Watch this space—but for how long?

Institutions are trapped until the government sets a course on university finance

It’s almost like we’d never been away. As a fresh academic year begins, the huge issue of university financial stability continues to dominate headlines in research and higher education. UK Research and Innovation is now looking at “worst-case-scenario planning”, and in particular how the country’s national funder might respond to a university’s collapse.

UKRI’s concern underscores the risk to university research from an unsustainable higher education funding system, with more than 100 institutions posting deficits in their latest accounts, according to Higher Education Statistics Agency data. But while the scale of the problem is becoming more widely acknowledged, and universities around the country continue to announce cost-cutting drives, the new government has yet to give any real steer on how it intends to approach the systemic issues at the heart of the crisis.