WEEKEND READING: Death by a thousand cuts: why universities cannot survive on goodwill alone

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Alessandro Siani, Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of the Environment and Life Sciences, University of Portsmouth.

There is a visible shift in mood across higher education in the UK. Whether in committee meetings or coffee breaks in between lectures, conversations have moved from the familiar tongue-in-cheek moaning about marking and grant proposal deadlines to more foreboding tones and matters. If the current academic zeitgeist had to be summarised in a single word, it would probably be ‘survival’ – both at the institutional and individual level.

While budget cuts, institutional restructures, and a certain degree of uncertainty have always been a part of academic life, there is a palpable feeling of impending doom in UK higher education. The mounting pressure felt by institutions across the country is different from the peaks and troughs universities are accustomed to: this time it feels structural rather than cyclical, with no clear solution in sight. With academic and professional staff feeling overworked and undervalued, and two-thirds of university staff considering leaving the sector, it is clear that the current situation is not sustainable.  

Lifting higher education out of its current slump is likely to require a paradigm shift in how educational institutions are funded and managed. To move forward, however, it is worth asking how the sector ended up in such dire straits in the first place.

The financial foundations are collapsing

This problem boils down to basic maths: higher education institutions are struggling to secure enough funding to cover their operational expenses. Nearly half of UK institutions face deficits in 2025-26, and as many as fifty of them are at risk of closure within the next year due to insolvency. A key cause of underfunding is the historical stagnation of tuition fees (which have not kept pace with inflation for over a decade), leading to a decline in their real-terms value estimated at 26% between 2017 and 2025. Many universities reacted to the tuition fees freeze by increasing the intake of international students to compensate for the real-terms loss in home tuition fees. However, the new international student visa restrictions imposed in 2023 by the Sunak government caused a sharp drop in international applications, leading to a steady decline in university income over the following years. Moreover, the current Starmer Government has recently announced the introduction of an international student levy starting from 2028 to fund support for home students. This proposal raised further concerns for higher education institutions (particularly larger ones), which would be expected to foot the bill by either absorbing the costs or passing them onto the students, making those institutions less competitive in the international market. While the Government has also announced that tuition fees will rise in line with inflation for academic years 2026/27 and 2027/28, with future fee uplifts conditional on higher education providers achieving a higher quality threshold , higher education institutions are still scrambling to make ends meet.

Restructuring, redundancies, and the burden on those who remain

The UCU’s live tracker of redundancies, restructures, reorganisations and closures across the UK higher education sector offers a sobering insight into the impact of underfunding on institutions and people alike. As of December 2025, the tracker lists a hundred and five higher education institutions as currently undergoing redundancy and restructuring programmes, and universities have announced over twelve thousand job cuts over the previous year alone.

The consequences of the job cuts are not only catastrophic for those who find themselves suddenly unemployed. After each redundancy round, the remaining staff are left struggling with uncertainty around further cuts on the horizon, survivor’s guilt and drastically increased workloads. Despite carrying an ever-growing emotional and operational burden, staff often end up sacrificing their time and wellbeing to ensure that student support, research outputs and administrative responsibilities continue to be delivered to a high standard.

Workload models: when the numbers lose meaning

Given these challenges, senior leadership teams often find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they are tasked with sustaining operations with shrinking budgets and skeleton staff, which inevitably leads to unpopular decisions. On the other, they are aware of the need to preserve morale in a workforce already stretched thin.

In this context, workload models can appear like an attractive solution, offering – at least in principle – a transparent way to allocate an increasing amount of work amongst dwindling staff numbers. Workload models are automated systems used to quantify and allocate workload by assigning a set time allocation to each task – for example, thirty minutes for marking an essay. The problem arises when time allocations are manipulated to deflate the formal workload, artificially creating capacity to carry out additional work. In the previous example, if the allowance for marking an essay was reduced from thirty to ten minutes, staff would be expected to mark three times as many papers in the same time – which realistically means taking thrice as long if (as is usually the case) staff are unwilling to carry out the task to a significantly lower standard. Under the veneer of fairness and organisational efficiency, workload models are increasingly being revealed for what they often are: an accounting trick to prove that there is still capacity and justify staff cuts and increased workloads.

Most academics thrive on hard work and regularly go above and beyond often at the cost of their work/life balance, but many are no longer willing to be gaslit about the amount of work they are doing. It is becoming increasingly clear that the misalignment between modelled and actual workloads has a detrimental effect on staff morale and trust in their leadership teams.

Where can the sector go from here?

Despite all of this, most higher education institutions continue to function – not because the current system works, but because the staff on the ground are working to breaking point and beyond to keep things running. To ensure the long-term sustainability of the sector, the focus should shift from surviving to thriving, and the planning from tactical to strategic.

A two-pronged policy intervention should constitute the bedrock of academic funding and sustainability. The first prong is an increase in governmental support: it is imperative that governments, regardless of their political colour, acknowledge that higher education is a remunerative investment in the future not just of our learners, but also of our communities, industries, economy and nation at large. It is also crucial to reverse policies that have been proven to cause financial strain (such as the restrictions on international student visa introduced under Sunak), or at the very least to avoid further aggravating them, as it appears to be the case with the proposal set forward by the Starmer government in 2025 to extend the visa restrictions to research master’s courses.

The second prong implies a paradigm shift in how higher education institutions are administered. The idea that universities and colleges should run like businesses has been argued to be incompatible with their very nature and purpose: to educate, innovate, develop critical thinking and professional skills. To thrive, higher education institutions cannot be forced to chase profits – which inevitably leads to cutting corners and prioritising metrics over integrity and excellence – and should instead embrace their irreplaceable role as communities of practice and learning.

At present, the only certainty is that staff trust and goodwill cannot be expected to last forever and, unless urgent action is taken to stop their erosion, it will be hard to rebuild institutional cultures that were fostered over decades of hard and collegial work.