University finances: information for students
1 July 2024 update
UK funding for higher education continues to be very challenging, and like many other universities, we continue to face increasing costs.
UK universities do not make a profit and any income is spent on running the university or reinvesting for the future. You can see how we spend your fees, but even though tuition fees play a significant role in university finances, it's now widely reported that universities across the country lose £1 billion each year on teaching domestic students and £5 billion on undertaking research.
We are also facing cost of living and inflationary pressures, with more expensive fuel, energy, maintenance and equipment. For example, a microscope that used to cost £100 at the beginning of 2021, now costs more than £120. We are having to absorb these increased costs.
All of this means we need to find different ways to manage our finances so that we can reinvest in teaching and learning, our student experience and in our research.
The need for change
Charlie Jeffery, our Vice-Chancellor, recently wrote a comment piece for the media about why universities need to act now to manage their finances and the need to rethink how the UK helps fund its universities.
He stresses how we must protect high quality teaching and research, and he sets out a ten-point plan for a more resilient sector.
What York is doing about it
York has moved quickly to put in place a series of measures to control what we can.
As well as finding new ways to increase our income, we also need to lower how much it costs to run the University.
A big part of this is looking at our estate costs. We want to focus on using our buildings more effectively, by spending time in the better buildings, and moving out of our older ones that are expensive to maintain and run.
For our staff, we need to reduce costs by removing inefficiencies and duplication, and we want to protect our staff's time on the activities that bring the most benefit for our students and our research. We also need to return staffing levels back to what we had in September 2022. Measured by average salaries, this adds up to 150 academic and 263 professional service posts. It’s about a 7-8% reduction in total staffing levels.
What this means for our students
We have been talking about how we need to organise ourselves differently, so that we can lower our costs. We’ll do this in lots of different ways:
- Changing how we use our buildings
Making better use of our campus space is not only an important part of our financial measures, but it will continue to be a key contributor to future environmental sustainability targets for the University. - Re-examining our big estate initiatives
We have paused or delayed some of our big investments, like building a new Student Centre. We will keep investing in our student experience - and especially mental health and wellbeing - but carefully managing our estates costs is a big focus. - Changing the work for our staff and what they spend their time on
We want our staff to focus on what matters most for high quality teaching and support.
For example, we are looking at our teaching governance to reduce the number of committees, whilst also maintaining students' input into key decisions and ensuring that the student voice is heard.
Because we will have fewer staff at the University in 2024/25 and beyond, we need to change the work and do things differently to support staff workload. - Marking and assessment
As part of their progress, students will likely see changes in the future to how their learning is assessed and marked. For some students, this may mean less assessments overall, less bunching of assessments, and fewer assessments per module. This should also mean that feedback is more timely and meaningful. We want to support future modules that attract a lot of interest and there will be more consistency for those students on combined programmes or taking electives. - Support services
It might also mean changes to how we provide our broader support services to students. For example, we have an opportunity to review the many ways in which we provide welfare and wellbeing support across the University. This would include exploring all the ways we can better combine and integrate our support across accommodation services, student life and wellbeing, and Colleges, as well as student support provided from central, department/school teams and student unions.
Core to all of this is ensuring that we protect the most important aspects of our student experience, and help students to access services in more simple and straightforward ways.
What this means for our staff
As well as reducing money spent on our operational costs - like our estate - and what our staff spend their time on, we also need to run the University with fewer people, by offering colleagues the opportunity to take up voluntary severance.
Voluntary options
We need to reduce our staff costs, but it’s really important to us that any decisions staff make about leaving the University are voluntary. Voluntary severance means we want to hear from colleagues who may wish to retire early or have expressed an interest in leaving.
York has acted sooner than most to build our financial resilience and in May 2024, we opened a voluntary scheme for colleagues. We have recently extended it to run until August 2024. Anyone who is funded by the University on a core contract can apply.
At the beginning of July, we updated staff to say that the rate of applications for our voluntary scheme is not where we need it to be.
This has meant that we have regretfully begun formal consultation with the campus Trade Unions on a potential redundancy situation from September 2024. This will be a last resort, if we do not meet the savings needed through voluntary means, but we now need to prepare for this.
Next steps
Universities across the UK are announcing cost cutting measures, including severance schemes, restructures, reorganisations and redundancies.
If we have to resort to redundancies, how we go about this is really important. We will not only protect the student experience and high-quality research, but York will face up to these difficulties with integrity, compassion and respect. No matter how challenging the situation, we are committed to managing these next steps with care and sensitivity.
In the meantime we will do all we can to maximise voluntary uptake of our VS and VS with early retirement scheme.
We’ll keep our plans under review as we measure how successful we have been in returning the University to a financial surplus. It’s really important we don’t take too long to get out of our current deficit.
York is one of only four universities to have won the top Gold Teaching Excellence Framework award and be in the top ten in the Research Excellence Framework (matched only by Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial), and we are acting now to preserve and protect the quality and impact of this teaching and research.