Lots of hard truth here. The university business model is indeed broken. The desirable feature of time to think and explore deeply, and to research and write, has been reduced and removed from academic careers. Our brightest PhDs and PDRAs can see this: they vote with their feet. R&D environments for STEM folk, for all but the most fundamental intellectual long-term themes, may well be better (more time, bigger missions and ideas, more resources, better conditions and salaries) inside companies (of all sizes). All of the public funding cakes are now reduced and more and more "managed". Peer review is killing innovation by group think.
Meanwhile, many universities have been captured from within by their admin and management committees, often by volunteer activists, and our universities prioritise and impose "process drag" from increased admin, compliances, and virtue signalling, instead of their core missions (R&D and T&L), and translation of both the technologies and people pipelines into economic priority sectors (which is what HMG says it wants).
Passive, tick-box, "support" functions, often digital now, eat up academics' time. Yet the game has changed for good: fundamentally seeing "students as customers" requires more "quality" (as opposed to excellence!) and much more defensive practices.
Every family in the country with a student is fully exposed to the universities' present direction of decline. Not short of applicants though. Parents and backers mix their understandable pride with valid concerns about future career prospects. Yet are universities actually fit for purpose? Are they still a departure lounge, or launch pad, for intellectually and socially developed graduates, as a "product" for the UK (educated to a leathal level)? Or merely holding pens?
Great analysis and much food for thought, as always Anthony 😊
The point that sits most uncomfortably with me is the idea that there would be more “education only” academics with research work concentrated in a smaller group who spend more time on this endeavour. I feel this runs the risk of greatly diminishing the value of higher education, which needs go beyond teaching students relevant knowledge in a particular discipline and the skills to apply them. An HE graduate should also be able to systematically critique that knowledge as well as understand why that knowledge is applied in particular ways, so that they can develop and apply new methods when the ones they have learned are inadequate to the new contexts they face once they leave university.
To deliver such an education well, does it not need academics who are actively honing their own critical enquiry and innovation skills through research or scholarship of teaching and learning?
If research becomes an activity that only a few academics do, and they do it the exclusion of teaching, wouldn’t higher education be impoverished?
While this may sound like nostalgia on my part, I think the key difference needed is new ways of planning and managing academic workloads so that academics can flexibly increase their research intensity, while maintaining their teaching skills, and vice versa, depending on the context of the research funding and teaching needs.
This also needs to recognised by funders, allowing academics who win fellowship grants to still maintain some (minimal) teaching skills so that they can still contribute to the core activities of the university even when there are fallow periods of funding.
This is an important and complex issue. First, I am not sure that I said we needed more ‘education only’ academics, rather I think that we needed to rethink roles in a more fundamental way and leverage academic engagement more effectively. I certainly agree graduates need a research mindset - particularly now AI is reshaping knowledge-based jobs. I also agree that curricula need to be research informed. I am something of a sceptic about how research positively impacts teaching though I recognise there are some important indirect effects. The key issue is however what we can afford. If we assume that research cost recovery stays where it is we can only afford to have a small proportion of our staff research active. I would rather, in the circumstances, fewer with a proper effort allocation rather than more without the capacity to engage at the appropriate level.
Reflecting further - I wanted to acknowledge the key points you make in your post about strategic management and more sophisticated performance management. A focus on developing these would help address the concerns I raised in my comments above. Perhaps this should be a priority for the ResearchPlus group, where both our institutions are founding members?
I also wonder if there could/should be an economic model for higher education that didn’t prioritise growth, but rather adopted the philosophy of “Doughnut Economics” put forward by Kate Ranworth and colleagues. I think this would align with your desire for more of a systems approach as well.
Definitely a complex issue! I did intepret your statement that "We likely require fewer academics with research in their remit, ..." to imply that this mean that there would be proportionally more academics whose focus was "education only". Apologies for my error of extrapolation 😰
I agree with the idea that when people have funding for research (whether that is external funding or funding a university decides to invest in research from its reserves or other sources), then they should be more focussed on conducting that research. However, I also worry about a fully 'dual-track' academic community where a few academics get to spend the all of their time doing research and the others spend the all of their time teaching. Would the teachers ever get to switch to the research track? Those on the research track will have a run of success in winning bids - privileged by the 'matthew effect' of having the time to submit more bids and build more collaborations, etc. However, there will still be significant periods where no grants are won. Would the researchers be able to cover teaching having not done any for over 3 years, or does the university make them redundant at that point?
My preference is for a model where the subset of academics in a department who are research intensive can change over time. Maybe this is what you meant too and would fall into an area where "everything must change", as I have not come across any exemplars of institutions/departments that have done this well.
I have to agree with much of your analysis. I always like reading your takes on the current situation of higher education in the UK, as being among the most clear-sighted around. There is definitely a need for radical thinking , the mass higher education system genie is well and truly out of the bottle. There has to be a fundamental rethink of what higher education is for, what society expects of it (and is willing /not willing to pay for) and how that can be realistically delivered. The sector ( that includes VCs and all staff -academic and non academic alike -and, absolutely, the apparently intellectually-fossilised higher education unions) needs to start looking forward and not be forever harking backward or simply demand the ‘easy fix’ of more government money ( and government is not going to ride to the rescue.)
You make a good point that not enough attention has been paid to the 'staff experience' in all of this rapid change and in a - theoretically cutting-edge - labour-intensive industry this is a key weakness. If there is to be any hope of preserving a higher education system of which the country can be proud, much more attention needs to be paid to staff morale, the quality of staff universities are able to hire and, indeed, the salary levels and conditions which - certainly at the highest levels of expertise - are currently woefully inadequate to attract world-class talent. It may well be that a radical reconfiguration of the staff profile will be necessary ( as you suggest - with smaller numbers of higher paid academic specialists, and greater numbers of associated support staff ) to match a reinvented and reinvigorated system fit for the future. In this, and in previous articles you have written you have emphasised the need for greater heterogeneity of institution - different institutions with clearly different provision recognising the diversity of the student body and clearly not all institutions need to major on research ( whether applied or blue skies. )
A couple of years back ( 2022) my self and my colleague Professor Iain McNicoll produced an analysis of the UK higher education sector, applying fundamental economic theory to the workings of the UK sector in an bid to understand why the sector was in continual crisis. (Estimating the True Economic Value of the UK Higher Education Sector - on our website: https://www.viewforthconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Estimating-the-true-economic-value-of-the-UK-higher-education-sector.pdf ) . Our conclusions were grim – without change, and carrying along the same path, the sector was in an inevitable spiral of decline - brain drain, inability to hire sufficiently qualified talent, associated fall in world standing and competitiveness, inability to innovate or invest, inability to meet society’s needs…. . Since we published that paper all that has been surprising to us is the speed with which the sector has been hurtling towards collapse. While inevitable, we thought it would take longer.
We need more clear sectoral leadership as well as recognition by university staff themselves (and the higher education unions) that things cannot go on as they did in the past and the sector needs to proactively grasp that change. Listening to the Mark Carney speech this week at Davos, two quotes jumped out at me which seemed equally applicable to the situation of universities…. (1) “ If you are not at the table, you are on the menu” and “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
"I envisage more learning designers, student advisers, experience managers, technicians, career coaches, practitioners in residence, faculty associates, and similar"
One man's dream is another man's nightmare.
Here's a suggestion. Instead of hiring all these, why not create subsidiaries for each of these services, that can be used by other universities as well (consolidation!), or even secondary schools (which seems to be what a number of administrators think a university is) and, why not, members of the public?
I suspect that the learning designers subsidiary in particular will be so successful that we'll soon be swimming in money.
I don't know that much about career support - I suspect that you know a lot more on the topic.
I agree with you that employment is a key outcome for universities. Right now, the student loans company knows exactly who studied what and how much they're earning (or not). I don't understand why the government doesn't publish that data, broken down by specific degree, at specific university. Perhaps with some data on socioeconomic background of the graduates, too. That would help student candidates and their families immensely in choosing a specific degree to study. (1)
Instead they ask universities to spend time and money to call graduates and try to discover the data that the government has already. Don't get it at all.
(1) Of course, nowadays a degree doesn't help much, as the job market keeps changing and one may need to change speciality a few times during their career. But still, giving people some concrete data may help.
Shared services are an important part of the picture (though VAT remains a problem). I do think we should contemplate a much more multi professional future.
A fear I have is that universities are trying to reproduce almost all aspects of society - job centres (career advisors), GPs (mental health), etc. That has an enormous cost and sidetracks from the main purpose of the institutions.
It might be better if universities were to subsidise positions in the local services, helping all of the local community in the process. These services are offered for free, so there shouldn't be an issue with VAT.
Being diagnosed with ADHD at 18 is a tad late - better to make sure that there's capacity in the local community to diagnose this early on so that pupils will receive all the support they need when they need it the most and lose their potential.
I do not wholly disagree. Pushing services into universities (to be subsidised by overseas fees) has been a consistent government strategy. Underpinned by regulatory force. I do think careers is a core university function. Counselling and mental health perhaps less so.
Careers - if I have a degree from Durham/York but I've moved to London, should I go visit Durham/York for the service? If London universities were to help subsidise specialists in local job centres they'd help a lot more I believe. If there's a regulation forcing them to offer this within the institution, then maybe we can push to help them change their mind and/or provide just one who books them meetings with the job centre specialist.
Could not agree more with “I understand the move to greater remote work but it may be that, whilst it is individually beneficial, it has diminished the collective benefits derived from a ‘scholarly community’ “
If one Googles "universities death by bureaucracy", the AI overview provides a good description of the problem.
It would be informative if universities were to release a breakdown of their staff numbers throughout the years, into two categories: staff teaching/doing research on one hand and staff doing neither on the other. The latter category has expanded too fast. And some of them have no real job - to prove their usefulness they simply create more work for the others.
How to tell if an admin is doing real work or not? Ask them for an email from a student or teaching/research staff in the last year, where they were asked to help with something. Something that wasn't created by another admin (possibly themselves). If they cannot find one, then place them in a separate department, where they are not allowed to email out - any "directives" and "initiatives" they come up with would be for their department only. We would still pay them but at least they wouldn't drag the rest of us down.
Also - whenever someone comes up with a new obligatory process that everyone should follow, it should be put to vote by those who will have to follow it. Most of them make as much sense as Team GB announcing that from now on all athletes, in all sports, will have to train the same way - Olympic medals galore!
I would be keen to support this and very much agree that we need to put tiresome, and frankly insulting, assumptions of the kind you describe aside. Perhaps some empirical work is called for. We need ultimately, I believe a very different multi professional workforce structure.
In the UK most universities report comprehensive data on their staffing profile , by standard occupational classification, to the Higher Education Statistics Agency and this is publicly available information. Which addresses your point in paragraph two . The ratio between 'academic' and 'other' staff has not in fact changed markedly over the past few years, generally sitting around the 55% academic and 45% other staff. Some minor variation depending on the type of institution. ( e.g. post-92 universities often have a smaller proportion of 'other' staff. )
Not sure that hiring 7.23% more academics to teach 23.41% more students is helped much by 33.96% more administrators.
(Don't think that City is a particular outlier in HE, just picked it as a specific example. Then again, I haven't checked all of them, maybe this example is unfortunate.)
(*) "From 2019/20, it is not mandatory for HE providers in England and Northern Ireland to return information about non-academic staff. Of the 228 providers returning staff data to HESA in 2023/24, 125 opted into returning data about all of their non-academic staff. The remaining 103 opted-out and therefore only returned non-academic staff data pertaining to vice-chancellors/head of institutions or governors. "
How nice... Why report bad news I guess, best to ignore them. Universities like City that keep reporting them should be commended.
Just a quick point re the non-mandatory reporting. I agree it is a disgrace that reporting of non-academic staff numbers is not mandatory. For this you can blame the 'wisdom' of the Office for Students who made the decision in 2018 that HEIs in England did not need to report these numbers. It was a nonsensical, plain stupid and ignorant decision, which greatly damaged the potential for robust economic analysis of UK HE at a UK level. When something is no longer mandatory, in a cost-cutting world many will not then do it. Thankfully a good number, although not all, of the universities continued to voluntarily record and report this data ( City being one of them) so one can get a 'feel' for trends , among the larger institutions at least. Scottish universities all continue to report this data ( an SFC requirement.) Would need to check if it's a requirement in NI or Wales or just being done voluntarily.
Yes indeed, it would be very informative to have a better picture of staff roles , particularly non-academic staff roles, and how these are are evolving over time. There is a tendency for critics to make the assumption that these jobs must all be bureaucratic 'pen pushers', a waste of resources etc. This can get tiresome. I don't think a more comprehensive picture can be gleaned, however, solely from HESA, it would need additional survey work and sampling from a number of institutions - combined with information that might be gleaned from other sources eg UCEA. Exactly the sort of thing UUK could productively look at .... and also if we are to really confront the reality of higher education today, it's kind of essential to know who is doing what, and why , how resources are used, etc ( one of the reasons the Office for Students decision to cease needing even basic data collection on this matter was so stupid ( all those non academic staff clearly being , in OfS eyes, of no importance in the delivery of the university's mission. )
Lots of hard truth here. The university business model is indeed broken. The desirable feature of time to think and explore deeply, and to research and write, has been reduced and removed from academic careers. Our brightest PhDs and PDRAs can see this: they vote with their feet. R&D environments for STEM folk, for all but the most fundamental intellectual long-term themes, may well be better (more time, bigger missions and ideas, more resources, better conditions and salaries) inside companies (of all sizes). All of the public funding cakes are now reduced and more and more "managed". Peer review is killing innovation by group think.
Meanwhile, many universities have been captured from within by their admin and management committees, often by volunteer activists, and our universities prioritise and impose "process drag" from increased admin, compliances, and virtue signalling, instead of their core missions (R&D and T&L), and translation of both the technologies and people pipelines into economic priority sectors (which is what HMG says it wants).
Passive, tick-box, "support" functions, often digital now, eat up academics' time. Yet the game has changed for good: fundamentally seeing "students as customers" requires more "quality" (as opposed to excellence!) and much more defensive practices.
Every family in the country with a student is fully exposed to the universities' present direction of decline. Not short of applicants though. Parents and backers mix their understandable pride with valid concerns about future career prospects. Yet are universities actually fit for purpose? Are they still a departure lounge, or launch pad, for intellectually and socially developed graduates, as a "product" for the UK (educated to a leathal level)? Or merely holding pens?
Great analysis and much food for thought, as always Anthony 😊
The point that sits most uncomfortably with me is the idea that there would be more “education only” academics with research work concentrated in a smaller group who spend more time on this endeavour. I feel this runs the risk of greatly diminishing the value of higher education, which needs go beyond teaching students relevant knowledge in a particular discipline and the skills to apply them. An HE graduate should also be able to systematically critique that knowledge as well as understand why that knowledge is applied in particular ways, so that they can develop and apply new methods when the ones they have learned are inadequate to the new contexts they face once they leave university.
To deliver such an education well, does it not need academics who are actively honing their own critical enquiry and innovation skills through research or scholarship of teaching and learning?
If research becomes an activity that only a few academics do, and they do it the exclusion of teaching, wouldn’t higher education be impoverished?
While this may sound like nostalgia on my part, I think the key difference needed is new ways of planning and managing academic workloads so that academics can flexibly increase their research intensity, while maintaining their teaching skills, and vice versa, depending on the context of the research funding and teaching needs.
This also needs to recognised by funders, allowing academics who win fellowship grants to still maintain some (minimal) teaching skills so that they can still contribute to the core activities of the university even when there are fallow periods of funding.
This is an important and complex issue. First, I am not sure that I said we needed more ‘education only’ academics, rather I think that we needed to rethink roles in a more fundamental way and leverage academic engagement more effectively. I certainly agree graduates need a research mindset - particularly now AI is reshaping knowledge-based jobs. I also agree that curricula need to be research informed. I am something of a sceptic about how research positively impacts teaching though I recognise there are some important indirect effects. The key issue is however what we can afford. If we assume that research cost recovery stays where it is we can only afford to have a small proportion of our staff research active. I would rather, in the circumstances, fewer with a proper effort allocation rather than more without the capacity to engage at the appropriate level.
Reflecting further - I wanted to acknowledge the key points you make in your post about strategic management and more sophisticated performance management. A focus on developing these would help address the concerns I raised in my comments above. Perhaps this should be a priority for the ResearchPlus group, where both our institutions are founding members?
I also wonder if there could/should be an economic model for higher education that didn’t prioritise growth, but rather adopted the philosophy of “Doughnut Economics” put forward by Kate Ranworth and colleagues. I think this would align with your desire for more of a systems approach as well.
Definitely a complex issue! I did intepret your statement that "We likely require fewer academics with research in their remit, ..." to imply that this mean that there would be proportionally more academics whose focus was "education only". Apologies for my error of extrapolation 😰
I agree with the idea that when people have funding for research (whether that is external funding or funding a university decides to invest in research from its reserves or other sources), then they should be more focussed on conducting that research. However, I also worry about a fully 'dual-track' academic community where a few academics get to spend the all of their time doing research and the others spend the all of their time teaching. Would the teachers ever get to switch to the research track? Those on the research track will have a run of success in winning bids - privileged by the 'matthew effect' of having the time to submit more bids and build more collaborations, etc. However, there will still be significant periods where no grants are won. Would the researchers be able to cover teaching having not done any for over 3 years, or does the university make them redundant at that point?
My preference is for a model where the subset of academics in a department who are research intensive can change over time. Maybe this is what you meant too and would fall into an area where "everything must change", as I have not come across any exemplars of institutions/departments that have done this well.
I have to agree with much of your analysis. I always like reading your takes on the current situation of higher education in the UK, as being among the most clear-sighted around. There is definitely a need for radical thinking , the mass higher education system genie is well and truly out of the bottle. There has to be a fundamental rethink of what higher education is for, what society expects of it (and is willing /not willing to pay for) and how that can be realistically delivered. The sector ( that includes VCs and all staff -academic and non academic alike -and, absolutely, the apparently intellectually-fossilised higher education unions) needs to start looking forward and not be forever harking backward or simply demand the ‘easy fix’ of more government money ( and government is not going to ride to the rescue.)
You make a good point that not enough attention has been paid to the 'staff experience' in all of this rapid change and in a - theoretically cutting-edge - labour-intensive industry this is a key weakness. If there is to be any hope of preserving a higher education system of which the country can be proud, much more attention needs to be paid to staff morale, the quality of staff universities are able to hire and, indeed, the salary levels and conditions which - certainly at the highest levels of expertise - are currently woefully inadequate to attract world-class talent. It may well be that a radical reconfiguration of the staff profile will be necessary ( as you suggest - with smaller numbers of higher paid academic specialists, and greater numbers of associated support staff ) to match a reinvented and reinvigorated system fit for the future. In this, and in previous articles you have written you have emphasised the need for greater heterogeneity of institution - different institutions with clearly different provision recognising the diversity of the student body and clearly not all institutions need to major on research ( whether applied or blue skies. )
A couple of years back ( 2022) my self and my colleague Professor Iain McNicoll produced an analysis of the UK higher education sector, applying fundamental economic theory to the workings of the UK sector in an bid to understand why the sector was in continual crisis. (Estimating the True Economic Value of the UK Higher Education Sector - on our website: https://www.viewforthconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Estimating-the-true-economic-value-of-the-UK-higher-education-sector.pdf ) . Our conclusions were grim – without change, and carrying along the same path, the sector was in an inevitable spiral of decline - brain drain, inability to hire sufficiently qualified talent, associated fall in world standing and competitiveness, inability to innovate or invest, inability to meet society’s needs…. . Since we published that paper all that has been surprising to us is the speed with which the sector has been hurtling towards collapse. While inevitable, we thought it would take longer.
We need more clear sectoral leadership as well as recognition by university staff themselves (and the higher education unions) that things cannot go on as they did in the past and the sector needs to proactively grasp that change. Listening to the Mark Carney speech this week at Davos, two quotes jumped out at me which seemed equally applicable to the situation of universities…. (1) “ If you are not at the table, you are on the menu” and “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
"I envisage more learning designers, student advisers, experience managers, technicians, career coaches, practitioners in residence, faculty associates, and similar"
One man's dream is another man's nightmare.
Here's a suggestion. Instead of hiring all these, why not create subsidiaries for each of these services, that can be used by other universities as well (consolidation!), or even secondary schools (which seems to be what a number of administrators think a university is) and, why not, members of the public?
I suspect that the learning designers subsidiary in particular will be so successful that we'll soon be swimming in money.
Careers are part of a continuum of engagement with employers and skills. Employment is a key outcome for universities.
I don't know that much about career support - I suspect that you know a lot more on the topic.
I agree with you that employment is a key outcome for universities. Right now, the student loans company knows exactly who studied what and how much they're earning (or not). I don't understand why the government doesn't publish that data, broken down by specific degree, at specific university. Perhaps with some data on socioeconomic background of the graduates, too. That would help student candidates and their families immensely in choosing a specific degree to study. (1)
Instead they ask universities to spend time and money to call graduates and try to discover the data that the government has already. Don't get it at all.
(1) Of course, nowadays a degree doesn't help much, as the job market keeps changing and one may need to change speciality a few times during their career. But still, giving people some concrete data may help.
Shared services are an important part of the picture (though VAT remains a problem). I do think we should contemplate a much more multi professional future.
A fear I have is that universities are trying to reproduce almost all aspects of society - job centres (career advisors), GPs (mental health), etc. That has an enormous cost and sidetracks from the main purpose of the institutions.
It might be better if universities were to subsidise positions in the local services, helping all of the local community in the process. These services are offered for free, so there shouldn't be an issue with VAT.
Being diagnosed with ADHD at 18 is a tad late - better to make sure that there's capacity in the local community to diagnose this early on so that pupils will receive all the support they need when they need it the most and lose their potential.
I do not wholly disagree. Pushing services into universities (to be subsidised by overseas fees) has been a consistent government strategy. Underpinned by regulatory force. I do think careers is a core university function. Counselling and mental health perhaps less so.
Careers - if I have a degree from Durham/York but I've moved to London, should I go visit Durham/York for the service? If London universities were to help subsidise specialists in local job centres they'd help a lot more I believe. If there's a regulation forcing them to offer this within the institution, then maybe we can push to help them change their mind and/or provide just one who books them meetings with the job centre specialist.
Could not agree more with “I understand the move to greater remote work but it may be that, whilst it is individually beneficial, it has diminished the collective benefits derived from a ‘scholarly community’ “
If one Googles "universities death by bureaucracy", the AI overview provides a good description of the problem.
It would be informative if universities were to release a breakdown of their staff numbers throughout the years, into two categories: staff teaching/doing research on one hand and staff doing neither on the other. The latter category has expanded too fast. And some of them have no real job - to prove their usefulness they simply create more work for the others.
How to tell if an admin is doing real work or not? Ask them for an email from a student or teaching/research staff in the last year, where they were asked to help with something. Something that wasn't created by another admin (possibly themselves). If they cannot find one, then place them in a separate department, where they are not allowed to email out - any "directives" and "initiatives" they come up with would be for their department only. We would still pay them but at least they wouldn't drag the rest of us down.
Also - whenever someone comes up with a new obligatory process that everyone should follow, it should be put to vote by those who will have to follow it. Most of them make as much sense as Team GB announcing that from now on all athletes, in all sports, will have to train the same way - Olympic medals galore!
I would be keen to support this and very much agree that we need to put tiresome, and frankly insulting, assumptions of the kind you describe aside. Perhaps some empirical work is called for. We need ultimately, I believe a very different multi professional workforce structure.
In the UK most universities report comprehensive data on their staffing profile , by standard occupational classification, to the Higher Education Statistics Agency and this is publicly available information. Which addresses your point in paragraph two . The ratio between 'academic' and 'other' staff has not in fact changed markedly over the past few years, generally sitting around the 55% academic and 45% other staff. Some minor variation depending on the type of institution. ( e.g. post-92 universities often have a smaller proportion of 'other' staff. )
Dear Ursula, thank you for the pointer, didn't know about it! I imagine that you meant this https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he
Looking at City, UoL, in 2014/15 it had:
1730 academics, 1060 non-academics
In 2023/24 it had:
1855 academics, 1420 non-academics
So the respective increases are:
+ 7.23% academics and +33.96% non-academics.
The student numbers were:
18280 (2014/15) and 22560 (2023/24), a +23.41% increase.
https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/whos-in-he
Not sure that hiring 7.23% more academics to teach 23.41% more students is helped much by 33.96% more administrators.
(Don't think that City is a particular outlier in HE, just picked it as a specific example. Then again, I haven't checked all of them, maybe this example is unfortunate.)
Out of curiosity I looked at sector totals too.
Students:
2,315,840 total in 2014/15
2,457,250 total in 2018/19
2,904,425 total in 2023/24
Increases from 2014/15: +6.11% and +25.42%
Academics:
198,335 in 2014/15
217,065 in 2018/19
246,930 in 2023/24
Increases from 2014/15: +9.44% and +24.5%
Non-academics:
205,500 in 2014/15
222,885 in 2018/19
206,745 in 2023/24 (*)
Increases from 2014/15: +8.46% and +0.61% ??? (*)
(*) "From 2019/20, it is not mandatory for HE providers in England and Northern Ireland to return information about non-academic staff. Of the 228 providers returning staff data to HESA in 2023/24, 125 opted into returning data about all of their non-academic staff. The remaining 103 opted-out and therefore only returned non-academic staff data pertaining to vice-chancellors/head of institutions or governors. "
How nice... Why report bad news I guess, best to ignore them. Universities like City that keep reporting them should be commended.
Just a quick point re the non-mandatory reporting. I agree it is a disgrace that reporting of non-academic staff numbers is not mandatory. For this you can blame the 'wisdom' of the Office for Students who made the decision in 2018 that HEIs in England did not need to report these numbers. It was a nonsensical, plain stupid and ignorant decision, which greatly damaged the potential for robust economic analysis of UK HE at a UK level. When something is no longer mandatory, in a cost-cutting world many will not then do it. Thankfully a good number, although not all, of the universities continued to voluntarily record and report this data ( City being one of them) so one can get a 'feel' for trends , among the larger institutions at least. Scottish universities all continue to report this data ( an SFC requirement.) Would need to check if it's a requirement in NI or Wales or just being done voluntarily.
It would be interesting to get more granular. What proportion are student facing, what proportion digital etc.?
Yes indeed, it would be very informative to have a better picture of staff roles , particularly non-academic staff roles, and how these are are evolving over time. There is a tendency for critics to make the assumption that these jobs must all be bureaucratic 'pen pushers', a waste of resources etc. This can get tiresome. I don't think a more comprehensive picture can be gleaned, however, solely from HESA, it would need additional survey work and sampling from a number of institutions - combined with information that might be gleaned from other sources eg UCEA. Exactly the sort of thing UUK could productively look at .... and also if we are to really confront the reality of higher education today, it's kind of essential to know who is doing what, and why , how resources are used, etc ( one of the reasons the Office for Students decision to cease needing even basic data collection on this matter was so stupid ( all those non academic staff clearly being , in OfS eyes, of no importance in the delivery of the university's mission. )