Britain may soon have a bankrupt university

ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES have long been defined by their architecture, from the dreaming spires of Oxford, to the red-brick universities built after the Industrial Revolution, to the concrete polytechnics that sprouted everywhere after the 1960s. Those who visit a campus today are likely to see another big round of building in progress. This time glass and steel are the main media, sometimes accompanied by cladding in garish colours.

The rush to build reflects a battle to attract students, which is putting a growing strain on universities’ finances. Universities receive twice as much money per student as they did two decades ago. But an increase in spending means that they are nonetheless racking up debt. Britain’s 130-odd universities owe nearly £12bn ($16bn), up from around than £5bn in 2012, according to estimates collated by Reuters. In 2016-17, the most recent year for which data are available, 19 universities ran deficits, compared with six the year before. A few are said to be near bankruptcy. Some in better health are considering whether they would take over a neighbour if the option arose.

The competition for students is the intended consequence of a series of reforms introduced by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2010-15, which aimed to get more people into higher education while pushing universities to pay more attention to teaching. The headline reform was to nearly triple the fees that universities were allowed to charge students, to £9,000 a year. One reason for lifting the cap was to provide income for universities to borrow against. David Willetts, the universities minister at the time, has written that “financiers always used to advise us that university balance sheets were very conservative.”

A less noticed but more important change was to remove limits on the number of students that universities could admit. Since they now rely on students’ fees for much of their income, universities are keen to attract them. And since there are no longer restrictions on admissions, the most attractive universities can suck students away from the rest. This explains why borrowing has mostly been spent on sprucing up campuses. On an open day, “how do you judge whether a university is good or bad?” asks one university official. “You can’t judge course content, so you use lecture halls or sports facilities as proxies.”

Since the financial crisis, bank lending has dried up. So universities have turned to capital markets. The universities of Leeds, Liverpool, Cardiff, Manchester, Cambridge and Oxford have all taken advantage of low interest rates by issuing public bonds, raising £250m-750m each. Less prestigious universities have looked to private investors, such as insurers and pension funds, in deals with shorter maturities.

The lowest-ranked universities struggle to find any lenders. It is also they who are running the biggest deficits (see table). Some institutions acknowledge that conditions are difficult: higher education “has become market-driven and increasingly competitive,” says the University of Bradford. Others point to particular circumstances. St Mary’s University, for instance, says its deficit “was planned and focused on investment in areas of growth and student experience.”

The squeeze is about to tighten. An unexplained fall in the birth rate at the turn of the millennium means that between 2017 and 2020 the number of 18- to 20-year-olds will drop by 150,000, meaning fewer potential customers. The government’s efforts to cut migration will make it hard to recruit students from overseas to make up the shortfall. A forthcoming review of higher-education funding may recommend reducing tuition fees. On top of this, universities expect to have to increase their contributions to pension schemes. Some will “reach a point where it is difficult to make more efficiency savings,” says Steven West, vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England. “A shock is about to hit.”

Most universities will ride it out. Jason Rothenberg of MetLife Investment Management, an institutional asset manager, says one attraction of lending to English universities is good government oversight from a new regulator, the Office for Students (OFS). It ought to be aware of any difficulties before they emerge, since it checks on the finances of all institutions that register with it. University boards are also meant to monitor the finances of their institution. But some in the sector admit that small, undistinguished universities may struggle to attract board members of sufficient calibre to do the job.

The assumption among some universities and lenders has been that if a university gets into trouble, the government will bail it out. On November 6th Sir Michael Barber, the chairman of the OFS, said it would not. “This kind of thinking, not unlike the ‘too big to fail’ idea among the banks, will lead to poor decision-making and a lack of financial discipline, is inconsistent with the principle of university autonomy and is not in students’ longer-term interests,” he cautioned. The regulator’s aim will be to protect students, not the university, perhaps by moving them to another institution or by arranging a takeover of their existing one. Sam Gyimah, the universities minister, said this week that it was not the government’s job “to bail universities out when they make reckless financial decisions.”

He is surely right. But will the government have the stomach to let a university go under? It would face accusations that it had allowed mis-selling to students. Some of the most vulnerable universities are in parts of the country where good jobs are scarce. Nevertheless, one of the requirements imposed by the OFS is that universities make plans for what would happen to their students in the event of the university’s bankruptcy. So far, too many have viewed it as a bureaucratic exercise, says Sir Michael. In fact, he warns, “it is an essential element of the system.”