Tuition fee refunds, deferrals and the marketisation of education: a thread on coronavirus
If you had your education interrupted this past year, you might be considering asking for a refund on tuition fees

Or, like my sister who was supposed to be heading to university this academic year, you might be deciding whether or not to defer your entry to avoid online classes and a reduced social life

Following a question from a friend, I took a little dive into university finances to take a look at the effect this would have. I chose to focus specifically on Royal Holloway, which is where I graduated from. Let’s use the 19 figures as income estimates before virus adjustments

Royal Holloway took in just over 188.5mil in 2019, of which 114.6mil was tuition fees. The rest is made up of:
Research grants - 16.4mil
Funding body grants - 20.5mil
Investment income - 1.8mil
Donations - 768k
And “other income” - 34.479mil

If we assume that everyone who went in 2019 received a third of their tuition fees back (given the current petitions argue for third term refunds), then Royal Holloway would get only 76.4mil from tuition fees. Let’s take this as a reduction to 2020 income on tuition fees.

This brings their income down to 150.3mil total.
There’s not a lot of point weighing this against expenditure - RoHo made a pretty significant deficit in 2019 as a result of an extensive building programme. But I think it’s very important to weigh it against STAFFING costs.

In 2019, RoHo spent nearly 132.9mil on staffing costs inc. pensions. With operation costs, research costs, etc etc - the likelihood of being able to retain any precarious staff like early career researchers on a slashed budget like that is minuscule.

So tuition fee refunds, regardless of whether students deserve them or not (and, well, I think we shouldn’t have to pay for education anyway so...) would be completely disastrous for university staff. But wait, it gets worse!

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Nearly all other revenue streams are being affected by coronavirus too. Let’s revisit the other income we discussed:

Research grants - 16.4mil. A large amount of research money comes from the government, who (and you may have missed this) are having a hard time financially right now. While any depts researching the ‘rona might be quids in, we can assume that overall they’re gonna lose ££££££

Same with funding body grants - when the entire stock market has crashed and interest rates are MINISCULE, funding bodies have hugely reduced budgets to give out grants

Investment income? Makes up only a very small slice of the budget but still, absolutely decimated.

Donations? Again, only a small slice of the budget, but all the big boy donors just had their own investments destroyed so I’m not sure how generous they’ll be able to be

Ah, the mysterious “other income”. Well, nearly 28mil of that is income on catering, halls and other facilities. If courses were all to take place at home, that’s basically going to be non existent. In fact, any reduction in campus footfall is catastrophic...

Simply put, both deferrals and fee refunds are additional nails in the coffin of a financial disaster. Royal Holloway has limited financial reserves, yes, but the chance of staff getting through this unscathed? Minimal.

In fact, any university with even a hint of financial trouble is, to put it lightly, absolutely fucked by the effects of the virus. I think most people would agree that higher ed is extremely important in the UK

Not just for research facilities, but because it’s actually quite important to society that we have people who are educated. It’s crucial that we retain this educational infrastructure... but *one* virus is threatening that

Obviously the government is unprepared for this pandemic in basically every sense, but the virus has REALLY exposed just how dangerous it is when crucial public services are not publicly owned.

The privatisation and marketisation of education means that one disaster can absolutely destroy them. Whether they live or die depends entirely on PROFIT instead of their value to society.

The worst thing? Academics have been warning people about this for YEARS. This was entirely predictable. And now their jobs are in danger. People DESERVE tuition refunds, but at what cost? Principals are not gonna pay the price here. Your precarious staff members are.