Whose money is it anyway?

It’s hard not to notice the current focus by some in government, parliament and the media on universities, and in particular issues of value (levels of tuition fees) and accountability (how can VC’s high salaries be justified).

There’s lots to be said on this, but in this blog I want to focus on an underlying issue: whose money is it anyway? Put bluntly, if universities are spending private money, then it’s no business of the state what they spend it on, as long as it’s legal.

Universities get money from lots of sources, and they publish information annually – through their annual accounts and through statutory returns to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) – about what exactly they get and from who. The information is in a standard format, with many categories. Bear with me while I list these; it’s worth seeing to give context to the argument I’ll be making later. There are:

• Funding body grants

• Tuition fees, comprising Full-time undergraduate, Full-time postgraduate, Part-time undergraduate, Part-time postgraduate, PGCE, Non-EU domicile, Non-credit-bearing course fees, FE course fees, and Research training support grants.

• Research grants and contracts, comprising grants from: BEIS Research Councils, The Royal Society, British Academy and The Royal Society of Edinburgh; UK-based charities; UK central government bodies/local authorities, health and hospital authorities; UK central government tax credits for research and development expenditure; UK industry, commerce and public corporations; other UK sources; EU government bodies; EU-based charities; EU industry, commerce and public corporations; EU (excluding UK) other; Non-EU-based charities; Non-EU industry, commerce and public corporations; Non-EU other

• Other services rendered, comprising income from BEIS Research Councils, UK central government/local authorities, health and hospital authorities, EU government bodies and other sources

• Other income, comprising: Residences and catering operations (including conferences); Grants from local authorities; Income from health and hospital authorities (excluding teaching contracts for student provision); Other grant income; Capital grants recognised in the year; Income from intellectual property rights; and Other operating income

• Donations and endowments, comprising New endowments; Donations with restrictions and Unrestricted donations

If you’ve made it through the list (well done!) you’ll see that some of these come from public sources (eg BEIS research grants), some of these are private (eg UK industry grants). Add together all of the public income for a university, divide by the total incomer, and you can work out what percentage of the university’s income is from public sources. Which is surely relevant for understanding how accountable universities need to be with their spending choices.

For some categories, though, it isn’t obvious if it’s public money. The big one here is tuition fee income.

For income from non-EU students, it is clearly private income. Even if they’re supported by their own government, the UK government doesn’t have a duty or obligation in relation to the money.

For postgraduate tuition fees paid by home and EU students, it will be a mixed bag: some will be paid by the students themselves or their employers; some will be funded via postgraduate grants; some will be paid via public PG loans schemes.

For home and EU undergraduate fees, we need to think about it. Where students have to pay tuition fees (remember that Scottish students in Scotland pay no fees) they are able to take out a loan, on less than commercial terms, from the Student Loans Company. And students do this. After graduation, students make repayments towards the loan from their salary; the amount they repay depends on how much they earn. And after 30 years the remaining debt is cancelled. The initial funds are provided to the Student Loans Company by the state; and an allowance for the ultimately unrepaid element – called the RAB charge – is also part of government spending. So is it public or private money? With hindsight, a proportion of it is private, and a proportion public. Up front, the cash is public.

On this basis it is possible to masker the calculation about the proportion of universities income which comes from public funds. I’ve included home and EU undergraduate tuition fees; I’ve excluded postgraduate tuition fees; I’ve included research and other services rendered sources from UK government and public bodies, and from EU government and public bodies (the income for this ultimately derives from UK government funds, as we’re a net contributor to the EU budget.)

What this shows is that universities receive significant public funding. Across the UK as a whole, 58% of income in 2015-16 (the most recent year for which HESA data is available) comes from public sources. In actual money, that is £20.3 billion out of a total income of £34.7 billion. Yes, I did say billion. It is a lot of money!

Nation	% Publicly-funded
England	58%
Wales	65%
Scotland	59%
Northern Ireland	75%
Total UK	58%

Of course this varies between individual universities. Some have very little income (comparatively!) from non-public sources; a few have very little (again, comparatively!) from the public. 

The graph shows the data: each university is one of the bars; they’re rank ordered from the most dependent on the left (Plymouth College of Art, since you ask, with 96% dependency on public funding) through to Heythrop College on the right (with no public funding whatsoever.) Even the famously-private Buckingham University has a little public income - £95k in funding body grants and research income from UK public bodies. Which means that it is second from the right, with about 0.25% of its income from public sources.

Source: HESA data

What of other universities? The Russell Group members range from the mid 20s (LSe with 24%) to the high 60s (Queen’s Belfast with 69%). The big post 1992 civic universities range from the mid 50s (Sunderland with 56%) to the mid 80s (Liverpool John Moores with 86%). The smaller or specialist research intensives (the 1994 Group, as was) range from the high 30s (SOAS with 38%) to the mid 60s (Birkbeck College, with 66%).

So does the state have an interest in how universities spend their money? The data say yes: at least to the extent that the money derives from public sources.

This doesn’t mean that all of the criticisms made of universities are valid. And it doesn’t mean that university autonomy isn’t a good idea. History, and international comparisons, tell us that the best universities are those that have the most freedom to make their own academic choices.

But it does lend validity to arguments that universities need to be accountable for their spending choices. In my experience, universities don’t disagree with this need for accountability. 

What of current criticisms? The danger is that the huge good that universities do for individuals and for society as a whole is forgotten amongst the current hubbub, and damage is then done. To avoid this, those making the noise need to be careful that their criticisms are well-founded. There’s an anti-elitism in current public discourse which easily mutates into unthinking policy.

And universities themselves need to be aware that (some at least) of the criticisms come from a real point. Are student always the first thought? Sometimes research sees like it is king. And is there real transparency? A few universities have a student on their remuneration committees, and their world has not fallen down. Why not more?

Cartel schmartel

The question of university tuition fees in England is causing brouhaha again. Part of the issue seems to be some Conservative ministers wanting to catch up on an issue where the Labour Party had the edge on them at the recent General Election. Part of the issue appears to be a Damascene conversion by Andrew Adonis, the behind-the-scenes architect of the 2004-06 increases in tuition fees, and in particular his assertions that universities are operating a cartel about fees. A particular trigger appears to be recent revelations about the amount of debt that students will incur and not repayhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-40547740.

At heart, a lot of the issues appear to relate to the consistent £9k fee charged by universities in England. This costs more than the government planned (an estimated cost of £7.5k per student per year underpinned the calculations in 2010 and 2011). So why do universities charge £9,000 per year? And why do students pay?

(Cautionary note: although I graduated from LSE, I am not an economist. But I don’t think that arguments I make are bad arguments. Second cautionary note – the Higher Education and Research Act and the Office for Students changes a lot of the nomenclature in this, but the fundamentals remain the same.)

(by the way, on this general topic here is a really good article from the BBC showing some data about this complex topic)

Firstly, let’s look at the question of why students pay.

The student loans scheme in England is not like a normal loan. Repayments are contingent upon income levels (ie you don’t pay until you earn £21,000 per year; and then you pay a flat rate 9% of income over 21,000 per year.). You keep paying until you’ve paid off the debt, or until 30 years post-graduation.

This means that many won’t fully repay their student loans, as their income levels between 21 and 50 aren’t high enough to have paid for enough years. It also means that for any given level of income, the amount you repay would be the same regardless of the amount of loan you took out. Let’s show how that works:

Student A borrowed £9,000 per year - £27,000 in total – to fund tuition fees at Poppleton University. They now earn £25,000 per year, and so every year they repay £360 – that is, 9% of £4,000, which is the difference between their income (£25,000) and the threshold (£21,000).

Student B went to the Poppleton Metropolitan University which charges £6,000 fees per year, so they borrowed in total £18,000. They now earn £25,000 per year, and so every year they repay £360 – that is, 9% of £4,000, which is the difference between their income (£25,000) and the threshold (£21,000).
You can see that the annual amount of repayments is not related to the amount borrowed. Total amount repaid does relate – in principle – to the amount of borrowing, but you’ll only be expected to repay all of the debt if you earn enough.

This leads to my first proposition: the loans system does not encourage students to be price-sensitive.

The second question relates to why universities charge £9,000. It’s important to understand how this £9,000 is made up. The legislation provides for a standard amount (£6,000 per year) and a variable element (initially an additional £3,000 per year, now £3,250.)

Any approved English HE provider can charge £6,000 per year. Institutions can charge an additional fee if they have an access agreement with the Director of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA).  The Access Agreement sets out what additional fee they plan to charge, and what they’ll do to ensure that this does not militate against fair access. The assumption was that only in exceptional cases would £9,000 be payable; but there was no mechanism to enforce this. OFFA had to judge each application on its merits. And so if, say, University A had got an access agreement for £9,000 fees with fair access spend of £500 per student, then University B which proposed £9,000 fee with £500 fair access spend per student would be able to argue that to deny them the right to charge £9k would be perverse. The quality of the university was not a consideration.

In that initial round, nearly every university had its access agreement approved without conditions; a few had to make revisions. But none were turned down. £9,000 proved not to be exceptional.
Why did universities even suggest such a fee level? In part because fees act as a marker for quality. If your rival charges £9,000, why would you charge less? To do so could be to indicate that you weren’t as confident as your rival in the value of your offer.  It isn’t about greed or excess; simply about market position.

So this is my second proposition: there was no incentive for universities not to charge £9,000.

Also relevant was the actual behaviour of students. When setting higher fees for the first time, many university governing bodies recognised that they were entering the unknown. There was a recognition that student numbers might well fall. So a £9,000 fee, together within internal budgeting for fewer students, would make sense. We put on a brave face for the world, but plan for hard times. As it turned out, student numbers did not (after the first year) decline. And this is the third factor which I think is relevant.

Student recruitment has historically been controlled by the government, through a funding cap. Essentially, universities had a recruitment target set by HEFCE; there were penalties for exceeding this. When the cap was relaxed and then removed, as happened in 2013-14 onwards, universities were free to recruit as many students as they liked. This meant that a university which was growing could afford to spend resources on other activities, as in most cases the £9,000 fee was greater than the full cost of teaching. This enabled development of new subjects; investment in new buildings for teaching and research; and investment to improve reputation in, for instance, the REF.

This creates my third proposition: universities had many incentives to grow; few to remain the same size.

Put these three factors together, and a lot of the features of the current system become clear. £9,000 fees were the natural desire for universities. There was no price competition between universities, because enough students (in a growing market) were not price sensitive. So £9,000 becomes the norm.

This isn’t a cartel. Universities are by habit compliant with law and regulation, and the injunction ‘do not discuss fees with your peers’ was, in my experience, very well observed.  But it was bad regulation. The design of the system did not, beyond pious words, prevent £9k becoming the norm.

What would Nick do?

 Equally, universities had for decades been enjoined to behave more entrepreneurially. In relation to PGT fees, universities were encouraged to see these as a price, not a cost. Would students pay the fee? If so, charge it. If the fee wasn’t enough, stop teaching the programme. And this habit infused undergraduate fee decisions. It would be possible to regulate or legislate for a fee regime that reflected cost not market price. But this wasn’t done.

So what is to be done now? I’ve a simple plan. Ask Nick Barr. He’s Professor of Public Economics at LSE, knows more about higher education funding than almost anybody else in the world, and is wise and fair-minded. Ask Nick Barr how to fund students and universities on a fair and sustainable basis. And do what he says.