Fight the university cuts onslaught
We need full funding from the Scottish government
Lucas Grant, Aberdeen Socialist Students
Universities have been hitting the headlines in past months. Years of government underfunding and poor financial management are now finally catching up with administrations, with 43% of universities forecast to be in deficit at the end of the 2024 – 2025 period.
Practically, this means university leadership implementing severe cost cutting in a few key areas. These so far have primarily been in hiring freezes, voluntary redundancy schemes, among a host of proposals. 1 in 2 universities are now cutting staff jobs and student courses.
This has led directly to strike action by staff in universities recently in Scotland including UWS, Robert Gordon and Edinburgh.
More elaborate solutions are in motion elsewhere, the University of Kent is being taken over by the University of Greenwich, merging into the UK’s first “super-university” of over 50,000 students.
For staff and students, many are criticising the move for the long period of uncertainty that this may bring.
A part of these financial problems are the decrease in international students, with those applicants down by 16% last year.
The reasons for this are varied, a component however likely comes in the uncertainty for international students.
The UCU, the university lecturers union, has reported on the governmental measures being taken against international students claiming asylum when necessary.
Universities are being used as an extension of the “border force”, reportedly punishing universities for accepting students who claim asylum.
With uncertainty over jobs, lecturers are planning their own action. Around 65,000 UCU members working in universities across the UK will be balloted for strike action after a paltry 1.4% offer of a pay increase, which represents a 3% real-terms pay cut the union announced.
The dispute comes in the context of pay being degraded against inflation by at least 30% over the last decades. This combined with diminishing conditions has unsurprisingly stoked industrial action from staff over the last number of years.
The union is now preparing an aggregated UK-wide ballot of its members, covering 138 institutions, which it expects to open in the week commencing Monday 20 October.
Polling of undergraduates published by the UCU has revealed the toll that all this takes on students:
- 92% of students say their maintenance loan does not cover their expense of living with just over half of students reporting that financial pressures negatively affect their mental health.
- 75% of students agree that the continued rise of the cost of tuition will make university less accessible
- 55% of students advocate for an immediate end to tuition fees.
Sinead Daly, UWS
The crisis in higher education in Scotland has been driven by over a decade of sustained underfunding from the Scottish Government.
According to Universities Scotland, funding per student has fallen by an eye-watering 39% real terms over the last decade.
These cuts hit hardest in ‘modern universities’ like Glasgow Caledonian and UWS, which rely more heavily on public funding and serve a greater proportion of working-class students.
UWS has the highest proportion of working-class students of any university in Scotland, with over 30% from the most deprived areas and 45% first in their families to attend university.
These students often need more tailored academic and pastoral support to thrive – but worsening student-to-staff ratios are making that harder.
As funding declines and staff numbers are squeezed, students are left with larger class sizes, fewer contact hours, and less access to the support that helps level the playing field.
There is also a growing number of voices within think tanks, university leadership and political circles that are calling for the scrapping of free education in Scotland.
If this happens, it would mark the end of the principle of access to higher education and saddle generations of young people with an average graduate debt of £53k. This would turn higher education into an even more exclusive club.
Socialist Students and Socialist Party Scotland fight for:
- No cuts to courses, staff jobs and student services
- Build united strike action against cuts. Trade unions organise for a national education shutdown
- Open the books to democratic trade union inspection.
- No trust in university bosses to run education
- Scottish government must fully fund HE
- For free education – abolish all fees, scrap student debt and for a living grant for all
- Sack the bosses – for democratically run universities by committees of staff, students and local communities
