As a mounting financial crisis grips UK universities, thousands of jobs are being axed across the sector. This page tracks latest updates, exploring the reasons behind the redundancies, how they will affect staff and students, and the long-term impact on higher education and research.

In addition, several universities have opened severance schemes or announced savings programmes without specifying how many jobs are likely to be lost. These include the University of Edinburgh (read more) and the University of Liverpool (read more).

Read more:

• University bailouts needed as 5,000 jobs axed, UCU tells Labour (March 2025)
• Slow cuts or risk lasting harm, staff warn stricken universities (January 2025)
• University job cuts to ¡®hit 10,000 by year end¡¯ despite fee rise (November 2024)

The root cause of redundancies across British higher education is an unsustainable funding model. Although tuition fees in England will increase to ?9,535 this autumn, this comes after an eight-year freeze at ?9,250. The real-terms value of this fee income in 2012 prices, when fees were tripled to ?9,000, now stands at about ?6,000 per student.

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With limited direct public funding from the Westminster government, universities have been forced to rely on international student recruitment to cross-subsidise both teaching and research activities. However, many universities have reported sharp drops in overseas enrolments since the introduction in January 2024 of a ban on taught postgraduate students bringing family members with them to the UK.

At the same time, domestic undergraduate recruitment has become increasingly competitive. Faced with dwindling international enrolments, highly-selective institutions, including a number of Russell Group members, have hoovered up a growing share of UK school-leavers, leaving less-selective universities short.

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Although the devolved nations have their own funding systems, the fundamental problems of dwindling per-student funding and disappointing international student enrolments apply across the UK. In Scotland, students do not pay tuition fees, with the Holyrood government instead providing direct funding to universities. However, Scottish institutions receive only about ?7,610 per student on average, the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated in 2023, with the value of teaching grants having declined by more than a fifth in real terms over the preceding decade.

Alongside all of this, universities are contending with increasing costs, with inflation pushing up prices across areas such as staffing, research, estates and utilities. The increase to employer national insurance contributions announced in the chancellor¡¯s Autumn Statement is likely to cost English universities ?430 million, outweighing the ?371 million anticipated income from the tuition fee rise, according to the Office for Students. And, across the UK, many modern universities ¨C those that gained university status in 1992 or later ¨C are contending with significantly increased employer contributions to the Teachers¡¯ Pension Scheme, which now stand at 28.68 per cent of staff salaries. This compares?with 14.5 per cent under the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), which primarily serves more historic institutions.

Analysis by Times Higher Education published in January found that around one in three UK universities which had published their accounts for 2023-24 at that point had reported operating deficits, up from around a fifth the year before. The OfS has warned that three-quarters of English providers could be in deficit by 2025-26 without ¡°mitigating action¡±.

Read more:

• Will rocks really melt with the sun before Scotland charges tuition fees? (March 2025)
• UK universities face mounting cash flow problems (January 2025)
• Banks get tougher as UK universities¡¯ debt issues mount (December 2024)

Many University and College Union branches have reacted to news of job cuts by balloting for industrial action, arguing that vice-chancellors are ¡°exploiting¡± financial challenges to make deep cuts, blaming leaders for wasting money on executive pay and vanity projects.

Beyond the impact on staff losing their jobs, redundancies are likely to have a significant impact on the academics and higher education professionals that remain, in the form of increased workloads and stress.

Research activities are also expected to be affected, with a number of cuts targeting research units, and other institutions seeking to reduce the proportion of their research that they fund from their own resources.

The impact of cuts?will probably become increasingly noticeable to students, with a number of universities planning to close programmes alongside job cuts, with redundancies also likely to limit the availability of module options for students already enrolled. Sector leaders have warned that it is inevitable that class sizes and student-staff ratios will increase, and there have also been predictions that assessments are likely to become increasingly standardised and formulaic, because universities will lack the resources to mark more complex tasks.

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Historically, when one of the major anglophone recruiters of international students has put the brakes on enrolments, others have opened their doors. What is unique about the current situation is that all of the major English-speaking study destinations ¨C Australia, Canada, the UK and the US ¨C are displaying increased hostility towards student migration at the same time.

The impact has been greatest in Australia, which has long been heavily reliant on overseas students, where the government has imposed institutional visa caps and throttled visa processing. Well over 1,000 redundancies have been announced so far, with some commentators predicting ¡°Covid-scale¡± job losses.

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After the Canadian government imposed provincial student visa caps, international enrolments are projected to fall by 45 per cent, with leading institutions starting to announce spending cuts and job losses.

While international students have expressed mixed feelings about enrolling in US colleges under a Donald Trump presidency, it is the White House¡¯s funding freezes and attacks on diversity initiatives which are having the greatest impact on universities there, with institutions already announcing hiring freezes and scaling back planned investments.

Universities elsewhere are making cutbacks, too, including institutions in the Netherlands.

Writing for THE, four academics gave their views from the front line of the redundancy crisis. One scholar, who asked to remain anonymous, described losing ¡°whole departments, entire degree programmes and scores of highly experienced professional service colleagues from essential roles¡±, with their own department among those targeted.

¡°I found myself sobbing every time I came into the office. It felt unimaginable that an intellectual project into which so many people had invested so much of their lives would simply fade away,¡± they wrote.

Les Back, subject group lead in sociology at the University of Glasgow, wrote that redundancies in ¡°safe institutions¡± such as Edinburgh and Cardiff ¡°reverberates everywhere and conveys that jobs are unsafe anywhere¡±.

¡°Fear and insecurity are spreading across the sector in ways that I have not seen before, making people afraid to be openly critical. And while the survivors most traumatised by redundancy processes are eager to do almost anything to keep their jobs, many others become less amenable or collegiate, determined to just keep their heads down. They disengage from communal academic endeavour, such as departmental meetings and peer reviewing,¡± Back wrote.

¡°But the truth is that while scholarship is rewarded individually, it cannot be practised alone; it is a shared collective endeavour or it is nothing. Redundancies in one place damage us all. Unprecedented damage is being experienced everywhere in UK higher education at the moment, and we must find ways to repair it.¡±

Read more:

• The UK¡¯s redundancy crisis: four views from the front line
• So you¡¯ve been laid off. What now?

University staff affected by redundancies and restructuring may wish to seek support from one of the five sector trade unions. The largest is the , but , , the and the (EIS) also have higher education members. Unions may be able to support staff members hoping to seek legal advice.

Separate to any restructuring process, many universities will offer mental health and other support to employees.

Campus, THE¡¯s professional advice site for higher education faculty and staff, offers a range of resources relating to careers, resilience and well-being. Highlights include:

• How to face adversity and change in higher education with resilience
• Strategies for cultivating academic resilience
• How to find personal fulfilment after being a scientist
• Towards independence: blazing your trail as a freelance researcher
• Mind the gap: how to write career breaks into your CV

Students who feel that university redundancies and restructuring have adversely affected their learning may wish to seek redress via the sector regulator ¨C for example, in England, the ¨C or the sector ombudsman ¨C for example, in England and Wales, the .

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