional green transitions, and there’s a broad consensus that universities play a vital role mediating relationships among regional actors with very different agendas.

They still retain legitimacy. They haven’t been politicized to the extent that other institutions have. So they’re uniquely positioned to bring political and community actors together and help orchestrate collective agendas.

But that takes time. It doesn’t always yield short-term results. So university leaders need to be willing to take risks. They need to allow academics to play roles that go beyond the traditional functions of teaching and research.

So I think what we’re seeing is a rediscovery of the civic role of universities—at an important historical moment. A shift from discussions about interests and money to discussions about values and norms.

AU: Romulo, thank you very much for joining us today.

RP: Thank you very much, Alex.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.

This episode is sponsored by KnowMeQ. ArchieCPL is the first AI-enabled tool that massively streamlines credit for prior learning evaluation. Toronto based KnowMeQ makes ethical AI tools that boost and bottom line, achieving new efficiencies in higher ed and workforce upskilling.

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May 15, 2025
Bastyr University Plans to Sell Campus

Cash-strapped Bastyr University is selling its campus in Washington State in an effort to stabilize its shaky finances, which landed the institution on show cause status with its accreditor earlier this year.

Bastyr’s Board of Trustees approved a plan last week to list the campus for sale.

The Washington campus is located on 50-plus acres outside Seattle; the university also maintains a site in San Diego. Officials wrote on a frequently asked questions webpage that the “sale of the [Washington] campus will restore financial health to our university, allow continued movement forward with our strategic plan and is intended to positively impact our accreditation status.”

The FAQ page emphasized that selling the campus does not mean Bastyr is closing.

Rather, “Financial infusion makes the university more stable and allows us to better weather the fluctuations of the academic environment should a crisis occur,” officials wrote. They also noted Bastyr “cannot afford to maintain and modernize the main campus building” and that “the university occupies less than 50% of its space, but must fund 100% of campus upkeep.”

The FAQ indicated that either a full or partial sale of the campus is possible.

Despite the sale, a move will likely be years away; officials wrote on the FAQ page that Bastyr plans to lease the campus for “up to a few years to allow for a thoughtful and phased transition.”

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May 15, 2025
Liberty University in Black and White

Liberty University, one of the largest Christian universities in the world, presents a striking contrast between its largely white residential campus and a more diverse, working-class population studying online. This divide highlights ongoing questions about race, access, and culture in American higher education—especially in religious institutions that promote traditional values while navigating a changing demographic and social landscape.

A Whiter Campus

As of 2021, Liberty’s Lynchburg, Virginia, residential campus remains overwhelmingly white. Seventy-four percent of students living and studying on campus are white, with only 4% identifying as Black or African American, 5% as Latino, and 2% as Asian or Pacific Islander. Less than 1% of residential students identify as Native American. In contrast to the national trend of increasing diversity on college campuses, Liberty appears to be growing whiter. In fact, the number of African American students on campus has declined in recent years, raising concerns about how welcoming the university is to students of color.

This demographic imbalance is not new. Liberty University has a long history of racial segregation and discrimination, particularly in its formative years under founder Jerry Falwell Sr., who defended segregation in the 1960s and opposed civil rights legislation. While Liberty’s public stance has changed over the decades, the legacy of those positions still casts a long shadow.

A More Diverse Virtual World

Meanwhile, Liberty University Online (LUO) paints a different picture. In 2017, only 51% of its undergraduate population identified as white, compared to 15.4% who were Black or African American. Hispanic and Latino students made up 1.7%, and students of two or more races, 2.3%. A significant 26.5% of LUO students were categorized as “race/ethnicity unknown,” potentially obscuring additional diversity. These students come from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and 86 countries, with more than 30,000 military students and over 850 international students among them.

LUO students are also disproportionately older, more likely to be working full-time, and often seeking degrees for career advancement or personal growth rather than the traditional “college experience.” Many are first-generation college students or part of the educated working-class navigating life through faith, family, and financial constraints. In contrast to the traditional campus, LUO’s virtual classrooms are where Liberty more closely resembles the multiracial and socioeconomically diverse America it often claims to serve.

The Racial and Class Divide

This bifurcation between Liberty’s on-campus and online populations underscores a larger tension within the university: a cultural and racial divide that mirrors the broader fissures in U.S. society. The residential campus, steeped in conservative Christian traditions and a homogeneous student body, promotes a culture aligned with white evangelicalism. Meanwhile, its online division serves a more varied student population—many of whom are drawn to Liberty for its affordability, flexibility, and religious identity, but may not share in the campus culture or feel represented by its leadership and branding.

Reports of problems faced by Black students on campus—including concerns over campus climate, lack of representation among faculty, and curriculum that minimizes racial history—suggest that Liberty’s commitment to diversity is uneven at best. While the university has made modest gestures toward inclusion, critics argue that these efforts are often performative and fail to address systemic issues rooted in the institution’s founding principles.

Conclusion

Liberty University’s dual identity—as a white-dominated, conservative campus and a more diverse, online workforce training hub—raises difficult but necessary questions about race, class, and the role of religion in higher education. For an institution that claims to train “Champions for Christ,” the challenge remains whether it can reconcile these differences or if the divide will only grow starker in the years ahead.

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May 14, 2025
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.

[Full screen]

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).

[Full screen]

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