UKH

Anyone here know anything more on this?

Hallam always seemed to me to be up with the more sensible post 92 institutions in terms of management, so this news was a real shock to me.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-67707857

How horrid, and what miserable timing.

It's not a good time for Unis in Sheffield. UoS recently announced a school restructure, out of the blue and on very short notice, that will mean job losses in the coming year. Also dropped out of the top 100.

Offering your whole teaching pool VSS is terrible though.

Seems to have been kept quiet; both daughter number 2 and her BF are students there and they didnt know anything. Both a bit concerned now as she returns for her final year next year after doing industrial placement, and he (in final year) was considering a masters for next year. I dont think as an UG she will be affected, but he's a bit concerned and trying to find out the potential impact. Has only been given the "oh, dont worry, i'm sure it'll be ok" from the department thus far.

Not unique to Sheffield, many universities are in dire straits financially. 

Some day we may go back to universities being centres of learning, rather than corporate enterprises catering to customers, primarily foreign students through necessity as that's where the money lies to keep them afloat. 

I work in identity security and governance technology. In short, a platform which both protects organisations but provides rapid access to apps and data to improve productivity but also improve user experience.

Universities are some of our most active new customers right now - mainly prestigious ones attractive (and attracted) to overseas students. They are fearful of social media and gossip amongst savvy youngsters and the backlash/consequances of  a poor reputation based around user experience.

They are investing millions across the board (some individual unis millions themselves) to deploy our technology so that the students have the best user experience. They are using us as a competitive advantage.

Which shows the reliance on some of these institutions have on overseas money.

It's been going on a while - I blame Thatcher, if something wasn't market driven it was a waste of time.

I did an MA in the mid 90s, there were a couple of Romanian doctors on the course who were doing little or no work.

'Aren't you concerned you might fail?' we asked. They looked at us pityingly.

'They won't fail us' they said. 'They need our money too much.'

I would say that Tony Blair's government did a lot to get us to this point. They wanted a massive increase in student numbers, which they got, but they changed the funding model. The initial period of growth and expansion was very positive but the growth has tailed off and Universities now need to compete with each other to ensure they fill their facilities. I think that marketising HE was always going to cause some Universities to fail (or at least shrink) and that recent high inflation coupled with no extra income has just sped things up.

Have to agree. Recently my daughter gained a PhD from the faculty of medicine at Imperial and I would estimate that well over 90% of the graduates were Asian.

I am sorry to speculate that it may not happen soon

Signed, ex academic

The Uni I work at has offered all academic staff voluntary severance as well. I learned today about Sheffield and also of a 3rd uni in the UK where this just happened as well. It's very stressful as the offer isn't tempting and then you know if you say no they might come for your job next year. They have told us explicitly that compulsory redundancies are on the table. I accidentally injured myself randomly the day after they announced it, and a week after experienced some strange and disorienting physical symptoms that I think must be from the stress. Fortunately seem to be regaining my balance just in time to leave to go climbing. Fun times...

Hi offwidth, VSS has been a constant at many unis recently, and rapidly increasing. The 9k student ug fee hasn’t risen in years, and the sector is approaching breaking point. Numbers are down with outfits like Lancaster looking like coming in 700 ugs lower than expected in current UCAS round. I’m not surprised at Hallam, being a decent post ‘92 but too reliant on UG income, and a large/growing estate common with many post 92s. 

Overseas numbers are down, and the word filtering down from govt is that they would let institutions go to the wall. I suspect this won’t just be the tories’ strategy.

For the individual it's voluntary - no one has to apply.

For the organisation it's selective - they don't have to say yes if they want to keep an individual.

For the students fed up with some academics being lazy, delivering poor quality teaching and little research of value, it's encouraging that they might see improvement.

For the academics who do a good job it might be attractive...but they'll get turned down, so it might be frustrating to see the lazy ones paid to go.

For the lazy ones, it's far too generous...but it's been far too hard to move them out any other way owing to rather backward herd behaviour.

Fire away!

Why would a hypothetically lazy employee “getting away with it” go for VSS?  

Not necessarily; if a good but senior professor applies they can sever them and get a new junior person in, pay for itself in no time…. If they ignore the value of experience…

Avoiding a less generous compulsory redundancy in a few months?

Presumably a senior professor would be bringing in substantial funding which a junior person wouldn't be so not so simple. If reducing headcount is required I'd think a voluntary approach initially is probably least bad.

I'm aware of that Paul, but it's usually more departmental focussed in unis with poor management, so just really sad to see Hallam affected so significantly. I had good friends in senior places there and did some work for the Uni on a few occasions on good quality overseas arrangements 

Sure.  I take your point.  My experience is that they do.  Many of them fit the demographic of being a year or two before retirement and this bridges the gap.  Some seem to almost incite it. 

Yes.  But your conditional is important and, (my conditional) if it's run as a rational process, that would be considered.

Also, the most experienced are likely to be the most expensive on MARS (or whatever voluntary severance this is), so often it's short-sightedly either new blood or old hands rather than choosing the best for the research and teaching requirements of the future.  However that's a failure of implementation, not of the concept.

CTFY

Indeed.  And on this very forum we have someone doing a PhD in the motivation behind "extreme sports".  That's real money being spent

Academia needs to seriously enrich it's offer.

I've seen outcomes of too many of these major staffing restructures and they almost never leave the uni in a better state, and usually cause more good people to leave than bad (because its hardly a great-sounding prospect for the future and the best will find it easier to get a new job quickly).

The idea post 92s are full of lazy lecturers these days is just plain daft ... they are normally factories for teaching outputs and generation of 'hard boiled' research outputs and so the least productive staff soon hit 'procedures' (back in 1992 I might have had more sympathy with that view).

I'm sure you didn't mean it like that, but just to let you know that reads as if you've invented symptoms.  People might conclude that you are part of the problem and a disgrace to academia.  Now I'm sure it's not true, and you're genuinely sick.  But thought you should know how it might be perceived.

Compulsory redundancies of permanent academic staff are still rare.

Sadly, I agree.  They're not usually well handled and don't usually remove problems and leave (and motivate) good people.

Don't agree.  I talk to a lot of undergraduates (>1000/year) and the distinction between good and bad is stark, and virtually (I can't think of an exception but there might be) all have experienced at least one lazy, unproductive "passenger" member of teaching staff.  Interestingly, they recognise the unfair burden this puts on colleagues and how it drags down departments.

I accept it's quite hard territory to navigate - Wiles probably looked hopelessly unproductive for a couple of years - but we're talking decades with some people.

Actually, I need a second bite at this.  Unacceptable.  It illustrates *exactly* the type of person that universities would be liberated to be shot of.

I don't know anything about the specifics of SHU, which, like you, I've always believed to be a pretty well run institution.

But the sector rumour is that about a dozen universities are in serious trouble right now.  The big new factor is a 5% increase in the employer contribution for the Teachers' Pension Scheme - for schools, central funding has been increased to account for this, but for many post-92 universities, whose staff are in the TPS rather than USS, they need to find the money themselves.  Add to this the inflation spike (which probably affects institutions with big ongoing capital programmes particularly), and there is a big unforeseen increase in costs.

This takes place against the chronic background of the erosion of the value of the fixed £9250 fee.  This represents a 25% real terms cut in funding per student since the new fee regime was introduced in 2012.  As others have observed, the only place universities can generate any surplus is for overseas students, so they are very exposed to the government's current desire to reduce the immigration figures by any means available.

In addition, the regulatory environment for universities is much more difficult since the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act, which abolished the Higher Education Funding Council and replaced it by the Office for Students.  HEFCE had a remit to look after the health of the (English) HE sector as a whole, and when necessary it didn't hesitate to bail out institutions that found themselves in difficulty, but OfS has a much more adversarial relationship with the sector.  It's implicit in the set-up that universities will fail, and OfS's mission is not to try and save the institution, but to look after as best it can the interests of students who might be caught up in the failure of a university.  I don't think politically this will survive contact with reality when the first big institution fails, as is likely sooner rather than later.

So, final salary pensions are expensive.  Who knew?

You have diluted the foolishness of your previous post but still: post 92 Unis require concrete delivery these days. They are either doing well on teaching (measured by results and regular student serveys) or on REFable outputs, or something else that is highly valuable (like external income). I've seen new staff with no experience of UK HE but good research CVs struggle initially on teaching but they either improve, get promoted out of most teaching or leave.

Unfortunately you have not.

Not at all, you've twisted what I said. The stress had a physical impact on me. It was something that didn't stop me working but it was unnerving, unusual, and kept me from doing much training for a week. Years of this kind of environment and it can definitely affect your health. A lot of people at the uni have quit or found work elsewhere. If we're the problem, AI can teach your grandkids .

+1 to this..

I was at Hallum this week doing 2 days teaching (guest lecturer rates)....talking to the staff all of the things you expressed are accurate...

Another issue is debt -- the banks will prop up a university for a few years but if they call in their loans it can all come crashing down pretty quickly. Fluctuations in the numbers of incoming students, more students failing out or not returning than expected, a few million in the red. If that die comes up the same way 3 years in a row, it's a very bad situation.

A chat with a VC mate of mine put 20-25 institutions in the danger zone, although the financial impact of inflation on capital projects is pulling more in. Apparently, OfS would look to other regional institutions to step in to see the students through to graduation. 

Surely this depends on who's paying for the PhD. 

Even if the project is crap, in the current environment who's going to turn down a student or company wanting to spend a shed load of their hard earned? 

This goes back to the comments made above about academic standards and running a hard nosed business not really working together.

Sure.  And the bit about conveniently getting "well" to go climbing?  So are you lying to me or to yourself?  Anyway, I just said it might be misinterpreted.  But we both know what you are.

Only if your goals are short-term.  If you want to build a decent reputation, you wouldn't support poor research

I think they can - and need to.  I don't see the top few facilitating such research.  3 papers at I.F. 5 and above or move on...

You may be unaware but the aggressive tone of your posts on here is often really unpleasant.

George had an unfortunate injury, and subsequently developed possibly stress related symptoms that interfered with work which have cleared up as he approaches a temporary escape from said environment.Anyone can imagine how that looks to a manager looking for redundancies, or at least that it looks like ammunition to use in an ongoing redundancy process. It is also utterly unsurprising that any stress related symptoms would subside before he went off climbing. I got through the most miserable 5 months of my career by either being about to go on, on, or having just been on a bike packing trip, the stress and unhappiness from work overshadowed the activity (sitting outside a boots in Beauly in tears because of the impact the stress had had on my depression was a low point), but the bike packing kept me mentally afloat. I would imagine that everyone on here will have a story of doing a hobby helping relieve stress or alleviate stress related symptoms.

The type of people universities need rid of are the ones who arrange meetings with students/ office hours and then pretend they aren't in their office when someone knocks on their door at the given time (a habit of my once head of course at Loughborough), the ones who actively make people's lives difficult due to their laziness. People who are absent on a in individual occasion at an inconvenient time due to illness? That will happen sometimes regardless of work ethic, competence and atmosphere in the workplace and has no relevance to their value in an organisation.

Fair enough.  I don't like disingenuity and will call it out.  Lead swingers make me cross.  Probably I could be gentler; I'll reflect on that.  I assume you're referring to my response to George; the one to Offwidth was just mirroring!

By all means.  The way it was phrased seemed to actively encourage the ambiguity.

We agree.  However saying you went sick, in a bragging tone, in a discussion about the legitimacy or otherwise of voluntary severance, is open for challenge.  We also agree that there are academics, such as you describe, that universities could well do without and everyone would be happier for it.

One of the ironies about this pension issue is the USS disputes effectively deputised academic experts across various fields to look at how such defined benefit  (DB) pensions were valued and cemented the evidence the UK DB valuation mechanism is broken (and along the way identified some mistakes in USS). The government don't care to listen as  their donors make more money out of DC pensions; and  more importantly given TPS and the NHS are unfunded schemes (backed by government money) any extra money they unfairly rake in to government coffers can be used for election bungs, whilst severely stressing post 92 unis, colleges, schools and NHS trusts.

The faulty valuations mean DB pensions are much less expensive than the government tell us they are. On a government money-in money-out basis on a fairly stable workforce and retirees, they certainly seem plenty stable; yet the valuations predict humongous deficits based on cascaded over cautious assumptions (like average above inflation pay growth!!??) .  You can also guarantee all the additional stress these public sectors workers are increasingly under, won't lead to as many long happy retirements on big pensions after working to retirement age as we used to see (not that, as Spenser points out,  you seem very sympathetic to stress.... odd really given your work). Plus many DB reforms have cut out past distortions like enhanced years (to aid redundancy), caps on the pensions of the highest paid, and a move to career average based benefits.

I think you need to wind your neck in.

I didn't read George's post in anything like the way you did. I think you need to take a look at why you did.

Just to add that I’m reading this thread with interest as a secondary teacher who has students heading off to HE every year. There’s lots of interesting insights from a wider perspective and from inside the system.

In contrast, your tone is really quite jarring and vile, basically having a go at someone who is possibly losing their job and blaming them for structural issues far beyond their control. Perhaps I could speak in your way and say “you know that hate filled aggressive judgey types like yourself deserve all the bad karma that rolls their way, glass houses and that, I really hope that you suffer some sort of consequence over Christmas because ‘you know what you are’.”

Or you could, you know, just be nice? You actually have no idea about this individual and you’re projecting a lot of stuff onto a very short forum post. If, let’s assume, this person is feeling stressed and anxious about their employment and future your posts could actually be a significant addition to their negative feelings. You are entitled to your own thoughts of course, but directing them at an individual in the way you have is out of order imo.

I interpreted it as a "oh heck, I am worried about the impact this thing out of my control is going to have given the context".

I was in a similar situation earlier on this year with some withdrawals coming off anti depressants immediately before leave and my line manager noted that it would possibly look a bit off to HR, but he could see I was struggling to sit up on the teams call the day before I was supposed to go. I was able to stay sat up in the afternoons but could still barely process information. In the event of things my trip was cancelled and my girlfriend looked after me because I couldn't safely drive to the Lakes. It's an utterly horrible position to be in!

So did I...  but you know us engineers are well known to be especially sensitive types.

Back on the serious front why assume bad when Occam gives us a more likley explanation?

His comment about the PhD really annoyed me as well....I'm on the record here for defending PhDs from the social sciences and sports science that relate to climbing. However,  I'm pretty sure this was what he was talking about:

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/expedition+alpine/phd_research_in_extreme...

...which really concerns me as well, given worrying looking evidence of leading questions with intrinsic assumptions that wouldn't have got past the supervisor, let alone ethical approval in my old place. However implying this is somehow typical of academia on a thread about a University restructure impacting so many academics (and inevitablly even more students) deserves the UKC xmas Grouch award.

As far as PhDs are concerned, there’s are a lot of hand wringing about ‘crap’ PhDs, but ‘crap’ will be defined by novelty, addition to knowledge, defense of the thesis, and an external examiner, not the subject matter. There is validity across the academic disciplines.

Also, outside of the traditional Phd, there are multiple routes like PhD by publication etc. to make the process more inclusive. I’m working on my third institutional REF  preparation at the moment, meeting units of assessment, chairing the professoriate, trying to guess what the rules will be, all that stuff. It’s always a real education to find out about life outside of my blinkered traditional engineering world view, and how varied it is.

Not all fields have a lot of grant income however, social sciences for example.  I know of a couple of profs who got told off for having too much grant funding because the current bean counter / FEC view is that all STEM research was a net cost to the university.  Thee and me know how departments would fold without that cash…

Morning folks

I've had a think - and I want to apologise to the thread, and George in particular.  No excuses; it was out of order.

I've messaged George privately also.

Sorry; mistake learned from and thanks for the feedback

Yes that's a particularly nasty trap. Many departments need REF based research grant prestige to survive but in STEM it's rarely provided at full cost:  Universities make a loss on most grants. To add insult to injury some less constrained research funds are excluded from REF. Home undergrad student numbers can also be a struggle in STEM. Overseas student income fills the gaps.

This really hit national headlines decades back with the Exeter chemistry department closure debacle (leaving no undergrad chemistry provision in the SW). The need for improved national planning in STEM to stop the financial waste and skill drains of departmental closures was a central plank in my first election as a moderate onto UCU NEC.

A friend is doing a self funded PhD looking at the support of autistic people in the workplace, it's of more social value to society than many industry funded PhDs and could save more money from HR functions (recruitment costs, employment tribunal and lost productivity etc) and employment tribunal claims than many of those funded PhDs will save from Engineering functions.

I have no end of admiration for her given the hardship which she has experienced doing it, unfortunately the way that funding is allocated to stuff doesn't help really worthwhile stuff get done at times.

We could talk about the arcane calculation of FEC until the end of time. However, in the real world, the rankings which bring in the students (particularly overseas) on the most part include research, but no effort is made to calculate this contribution with many others. Try recruitment and retention of staff if there’s no mechanism for research to buy out from the teaching workload model. It’s prob the most common question from interviewees for academic posts ‘how much teaching?’.

Luckily we’re back in Horizon Europe with 100% FEC, and 80% from EPSRC isn’t too shabby. Also in the real world, we’re setting up a new medical school, and suddenly my 0% grants from the health charities are hot news😂 Final rant, we’re running projects with very large companies where experimental and even computational work (inside their firewall) is conducted in their facilities but I still have to argue the toss over the contribution to FEC rate.

Fair play to you. Respect. 

Forgive a potentially foolish question from someone who's not on the grant-funded side of things, but how does that come about?  Do people apply for too little grant (figuring they can make it up other ways) or do the grant-providers only stump up part of the cash asked for?  Or some other, third thing that I've not thought of?

I got a call from Sheffield university, my alma matter, about a year or so ago essentially begging for money. It started off feigning interest in how I was doing etc. then asked me for a donation. Turns out they were paying current students to phone former students to invest in the university. It seemed a little odd at the time but I didn't realise they might be struggling.

Something needs to change for sure. I graduated around 2009 and during my time there it increasingly felt like a business rather than a proper academic institution. Everyone in my year got 2.1 or better apart from one person who got a 2.2. Yes, of course there's special incentive for people to work hard and get a 2.1 due to employment prospects but the fact pretty much everyone seemed to do well seemed odd to me and maybe reflected a dumbing down of standards. Better to keep your customers happy. Forgive me if that appears too cynical.

You apply for the “full economic cost” and get usually 80% of that. But the figure includes EVERYTHING the university can think of. Cost of admin staff, cost of building, cost of VC’s salary, cost of paying my salary that they will be paying whether or not I get this grant. So it’s arguably disingenuous for them to claim it’s costing them money because they only get 80% of that grand total 

Never once did I hear discussion of the marginal cost of landing a research grant…

The 20% is meant to come via other routes too. But it is all very opaque and difficult to calculate anyway.

Liverpool Hope have launched a similar scheme. Others will no doubt follow, reflecting the appalling state of finances in the UK HE sector.

You highlight that an important point- and (separate to your point) interestingly that’s about the one thing that I seem to remember grant T&Cs forbid the university from counting in FEC

I've seen it in workload models . No idea how it was allocated financially.

I recall some of my student cohort doing this at Bristol c25yrs ago.

I assume commonplace in the US?

I thought every uni did this. I got letters from Cambridge saying 'we've reached the first billion, help us reach the second'. An odd logic.

Manchester started emailing me. I only did a PhD viva there!

That's a bit ****** harsh MOACS???

Sorry, was referring to the VS schemes, not the 'get the students to ring up the alumni for donations' thing. Yeah, everyone does the donations thing, I used to get them from both the universities I studied at; I work at one that's less well-endowed than them, and suffering because of the different priorities in spending HE money in Wales.

I think they do. They seem very bad at it in the UK, the pitch normally being along the lines of "Give us some cash, will you?". US universities  seem much better with a serious attempt at getting a sense of mutual loyalty.

I have never given my alma mater any contact details; I've had no reason to contact them since I graduated.

I know someone who had a lot of projects on 80% FEC who got word from on-high that they were costing the institution too much.  So they took all their grants and people to another university that wasn't quite so confused..

Back when FEC based costing was first introduced a couple of decades ago, I rather thought the costs were deliberately inflated to ensure that then-RCUK grants continued to bring in sufficient cash at the proposed 80% level that the operational status quo wouldn't be rocked by the change in funding model, and then administrations seemed to forget about said whiz and started believing in FEC as definitive truth.  I'm firmly of the same view as another poster that FEC counts many costs that are incurred regardless of if a grant is awarded or not and so it's absurd to automatically consider grants at < 100% FEC as loss making.

Pro-tip - once the medical school is set up, think kindly of your new academics who came on board and sacrificed two years of research outputs to get it through certification, so please don't decide to cancel the medical school and shaft them all  (naming no names!)

It's been almost a decade since I was involved in writing a 0% FEC grant against charitable funding but at the time I recall there was a central government pot that could provide a top up to 80% FEC level.  Is that gone now?

On the subject of UK universities and funding, something I'd noticed in my last years with a .ac.uk email address was a tendency for some to openly take funding from well dodgy foreign governments in military-proximal areas that hadn't (yet) been sanctioned. 

This one is probably right up your street... There was a news report [1] back in the summer (that didn't get picked up much in the UK) that several UK universities had taken Iranian regime funding to develop fuzzy logic based FADEC systems that would improve the range of UAVs.  I assume any range improvement also results in a reduced thermal signature.

Of note is that Iranian drones are being used in large numbers to attack Ukraine over the last year. #Oops.

My view is that the research was going to happen, and some of it be published, regardless of if Tehran funded it or not, but a major ethical line is crossed with UK based academics taking Iranian funding, and that one would expect a more privileged flow of information to the funders than to the public journals.

The situation is escalating.  In the last few weeks, Iranian supplied drones - presumably with this UK developed technology paid for by Tehran - are being launched by Houthi rebels from Yemen against international shipping in the Red Sea, leading to the suspension of some international shipping through the area (the thought of more supply chain disruption drives me to despair) and also leading to live intercepts of drones by a US Arleigh Burke class destroyer and now a British Type-45 destroyer in the area.  You can guaranteed that every possible piece of intelligence on the live deployment of these weapons systems is being sucked up by China.   Mind you, at the rate the Houthis are going they're going to exhaust the loaded VLS cells in the Red Sea soon enough...

Not - in my view - a proud moment for the UK universities that took Iranian funding, and some of them are big names indeed.  What really astounds me is having seen other well dodgy funding green-lit by ethical committees who didn't grok how it could directly translate to offensive weapons technology whilst they blocked more overtly signalled defensive projects.  Children in the playground.

[1] https://www.thejc.com/news/irans-suicide-drones-are-being-developed-at-brit...

I believe it still exists. It absolutely does not top up to 80% FEC, but it’s a lot better than zero indirect costs. However, I can tell you of at least one university that conveniently ignores that in their internal beancounting, thus treating charity research as more of a’loss’ than it should be.

Final salaries closed a long time ago now.

It’s other things that are hammering the finances now…

• Fees being in effect eroded because they don’t track inflation
• VC and senior management salaries that have had year-on-year growth well above everyone else for over a decade, combined with significant growth in the size of senior management.
• Giant loans taken out (£.2Bn to £1Bn or so) by unis on multi-decadal timescales to build capacity for growth in a sector of fixed size
• Over reliance on Chinese students and their lucrative fees - to the point JISC has - on government orders - compromised the basic principles of academic freedom of thought by making firewalls to prevent Chinese students in China from viewing material unacceptable to the Chinese government when accessing UK university resources

It’s easy to rally against final salaries but it’s lazy and misses the wider structural problems.  Bringing the free market to universities has set in motion a train of events that could destroy what was one of the UKs absolute Crown Jewels.

The academic institutions that get 80% FEC will have overheads that also get paid at 80% but basically this pays over and above the 20% gap for the directly incurred costs needed to deliver the grant. This is called research net contribution (RNC). Overheads are based off the TRAC calculations but it’s basically linked to infrastructure costs.

Charity grants typically pay 100% for directly incurred costs but no overheads or prof staff salary, so no RNC and a big hit due to no overheads. Uni’s that focus on these funders as it’s often seen as easy money compared to UKRI, NIHR etc are having to pay more  to do the research they are being paid for thus end up in trouble unless they have other means.

I could have guessed the FADEC unis, it’s all part of blinkers on, led by the THE holding world summits in places like Saudi. I got blocked by them on Twitter for asking if N Korea was next to host it 😂

As a young whipper snapper in a project meeting with Rolls Royce, I suggested that we replaced the gain-scheduled PID on their FADEC for the (at the time) new Trent engine with a fuzzy controller. I thought I was going to be marched off the premises. A senior engineer tersely explaining ‘that we don’t use non deterministic controllers in our aero engines’, and certainly not AI. 

I was struggling to see how universities were using Forward Error Correction in their budgeting.