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Nearly one in four leading UK universities are slashing staff numbers and cutting budgets, with up to 10,000 redundancies or job losses, bringing calls for action to avoid damaging the sector’s international standing.
In the past week four universities, including two members of the research-intensive Russell Group of universities, have announced a combined 1,000 job losses in response to budget shortfalls.
About 90 universities are currently restructuring alongside compulsory and voluntary redundancy schemes to lower their wage bills.
That includes Cardiff University’s cuts to its highly rated nursing courses as well as job losses in humanities subjects, proving that “funding pressures do not respect prestige or status”, according to one commentator.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has sounded the alarm that the financial crisis is “engulfing” nursing courses. A majority of nurse-lecturers and other higher education nursing staff across the UK reported redundancies and recruitment freezes, when there are more than 40,000 vacancies in the sector.
Helen Whyley, the executive director of RCN Wales, said she was “very concerned” by Cardiff’s proposals.
She said: “Its school of nursing has a longstanding reputation for excellence, producing highly skilled, compassionate nurses who have gone on to serve communities locally and across Wales.
“This decision has the potential to threaten the pipeline of registered nurses into the largest health board in Wales and undermines efforts to address the critical staffing crisis in the NHS and social care.”
While universities such as Durham and Cardiff are only now announcing job losses, others have undergone constant cost-cutting and restructuring for the past three years as rising costs and declining tuition fee income from domestic students have eroded budgets.
One vice-chancellor said the “drip-drip” nature of the cuts meant they had largely passed under the public’s radar.
“If the BBC or John Lewis was cutting 5,000 or 6,000 jobs, we’d hear all about it but what we’re seeing in universities isn’t being noticed,” they said.
The Wellcome Trust – a major funder of medical and scientific research – and the Royal Society for Chemistry warned the cuts were damaging to the UK’s role as a world leader in science and to the supply of highly skilled workers needed for long-term economic growth.
The number of undergraduate chemistry degrees has shrunk by more than a quarter since 2019. The University of Hull has said demand for places on its chemistry course is now too low to make it viable, despite its strong position on university league tables.
Jo Grady, the University and College Union’s general secretary, said “urgent action” was required by government to stop university managers destroying livelihoods and wrecking academic standards.
“If vice-chancellors do not step back from the brink and work with us to protect jobs, serious industrial unrest cannot be ruled out,” Grady said.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said universities in England had seen their income dissolve since 2017, when the Conservative government froze undergraduate fees at £9,250 as inflation surged. Universities that relied on fees from international students have also been hit by the last government’s visa changes, which set off a steep fall in the numbers coming to study in the UK.
Prestigious universities that previously required high A-level entry tariffs have reacted by taking on more UK undergraduates, filling gaps left by international students but leaving fewer students for the rest of the sector.
David Kernohan, the deputy editor of Wonkhe, which analyses higher education, said: “It is now clear ‘high tariff’ providers have been lowering their entry tariff, often substantially, in order to grow recruitment – meaning students with less-than-stellar grades have been ending up in prestigious institutions, and the kinds of places students like that would more usually attend have been struggling to recruit as a result.”
There was relief last year when the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, raised domestic undergraduate tuition fees in England to £9,535 starting from next September. But the Office for Students, the higher education regulator for England, estimates that the sector faces a combined deficit of £1.6bn in 2025-26, even after the fee increase.
Higher education in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland has separate funding regimes but Cardiff is not alone in feeling the pinch: Queen’s University Belfast, Aberystwyth, Glasgow and Aberdeen are among those making cuts.
Prof Robert Van de Noort, the vice-chancellor of the University of Reading, said reshaping within the sector was “inevitable” but that innovation in teaching as well as research was needed.
“Vice-chancellors always want more government funding but we should also find ways to do things differently. For example, our new sustainability scholarships, which begin this year, will attract future green leaders to study at Reading across all degree subjects,” he said.
