This is a pretty sobering assessment; some excerpts:
Manchester University published what it considered its worst-case scenario about what might happen next year: 80 per cent of students from outside the EU and 20 per cent of UK and EU students could defer or drop out. On that basis, they estimate, the university stands to lose £270m in a single year.
If you work through that scenario, it means the UK universities would be down by £6.7bn from tuition fees alone. Last year, excluding one-off pension costs, most institutions ran a narrow financial surplus. They made about 3.5 per cent more than they spent. Under the nightmare scenario, the lost fees would drive the average university to a 16 percentage point deficit.
Assume, too, that universities might lose two terms of housing, catering and conference income. Social distancing is cancelling events, preventing full occupancy of buildings – and has already cost them one term of rent. That would add another £1.5bn to the losses, and the average deficit could drift out to 20 per cent. Even if that were a one-off hit, and institutions could be sure that the good times were coming back, it would mean a lot of debt for the sector to carry. For some institutions, it would mean the end....
The hardest hit institutions in our scenario in absolute terms include a lot of very famous institutions: UCL would lose £115m in fees. Manchester, King’s, Edinburgh, Leeds and Warwick more than £60m....
The reason research-intensive places are so exposed to this crisis is that one of the clearest relationships in the university system is between research and fees from non-EU students. This is usually presented as a virtuous cycle: high prestige institutions attract foreign students, who will pay a lot for the privilege.
But there is another way to look at it: the government’s increases in research spending have not kept pace with the cost of the universities’ work. So institutions have expanded research spending and filled in the gaps in their research budget with fees from overseas students....
Some of them, in addition, are very exposed to revenue from student rent, catering and conferences. A two-thirds hit to that income line would cost Durham more than 8 per cent of its total revenue, with York, Leeds and the LSE all set to lose more than 5 per cent. Our scenario shows the LSE would suffer the biggest relative hit overall of this group – an 18 per cent fall.
Warwick would lose almost £95m from rent, conferences and fees – slightly less than the university’s own central estimate for what will happen. Stuart Croft, the vice-chancellor at Warwick, said: “We have been very open with our staff and students. In 2020/21 we predict that the impact of the pandemic will be to reduce our income by a total of £105 million"....
There's a lot more detail in the article.
