Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Sign up, and get your own copy of the news that matters sent to your inbox every week. Sign up for the On EdTech newsletter. Interested in additional analysis? Upgrade to the On EdTech+ newsletter.
I will be at the Open edX conference this week and would love to meet any readers who are attending.
But what did I read this week, and was it interesting?
The reactive university
We hear a lot about higher education institutions shutting down and facing budget challenges, and I suspect we will be hearing a lot more. But two cases this week caught my eye and got me thinking about some of the broader patterns emerging across higher education.
Nottingham
At the University of Nottingham in the UK, thousands of staff were told this week that they were at risk of redundancy. The university reported an £85 million budget deficit last year and warned that it could run out of money by 2031.
The redundancies are the latest sign of the funding squeeze and slump in international student numbers affecting even highly-ranked institutions such as Nottingham, a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities.
The university wants to cut more than 600 academic and support posts through a combination of voluntary and compulsory redundancies in subjects and departments with low staff-to-student ratios, including physics, medicine and health sciences.
These cuts come on top of cuts made last year when Nottingham also faced a budget deficit.
As part of the cuts, the university announced in November that it is planning on closing 42 courses, including music and modern foreign languages courses, as well as programmes in child health, mental health, theology, education, microbiology and agriculture.
The university attributed those cuts to a “real decline in students wanting to study on those courses over the last five to ten years.”
Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Premium to get access to the rest of this post.
Upgrade